Latin American Detention Facilities

The US sought to extend its authority over Latin America before and during World War II, to promote both national security and business interests. Except for Argentina, Brazil and Chile, the Latin American countries complied.  Facilities were built in places such as Cuba, Columbia and Costa Rica.

We helped them house their "aliens."  Japanese and German nationals were housed in the facility in Cuba on the left and in Costa Rica on the right.

By June 1942, 1,521 Italian aliens had been arrested by the FBI. About 250 individuals were interned for up to two years in military camps in Montana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas.

Why no reparations for the Italians?

British Camps in South Africa - 1900 - 1902

During the Boer War the British Army set up camps, originally termed "refugee camps" to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for one or other reason related to the war.  However Kitchener decided to up the ante in order to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. Kitchener initiated plans to

"flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children.... It was the clearance of civilians—uprooting a whole nation—that would come to dominate the last phase of the war."

As Boer farms were destroyed by the British under their "Scorched Earth" policy—including the systematic destruction of crops and slaughtering of livestock, the burning down of homesteads and farms, and the poisoning of wells and salting of fields—to prevent the Boers from resupplying from a home base many tens of thousands of women and children were forcibly moved into the concentration camps. This was not the first time a nation had used camps (Spanish and United States had used them) but the Boer War concentration camp system was the first time that a whole nation had been systematically targeted, and the first in which some whole regions had been depopulated.

Eventually, there were a total of 45 tented camps built for Boer internees and 64 for black Africans. Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps from neglect, poor hygiene, bad sanitation and food shortages. 

The food rations were meager, there was a two tier allocation policy whereby wives and children of men who were still fighting were routinely given smaller rations than others. The inadequate shelter, poor diet, inadequate hygiene and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery to which the children were particularly vulnerable. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities many of the internees died.

To learn more about the Boer War and the British see our South Africa page

"We Jews are on the side of Great Britain, and shall fight for democracy."

He added that "the Jewish representatives are ready to sign an immediate agreement to allow the use of all their resources in men, techniques, material aid and all their capacities." This letter was printed in "The Jewish Chronicle" of September 8th, 1939 ; it was a genuine declaration of war on Germany by the Jewish people and raised the problem of internment of all Jews in Germany within concentration camps as "citizens of a nation at war with Germany."
 

Some remarks about the function of the German concentration camps

From 1933 to 1939, the German concentration camps did not serve any economic purposes. They were used to isolate both inveterate criminals and political opponents deemed to constitute a menace to the National Socialist government. The peace-time figure of prisoners was usually quite low. For example, there were no more than 7500 concentration camp inmates in summer 1937, the majority of them being ordinary criminals and so--called "anti-social elements" (prostitutes, tramps, beggars etc.).

After the outbreak of the war, numerous new concentration camps were set up, and the number of their inmates dramatically rose. In addition to anti--Nazi resistance fighters from the occupied countries, many prisoners of war were sent to the camps. The mass deportation of Jews started at the end of 1941.

As the war dragged on, the lack of manpower became an ever-increasing problem for the German war industry so that the concentration camps gradually assumed an important economic function. On April 30 1942, SS--Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl, director of the SS--Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt, wrote to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler:

[To be quoted according to the official English version of the Nuremberg documents.]

"Der Krieg hat eine sichtbare Strukturänderung der Konzentrationslagergebracht und ihre Aufgaben hinsichtlich des Häftlingseinsatzes grundlegendgeändert. Die Vermehrung von Häftlingen nur aus Sicherheits--, erzieherischen oder vorbeugenden Gründen allein steht nicht mehr im Vordergrund. Das Schwergewicht hat sich nach der wirtschaftlichen Seite hin verlagert."

NOTE:  The English translation was not provided so we used google translate on the above German text:

The war has a visible structural change of the concentration camps and their duties in relation to the use of inmate changed fundamentally. The propagation of detainees only for security - an educational or preventive reasons alone is no longer in the foreground. The focus has been on the economic side shift

Owing to spotted typhus and other epidemics, but also to poor food and clothing, the death rates in the concentration camps were appallingly high. On December 28, 1942, Richard Glücks, inspector of the concentration camps, stated in a circular letter sent to all camp commanders:

[Official English version Nuremberg documents]

"Die 1. Lagerärzte haben sich mit allen ihnen zur Verfügung stehenden Mitteln dafür einzusetzen, dass die Sterblichkeitsziffern in den einzelnen Lagern wesentlich herabgehen ... Die Lagerärzte haben mehr als bisher die Ernährung der Häftlinge zu überwachen und in Übereinstimmung mit den Verwaltungen der Lagerkommandanten Verbesserungsvorschläge einzureichen ... Der Reichsführer SS hat befohlen, dass die Sterblichkeit unbedingt geringer werden muss."

NOTE:  The English translation was not provided so we used google translate on the above German text:

The 1st Camp doctors have dealt with them all the means available to ensure that the mortality rates in the various camps go down much ... The doctors have more storage than before the diet of the prisoners to be monitored and in accordance with the administrations of the camp commandant improvement suggestions ... The Reich leader SS has ordered that the mortality rate must be strictly lower

Glück's instructions had visible consequences; within 8 months the mortality in the camps sank by almost 80%.

Apart from their economic importance, the concentration camps also fulfilled security functions. In many of the occupied countries, the Germans were facing powerful armed resistance movements which constituted a serious threat to their troops and installations.

According to American historian Richard C. Lucas, Polish resistance fighters inflicted the following damage to the Germans between January 1941 and June 1944: They damaged 6'930 train engines, derailed 732 trains, destroyed 979 train wagons, blew up 38 bridges, destroyed 68 aircraft, burnt down 15 factories, annihilated 4'623 military vehicles, committed 25'125 acts of sabotages and 5'733 attacks on German troops (10). No occupying power would have put up with this. Like every occupying power before and after them, the Germans reacted to the terrorist activities of the resistance movement by brutal repression against the civilian population: Not only civilians suspected of being in league with the partisans but also hostages were deported to the camps by tens of thousands.

 

The Liberation Of The
Camps - Facts To Consider
By Theodore J. O'Keefe
1-29-5

 

Nothing has been more effective in establishing the authenticity of the Holocaust story in the minds of Americans than the terrible scenes US troops discovered when they entered German concentration camps at the close of World War II.

 

At Dachau, Buchenwald, Dora, Mauthausen, and other work and detention camps, horrified US infantrymen encountered heaps of dead and dying inmates, emaciated and diseased. Survivors told them hair-raising stories of torture and slaughter, and backed up their claims by showing the GIs crematory ovens, alleged execution gas chambers, supposed implements of torture, and even shrunken heads and lampshades, gloves, and handbags purportedly made from skin flayed from dead inmates.

 

US government authorities, mindful that many Americans who remembered the atrocity stories fed them during World War I still doubted the Allied propaganda directed against the Hitler regime, resolved to "document" what the GIs had found in the camps. Prominent newsmen and politicians were flown in to see the harrowing evidence, while the US Army Signal Corps filmed and photographed the scenes for posterity. Famous journalist Edward R. Murrow reported, in tones of horror, but no longer of disbelief, what he had been told and shown, and Dachau and Buchenwald were branded on the hearts and minds of the American populace as names of infamy unmatched in the sad and bloody history of this planet.

 

For Americans, what was "discovered" at the camps -- the dead and the diseased, the terrible stories of the inmates, all the props of torture and terror -- became the basis not simply of a transitory propaganda campaign but of the conviction that, yes, it was true: the Germans did exterminate six million Jews, most of them in lethal gas chambers.

 

What the GIs found was used, by way of films that were mandatory viewing for the vanquished populace of Germany, to "re-educate" the German people by destroying their national pride and their will to a united, independent national state, imposing in their place overwhelming feelings of collective guilt and political impotence. And when the testimony, and the verdict, of the Nuremberg Tribunal incorporated most, if not all, of the horror stories Americans were told about Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places captured by the US Army, the Holocaust could pass for one of the most documented, one of the most authenticated, one of the most proven historical episodes in the human record.

Typhus, not poison gas

 

If not by gassing, how did the unfortunate victims at Dachau, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen perish? Were they tortured to death or deliberately starved? The answers to these questions are known as well.

 

As Dr. Larson and other Allied medical men discovered, the chief cause of death at Dachau, Belsen and the other camps was disease, above all typhus, an old and terrible scourge of mankind that until recently flourished in places where populations were crowded together in circumstances where public health measures were unknown or had broken down. Such was the case in the overcrowded internment camps in Germany at war's end, where, despite such measures as systematic delousing, quarantine of the sick and cremation of the dead, the virtual collapse of Germany's food, transport, and public health systems led to catastrophe.

 

Perhaps the most authoritative statement of the facts as to typhus and mortality in the camps has been made by Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, who was with US forces in Germany in 1945. Dr. Gordon reported in 1948 that "The outbreaks in concentration camps and prisons made up the great bulk of typhus infection encountered in Germany." Dr. Gordon summarized the causes for the outbreaks as follows: 

Germany in the spring months of April and May [1945] was an astounding sight, a mixture of humanity travelling this way and that, homeless, often hungry and carrying typhus with them ...

Dr. Gordon's findings are corroborated by Dr. Russell Barton, today a psychiatrist of international repute, who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student in 1945. Barton, who volunteered to care for the diseased survivors, testified under sworn oath in a Toronto courtroom in 1985 that "Thousands of prisoners who died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp during World War II weren't deliberately starved to death but died from a rash of diseases."

 

Dr. Barton further testified that on entering the camp he had credited stories of deliberate starvation but decided such stories were untrue after inspecting the well equipped kitchens and the meticulously maintained ledgers, dating back to 1942, of food cooked and dispensed each day.

 

Despite noisily publicized claims and widespread popular notions to the contrary, no researcher has been able to document a German policy of extermination through starvation in the German camps.

   

Camp Survivors: Merely Victims?

 

US Army investigators, working at Buchenwald and other camps, quickly ascertained what was common knowledge among veteran inmates: that the worst offenders, the cruelest denizens of the camps, were not the guards but the prisoners themselves. Common criminals of the same stripe as those who populate US prisons today committed many villainies, particularly when they held positions of authority, and fanatical Communists, highly organized to combat their many political enemies among the inmates, eliminated their foes with Stalinist ruthlessness.

 

Two US Army investigators at Buchenwald, Egon W. Fleck and Edward A. Tenenbaum, carefully investigated circumstances in the camp before its liberation. In a detailed report submitted to their superiors, they revealed, in the words of Alfred Toombs, their commander, who wrote a preface to the report, "how the prisoners themselves organized a deadly terror within the Nazi terror." [12]

 

Fleck and Tenenbaum described the power exercised by criminals and Communists as follows:

 

The trusties, who in time became almost exclusively Communist Germans, had the power of life and death over all other inmates. They could sentence a man or a group to almost certain death ... The Communist trusties were directly responsible for a large part of the brutalities at Buchenwald.

Colonel Donald B. Robinson, chief historian of the American military government in Germany, summarized the Fleck-Tenenbaum report in an article published in an American magazine shortly after the war. Colonel Robinson wrote succinctly of the American investigators' findings: "It appeared that the prisoners who agreed with the Communists ate; those who didn't starved to death." [13]

 

Additional corroboration of inmate brutality has been provided by Ellis E. Spackman, who, as Chief of Counter-Intelligence Arrests and Detentions for the US Seventh Army, was involved in the liberation of Dachau. Spackman, later a professor of history at San Bernardino Valley College in California, wrote in 1966 that at Dachau "the prisoners were the actual instruments that inflicted the barbarities on their fellow prisoners." [14]

 

'Gas Chambers'

 

In December 1944 US Army officers Colonel Paul Kirk and Lt. Colonel Edward J. Gully inspected the German concentration camp at Struthof-Natzweiler in Alsace. They submitted their findings to their superiors, who subsequently forwarded their report to the US War Crimes Division. While, significantly, the full text of their report has never been published, it has been revealed, by a historian supportive of Holocaust claims, that the two investigators were careful to characterize equipment exhibited to them by French informants as a "so-called lethal gas chamber," and to claim it was "allegedly used as a lethal gas chamber." [15] (Emphasis added)

 

Both the careful phraseology of the Natzweiler report, and its effective suppression, stand in stark contrast to the credulity, the confusion, and the blaring publicity that accompanied official reports of alleged gas chambers at Dachau. At first, a US Army photo depicting a GI gazing at a steel door marked with a skull and crossbones and the German words for: "Caution! Gas! Mortal danger! Don't open!," was identified as showing the murder weapon. [16]

 

Later, however, it was evidently decided that the apparatus in question was merely a standard delousing chamber for clothing, and another alleged gas chamber, this one cunningly disguised as a shower room, was exhibited to American congressmen and journalists as the site where thousands breathed their last. While there exist numerous reports in the press as to the operation of this second "gas chamber," no official report by trained Army investigators has yet surfaced to reconcile such problems as the function of the shower heads: Were they "dummies," or did lethal cyanide gas stream through them? (Each theory has appreciable support in journalistic and historiographical literature.)

 

As with Dachau, so with Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, and the other camps liberated by the Allies in western Germany. There was no end of propaganda about "gas chambers," "gas ovens," and the like, but so far not a single detailed description of the murder weapon and its function, not a single report of the kind that is mandatory for the successful prosecution of any assault or murder case in America at that time and today, has come to light.

 

Furthermore, a number of Holocaust authorities have now publicly decreed that there were no gassings, no extermination camps in Germany after all. (We are now told that "gassing" and "extermination" camps were located exclusively in what is now Poland, in areas captured by the Soviet Red Army and made off-limits to western investigators.)

 

Dr. Martin Broszat of the Munich-based Institute for Contemporary History, which is funded by the German government, stated categorically in a 1960 letter to the German weekly Die Zeit: "Neither in Dachau nor in Bergen-Belsen nor in Buchenwald were Jews or other prisoners gassed." [17] Professional "Nazi hunter" Simon Wiesenthal stated in 1975 and again in 1993 that "there were no extermination camps on German soil." [18]

 

Dachau "gas chamber" No. 2, which was once presented to a stunned and grieving world as a weapon that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, is now described in the brochure issued to tourists at the modern Dachau "memorial site" in these words: "This gas chamber, camouflaged as a shower room, was not used." [19]

NOTE:  Since this was written it has been conclusively proven that there were no gas chambers anywhere.  Not in Germany, not in Poland, not in any German concentration camp.  The only "gas" used was to get rid of lice on incoming inmate's clothing and bedding to combat typhus, the deadly disease that ended up killing so many at the end of the war when Germany was in chaos and running from the Russians on one front and the Americans and British on the other.

The Propaganda Intensifies

 

More than 50 years after American troops entered Dachau, Buchenwald and other German camps, and trained American investigators established the facts as to what had gone on in them, the government in Washington, the entertainment media in Hollywood, and the print media in New York continue to churn out millions of words and images annually on the horrors of the camps and the infamy of the Holocaust. Despite the fact that, with the exception of the defeated Confederacy, no enemy of America has ever so suffered so complete and devastating defeat as did Germany in 1945, the mass media and the politicians and bureaucrats behave as if Hitler, his troops, and his concentration camps continue to exist in an eternal present, and our opinion makers continue to distort, through ignorance or malice, the facts about the camps.

 

Time for the Truth

 

It is time that the government and the professional historians reveal the facts about Dachau, Buchenwald and the other camps. It is time they let the American public know how the inmates died, and how they didn't die. It is time that the claims of mass murder by gassing are clarified and investigated in the same manner as any other claims of murder. It is time that the free ride certain groups have enjoyed as the result of unchallenged Holocaust claims be terminated, just as it is time to end the scapegoating of other groups, including Germans, eastern Europeans, the Roman Catholic hierarchy, and the wartime leadership of America and Britain, either for their alleged role in the Holocaust or their supposed failure to stop it.

   

Summary

 

The conclusions of the early US Army investigations as to the truth about the wartime German concentration camps have since been corroborated by all subsequent investigators and can be summarized:

 

1. The harrowing scenes of dead and dying inmates were not the result of a German policy of "extermination," but rather the result of epidemics of typhus and other disease brought about largely by the effects of Allied aerial attacks.

2. Stories of Nazi super criminals and sadists who turned Jews and others into handbags and lampshades for their private profit or amusement were sick lies or diseased fantasies; indeed, the German authorities punished corruption and cruelty on the part of camp commanders and guards.

3. On the other hand, portrayals of the newly liberated inmates as saints and martyrs of Hitlerism were quite often very far from the truth; indeed, most of the brutalities inflicted on camp detainees were the work of their fellow prisoners, in contravention of German policy and German orders.

4. The alleged homicidal showers and gas chambers were used either for bathing camp inmates or delousing their clothes; the claim that they were used to murder Jews or other human beings is a contemptible fabrication. Orthodox historians and professional "Nazi-hunters" have quietly dropped claims that inmates were gassed at Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps in Germany. They continue, however, to keep silent regarding the lies about Dachau and Buchenwald, as well as to evade an open discussion of the evidence for homicidal gassing at Auschwitz and the other camps captured by the Soviets.

 

 

The original version of this revised and updated essay first appeared in The Journal of Historical Review, July-August 1995 (Vol. 15, no. 4), pp. 18-23.  

This was heavily summarized.  To read the entire article go to http://www.rense.com/general62/camps.htm