After Wannsee, sure. Prior to that they really were - mostly - about controlling movement, rather than for extermination purposes. Particularly the camps set up by the SA in 1933-35.
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Can you compare Japanese interment camps to jewish concentration camps?
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classical_hero
In whom I trust
A more adept comparison would be the Nazi camps and camps run by the Japanese.
There were about 300-odd Nazi Concentration Camps at the height of the Third Reich, and all of them can be considered "death camps" in that people were arbitrarily and ruthlessly murdered in them. But it was the Wansee Conference in early 1942 that outlined the "final solution" for the elimination of the Jews. Six camps were selected in Poland - Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka to become "Extermination Camps". The Todt Organization built the "Crematoria" - death factories - in these six locations; the gas chambers (showers) in the front and the crematoria (ovens) in the rear. These facilities could "process" 1000 bodies every twelve hours - as opposed to the average camp were a few dozen might die each day. In addition to the gas chamber victims, the normal murders (beatings, starvation, diabolical medical experiments) were also conducted.
Again, Lord Baal is correct about the camps getting worse over time. It should be remembered that prior to the invasion of Poland in 1939, there were Western Embasies as well as journalists like William Shirer, newsreals, etc. in Germany, and any true atrocity would be instantly known around the world. Furthermore, many early camp inmates at Dachau and elsewhere were political undesirables - socialists, communists, critics of the regime. Once these were out of the way, the true work could begin.
Again, Lord Baal is correct about the camps getting worse over time. It should be remembered that prior to the invasion of Poland in 1939, there were Western Embasies as well as journalists like William Shirer, newsreals, etc. in Germany, and any true atrocity would be instantly known around the world. Furthermore, many early camp inmates at Dachau and elsewhere were political undesirables - socialists, communists, critics of the regime. Once these were out of the way, the true work could begin.
Luckymoose
The World is Mine
I can compare them:
-They were both camps
-They both concentrated select members of a population
-They were both camps
-They both concentrated select members of a population
It must also be said that from the period 1936-39, many of the inhabitants of concentration camps were outright criminals, not even opponents of the regime or political undesirables. The Nazi philosophy behind the camps was to confine "race enemies" and habitual criminals - especially minor offenders, like shoplifters and pick-pockets - were considered amongst the worse of these, because they should have known better, as they were often "pure" Germans.
It was fairly common back then for criminals to be released from prison, only to immediately be picked up by the Gestapo and placed in a camp. This practice ended when the Nazis really began to gear up for war, as all but the most hardened criminals - murderers, rapists, etc. - were useful as cannon fodder in military service.
It was fairly common back then for criminals to be released from prison, only to immediately be picked up by the Gestapo and placed in a camp. This practice ended when the Nazis really began to gear up for war, as all but the most hardened criminals - murderers, rapists, etc. - were useful as cannon fodder in military service.
Absolution
King
Why you can't compare?
because the holocaust was a collective disaster.
It isn't only group of men suffering, but its the feeling that after you die, every one else of your people will go that way, with nothing to stop it.
Your community, and all of the Jews will be gone exactly like you are going to be gone. You don't only worry about your survival but also about the global Jewish survival.
Maybe for an isolated individual, there had been worse places for turtuing during history, the Incvisition for example.
But the holocaust was extremley more than a group individuals suffering in a camp. I'm sure these Japanese didn't about the future of the Japanese people in the world.
As a collective issue, don't bother to compare anything to the holocaust.
You can maybe compare those Japanese to the Communists which were put in the Nazi camps. This comparison realy makes sense, but I assume that the Nazis were worse than the Americans in this comparison as well...
because the holocaust was a collective disaster.
It isn't only group of men suffering, but its the feeling that after you die, every one else of your people will go that way, with nothing to stop it.
Your community, and all of the Jews will be gone exactly like you are going to be gone. You don't only worry about your survival but also about the global Jewish survival.
Maybe for an isolated individual, there had been worse places for turtuing during history, the Incvisition for example.
But the holocaust was extremley more than a group individuals suffering in a camp. I'm sure these Japanese didn't about the future of the Japanese people in the world.
As a collective issue, don't bother to compare anything to the holocaust.
You can maybe compare those Japanese to the Communists which were put in the Nazi camps. This comparison realy makes sense, but I assume that the Nazis were worse than the Americans in this comparison as well...
Tahuti
Writing Deity
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What you said seemed to imply that the Japanese internment wasn't motivated by racism, even though it definitely was. If it weren't for White Supremacy, German Americans and Italian Americans would've been interned as well.
del62
Deity
It always concerns me as to the motives of those who wish to compare them.
Louis XXIV
Le Roi Soleil
For what it's worth, German-Americans were detained during World War I. And it was also much easier to detain Japanese-Americans because they were in fairly cohesive communities as opposed to integrated into the population as a whole. But I do agree that racism was involved. It's most noteworthy with Hawaii, which had the largest Japanese population, was attacked by Japan, and never interned their inhabitants. The reason was that people were fairly tolerant of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii compared to the people who lived in Pacific states who had a long, ugly history of racial discrimination against Asians.
Aroddo
Emperor
@OP
You can compare them, of course, and there are certainly several similarities ... but frankly: doing so is extremely insulting to anyone who survived (or whose relatives survived) the jewish concentration camps.
And when your aquaintance said that you can't compare those two, she didn't mean that literally.
You can compare them, of course, and there are certainly several similarities ... but frankly: doing so is extremely insulting to anyone who survived (or whose relatives survived) the jewish concentration camps.
And when your aquaintance said that you can't compare those two, she didn't mean that literally.
This happened in Australia as well.
Things are always more complicated than we think. Racism is the go-to theory for just about everything these days, but there were other factors to consider as well.
One of the principle reasons for the Nisei Internment was that the Japanese attacked us (Pearl Harbor) while the Germans and Italians had not. There was tremendous outrage and hatred for the Japanese after December 7th, 1941, and keeping in mind the 5th Columnist activities Americans had been reading about in the European War, it seemed sensible at the time to relocate the West Coast Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians) away from what was assumed to be possible Imperial Army invasion beachheads.
The Hawaiian Nisei were not relocated largely because they made up over a third of the population (150,000/400,000) - to do so would be impractical and would destroy the economy of the islands.
Furthermore, Japanese-Americans in the Mid-West and the Eastern US were not relocated, since they were outside the Pacific Coast Defense Zone.
Presidential Order 9066 - not one of FDR's better decisions - also has a turbid political history. A Democratic President being forced by the West Coast wing of his party to take an immoral action to maintain control of Congress during the off-year (1942) elections. This despite the fact that J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI briefed him that the Nisei were harmless and actually quite patriotic.
I would not for a moment deny that racism had a role in the Nisei Internment. I'm just pointing out that there were other factors involved and it's not so simple as many today think.
The essential difference between American racism and that of the Nazi's was that we didn't hate our minorities and didn't want to exterminate them. Whereas the Nazi's wanted to purify their land and their population of vermin - Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other undesirables.
Absolution
King
Oh come on, it wasn't a danger of extinction for the Japanese people.
It wasn't intended to be so as well.
If you compare it to Jewish history, it is maybe even closer to the Russian pogroms than to the Holocaust. Not in the techniques, but in the level of horror.
I think what Absolution means is that the holocaust was what we would today call an existential threat for the Jewish race. For instance, while more Russians and Chinese were actually killed than Jews in WW II, their greater numbers actually represented just small fractions of the total Russian and Chinese populations, respectively. As tragic as the numbers indicate, there was never any possibility that their races could become extinct. While for the Jews the Final Solution represented the lion's share of their European population. The Jews were almost completely exterminated in Europe. Meanwhile for the Nisei Internment, there was no extermination at all. Therefor he's saying that the Holocaust is on a different level than the Internment. Not comparable at all.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
What about other genocides? Holocaust is not anything unique compared to other genocides in history, except of methods of killing used.
Maybe Holocaust also caused more victims than any other genocide (I'm not sure here), but the most intensive / bloodiest genocide regarding the number of victims per time period was probably the Rwandan Genocide in 1994 (1,071,000 deaths in 100 days = 10,710 deaths on each day of the genocide).
OTOH, a smaller number, but probably a similar fraction of the total population, perished in Pharrajimos (genocide of Romani people in WW2).
Glassfan said:
Regarding these camps which you mentioned above:
I was shocked to see, that the most numerous group among victims of the Auschwitz camp, were Hungarian Jews (not Polish Jews).
According to dr Franciszek Piper, number of people who perished in KL Auschwitz was as follows:
- 960 thousand Jews (out of 1100 thousand who were imprisoned there):
- 438 thousand Jews from Hungary (so around 100% of total Jewish population of Hungary)
- ca. 300 thousand Jews from Poland
- almost 70 thousand Jews from France
- 60 thousand Jews from Holland
- 55 thousand Jews from Greece
- 75 thousand Poles (out of up to 150 thousand who were imprisoned there)
- 21 thousand Romani people (out of 23 thousand who were imprisoned there)
- 15 thousand Soviet POWs and up to 15 thousand civilians of various nationalities (out of over 30 thousand imprisoned from these 2 groups)
Interesting is the % of survivors - only 8,7% of all imprisoned Gypsies survived, while 12,7% of all imprisoned Jews.
The extermination of Jews on massive scale started already in June 1941 with the invasion of the Soviet Union, by Einsatzgruppen.
Stahlecker - commander of Einsatzgruppen A (ca. 1000 SS-men in 4 units 250 men strong each) - reported the killing of 140,000 people during just the first 4 months of Fall Barbarossa (until the end of October 1941), including 135,000 Jews and 5,000 people of other nationalities.
Ohlendorff - commander of Einsatzgruppen D - was much less efficient, he reported "only" 90,000 kills in period June 1941 - June 1942.
After the war, Ohlendorff claimed that Stahlecker must have overclaimed / lied regarding his 140,000 in just 4 months.
Of course, the thread is about Japanese internment camps vs. Nazi concentration camps. But your point is valid. The Holocaust is not unique - there've been several large genocides in the 20th century including the Armenian (1915-23) and the Killing Fields (Cambodia 1975-79).
But the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews is the most well-documented and in many ways most horrific of them all.There's a fascination as to how a civilized, highly cultured and intelligent people could descend to such levels of depravity. General Eisenhower's quick decision to open the camps to journalists and filmmakers, as well as the recovery of the German records and the testimony of survivors have left such a plethora of documentary evidence as to shock and astound.
I once did a casual study and found that while my local library had 3 books on the Japanese Internment, there was an entire stack - several hundred books on the Jewish Holocaust.
Absolution
King
No other genocide was more intensive and decisive as the Holocaust.
The holocaust had started by an idea of a man who thought to himself: "I just have to kill them all cause I hate them!!", not because of any single conflict betweem people.
Especially in Germany, which doesn't have a history of Jewish pogroms like in Russia or in Spain.
Most genocides werre caused by some kind of national rivalry between the groups of people, or because of a conflict between them. Therfore, the purpose of the genocide is usually not "absolute extinction".
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
As I wrote, Rwandan Genocide was over 10,000 deaths per day - on average. Was the Holocaust really more intensive?
I don't think that the Jewish part of the Holocaust* was a match for this - considering that it lasted much longer than Rwanda Genocide.
*I wrote "the Jewish part", because Nazi crimes on nations other than Jews are sometimes also included into what is called "the Holocaust".
Regarding the % of victims - the genocide of Gypsies killed similar % of European Gypsies as the Holocaust did with European Jews. There were ca. 8.862 million Jews in Europe in 1939 according to Dawidowicz, ca. 8.6 million of them according to Johnson fell under direct or indirect influences of Nazi Germany.
Estimates of the number of Jewish victims of Holocaust vary, but probably European Jews lost slightly over 60% of total population.
American Jews, on the other hand, didn't suffer any losses during the Holocaust. Many of them only lost their European families.
Rather "I just have to kill them cause I hate them and there is no other way to get rid of them." Remember, that at the beginning the Nazis wanted to deport the Jews somewhere (there were many proposals - starting from Palestine, Madagascar & Australia, ending on Siberia) rather than kill them.
Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust#Resettlement_and_deportation
I think the death industry was more expensive than deportation.
OTOH, Nazi Germany compensated for expenses on creation & work of their death industry by stealing property of the victims.
I always wondered if Nazi Germany spent more money than it earned on the Holocaust, or inversely.
Of course that Germany has a history of Jewish pogroms - and the Kristallnacht of 1938 was by no means the first of them.
Already in Medieval Germany Jewish pogroms were taking place just like in Medieval Spain.
In period 1096 - 1349 a series of pogroms in Germany caused massive emigration of Jews from Germany to Poland. Later anti-Semitism in Germany continued - for example Martin Luther openly proclaimed anti-Jewish slogans. Check for example Martin Luther's "Von den Jüden und iren Lügen" ("About the Jews and their Lies") published in 1543. Later was a period of anti-Semitism gradually decreasing in Germany, this was also caused by Jewish Haskalah.
But in the second half of 19th century when German nationalism was born, anti-Semitism once again started to grow.
Holocaust was caused by this as well. It was caused by national rivalry between Germans and Jews.
The former (Germans) accused the latter (Jews) of contributing to German defeat in WW1 and to other disasters that fell on Germany.
Of course the Holocaust had also racist backgrounds (Jews - especially Eastern European Jews - Ost Juden - were considered subhumans).
But racism and racial hatred is born as the result of some other conflicts and rivalry.
German Jews were more assimilated with the rest of German society than for example in Russia. But still it did not prevent the distinction between "we" and "them" made by many Germans in the age of growing nationalism (1850s - 1930s). Of course this distinction applied to all minorities.
Already in 1916 the German army ordered to carry out Judenzählung - a count of all Jews serving in the army. It was already "racial" segregation.
Later Jews were accused of German defeat in WW1. Why Jews? Probably because they were the most influential & numerous minority in Germany.
In Russia Haskalah movement was weak. Haskalah contributed to reduction of differences & conflicts between Jews and Christians in Western Europe.
In Russia Haskalah didn't take place on such scale, and thus Jews did not assimilate with the rest of the society to the same degree.
The purpose of any genocide is to "get rid of them from our territory / sphere of influence" - and so was the purpose of the Holocaust.
If the purpose of the Holocaust was "absolute extinction", Hitler would invade the USA - because it had the largest Jewish community on Earth.
The main purpose of Hitler was not to get rid of all Jews, but to gain "Lebensraum" for the German nation in the East.
But of course Hitler wanted that "Lebensraum" to be clear of Jews - and only that's why he exterminated local Jews who lived there.
In other words - he didn't capture that land to kill Jews who lived there. He killed Jews who lived there because he captured that land.
The Nazis considered the Jewish nation as a problem, an obstacle in their race to their "1000 Years Reich" - not as a target itself.
Domen
Misico dux Vandalorum
I think the genocide of Tutsi people carried out by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in 1994 was even bigger.
And should be the most shocking one for us, because it happened so recently (18 years ago).
But it isn't, because Europe and America don't really care for what happens in the so called "Third World".
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Even more shocking is that European companies were selling weapons for Hutu extremists both prior and during the genocide.
Well, civilization and culture has simply not much to do with depravity or lack of such.
Societies of hunters and gatherers had the problem of depravity & depraved people, and our modern societies also have them.
Uncivilized and with more simple / less advanced culture does not mean that they are more depraved.
The Bushmens from the Kalahari Desert, for example, could be the guiding light for most of modern Europeans or Americans regarding morality.
Regarding intelligence - I think that all human societies have similar average level of intelligence. Be it Germans or Bushmens. Of course Germans later go to school and Bushmens don't - but innate human intelligence is something different than education. And Bushmens also learn, but they learn other things.
But good that you mentioned this point, because this illusion - that Germans are "too civilized" to commit crimes - existed also back then:
Antoni Slonimski (a Polish poet of Jewish descent), in late September 1939 when Germans were advancing from the West & Soviets from the East - both heading to the center of Poland - was escaping to the south, to Romania, and stopped in the town of Brody, in a house of a Jewish family:
"(...) Reinvigorated by a meal I started discussion with an old Jew. Once again the disappearance of self-preservation, or maybe the stubborn believe of Jews in the German civilization, surprised me. But what I was to expect from an uneducated Jew from Brody, if even my Jewish friend, literary critic, was laughing at me when I tried to explain to him, that the Nazis were going to do similar things in occupied Poland to those things which they already had been doing in their own country and in Austria. In exactly the same, ironical way, that old Jew from Brody asked me: Mr Slonimski, do you really believe that such a cultural nation can loot? He was not afraid of Germans. He was afraid of pogroms. And even I, at that time, did not realize the scale of the defeat, I didn't believe even for a moment, that the very existence of the entire nation itself was endangered. (...)"
Source: Antoni Slonimski, "Alfabet wspomnień" ("Alphabet of memoirs").
Absolution
King
The pogrom of 1938 was the prologue of the Holocaust.
About the rest, you have no reason to think that there was a genocide with more meaning and determination to extinct people than the Holocaust.
Add to this the fact the Jews in central Europe didn't struggle for any right or sovereignty before they were slaughtered in great masses.
And btw, they didn't end up with the transportions not because they couldn't, just because they started to think about Nazism as a global plan. It wasn't like that at the beggining.
About the rest, you have no reason to think that there was a genocide with more meaning and determination to extinct people than the Holocaust.
Add to this the fact the Jews in central Europe didn't struggle for any right or sovereignty before they were slaughtered in great masses.
And btw, they didn't end up with the transportions not because they couldn't, just because they started to think about Nazism as a global plan. It wasn't like that at the beggining.
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