Nazi death camps started out very much like the American concentration camps of today
In our podcast this week, we interviewed journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of the important book One Long Night – A Global History of Concentration Camps. In the interview she talks extensively about how the German concentration camps during the lead up to World War II did not start out as the death factories that they eventually became. However, over time, they became something far more evil.
In today’s guest post, my friend Danny Steinmetz of Ann Arbor talks about his family’s experience with one of those early German concentration camps in Sachsenhausen. In his essay, Danny makes this important observation: “When AOC speaks of concentration camps I don’t think of Auschwitz’s gas chambers. I think of Sachsenhausen. I think of its harsh conditions leveraged to force a man, German to the core, to give up on living there. That is exactly the intent of the Trump regime’s policies of family separations, denials of asylum, ICE raids, and harsh conditions within the camps.”
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany
My Family’s “Concentration Camp” Story at Sachsenhausen and How it Lines Up with AOC’s Usage
Dachau was the original Nazi concentration camp and from 1933 to 1938 its prisoners were mostly non-Jewish political opponents of the regime. It was primarily a prison and labor camp. There were no gas chambers or any other mass murder facilities there during its early years. Dachau was in a suburb of Munich in the south of Germany. Sachsenhausen, opened in 1936, was CONTINUE READING: Nazi death camps started out very much like the American concentration camps of today | Eclectablog
