"Concentration Camp" is the proper word to describe the separation of children from their parents, the detention of children in cages, the detention of adults behind wire fences or in overcrowded, unsanitary detention centers, especially since children are dying in the custody of our government.

The concentration camps of Germany began on a small scale with immigrant Jewish people, looking for a better life, other non-Aryans, Catholics and whomever was considered “undesirable.” Once the Nazis got away with that phase of the early concentration camps, with little public outcry, they began to detain Jewish and other non-Aryan citizens in Germany and in the early occupied territories. No one stopped the Nazi government.

Then, the Nazis began the “Final Solution” in WWII and used the death camps which came years after the first concentration camps. You must remember how the early victims came to Germany. They immigrated from other countries for a better life without persecution. The Jewish people were all immigrants to Germany because they had no country until after WWII.

We would not have had the Holocaust if every day citizens had educated themselves and had taken the necessary action to halt the atrocities of the concentration camps and death camps. However, people looked the other way because Hitler proclaimed he would make Germany great again, after its defeat in WWI.

In closing, the way to honor the victims of all concentration camps, death camps and gulags is to stop their use in any form. Surely, we have learned from history and can apply what we know.

 

- David O. Smith