Article #14
As bad as Auschwitz? British
concentration camps during the Second
Boer War and modern-day equivalence
to the camps of the Nazi regime
As bad as Auschwitz?
British concentration
camps during the
Second Boer War
and modern-day
equivalence to the
camps of the Nazi
regime
Abstract
During the Second Anglo-Boer war (1899-1902) in what is
present-day South Africa, the British Army founded a series
of refugee and internment camps, often pointed to as the first
modern concentration camps. Although the overwhelming number
of casualties stemmed from malnutrition and disease due to
neglect, there is a modern tendency to view these places as the
first death camps, comparable to those erected by the Nazi regime
some 40 years later. This article will seek to assess the validity of
this comparison, to examine the state of the British concentration
camps used during the Boer war with specific relation to the
extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany. Ultimately to
assert why it is not fair to equate the Nazi-operated camps and
British-operated camps on the grounds of operational style,
mortality rate, government responses, but primarily a fundamental
difference in purpose.
Author: Owen Brown
In a recent episode of Question Time, aired 14th February 2019,
Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg entered a brief debate with
politics and economics commentator Grace Blakeley on the subject
of Boer War concentration camps. In this exchange, Blakeley offers
her unfavourable opinions on concentration camps through a
series of remarks: “The British invented the use of concentration
camps.”, “Hundreds of thousands of people died”, and perhaps most
damning “it was systematic murder” (BBC News, 2019). Over the
course of this brief exchange, both sides exchange facts which
are objectively wrong. But Blakely’s strong views do not exist in
a vacuum, a 2016 article from the Independent ranking five of
the worst atrocities of the British Empire lists Boer concentration
camps as number one (Osbourne, 2016). An older article from the
Guardian labels them as “death camps” (Harris, 2001). The label of
a ‘death camp’ conjures up images in the public mind of the most
infamous and best-known camps, the extermination camps of
the Third Reich. But this modern association between the British
concentration camps and the Nazi death camps, be it deliberate or
inadvertent, is unfounded, misleading, and dishonest. It is within
the best interest of historians to reject this false equivalency which
is pervading the popular narrative of the Boer War.
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