Some Hidden Legal Aspects of Concentration Camps

To the generations of people having grown up – like hot-house plants – in the suffocating atmosphere of Holocaust propaganda, it may come as a surprise to learn that concentration camps are not illegal, at least not under international law. There is nothing in international law prohibiting concentration camps, even today.[1] The following are a few quotes on the subject only:

The same work, one of the most objective, points out the difficulties involved for a defeated power:[8]

The fact is that “concentration camps” were, and are, legal under international law, and have existed in one form or another in practically all countries. One reason why they cannot be abolished is because no objective definition of the term “concentration camp” appears possible. Note that, to J.M. Spaight, a concentration camp is an “internment camp for non-combatants,” during wartime only. Whether American Civil War (more correctly: “Secession War”) prison camps can be assimilated into the same category as “concentration camps” is entirely a matter of definition.

What has not changed is the spirit of American-British hypocrisy and contempt for human life. For example, had it not been for the Northern refusal to exchange prisoners, there wouldn't have been any Northern prisoners in Confederate prison camps, such as Andersonville or anywhere else in the South. Despite the fact that the problem was the North's own doing, and that the Southern armies and population were starving as a result of the blockade and Union destruction of Southern crops and infrastructures, Confederate prisoners in Northern prisons were starved deliberately, in retaliation for the alleged “deliberate” starvation of Union prisoners in the South.

The commander of Andersonville prison camp in Georgia, Commander Hartmann Wirz, was a Swiss-German who visited Europe as an official representative of the Confederacy several times during the war, running the blockade. After the war, he was indicted for “conspiring with Jeff Davis and his rebel cabinet” to “render Union prisoners unfit for service through a policy of deliberate mistreatment and starvation,” and for killing a Union prisoner with a right-handed blow to the head.

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Wirz was subjected to a medical examination during his trial. He was found to be suffering from malnutrition; and atrophy and paralysis of the right arm as the result of unrepaired fractures. Wirz was convicted and hanged with a short drop, taking 14 minutes to die.

Photographs and engravings of Union prisoners from Confederate prison camps suffering from malnutrition, diabetes, gangrene, and cancer (!), in addition to all the usual contagious diseases, were then printed by Congress and widely distributed for 30 years after the war to keep the Republican Party in power. This was known as “waving the bloody shirt.” Since one lie requires another, and since Andersonville provides a perfect explanation for what happened at German camps in 1945, the more irresponsible of the Holocaustians have now come full circle, and are referring to Andersonville as “America's Auschwitz.”[9]

Concentration camps in their modern form are generally thought to have been invented by General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau, a Spanish General in Cuba, in 1897. Weyler was Spanish, but of Prussian descent, leading to the myth that such camps were a “Prussian invention.”

The Cuban War of Independence was fought with enormous destruction of property on both sides. Rebel guerrillas moving along the length of the island burned Spanish sugar plantations and other property in an attempt to render the island valueless to Spain; Weyler moved all “loyal” Cubans into “campos de reconcentramiento,” announcing that all civilians outside the camps would be treated as guerrillas and shot on sight. The intention was to cut the island in two and hamper the movements of the guerrillas.

The camps were shut as a result of American protests, and Weyler was recalled to Spain, a concession which failed to satisfy American greed for Spanish overseas possessions. Weyler served as Minister of War three times and died in 1930; there is a monument to him in Madrid. Modern Cuban sources estimate 25,000 deaths in the camps, down from a propaganda figure of 250,000.

The Spanish point of view is somewhat different. They argue that the strategy of the Cuban rebels, under the leadership of Máximo Gómez, was to drive all civilians unwilling to cooperate with the guerrillas into the towns, which were then to be deprived of food through the destruction of crops. Weyler simply reversed a situation created by the rebels: all civilians unwilling to cooperate with the Spanish were to be driven into the countryside, after which the countryside was to be deprived of food by the same methods. The rebels could never have defeated the Spanish and never even tried; their only hope was to involve the United States.

Following the Spanish-American War, Cuba was granted its independence, while all other Spanish overseas possessions were retained. Following Filipino defeat in regular warfare intended to free the country from its American “liberators,” guerrillas under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo continued the war using irregular tactics. At this point, the Americans imitated the tactics of “Butcher” Weyler, building concentration camps on the island of Mindanao, “to protect non-combatant civilians.” The number of civilian deaths in these camps is unknown.

If, as is usually estimated, 28,000 Boer women and children died in British concentration camps during the Second Boer War, this amounts to a death rate of 10-20% of the total civilian population in enemy occupant “death camps.” The only historical parallel to concentration camp mortality on this scale must be sought in Stalinist policies in the Baltic States. Special taxes were levied upon “loyal Boers” to enable the British to pay the costs of interning their relatives. The population of the camps amounted to virtually every woman and child in the Transvaal and Orange Free States; the western Transvaal, in J.M. Spaight's own words, was turned into a “smoking desert” on the grounds of “military necessity.”

In 1914, with the invasion of Belgium, Britain became the champion of the “independence and neutrality of small nations,” a chief propaganda aim of the First World War.

The 1944 Edition of Wheaton's International Law (published in London) alleges that the South African Republics “warred against Great Britain” (p. 99), and that the British went to war to defend the rights of British subjects abroad (a right never conceded to National Socialists where ethnic Germans in Poland were concerned).

At Nuremberg, concentration camps were held to be “criminal” (as long as they were German), while members of resistance groups were held to be patriots and heroes; shooting or imprisoning them (“Night and Fog”) was held to be “criminal.”

With the advent of alleged Al-Quaida prisoners at Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo Air Force Base in Cuba in 2002, it was once again discovered (by the idealistic Americans) that concentration camps are “legal” and that irregular combatants are “criminals.” Where was this knowledge at Nuremberg?

Since Camp X-Ray is “not on American soil,” and since the inmates are “not U.S. citizens,” they are not protected by U.S. law; but since it is a “domestic matter,” they are not protected by “international law” either. How very convenient.

The manner in which international conventions are intentionally drafted in vague language permitting interpretation in any manner one likes, has been brilliantly described by G. Lowe Dickenson in The International Anarchy 1904-1914.[10]

That the same is increasingly true of almost all law is probably obvious to anyone who has ever been involved in legal proceedings.

Thus, like “weapons of mass destruction” (another undefined term), “concentration camps” are illegal, immoral, and emaciating only when possessed by our enemies; our own concentration camps are perfectly legal, lawful, and laudable.

All nations intern enemy aliens during wartime. The Fifth Hague Convention even requires the internment of belligerent troops on neutral soil. How are they to be interned, if not in “camps”?

That the Jews were “enemy aliens” resident in National Socialist Germany is apparent from their own many “declarations of war” against Germany, beginning on March 24, 1933. Yet only a minority of all Jews were ever interned, even during wartime (the highest percentage occurring in Holland as the result of fears of an Allied invasion) – a degree of moderation never imitated by the United States, Britain, Australia, or Soviet Russia.

It appears to me that, far more important than the nomenclature of the penal institution in which one is incarcerated, are the procedures and rules of evidence according to which one is imprisoned, and the conditions of confinement. American prison conditions, despite expensive infrastructures, are among the worst in the world.[11] When Americans solve their own problems, they will be qualified to preach to the rest of the world.

Why exclusive attention should be focused on Jewish “suffering” in German prison camps 60 years ago, is something only the Jews can explain, particularly in view of the fact that their complaints of hardship are neither unique, nor, in many respects, even true.

Further Reading

• Andrjez J. Kaminski, Konzentrationslager 1896 bis heute. Eine Analyse, (Concentration Camps 1986 to Today. An Analysis), Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1982 (exceedingly extensive bibliography, somewhat marred by wholesale acceptance of Holocaust propaganda);
• Avrahim Shifkin, First Guidebook to the USSR: Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union, Stephanus, 1980, illustrated by 170 maps and drawings; the author is an Israeli whose father was murdered by Stalin;
• Emily Hobhouse, The Brunt of the War and Where it Fell, London, 1902;
• Emily Hobhouse (ed.), War without Glamour, or Women's War Experiences Written by Themselves, 1899-1902, Bloemfontein, no date;
• Walter Millis, The Martial Spirit, Literary Guild of America, 1931 (Cuban guerrilla war tactics; “reconcentration centers,” “camps” and “garrisoned towns”; anti-Spanish atrocity propaganda);
• Alexander Fuehr, Belgian Neutrality under International Law, Funk and Wagnallis, New York, 1915;
• Hartmut Stern, Jüdische Kriegerklärungen an Deutschland. Wortlaut – Vorgeschichte – Folgen, (Jewish Declarations of War against Germany – Wording – Prior History – Consequences), FZ-Verlag, Munich 2000 (available from Arndt Buchdienst, Postfach 3603, D-24035 KIEL, 25 Euros.)
• Manfred Jürgensen, Alan Corkhill, Raymond Evans, The German Presence in Queensland, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia, 1988 (expropriation and internment, etc., of German nationals during First World War).
• Roger Butterfield, The American Past, Simon & Schuster, NY, 1947. Quote on p. 191: “Yet General Grant himself had refused to save these men by exchange because – as he said – the South needed its soldiers back to carry on the war, while the North could always get new ones.”

Disclaimer:

I expressly repudiate any and all philosophical or moral conclusions which may appear to arise from the above article. I merely describe the legal situation as it exists. If British actions during the Boer War – traveling six thousand miles to invade the Boer Republics in order to steal their gold mines of the Transvaal, murdering 10-20% of the total white population of the country in concentration camps in so doing, etc. etc. – were not, and are not, illegal under international law, then “international law” is a mockery and a cynical farce. We would be far better off if there were no such thing as “international law,” because, in that case, there would no basis whatsoever upon which to make fraudulent, sanctimonious and hypocritical accusations against the Germans in 1933-45, or at any other time.

© June 10. 2003

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