British concentration camps

The term concentration camp grew in prominence during that period. Concentration camps are usually linked to WWII and the horrors of the Holocaust. But Germans were neither the first nation to make use of concentration camps nor the last.

At the time, they were fighting the Boer people in the Second Boer War in South Africa. January, Mrs Isie Smuts, wife of Gen.

The northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands, Alderney boasted two work camps, Borkum and Helgolan plus two concentration camps, Norderney and Sylt. Sylt was operated by the SS—and housed. They reinstated the republic, led by a triumvirate consisting of Vice President Paul Kruger, Commandant-General Piet Joubert and MW Pretorius.

Civilians were herded into the camps from their farms, but the insanitary conditions cost many their lives as hunger and disease ran rampant. Of the 100people interned in the camps , 29Boers die. A report after the war concluded that 29Boers (of whom 207 of the Boer child population, were children under 16) had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the concentration camps. This database has been compiled and is maintained by the BCCD project.

Visitors will be directed to the BCCD website to view information directly on their database.

The Germans responded with mass arrests of aliens from not only Britain but Australia, Canada, and South Africa as well. There were a total of tented camps built for Boer internees and for black African ones. Of the 20Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 26were sent overseas.

So, most Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children,. The Nazis first created a detention camp at Bergen-Belsen for 0foreign prisoners in. The camps were poorly conceived and manage and ill-equipped to deal with the large numbers of detainees. Their activities at other concentration camps such as Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, the Gross Rosen subcamps at Neusalz and Langenleuba, and the Mittelbau-Dora subcamp at Gross Werther were not subject of the trial.

It was based on British military law and the charges were thus limited to war crimes. The camps, which consisted of tents as the only shelter for the prisoners, eventually numbered over 10 with erected for the Boers and over sixty for Africans unfortunate enough to live in the territories “controlled” by the British army. The first camps were developed to shelter refugees from the war who had lost their homes to the fighting. British forces liberated concentration camps in northern Germany, including Neuengamme and Bergen-Belsen. Some 60prisoners, most in critical condition because of a typhus epidemic, were found alive.

Even when forcibly removed from Boer areas, the black Africans were not considered to be hostile to the British , and provided a paid labour force. The British along racial lines separated the White and Black camps. The inmates of the Black camps , situated along railway lines and on the border, became the eyes and ears of the British army.

The result: sickness and death spread like wildfire, killing women by the thousands and children by the tens of thousands. In a single year, percent of the entire Boer population died in the British camps—a figure that gets even worse when you realize it includes 20children.

On the battlefield England failed to get the better of the Boers (Dutch-descendants), and then decided to stoop to a full-scale war against the Boer women and children, employing a holocaust to force the burghers to surrender. Under the command of Kitchener, Milner and Roberts,. The camps were established by the British as part of their military campaign against two small Afrikaner republics: the ZAR (Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. Britain established the first concentration camps of the 20th century during the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. They were heavily defended and orders came in to build a complex of labor and concentration camps on Alderney, the smallest and northernmost of the islands, just miles from England’s southern coast.

Slave laborers, mainly from Eastern Europe and Russia, were brought in to build the camps. The scandalous campaign is back in. When the British army first began constructing camps during their South African war, no one called them concentration camps , they were simply called refugee camps or laagers.

It was at this point, that the British began to refer to the camps as concentration camps , which might be the first use of the term. A total of tented camps were built for Boer internees (and a further for black Africans).