Ep. 74- The Global History of Concentration Camps witih Andrea Pitzer

What is a concentration camp?  What are the distinguishing features of these spaces?  Where did they come from?

In this episode, I talk with Andrea Pitzer about the long, global history of the concentration camp and its evolution over time.  We talk about what the definition is, what qualifies something as a concentration camp, and how different societies have learned from each other in their various iterations of "the camp."

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and author.

Pitzer, Andrea. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps (2018)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.718)
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waipman Born. And today we're going to be talking about concentration camps, but not just Nazi concentration camps. We're going to be talking about the entire concept and the entire history of camps all across the world. And what we can learn from those about things that had in common, things that were different, learning between various regimes and iterations of this thing that we're calling a concentration camp.

And I literally have an amazing guest, Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a book called One Long Night about a global history of precisely that of concentration camps. And she is going to be perfect, I know, for this conversation. Andrea, thanks so much for coming on.

Andrea (00:44.995)
Well, thank you for having me on. I'm not necessarily happy to talk about all this stuff in our current moment, but I think it's super useful.

Waitman Beorn (00:52.354)
Well, as I said before we started recording, I live my life in scare quotes. So we all understand that concentration camps don't make us happy. Can we start really quickly by like, how did you get interested in this particular topic?

Andrea (01:05.562)
So oddly enough, I joke sometimes I'm like the least qualified person to write this book. I was working on a book about Vladimir Nabokov, the guy who Lolita and his family, you he was Russian and his father had been arrested first by the final czar and then by Lenin. They fled the country. They wound up in Germany. And so not surprisingly, this is all happening in the first half of the 20th century. There's lots of references to different kinds of camps.

There's World War I internment camps that play a role in one of his novels. His brother ends up in a Nazi concentration camp outside Hamburg. And of course, the Gulag in his home country. His wife is Jewish, so this is also an important part of who they were and how this history affected them. And so at some point, halfway into my research, I just said, wait, I need to find out.

when did concentration camps enter the world? how did this even happen that these camps existed? And it really never occurred to me that there was no book about that. It was just startling and it was so startling. And when I say I'm unqualified to write it, I had a background from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. I had done humanities, international affairs, politics, government. So I was probably not the least qualified person, but it's such a daunting thing.

And there's a reason academics go deep into a subject, right? So that they can master the archives in that area. They can master language. They can develop a network of peers. And if I was gonna take this on, I wouldn't be able to do much of that, right? In the course of just writing one book, I could not replace 2,000 colleagues and 30 years of their work. It's just not possible. But I decided it was important enough that at least it would be

a first shot across the bow that would then hopefully bring in other people and support and buttress and expand that work. And so I just decided that it was so necessary that I would at least sort of take the first step on that.

Waitman Beorn (03:13.87)
Well, and it's a really fantastic book. there are lots and lots of things to be learned in there. And I definitely learned a bunch of things in there. Because as you say, I'm focusing primarily on the Holocaust. I'm relatively conversant with Namibia because I teach comparative genocide. But lot of the other things, I really didn't have a good grasp on it. So it was really, really, really useful. But of course, I guess

The way that we have to start because I'm a professor after all as well is, with defining our terms, right? Um, because the book is about this, you have the concentration camp. And so whether you're an undergraduate or a graduate student or in a very accomplished writer and researcher and historian like you, how do we define that term? What is a, what is a concentration camp? What is it? What is a definition that's good enough to get us, you know, from the, where you start in the book to, to the present day.

Andrea (04:12.045)
So first and foremost, even though the very first examples that appear in my book do happen in wartime and are involved in military, we are talking about civilian detention. So it's the mass detention of civilians without due process or formal trial. And by that, mean, whatever is the existing legal system in that place at that time, this is an add on, an end run in some way around it.

So mass detention of civilians without due process or substantial trial, generally, almost always on the basis of identity. So it could be political affiliation, religious, ethnicity, racial identity, but it is on the basis predominantly of who they are rather than a specific crime that they've done or something that they have committed, even though often crimes are created, right? But the real underlying reason for detaining them is that identity.

And it is almost always done to entrench political power or to expand political power. And I think that that is really critical too, in terms of how we see things play out. That is part of the reason that they're the add-on because whoever's in charge in that moment wants to be able to do something that the letter of the law won't let them do. And it's almost always something that will benefit them or expand their power. And so,

That is sort of the base working definition that I went for.

Waitman Beorn (05:41.166)
And I think that's a really good one, actually. And I'll just point out also that, you know, war is actually a key component in the overwhelming majority of every case that you've talked about, actually, in some way, shape or form, whether it's civil war or insurgency or whatever. And of course, this is true of genocide as well, right? Almost all genocides have taken place in the context of a war. I'm going to throw a monkey wrench question at you. And this is...

Andrea (06:06.755)
Please do.

Waitman Beorn (06:09.282)
This is unfair because it wasn't on my list of submitted questions that I submitted beforehand. I'm a lawyer, right? This wasn't on this wasn't a discovery. But I'm curious. You don't mention American plantations, and I'm I'm curious if you tell me why, because, you know, as I've gotten older and more reflective, you know, I grew up in Virginia, you know, I'm I in fact, the house that I lived my most my life in was a former plantation.

Andrea (06:15.983)
That's fine.

Andrea (06:22.723)
I'm so glad you asked that because I was, go ahead, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (06:38.55)
And the more I think about it, the more I'm like, these are, these are slave labor camps. These are essentially a form of concentration camp. So can you tell me why, why you decided not to, or maybe it's this question of organizing the book.

Andrea (06:49.505)
Well, no, actually, I'm thrilled that you asked that because that was something that I normally address that I left off. And I think it's critical, which is nothing ever arrives as all historians know out of a vacuum, first of all. Second of all, what my book is a history of is modern concentration camps. And by modern, I am defining this pivotal moment in the book. think I call it going from the A bomb to the H bomb, right?

where detention becomes just a vaster, more weaponized thing. And that is made possible in the late 1800s. And it happens because of the invention, patenting, and mass production of both barbed wire and automatic weapons. And that revolution in detention that that offers is it allows a very small guard force to hold a large, large, large number of people. You can't get to the Holocaust without that, right? And so,

But I always want to make clear, and so I'm thrilled you asked that question, that it is not as if, as soon as automatic weapons and barbed wire were invented, that suddenly this thing descends from an alien spaceship. It comes out of the local conditions, culture, traditions, military actions, all of these things come together, and there are forerunners. I will say, however, that, and I do not mean this as a comparative thing, better or worse in any way, but I see

what gave birth to concentration camps as a slightly different phenomenon than what happened with slavery. And they kind of function in opposite directions. What I often call, since the book came out, I have taken to calling the concentration camp tendency, which is this tendency of isolating a certain group.

and removing them from society. So it is, I think of the language that's used around trans people right now, right? It is a concentration camp tendency style language. These people do not exist, they should not be seen, they should not be allowed access to certain things. So this kind of language that we see very much about immigrants in the US is that kind of rhetoric. And it is that they should be removed and sent somewhere else, right? And...

Andrea (09:01.323)
we have a pretty good idea given history that will be a punitive place. And the historical roots for that are in fact, a lot of imperialisms that happened over time in America, in the Americas, plural, in Asia and in Africa. We see it with the Spanish very early on, treatment of relocation of native populations, detention of native populations, some labor projects.

plus genocide as a piece of that. And we see it with the British in various parts of the world. In the middle of the 19th century, we start to see sort of proto kinds of detentions that look quite a bit like modern stuff, but they just can't do what becomes possible later. And we then also see it in the Americas, in North America under the British and then under the US government, Native American genocide.

done principally through removal, through removal to reservations, through massacres, sometimes detention in forts. These are all proto concentration camp forms. And slavery in my estimation, and I'm not gonna talk so much today about.

Native American and Indian slavery in the West because that's its own kind of little world and we probably don't have time to get into that today. But if we talk about the US's big original sin of chattel slavery, that functions differently because your goal is not to remove people from the society you are living in. Your goal is to kidnap people and bring them into that society. So the expropriation of labor,

is the fundamental driver of chattel slavery and the detention is then the side part of that, right? And so they kind of, they both do horrific things that are capable of destroying whole civilizations and genocide. I mean, they can lead to the same kinds of things, but I think they have opposite motivations, if that makes sense.

Waitman Beorn (11:01.494)
Yeah, mean, like said, it's not a, it's not a gotcha question. I'm just, I'm just curious because it's a...

Andrea (11:04.823)
No, but I always hate it if I don't have that introductory pardon because I think that we can absolutely. In fact, in Minnesota now, we are seeing detention at some of the same places where Native Americans were detained in these historical parts. And so there are those echoes that are so clearly there. And as the book was, it was twice as long as my editor wanted it. And so I tried to focus on this modern period. But just like these camps evolve, right, they evolved from something before.

that came.

Waitman Beorn (11:35.938)
Well, I guess it makes me think then also that another thing that we might consider to put in there is ghettoization, particularly in the context of the Holocaust, because that actually is kind of doing the function of a concentration camp in many ways. it seems it echoed the I'm going to mispronounce this, the roncontracion, recontracion. There we go. My Spanish is terrible.

Andrea (11:59.008)
Reconcentration. Reconcentration. we go. Reconcentration.

Waitman Beorn (12:03.406)
that we see in we'll talk about this in a minute because I want to begin here, but you know that we see, I mean, it's in Cuba and in those kinds of places. The ghetto is sort of the same. It's also similar to what's going on to tie it back again to the you talk about in your last chapters about the Rohingya where they're sort of they're forced into these living areas that are not super conducive to

to nice living and our confinement places. So maybe we can talk about, mean, one of the things that, as I mentioned in the introduction, that I think would be great is as we move through this, just this genealogy, because as you pointed out, history doesn't take place in a vacuum and people are learning about how to do this. This is a skill, as it were. mean, it's an architectural skill, it's an organizational skill, it's a sociological skill.

Andrea (12:56.813)
Yeah, logistics, huge logistics skill that gets passed along. Yeah, so I think the ghetto, if we wanna just stay on that for a second, that obviously has a huge role in the Holocaust. And that again is the concentration camp tendency. Even if you're not putting them in camps yet, you're walling them off from society, right? You're removing them from what is considered normal society that has access to rights and to living a life. And it was fascinating to go to this,

Western state of Rakhine in Myanmar and to see the Rohingya there, they were pushed outside town into these camps, but there was this one section, Ang Mingalar, where in fact they were left there, but it's walled off. And they even had buses that you could take for money because everything, right? Everything there is a black market kind of thing. And everything can...

if somebody had enough money, they can make it happen. So I can bribe my way to sneak into them, right? Even though I wasn't supposed to be in them at that point in time. And so they actually had buses that ran, but only between the camps and the ghetto and never touched the rest of the city. And by this, were saying, we're not running anything like a detention camp or a concentration camp, we're running refugee camps. They just can't leave them, right? And so there becomes this like weird language about it. And I think that,

You can see some of that in some of the Nazi discussions of camps. You can sometimes see it, of ghettos, sorry. But you see this ghettoization that happens, and that is too kind of a spiritual forerunner, if not the physical direct forerunner of camps as well. The fact that we had, even let's go to your field, Nazi Germany, pre-Nazi era during the Weimar Republic, they had what were called concentration camps for

what were called then gypsies, Roma and Sinti people is the more respectful name. And they were not what we think of as camps at all. They were basically kind of a sundown camps that you had to be out of certain places at certain times, be out of city limits, right? And this is where you would go to. So again, not at all what we think of as modern camps, but you see that tradition of you can force people outside of a community. You can kind of keep them expelled and everything from the pale settlement to, you know, there's a long history of that kind of stuff, but that's.

Waitman Beorn (15:04.329)
Yep.

Andrea (15:19.779)
That's also a kind of forerunner of the modern concentration camp.

Waitman Beorn (15:23.2)
Yeah, for sure. mean, this is a concept that runs throughout this study as well, which is the issue of immigration and who belongs where and all these kinds of things. I mean, even with the Roma in that case, that was an attempt to kind of make them sedentary, as it were, to make them settle down. Because the Germans and then later the Nazis thought this was sort of a degenerate way of civilization.

Andrea (15:44.141)
Right, not have just these nomadic populations like everyone

Waitman Beorn (15:53.258)
but there's also, you know, as, you get to, you were talking about sort of, you know, these other camps and, and this idea of who belongs where. And of course I'm even thinking, you know, I live in the UK now and there's, there's this talk about the hotels, you know, where the immigrants and refugees are, are, kept. And then it's, should we move them to an abandoned military base? You know, it's not, obviously I'm not saying that those are necessarily concentration camps, but it is a.

It is an attempt to concentrate people, you know, sometimes out of sight, out of mind, you know, in a way that's,

Andrea (16:23.951)
Well, and that's exactly why I came up with this phrase, the concentration camp tendency, because I think well short of creating actual concentration camp regimes, you get these warning signs when societies start using this language or they start moving people. In the US, one of the things now, and one of the things I'm super concerned about in addition to immigration, detention for immigrants is homelessness. And you actually see proposals to create camps for homeless people somewhere outside of town.

Waitman Beorn (16:52.492)
and destroy the camps that they've actually made themselves to live in.

Andrea (16:54.551)
Exactly. is the, you know, if we do talk about Vietnam later, it's the same impulse as destroy the village and save the village. you know, it's a little bit this idea. And it's interesting because some of this does rise out of like public health movements in the 19th century. And this idea that government has a role in preserving the public health, in creating social structures that are conducive and healthy and productive.

And I mean, I would not give up the germ theory of disease despite RFK Jr. for all the money in the world. But at the same time, we have to recognize that this was something that kind of could be used as a weapon, right? And that we see again and again that it's for the national hygiene. You know, we have Mussolini, we have Hitler. It's this idea of national purity, national hygiene. And I don't think it's that different than if we are gonna move those people in hotels somewhere where we don't have to look at them. Something that happens again and again.

or in the US moving unhoused people into settlements somewhere far from the towns that they're currently living in. Those are all kind of not the same as concentration camps, but those are dangerous tendencies to lean into for sure.

Waitman Beorn (18:04.302)
Yeah, I mean, they're the disease theory of social practice, right? You know, that we, the same way that we would isolate an infection or isolate a tumor to remove it, we would do the same thing with people that we decide are not, you know, conducive to society. And I guess, can we go back really quickly to the beginning here and get into the history a little bit? Is the US...

Did the US invent these or because the very first thing you talk about is the American Civil War with the Libra code, which is I actually just had a whole thing on him in my in my genocide class. And so I'm I'm kind of a big fan of Francis Lieber. But you start with you start with the American Civil War and then go quickly into into Cuba, which happened roughly the same time. But, you know, did the US invent concentration camps?

Andrea (18:52.821)
say no, they did not. If I had to have a yes or no, if we have to do a binary choice on that. Certainly, we see a lot of the forerunners, you know, through this Libra code that had these holes left in it for treatment of civilians, through some of the detention camps that we see in the war, the tremendous suffering and death that the people were subject to, those were prisoners of war. And so I do make a little bit that distinction in terms of

sort of the modern concentration camp devoted to civilians. But again, those military routes can't be denied. Certainly they influenced the shape of them. But if you look at British history, if you look at Spanish history in the colonies that they had in the mid 19th century, they were already trying to do some of these things like they end up doing, like the Spanish end up doing in Cuba. And I could talk a little bit about that in a second. But I would say that

there are like ghosts and whispers of it and America will very quickly follow on the heels of Spain and Cuba and impose the same kinds of things. And so this is partly just the practice of war around the world at that time, I think you see these things happening, but the US certainly had an enormous hand in the Native American removal and the horrific policies there. And then certainly adopting one of the earlier versions that the US inflicted in the Philippines.

but there was no single-handed invention of camps by any country. Spain bears a lot of responsibility, but British imperialism and U.S. imperialism, I would say, are also really key factors.

Waitman Beorn (20:33.498)
I I want to, like, I like Cuba because it, mean, I learned a lot about it, but also it was really interesting because one of things that I always think is really useful when, doing history and particularly when doing comparative history is the ability to point out that even people at the time recognized that these things were bad, right? Because one of things that people always say is, well, at a different time, people say this with they didn't know or racism was normal and blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, and of course you yes.

Andrea (20:55.565)
They didn't know.

Waitman Beorn (21:03.374)
societies were different and there were different ideas that were sort of more commonly held. But in the end, this is a cue, but I don't want you to talk about this, you still, even then you see colonial authorities who were like, we're not, I'm not going to do that thing because I think that thing is bad. And somebody else comes in and says, I am going to do that thing, you know, but you have at the same time, contemporaries, you know, one of whom is making a more, a sort of moral judgment about what is the right way to treat civilians and somebody isn't. And it's, it's great because it gives the lie to that whole

sort of, you're just as a contemporary here story and you're just trying to like project your woke ideology back onto onto a past that wouldn't recognize that sort of thing. And so can we talk about like what happens in Cuba and what are the what are the forms of concentration camps and why do they pop up there?

Andrea (21:51.708)
And so this is sort of the moment that the world crosses over between those proto forms. And then next up will be the US and the Boer War in which we start to see the tent cities and the things that start to look a little bit more like barracks and things. But Spain's attempt to suppress rebellion in Cuba, which is its colony at that point, is the real tripping point and crossing over moment because basically they had been

for decades trying to suppress a rebellion. And it would die down for a little bit. It would pop back up again. Sometimes the rebels took, know, really made them pay tremendous cost. And so the governor general in the mid 1890s basically wrote a letter to Spain, to his bosses back home and said, we aren't gonna be able to end this.

unless we change tactics. And the tactics that would be needed to end this are that we would need to be able to shoot prisoners. So just, if we got them, we can shoot them. And so there's your getting rid of the due process stuff a little bit. But in addition to that, that we would relocate the entire civilian population from contested areas where there's military fighting of any kind. We would give them very short notice to move.

And basically anybody that's left is fair game. And the idea would be that you would deprive the rebels from being able to sort of hide in various people's farms or to get food from them, to not let them see their families. You would cut them off from any support things, but also literally empty the countryside. So they started dividing up the island with barbed wire. Again, here we have this presence of barbed wire. And so...

they divide it into sections and they begin to clear sections is the idea. But the guy who writes that first letter doesn't agree to do any of this. He actually sends this letter to Spain and says, this is what we would have to do. But as the representative of a civilized society, I'm not gonna do it because the misery and suffering that this would cause would be unfathomable. So here's your point. Like they knew.

Andrea (24:11.875)
This guy was gonna be the guy who would impose those policies. And he knew not that it could lead to Auschwitz 50 years from then, right? But he knew that it would lead to something really terrible. So they sent in, they recalled him, and they sent in another guy, a general who was already nicknamed the butcher. So this guy was coming in with the express idea that not only was he allowed to impose these measures that his predecessor had refused, but...

that he could basically have a free hand to put down the rebellion. And he institutes Reconcentración. And this is again a little different because they aren't moving the civilians farther outside of their own society. They're actually moving the civilians off of these contested, their peasants basically, off of these rural areas and into Spanish held cities.

So it's kind of, it's a weird crossing over moment because it isn't sending them somewhere else behind barbed wire. It's bringing them into fortified cities behind barbed wire, except that there's no actual provision or very little in a few cases, but basically no provision made for where they will sleep, how they will eat. The idea is they're supposed to farm, they're farmers, right? Well, if somebody dropped you off in Hoboken,

how quickly it put you behind barbed wire so you couldn't leave, like you couldn't get your animals, your oxens, your mules, anything, and said, okay, grow your own food. Like that's not a simple thing. And many of these people were stuck on the outsides of these cities, but behind what were called deadlines, these barbed wire lines, and had no real access to food or anything. And most of these people were women and children. They very quickly began to get sick. Disease was rampant.

Water was sometimes, water supplies were sometimes terrible and food was a chronic issue. And it's really hard to estimate the numbers. You will see hundreds of thousands of people variation in terms of the totals, but it is estimated by most serious historians that at least 150,000 people died due to this period of re-concentration.

Waitman Beorn (26:20.914)
And presumably they're living alongside regular people who are having normal lives, you know, and are doing fine, right? Because they're, they're moved into regular cities.

Andrea (26:28.115)
Well, it's wartime. So there's, you know, there are some restrictions and things, but yes, they're eating and they have food and you see there's tremendous US sympathy for these re concentrados as they're called. And the reason is because there's actual journalists that are going down and reporting on this stuff and they're walking through these cities and there's literally women and children dropping dead in the streets, right? And so it is,

shocking. It shocks the conscience of people. And Americans, interestingly, this is the period of yellow journalism. And so things are described in really lurid and dramatic terms, although the reality is plenty lurid and dramatic. And Americans start raising, it's basically mutual aid. They start donating groceries and things and they're so horrified by what's happening, they want to send relief. And the train companies at the time agree to carry all this stuff.

to the coast. So everybody all over the country is donating to help these poor starving people in these, you know, bastard Spanish hurting the Cubans. And the ships take this stuff from the coast down to Cuba. So it will actually be delivered to help save these people. And the USS Maine is part of the convoy that like is protecting those civilian ships carrying this relief. And so that's why you get the Maine in harbor blowing up, which is what most people learn as the start of

the Spanish-American war, but the reason it was there was actually the Americans were already very moved by the plight of these people. And I will say that the Spanish government had exiled so many Cubans that wound up in America that they also had like really great PR. The people, the rebels had really great PR in the US at the time that were also like educated, heroic seeming people.

And so the Americans also very much identified with that.

Waitman Beorn (28:27.49)
And of course, the irony there is, of course, as you talk about in the book, one of the reasons with the Yale journalism and everything else is America is going to swoop in and stop these horrible human rights violations and then sort of does the same thing in the Philippines and even in Cuba, mean, it's sort of the way to fight the insurgency.

Andrea (28:45.131)
Well, they don't run the same kind of camps. yeah, but I mean, there is some detention, but Philippines is where we actually do it. And it's by virtue. Well, first of all, I should say that in the declaration, in President McKinley summoning the country to war, summoning the US to war, he basically says this policy of re-concentration, it's extermination. It leads to nothing but the wilderness and the grave. I mean, it's a very dramatic quote that then we defeat Spain,

pretty handily in a short period of time. And then we are faced with, and there's a lot of debates over whether we had promised the Filipinos would have independence, right? Whether we were promised that that would be given to them. And there's still lot of debates about that, but it's very clear that we did not deal with that honorably, whatever would the actual discussions were. And so then when the rebels are realized they're not getting independence and the US is gonna be, is gonna fight them on that.

then you actually have kind of a traditional war for a brief period of time and then they realize they can't win that. So then they go to these guerrilla tactics. They go to this sort of, like the rebels that you saw in Spain more, I mean, sorry, the Spanish fighting the Spanish in Cuba. then the US is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And almost immediately resorts to concentration camps as well as some executions and some other things. And so basically the first chance

The US had to inflict concentration camps after fighting concentration camps. They took it, you know? And so it's a real badge of dishonor for the country that we did that.

Waitman Beorn (30:24.93)
Yeah, I mean, and this is again, just to highlight for listeners, one of the, again, I think one of the continuities throughout this, along with this idea of immigration is also insurgency and some form of concentration camp as essentially an attempt to defeat insurgency. And I think we'll do that.

Andrea (30:44.995)
Well, and you hear it from the beginning, you're absolutely right. And I wanna throw in one word that is used early on, which is terrorists. Like from the beginning, you hear this word used to describe the actions of these rebels. And that becomes relevant throughout concentration camp history because being a foreigner or being seen as a terrorist, being able to be labeled as a terrorist are the two quickest ways.

that you can kind of get swept into most of these camp systems.

Waitman Beorn (31:16.364)
Yeah, I mean, and we'll talk about this when we get to maybe if we get to get Guantanamo, but there's also this element of fear, right? That the overarching state is afraid of a group of people, you know, and insurgency is all about that. You know, we can't pick out who the good guys and the bad guys are. So we're going to lump them all in because there's it seems like in all of the examples that you note in the book, there is some recognition that what the government is doing

Andrea (31:30.413)
very much.

Waitman Beorn (31:45.716)
is counter to accepted law in some way, shape or form. But the trade-off is theoretically that we're protecting the country from something worse. And therefore, it's...

Andrea (31:58.786)
Right, in the British and Malaya said, like, to preserve the law, is necessary for a time for us to break the law, right? It's this idea. And I might not have the quote exact, but it's basically that. And it's this idea. And this goes to those of you who are listening who are academics, you know, to states of exception, right? This idea that we suspend regular stuff for a time to do this unpleasant thing that has to be done. And the concentration camp rises out of that.

Waitman Beorn (32:05.174)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andrea (32:28.749)
suspension of law and order or that state of exception and often left unchecked becomes at least in its site, in its location, a permanent state of exception, right? And so, but counterinsurgency, you don't get to camps without trying to deal with counterinsurgency. Camps begin as a response to counterinsurgency.

Waitman Beorn (32:51.406)
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and we could have a whole different conversation about counterinsurgency because arguably we know one has really solved, solved that how to solve that problem anyway. Um, but I want to kind of keep us moving because we have so, so much history, so much history to cover. One of the things you do really well in the book is each in each chapter, each example, you have people that you try to follow through as much as possible. Um, you know, what I call sort of the forest gump approach, which I'm a huge fan of actually, you know, that you can find somebody who sort of

Andrea (33:02.541)
Yeah, there's so much.

Waitman Beorn (33:21.026)
can you can follow through the history, right? And, and, and experience it through their eyes. It makes it very personal. And one of the, one of the examples that I thought was really powerful and now we'll move to the Boers, which is the, that sort of where I first, before I actually, before I read your book, cause I didn't know about, about Cuba as much, you know, I sort of placed concentration camp beginning with the Boer war. but you talk about Emma Hobhouse, who is this an amazing person.

So maybe you can talk really briefly about where the concentration hands come from, but then about her and like, what is she doing and why is she important?

Andrea (33:53.132)
So Emily Hubhouse is this just wild character from early 20th century Britain, who is just basically a pain in the ass on several fronts. At one point she's a suffragette, she is doing all this really radical and powerful work, but is often just seen as like an annoying busybody. And what happens with the Boer camps is that

because we have so much to get through. I'll do the brief version of this, but during the Second Boer War, the British basically want to put down, I mean, there's questions of there's mining, there's rights to certain things, but the British are basically asserting control over Southern Africa in that moment, and they need to put down a rebellion of Boers. And so they create these camps very much along the same military principles that we see in Cuba.

which is that they have different areas, right? And they're clearing those areas of civilians. it is again, predominantly women and children. And you are not alone in sort of not knowing about the Spanish Cuban part of it. There are some historians that don't even count that necessarily as true concentration camp since you're bringing people into the cities instead of making them go somewhere else that's much more, you know, much more awful. I think you kind of don't get the...

to the Boer camps without the Spanish camps. But this is the moment of crossover. And in that moment of crossover, there are tremendous numbers of women and children, the wives and children of these Boer farmers, their extended families, and their servants are often in the Boer camps. In addition, there are camps for black Africans that are created. And one of the amazing things when I was researching this was the quasi-scientific approach

you see here that you didn't really see in Spain, because there's a sense right away, the people who are defending these are saying these are not concentration camps. These are refugee camps. very much, know, so one of the key things in this whole conversation I hope people come away with is from the beginning of modern concentration camp history, from the first two possible models that you could compare, the second one began by saying,

Andrea (36:20.201)
Our camps are nothing like those camps and they're not concentration camps. So that's just important because we hear that a lot today. And so it's something to keep in mind. But basically the casualty of people in these camps, civilian camps are double the war casualties. They occur predominantly because the camps are built hastily. They're poorly sited. In some cases, the water supplies are horrific. The food is horrific.

Medical care is abysmal, although it improves slightly as it goes on. so disease runs rampant through the camps. And then one of the most horrific details, this is I was getting to before, in the Black African camps, we have, again, have the beginnings of like a science of detention. It was determined that Black Africans needed half the calories of the detainees in the Boer camps, which were, even though they were seen as different, the Boers were seen as backwards and uncultured or illiterate.

they were seen as white, right? And so you see this racial distinction that is there. And Emily Hobhouse basically went and inserted herself into the whole network of camps. She's riding on trains around by herself, military transports, and she is going in and making demands of people running the camps and bringing to their attention the disease and the filth and the lack of food.

and the lack of medical care and insisting that it be changed. And she comes back and she's testifying and she kind of becomes the nudge conscience of the country. What's interesting is somebody says to her at some point, why don't you go to the black camps? And she's kind of like, no, that's not like, I don't need to do that, right? I've done this thing. And to be fair, most people were doing nothing. So she does have this heroic role.

in bringing attention to this very real suffering, but by not including those camps for black Africans in her overall thing. I think it allows the splintering and the creation of this Afrikaner myth that later helped South Africa, that they were the oppressed of this conflict and that they have a kind of suffering and a genocide is how they would claim it for themselves, that nobody else could understand or experience, right? And that that's where the hatred of them and the Afrikaner

Andrea (38:44.633)
culture or government comes from when in fact, not as many, but lot of black Africans, thousands and thousands of black Africans also died in even worse conditions. And so we have most of what we know about those black African camps comes from religious missionaries that were actually going into those camps. And so we have again in war dealing with an insurgency that isn't going well.

this measure that's taken. And it's important to say right from the beginning too, that I would say, as we could say about US immigration detention now, it's deliberately punitive. They aren't trying, it's not death camp at all. And we should make that distinction just so that it is said. I think you and I both know it so well we might forget to. But when I'm talking about concentration camps, I am talking about the things that were predominantly more like the pre death camp.

concentration camp system in Nazi Germany. The death camp system that is imposed mid-war is for the express mass extermination as quickly and efficiently as can be done in various forms, in settled camps, in mobile squads, and these other things.

Waitman Beorn (39:59.822)
Well, my listeners know that I don't use the word death camp at all, because they're all sort of death camps in a certain sense. It's extermination centers, which is like, and yeah, that's kind of how, because otherwise, people were murdered and people were murdered, people were killed, people did die intentionally in these other places, but that wasn't their sort of primary purpose in the way that Trebrinka and others.

Andrea (40:08.551)
Well, and I am happy to do that since you've already established that for your listeners. And so, what are they, not death camps, right? What are they?

Andrea (40:26.039)
Yes, and I love that for the framing that most of these camp systems that we are talking about, know, that the Holocaust, the Shoah retains its unique aspect in terms of the intention and the methods of those extermination centers. And so these camps are more like the lead ups to those extermination centers. And so when people sometimes say, well, it should only be the only things that should count should be those extermination centers, because that's what people think of.

then my answer to that typically, and we can go into this more when we get to Germany, but is is Dachau not a concentration camp then? Dachau has to count. It has to count. And if it counts, then these other things in other places in the world count too. But I'm never comparing these other systems to the mode and model of extermination centers.

Waitman Beorn (41:12.366)
Sure. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, there is an element though that where, you know, whether it's explicitly stated or not, in most of these places that you talk about throughout the book, through all history, know, conditions are created such that people will die. And that's not a problem for the people that are creating them. And in fact, sometimes it's not a bug, but it's the reason, you know, and it's a feature, right?

Andrea (41:34.937)
Absolutely.

Andrea (41:42.273)
It's a feature, right? Yeah, not a bug, but a feature.

Waitman Beorn (41:45.356)
You know, they're not they're not trying to, you know, systematically exterminate everyone who comes through the walls. But if they die, you know, that's not a big deal. so it's they're not just sort of these benign places where, you know, occasions people die. You know, the.

Andrea (42:02.017)
And that's what I wanted to get to, which is from the beginning, those Boer camps, the Reconcentrados where they're living, immigration detention in the US today, the conditions there are meant to be unpleasant. They are meant to be punitive. They are meant to do some harm. And in cases where the military, and you have an insurgency, it is they are trying to get the war fighters to give up.

in part because of the conditions in which their wives and children are being held, right? This is an active role that is taken in those. They are sort of hostages, but it isn't as if they aren't being fed at all. It isn't as if they aren't getting medical care at all. And sometimes there are outrages that happen and then there have to be reforms that are made. But the whole point of the detention is to make things difficult.

Waitman Beorn (42:38.282)
There's a hostage sort of element to it.

Waitman Beorn (42:46.072)
Right.

Andrea (43:01.081)
for both the people inside and their allies outside the detention facilities. And that's another theme. And so that's sort of the Boer conflict.

Waitman Beorn (43:09.454)
Yeah, I mean, and again, in a certain sense, the Nazis take this to 11, you know, in the sense of they these these these these countries that we've talked about so far. Even though I think we all agree that what they've done was inhumane and oftentimes a crime against humanity in many ways, there was still some level of sort of authority that you could appeal to for reform or for punishment or for change in a way that

is absent in some ways from the Nazi state, which just is 100 % committed to this. You couldn't have an Emily Howe policy in Nazi Germany.

Andrea (43:45.562)
Well, and, you do see a shift over time. No, but you do see a shift over time because even, you know, as late as like 35, 36, I'm certainly thinking through the Olympics, the optics of this kind of detention, they're very aware. And it's the optics often that, and often international optics that create this pressure. So with Spain, there were the international optics of it, right? With the British, it was this,

Waitman Beorn (44:01.559)
Right. Yeah.

Andrea (44:15.343)
claiming this sense of like, are the civilized people in this conflict. They literally would describe the Boers in terms of like animal, you know, metaphors at times. And so they were going to do the civilized thing, which put a certain pressure on them to behave a certain way, right? And it's one of the things that worries me about immigrant detention today is that the mantle of like democracy or who's gonna have an ideal about, US is not even pretending, the government is not even pretending for the most part.

to have that. And so the pressure of that, I think, is in some ways gone. But it is a continuum all the way from some camps that might originally start kind of as refugee camps, all the way to extermination centers, right? It's a range of how much harm are you willing to let happen? And then it crosses over to how much harm are you willing to inflict? To how many people are you willing to kill? To how can you literally erase this whole people from the planet? And I think it's important, as you said,

We don't wanna have too much of a hard distinction that it's not as if nobody was trying to kill people in some of these other systems we're talking about. In some cases, and I think two of the other early colonial camp system that you teach about, that you may not hit a lot on the camps, but in Southwest Africa. And we see the Germans creating Shark Island, right? Which is a...

Waitman Beorn (45:33.356)
Yeah, I just going to say, know, even in. Even in that you have, even in Wilhelm in Germany, you do have a certain liberal wing of politicians who. Who? Yeah, who say enough of this, we're not doing this. And at the same time, ironically, you know, you have the British in during the first World War period, compiling essentially a burn book of, you know, all the bad things that the Germans did in Namibia, which is kind of ironic, you know, but, know.

Andrea (45:43.577)
who defund, the Reichstag defunds part of the conflict, right?

Andrea (46:01.411)
Well, and this is one of the things I actually say in my note for the book. Some of the sources for the book, some of the best sources on atrocities by other countries is the blue books, but you also have to read them knowing that you're getting a specific slice of that picture. But it is often actually reported things, especially when they're particularly well documented. But the international willingness to rat out other countries and point the finger at other countries

Waitman Beorn (46:08.11)
There's Blue Books.

Andrea (46:29.551)
in the history of concentration camps is one of the best ways that we know sometimes what's going on because people know where to run to if they're whistleblowers or if they have stories and like, where is it gonna get out? So we have Max, sorry, Hans Beimler in Dachau in 1933 who manages to escape from Dachau. Now it's quite early on, but it's humiliating for the Nazis that he managed to do this and it's still not 100 % clear how he managed to do it, but where does he go? He goes.

to the Soviet Union and he tells his story. And it's a real story, but it is absolutely embellished like the anti, the Soviets hating the Nazis and then the mutual hatred there. So you can see the language of some of the propaganda and you can see all that, but it's a very real story about what was actually happening at Dachau and is one of some of the best insights we have from those who were targeted with violence as political opponents early on, what kind of treatment they got comes from competing countries

willingness to say the worst about what countries are doing. And we see it right from the beginnings of that, like right at the turn of the century, we see that. But again, that continuum of death, right? Shark Island off the coast in Southwest Africa at that time, when the Germans are putting down this uprising by the Nama and Herero people and committed genocide. The genocide, the official sort of military announcement of this that happens actually predates

any camps, right? And so that's a good thing also to note is that I think sometimes people immediately fuse genocide and concentration camps. And it's true that they often happen together, but sometimes you get one without the other, sometimes you get one before the other. And so they are kind of fellow travelers in this, you know, history of atrocity.

Waitman Beorn (48:20.216)
Well, there's also the labor piece, right? Because again, one of the things that's very interesting, I found really fascinating is the comparison between Weiler in Cuba and it might have been Weiler because it's European. I don't know. But the general in Cuba who basically said, let's go full on, Reconcentration and the and Fontrota, right? Who both of them sort of say, give me the, let me, let me.

Andrea (48:46.465)
Let's do it. Yeah, they commit to it.

Waitman Beorn (48:49.152)
Let me go to the super extreme route as best possible. Right. And they do. And then you but you also get the piece that again, another common thread throughout the history of concentration camps is this idea of labor, you know, that once once we have identified a group of people that we can put under our complete sort of extra legal control, then it seems like one of the things not so much on Shark Island, but on there, there lots of other camps within, you know, Namibia.

where people were forced to do labor. that seems to follow as well as once you create a population of people who are, as you say, sort of in the zone of exception of Gambens, sort of outside the realm of legal authority, then the thing that follows very quickly after it is, let's make them do stuff because we have them. So, you know, we can do this.

Andrea (49:37.968)
Well, and you see that with the black African camps in the Boer War as well, but it's a little bit more of an intermediate thing because they are also allowed some of them to raise their own animals while they're doing the forced labor. So again, it's this evolving thing that I think was a little bit looser. mean, it was horrific conditions, but it was a little bit looser than the treatment of the Nama and Herero. And yes, you do see those labor camps rise early and then that becomes

after those camps, there is always a question of whether there's going to be labor, right? And there often is forced labor.

Waitman Beorn (50:14.734)
Well, I think certainly also there's the racial component that is a major difference between those two examples, you know, where, where though they may be uncivilized sort of dumb yokels, the blores are white in the same way that British people are white. Whereas some affinity there, you know, where you don't, we don't have that in certainly not in, Southwest Africa, even though, even though a lot of the Rero and the Nama were like literate and Christian and everything else. But that's, that's a different, that's a different podcast for different time.

Andrea (50:27.917)
And there's some service paid to that, yes, yes.

Andrea (50:43.427)
But in terms of how they were perceived, like these are the black Africans and they should be working. I think there was definitely that idea.

Waitman Beorn (50:46.209)
Exactly. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (50:50.357)
Yes. Yes. And there's the settler colonial element, which is probably slightly different than in South Africa to a certain extent. But I want to keep moving because we've got so much. Yeah, I mean, it's great. It's great. Can we talk a little bit about the concentration camps of the First World War? Because one of the things that I think is really nice about what you've included is you also include

Andrea (51:04.109)
Welcome to my world.

Waitman Beorn (51:18.52)
sort of civilian internment camps, which again, in the larger universe of concentration camps seem to be relatively nice, though they are still extra legal detentions and that everybody in the first world war era is doing them.

Andrea (51:38.234)
So yeah, I wanted to include it because I wanted to insist on it because it's the same model, right? Like you might have your SUV and you might have your convertible, but like they're Fords or whatever it's gonna be. And I think it's really critical in that genealogy of knowledge that you were talking about, but also in the acceptability, the practice of doing this. When people look at things,

it's a trope that gets a little overused perhaps, but with the Imperial boomerang, what we see in these first 10 years of colonial camps is these Imperial countries doing stuff out in the colonies away from kind of you. And so what the role that Emily Hobhouse plays is she brings it back and makes people account for what is being done in their name somewhere else. The Reichstag on being informed of what's happening there, they actually cut some of the funding for this, if I'm remembering my history correctly, that there is some sense of this is not what we do.

Yet we get to a decade later after this sort of initial concentration camp period when these are seen as barbaric and horrific. And how do we get them into the heart of Europe, European capitals, right? And it's partly because, I don't wanna go too much into this, but military, how wars were conducted changed. And you had universal drafts that there was expected to be service from military age males in ways that had not always been true.

in every country previously, but now it was overwhelmingly the normal model. And so suddenly there's the question of the greengrocer who's been in Liverpool, who was born in Germany. He's been there for maybe 30 years in Liverpool, but he might still be a military age male. Maybe he's 41 or something. And so what do you do with that guy? Well, before you might've made him leave, you might've let him give his word that he's not gonna fight, or you might have just sent him back to Germany for the duration.

But if you send him back to Germany, he's gonna come back wearing a German uniform, right? He's gonna be drafted. And so there's this initial question of what do we do with World War I? And concentration camps at that time were pretty much in disgrace. So it takes a little bit of time for this idea to take root. But because it's already entered the world, it is in the back of people's minds. And I think you do see from the beginning detentions of people both by German authorities and by the British.

Andrea (53:59.608)
of people they suspect are spies, right? If they have information on them, if their informants have nailed them, they do lock up a number of people, but it's on the basis of something. And they use these enemy alien laws. And it's a tradition, certainly through British common law. It's also something with the 1798 Alien Act that the US has been dredging back up recently, interestingly, to send people to El Salvador. So there is this tradition in a lot of European countries.

that if somebody is an enemy alien during wartime, you can have a wider hand to what you do with them. But what happens with World War I is that there's a real paranoia that's been stoked for a long time that there are spies among us everywhere. And that has taken huge root in that moment. There are also more recent sort of anti-alien laws that have been developed in, Britain is a really good example of that. so there's this conflict.

and you have some liberal members of parliament saying, look, that greengrocer who's been in Liverpool for 30 years is no more harmful than your average bad Englishman, right? And that's an actual kind of debate that's had. And for the time being, the cabinet kind of withstands this push to lock everybody up, the Lusitania is sunk. And then you very quickly, and at that point, it's clear the war's gonna go on for a while.

Waitman Beorn (55:06.958)
All right.

Andrea (55:25.193)
Nobody is making decisive wins and you need to have some kind of response to this killing of civilians on this liner, right? And so the government falls, but there also just becomes this really cruel shift that happens. It's kind of a lock them all up idea. And when you have two imperial powers head to head with a lot of countries already, a lot of other countries already involved, it quickly becomes, it goes out to colonies and territories and allies. And suddenly you go from having almost no

real concentration camps in the globe to having them circling the globe. And you end up with more than 800,000 in this kind of detention, not accused of actually doing anything, just by virtue of who they are. And you end up with many additional hundred thousands in exile. So exile to certain regions like in Russia, for instance, where that's easier to do than the detention part, perhaps. And you see Red Cross.

Waitman Beorn (56:09.442)
Yep.

Andrea (56:23.223)
The Red Cross has been involved since the Spanish creation of Reconcentración, but you see a bureaucracy of detention arise and there are Red Cross observers and investigators that go check out each of these camps and create logs on them. And that was where my language limits were tremendous in this book, but thankfully my other really good fluent working language is French and everything was translated into French because it was the language of diplomacy.

And at Red Cross headquarters, there are records of all of these inspection visits. And so I was able to actually see what conditions were like in all of these camps all around the world. And it was an absolute revolution. And as you said, it was more benign in terms of deaths. And that was partly, again, these international optics, because everybody was sort of competing that we are the more civilized people. And so that treating people in these camps was seen as paramount.

Waitman Beorn (57:18.03)
Well, and also everybody had everybody's everybody had their citizens in somebody else's camps. Right. So like, you know, it's it's not like the Holocaust where, know, the state of Israel could say we have Germans, you if you do something bad, I it's it's, you know, yeah, I mean, it's like, yeah, but it's also like if you mess with our German citizens in the United States, then we'll mess with theoretically yours.

Andrea (57:24.289)
They're hostage populations, right?

Andrea (57:34.487)
It's not an internal population that's native to their country.

Andrea (57:41.006)
we could make conditions worse for years. But it turned into this real race. And so all kinds of stuff was, they were lending libraries. You could send money to people. You could send in some cases, care packages to people. Upper-class people could pay for nicer camps and be moved to where they would be with their own kind in some cases. But you also, what was fascinating about it was that, and this is why it was important to me to include it in the book, not just because you literally can't get to the early Nazi camps.

without World War I, it is simply not possible. But also the reason to have it in the book is because even this detention was incredibly damaging to people. It was devastating to people. And there was a Swiss doctor who was one of the Red Cross observers who coined this term barbed wire disease. And he coined it as early as 1919. And it's interesting to me, it's barbed wire disease. So one of those things I've identified as the

the symbols and the ability to impose these camps, right? It is the literally being behind this military style detention indefinitely. You didn't put on a uniform, you didn't fight, so it's not for anything you did. You literally, what he realized was people literally lost the ability to have any sense of control over their lives whatsoever, hope for the future. It created tremendous distress. It created...

psychologically damaging effects. Paul Cohen-Portheim, who wrote just a great book, he's the one I follow through the camps in that chapter. talks about nobody he knows emerges from the camps, kind of psychologically whole without being damaged in some serious way. Except of course, he says for himself, I'm fine, but I didn't meet anybody else, right? That this wasn't.

Waitman Beorn (59:31.278)
Yeah, thought this was a really good part because I think it's fair to say that these camps were quote not bad in the context of the history of concentration camps. But as you point out with first person examples, just being locked up and losing your liberty is traumatic.

and not knowing what's going to happen to you. This is a traumatic event, even in the quote, best of circumstances, right? mean, like not, and I think, you obviously without putting too fine a point on it, you know, where we are now as well with taking people off the street and locking them up, that's traumatic. Even if it's the best of conditions with the best of food and everything else, it's not good for you, you know? And one of the things that seems,

And the reason I bring up the World War I piece is that there's equal parts frustration and laziness by governments. One is the frustration that this is hard. mean, realistically, it's hard. Trying to sort out who in the country might be an actual enemy, spy or sympathizer or whatever, versus just somebody who lives there. That's actually empirically hard to do. And the lazy solution is we're just going to lock everybody up.

Andrea (01:00:55.533)
And it's important to say, yeah, the laziness is definitely the biggest factor. But I will say that in many instances, less so when you're dealing with like Spain in Cuba or in the Boer War, where you have large open areas and insurgencies that can hide and stuff. in most World War I and post, in many, I'll say, World War I and post-World War I situations,

Waitman Beorn (01:00:55.83)
because we're not going to take the time to sort out who's who.

Andrea (01:01:24.639)
in European countries, for example, they actually have a pretty good idea, you know, who needs to be locked up and who doesn't. And in fact, there's not been an example that I know of, of somebody that was rounded up when those mass roundups started happening, that was actually a spy that needed to, there is no sign of utility actually coming from British internment in World War I. And in fact,

Waitman Beorn (01:01:51.791)
Well, what I meant was, not necessarily that empirically it was true, but the impression, right? That governments are having to think about how we're going to do this, you know, and...

Andrea (01:01:57.88)
Yeah, well, no, and there are other camp systems in which it is. Yeah, but I just want to say that because I think that like my grandfather, think of who fought in World War II, and he always said, well, know, Japanese American tournament, we didn't know better. And we didn't know who might be dangerous. And in fact, like that example, which maybe we'll get to later, but you know, we had naval intelligence that said like, that's not necessary. And it was done anyway. And so I think that it creates, so there's the laziness.

Waitman Beorn (01:02:14.392)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:02:26.349)
and the not knowing, you're absolutely right, those are both two factors, but that not knowing gets used strategically in bad faith by actors who will benefit from it, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:02:34.944)
Yes. Yes. mean, there's an imagination there too. And then there's also the, mean, the World War II example of the internment camps for Japanese Americans is the obvious one because, you know, yes, there were smaller camps for European, German, Italian Americans, but we certainly weren't locking up en masse all of them in the way that we were trying to do for Japanese Americans.

Andrea (01:02:56.269)
And when you talk to people who were held in those Italian and German camps, they were often allowed to go into town and buy stuff. mean, because they were seen, there's the racial angle again, right? They were seen as... Right.

Waitman Beorn (01:03:11.288)
I mean, the German POWs in some camps were allowed to do that. It's crazy. Like in some camps in the West, like the German POWs could go downtown and like watch a movie as long as they were backed by 10. Yeah. Right. We're citizens. Yep.

Andrea (01:03:18.765)
But Japanese American citizens, the majority of those in turn were citizens, could not do that, right? And so this goes back to your idea though about race becoming like that really determines a lot of how people treat it. But another thing that happens is with the World War I camps is, and this is why it's another reason it's critical to have it in my book. It is then the rehabilitation of the idea of a concentration camp. And so I wanted people to see what happened in those camps.

because a lot of those things actually happened in early Nazi camps, in the Gulag. So theater productions, camp newsletters, things that became normal to do in those internment camps, because people basically were sitting around with not much to do, the authorities would let them do it to keep them busy, right? But you see those things in 1920s, 1930s, and even sometimes in the 1940s camps elsewhere.

And it shows you that that genealogy of knowledge again of practice, you know, it provides the example of we are humane people doing this, we are not monsters. And then you actually have some quasi evidence for that, right? Just because not people didn't die the way they did in those colonial camps. But in fact, not only were you doing psychologically tremendous damage to the people in those camps, but you are making those future camps possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:04:47.606)
Yeah, I mean, and then you have in the Second World War, you have the phenomenon of like having your your actual Nazi sympathizer side by side with the German Jew who has escaped, who's escaped Nazi Germany, but is interned interned on the Isle of Man or whatever, because they happen to be a German citizen. And the government has been too lazy to sort that out. And it'd be like, obviously, you're not,

Andrea (01:05:05.133)
Right, and.

Andrea (01:05:10.367)
And it's true and something I'd meant to mention now that you said, man, I'll make it, I'll come back to it. After World War I, the British reviewed what they had done and said it was a mistake. They understood it was a mistake and they did it again anyway. And so that tells you that once this idea enters the world, even when it's not, and I think that when I first started researching this, I expected there to be more, these guys saw them do this and so then they did this. And it's more that,

Waitman Beorn (01:05:27.031)
Right.

Andrea (01:05:40.068)
World War I, it's just worldwide. There's a global heritage of doing this and there's a global bureaucracy of doing it. There's even a global NGO involved in how do we manage this, right? And so from that moment, that's kind of, so those colonial camps are kind of the root of the tree. The trunk of the tree is those World War I camps. And then you see everything dive out sometimes in quite different directions. But almost every place has that heritage of World War

one camps and in some places it never stops. So the Gulag for instance, it goes right from we've emptied the camps because Russia makes the separate peace after the Bolshevik sees power, right? They leave the war and Trotsky is held actually in a World War I internment camp, not as an enemy alien, but as a favor by the Canadians.

because the British are worried he's gonna go back, which is exactly what happens to Russia and have a huge hand in what's happening there because the Bolsheviks have seized power. But in addition to his experience there, which he absolutely calls a concentration camp, you have this impulse of we have these empty camps, we have this tradition of detaining civilians. And the next thing that happens is Russia is plunged into a civil war and

Now it's not the enemy alien, it's just the internal enemy that we start locking up. So there is a threat of continuity and in the British treatment of Irish independence folks, not all fighters, some of them just civilians, some of them family of civilians, you start to see those same laws and that same kind of detention get applied. And so those World War I camps actually really do set the stage for what's next.

Waitman Beorn (01:07:29.358)
I mean, and there's also, I mean, maybe the next project is sort of a laziness as concentration camp practice because there's sort of, it's almost like, it's like that meme of, it work for them? No, but maybe it'll work for us. know, like that when faced with the situation, because of the genealogy of knowledge, because of the fact that this is now something that is in our lexicon, it's in our toolbox of things we can do.

governments just almost automatically fall back on, well, let's make a camp of some kind, because that's something that we know how to do, even though it never really is fit for purpose, as it were. so this is a form that we're all familiar with. so rather than, for example, trying to sort out who amongst the population of people from other countries in our country might actually be...

dangerous, we're just going to lock them all up, all the German citizens, we're going to lock them all up and because that's the easiest solution, right? Rather than trying to actually be nuanced about it. And that's the solution that we know how to do. So it's that whole, you know, when all you have is a hammer.

Andrea (01:08:37.111)
And it looks like we did something, right? It looks like we did something. We did something, hooray, right? This is what we're doing to protect you, but it's really to benefit our own power, right? It's really to have that political gain for the people that are doing it.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:41.004)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:48.845)
Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:08:53.006)
Yeah, I mean, it's hard to make a make a promotional video of a case officer doing a thorough interview of someone and deciding that they're, you know, like a totally normal person that they shouldn't be locked up when you can, you know, make a, make a, video of a, of a camp of some kind. and so I think that, I mean, and I think that goes partially to trying to explain why this form, why this form of, of oppression and population control, whatever,

Across the world, right? I mean, like it is now sort of a global phenomenon. And I guess, you know, one of the one of the questions that I might ask, you know, is the extent to which the idea of a concentration camp is a European idea. And I don't mean this in the sense of sort of I'm not going to get into the like, you know, you're you're being woke and you're blaming your peer for everything. But, you know, certainly in places that are

how to experience colonialism and imperialism. When Argentina is doing this, it's obviously Argentinians that are doing this, but they have in some ways learned it from the period of imperialism and colonialism. They haven't created an indigenous form of concentration camps, right? I mean,

Andrea (01:10:12.055)
Right, well, and that's actually one of the interesting things about it is this, there's two strands. So there's the international tradition that develops and rises very much out of imperialism. And this idea in World War I that's instituted very much rises out of European history, these colonial settings. And that is the, so if there's a common turn of concentration camps, it rises out of,

you're not a it's not communist but it rises out of this colonial project and experiment. At the same time once you have those World War I camps and again they're imposed many many many places the way they grow up out and up and out with different branches is that they get fused to what is the local cultural so like who's the out group

How does power flow? What is the history of detention in your country? For instance, Russia had Katorga for a long time. So it had this tradition of sending people off to labor camps. And it again got exponentially worse once we established the Gulag because the Gulag is borrowing and on those traditions that this international trend has created and it's exacerbating them.

also always, always happens inside, I think of Chinese camps, for example, in which there is some history of being owed labor to the state in earlier centuries. And so it takes root in the local soil, right? So it always has these two strains, but I would say the concept overall is a European concept.

Waitman Beorn (01:11:58.873)
I mean, and it's interesting that again, one of the things that I wanted to touch in this conversation, because I think it's so illustrative of this whole concept are the French camps in the sort of, say 1930 through 44, or actually through the fifties, right? And one of my good friends, Terrence Peterson is working on a book on reef salt, which is one of these places, right?

But they're fantastic. And I'm using that scare quotes because I live my life in scare quotes, but they're fantastic because they are exactly this continuity of here's a camp. We have a camp. The people that we're putting in it are different for different reasons, but it's like one size fits all solution. It's like the camp is the camp. Can you talk a little about those examples?

Andrea (01:12:44.985)
but the camp is a constant, right? Yeah.

Andrea (01:12:51.213)
Yeah, so I think that's often the one I give when I express concerns. When I first wrote this book, it came out in 2017, and I went to Gitmo a couple of times for it. And I was expressing concern during that first Trump administration at border detention, at Gitmo still being open, and this continuity of camps. And whenever asked for an example, I think the easiest one for people to understand, because if you give an example of something from Brazil, you know, like,

you know, or from some other country, people may not be familiar with that, but people are familiar with France as a country, they're familiar with Spain, they're familiar with Nazi camps, and so the French example is a perfect one that in the late 1930s under Franco, you have this tremendous civil conflict that happens, and as the Spanish Republicans in, almost at the end of that decade, are being routed.

they are losing to this, know, fascist, not a fascist, fascist, not a fascist, but basically fascist Franco, then they're fleeing across the border, the Northern Spanish border into Southern France, crossing the Pyrenees or different places. France is already extremely divided politically, like really super polarized. And there is so much fear that these

know, radical left wing, hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of weeks coming over the border are gonna destabilize France. And they've got Germany next door already. This is like not a good situation. And so the answer is they put them basically out on the beach at first. And these are horrific conditions. And people start dying. They move them to a number of camps that are just sort of thrown up. And one of them is Gurs, which has kind of become a legendary camp. actually went there.

to the ruins of where this site was. It's unbelievably remote, even now. There was a bus that goes there once a day and I ended up having to hitchhike part of the way to go to it. I think people go see it on tour buses, right? If they have a community of people that are going to visit it. But it is still today incredibly remote. And so what happened is that these Spanish Republicans were put up there and a lot of women and children, this is a little different than some of these earlier examples we talked about.

Andrea (01:15:07.939)
A lot the women and children were put elsewhere, but it was military age men for the most part. And they got really sick because like the Boer camps, were cited terribly. The food was awful. The conditions were, it was basically tents thrown into mud. You know, they were nightmarish conditions, even though nobody was trying to kill them. They were clearly needed to be kept outside of society. So this is still this isolation that they wanted them in. And then what you have happened in very short order,

is that you have war breaks out. And France says, hey, know, those internment camps from World War I, we've got a lot of people coming across the border from Germany and we don't know who's a Nazi spy and who isn't, or who's a problem and who isn't. So we are going to lock up again, all enemy aliens. So that meant even people that might've left in three years before, four years before, for instance, Jews fleeing Germany.

who are in France at that time, and Hannah Arendt is the famous example, wind up often at the tennis stadium first in Paris and then deported to various places. And in Hannah Arendt's case, it was to Gersen, Southern France. So we go from the Spanish Republican camp to enemy alien camp. And keep in mind that Nazis who were there were also enemy aliens at that time. So who you got locked up with was sometimes a real grab bag of nasty stuff.

And then of course, France falls in that war. And then what you end up with is that Geurs, Jews who are at Geurs become, they are deported to Drancy at Paris. And that is used as a transit camp to send them on predominantly to Auschwitz. And you have almost all the Jews that did not manage to leave before the Nazis took an interest in Geurs end up dying.

in Auschwitz, so thousands of people dying in Auschwitz. And that camp operated continuously during this whole period with three completely different identities, yet each one made the next one possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:17.455)
Yeah, I mean, and then you have the I I think I'm correct. It's certainly with with Reef Salt. have then you later have Algerians that are in turn in these places as well. So there's like a it's an immigration, but it's it's also an internment. I mean, it's like they can reuse this place for a long time.

Andrea (01:17:34.6)
And meanwhile, you have the French in Algeria. After World War II, everything kind of gets divided into two spheres, right? We have the Soviet sphere more or less and the US sphere. Of course, there's independent countries. But you have these two huge influences on the globe at that point. And the massive camps, the Gulag camps, the Chinese camps, the ones that are re-education through labor is sort of the idea behind them. Eastern European camps a little bit in Cuba, certainly in Vietnam after Vietnam falls.

Waitman Beorn (01:17:41.356)
doing it yet.

Andrea (01:18:04.429)
You know, all of those have this big, massive reeducation through labor model, but you still have these other camps that are what the French do in Algeria, which is relocating much more like those early turn of the century camps, relocating massive, massive millions of people, destroying kind of normal civil structures to put people in these supervised structural settings where they can be controlled. And so the camps then in France, you have the old model and you have the newer model, but

The thing that doesn't happen is none of them ever go away really, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:18:39.02)
Yeah, I mean, and that sort of brings us, guess, to the present era. we've skipped over lots of things which are amazing and worth our own podcast each one. It seems like one of the trends, if I'm looking at sort of arc, the arc of some of these of the conservation camp as an idea, is a trend into in some ways decentralization and secrecy, you know, with with things like Guantanamo Bay.

and things like, you know, the rendition camps, even in the sense, some of the things like in, in Chile with the disappeared and Argentina as well, you know, where, where secrecy has become a way of avoiding accountability. And what I mean is it's, slightly different than the Nazi period where, I mean, the Nazi camps were secret in the sense that they were behind the lines of Nazi Germany.

But they certainly weren't secret to anybody in Nazi Germany. mean, this was something that everybody knew was going on and more or less what happened in there. Whereas what's actually happening in some of these other places that we talk about in the more modern period, there is an element of secrecy to it that sort of adds into it. Is that fair or?

Andrea (01:19:59.79)
I think that is absolutely fair. And I think we're starting to reverse that trend just a little bit now in the US, because I do call this system that we're building that may eclipse the US prison system, concentration camps, because they are talking about, they're actively expanding. We're going to have a 10,000 person camp. We're going to have an 8,500 person camp, which is super alarming because we haven't seen those kinds of numbers outside of, let's say, Xinjiang with what the Chinese have been doing there.

Those are vast numbers for detention facilities. But in that period you're talking about, what we do see up through and including the war on terror and Gitmo is this atomization of detention, this secrecy of detention, this hiding of detention, this just-in-time aspect using contractors. You see all this stuff start to arise and it is very much to keep things quiet. And I think the main reason that that is done is actually again, international pressure.

and optics. And so the US is cheering on Chile, Argentina, Brazil, these other countries that are doing some of these things, but they're also preserving the fig leaf of we're in favor of democracy. And so it needs to happen quietly, ideally quickly. You do see in Chile at the beginning some big camp systems that start, but after the killing of Orlando Leteglie in DC,

the US decides that the secret police in Chile is out of hand and it ends up being disbanded partly through that international pressure and that smaller detention, which is much more what happens in Argentina. That is sort of how it unfolds. And that is what has continued through Guantanamo and the black sites and war on terror detention and torture that is done. And so I think that we are keeping real elements of that in the current Trump administration. We see the deportations.

using again the 1798 act from the US deportations to Sikot in El Salvador, which is very deliberately a place that nobody's supposed to come out of, A place that is lights are on 24 hours a day, but you can't go there unless you don't get to come out. And so we see the continuation of that trend. So the administration is clearly not rejecting that, but they feel comfortable enough that they've demonized the immigrant population enough.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:14.998)
Right.

Andrea (01:22:25.465)
that, yeah, and we're in addition to creating these camps around the world, which we are helping create this kind of detention in other places right now today, Cameroon and elsewhere, we've been starting to see reporting on this, we are gonna build camps domestically that will hold as many as another 80,000 immigrants in detention in addition to the 70,000 or so that are already detained.

Waitman Beorn (01:22:48.558)
Yeah. mean, do you want to hear my, my, my conservation camp continuity theory, um, with the current Trump administration. So it's Hegseth. Um, I think, I think you can explain a lot about Hegseth's attitude towards the law of war and the law of armed conflict with the fact that he was at Guantanamo as a lieutenant. think I had, I've been thinking about this a lot more in your book made me think about it even more, which is, you know, he's down there in the wild west era of Guantanamo Bay.

Andrea (01:22:53.251)
Would love to hear it. Yes.

Waitman Beorn (01:23:18.57)
watching, you know, know, CIA cowboys by the seat of their pants saying, look, we're being limited by these rules and constraints about how we can treat people. You know, the mission comes first of finding out, who's and now he's literally saying that, you know, like he's saying, you know, just, just what yesterday, today he said that we're not going to be constrained by stupid rules of engagement, this kind of stuff. And I think that, you know, with him, you have somebody who, I mean, granted he's, he's not a

He's not a deep thinker, but you have somebody who sort of was acculturated acclimatized to an environment where ethics, morality and law were seen as impediments to accomplishing the national security task. And he's now sort of blown that up to, you know, the military as a whole in its, in

in certain operations. That's my theory about strategic planning.

Andrea (01:24:16.951)
No, I absolutely think that's true. And that goes with much of what is shown here, which is that when you create this thing and you don't really decisively keep it from being able to come back, it will come back and back. And that is absolutely true in the research that I've done, which is adjacent to like war crimes stuff over conduct, right, rather than detention stuff. if you

allow that stuff to fester, it stays there. He should have washed out of any military like really early on if it weren't that we're on terror stage, right? If it were, I mean, this was a cowboy era and that absolute, it's not just cowboying, right? It is actually undoing any.

accountability. So it's partly, you you improvise in the moment and in bad, horrible ways, but it's also, and you should never be held to account because he's come out so strongly against any kind of accountability for this stuff. And there is no way for that not to now have tremendous repercussions in the US military. And, you know, and for those, mean, certainly the US military has its own complicated history and relations. But when you think of the

kinds of atrocities, let's say we saw Russian army inflicting in Ukraine, right? And encouraged to inflict in Ukraine. I think that the US Army is not that kind of drinking army in the same way. So there's going to be bad, there is going to be, actually, let's just skip this because I have a whole theory about this we're not going to go into. So you can just cut like wherever is convenient.

Waitman Beorn (01:25:57.292)
I'll mark it. There we go. I marked it.

Andrea (01:25:58.565)
about the accountability, just stop with the accountability. It's going to fester, it's going to continue.

Waitman Beorn (01:26:03.414)
Yeah, I mean, it's, I've always said, mean, you know, I was in the, I was in the army before I became a hippie Liverpool college professor, you know, and, know, what makes a military professional in my book is the ability to, to do all the, to do all the like cool, you know, lethal efficiency stuff, but also to adhere to the laws of war to protect innocence. You know, that's what, that's, that's what separates you from, from a mob, from a, from a sort of, you know,

some random group of people that isn't. And again, I'll be the first person to admit that the US military has not been perfect on that. But our record, historically has been fairly decent with regards to that.

Andrea (01:26:48.323)
Well, would put it in the same context as the camps in terms of the US actions there, right? It is, I think that there was a real service that has been done by the US espousing democracy, saying it's committed to democracy, occasionally being deeply committed to democracy, even when it has done none of those things, the fact that it was also doing those things, that there were supposed to be rules

that there was this idea that was held to that it was this example of how we ought to be in the world. In the history of concentration camps, that has made a tremendous difference. I talked to people in Chile who absolutely loathed Henry Kissinger as all upright people should. And at the same time said, but we believed in the ideas of what the US was saying. We wanted to hold them accountable to their own rhetoric. We wanted

that democracy to be delivered. And so I think that one of the tragedies of our moment is that Europe is what we have right now in terms of anybody espousing those ideals. And it's super complicated because they're facing, many of those countries are facing their own internal challenges on far right movements. And right now the loss as hypocritical as it could be, whether it's the military or on detention or on anything else,

Waitman Beorn (01:28:03.761)
Yeah.

Andrea (01:28:13.219)
The loss of that US voice, a public voice pushing for that is a tremendous loss to the world. And it's how you see this fascinating divide from the Japanese American internment camps. You had some people who say, believe in this idea, we're gonna be let go, it'll be fine, we'll just lay low and we'll be a model minority. And a whole bunch of other people who are detained who said, hell no, this is against every, but that you can even have that conversation. Like that's the two parts of America, right? Like in.

And right now I worry that that second voice as a restraint on the military and as a commitment to democracy globally that these ideals are worth something is not getting put out from the government. And I think so that's one of the reasons that what's happening with detention in the US right now is it's an extremely dangerous.

Waitman Beorn (01:29:02.414)
Well, and one of the things is just as we come towards an end here that I think is also, again, what's great about your book is that the more I read about it, the more I talk about it, the more I see connections. Right. And another one is this idea of sort of the paramilitary. We talked about the military in the United States. We see the militarization of the police and all these, you know, ice idiots running around with like, you know, like they're going to drop into Fallujah or something. But I think one of things that you see

in history concentration camps is that even though the concentration camp is this idea that is, has like long-term currency, there usually aren't at least not at the beginning professionals that have done this. So it's almost always kind of amateurs, people who aren't trained to be prison guards or run these sorts of facilities who end up running these facilities. And whether it's the early SA camps where it's just a bunch of, you know,

you fascist street brawlers who are now basically prison wardens. You know, yeah. Right. But you see that with

Andrea (01:30:02.243)
They're hazing, basically they go around hazing in horrible ways, the prisoners, right? Like locking them in lockers or blowing smoke at them or I mean, stuff that it's awful, but they're improvising in that moment, right?

Waitman Beorn (01:30:09.4)
Yeah

Waitman Beorn (01:30:14.69)
Yeah, I mean, and we, you know, that's the same thing with, I think we see that often here with, with the, you know, like alligator Alcatraz, or we're going to build a, we're going to buy an Amazon warehouse and make it into a camp. Cause that seems good on PowerPoint. Right. But, you know, that they, not that I want them to be more professional about it in a certain sense, but I mean, it's not like they have gone to a prison warden and said, Hey, we want to create a prison. Like what, what are the things we need to consider, you know, in order, in order to have, you know, how many

latrines do we need for X number of people? It's it's just amateur hour. then because, because of what we've talked about already, this, this trend towards in some ways, open secrecy, right? Whereas we know there's a nice facility here, but we're not allowed to go in it. Then you have a phenomenon that creates cultures of violence and, neglect and, you know, and persecution, taking advantage of a population that is again,

placed in some sense outside of the law.

Andrea (01:31:15.791)
Well, and yeah, and you don't place people outside the law to be extra special, nice to them, right? I mean, no, like to be honest. And so everybody, even the Yehous at the early stages, on some level, they kind of understand what the assignment is, right? And so then the question is how refined does that assignment become and how good at logistics and how malicious does the mission become? And I think that...

Waitman Beorn (01:31:22.318)
Right.

Andrea (01:31:44.688)
that I called the Everglades Camp, yes, Alligator Alcatraz as it's known, is a perfect example of that because it was stood up by somebody with like no real experience of it, kind of as a tent city type camp, cited horribly on purpose. I actually did one whole thread at one point about mosquitoes in concentration camps. I did a social media thread and it was literally from Australian offshore detention today to the Gulag, to Chinese camps.

to alligator Alcatraz, the deliberate role of like using mosquitoes as a kind of a torture. You these things, there's a reason they happen the way they do. So there is some deliberateness to that, but it's almost like they're saying like, what's the worst place we can put it, right? And then they try to figure out the logistics and then those logistics get streamlined over time. And one of the things that's very concerning to me is that one of the shifts that's happened recently for this warehouse acquisitions,

is that rather than just standing up tent cities, the government has decided to go through what's called a Navy WexMAC contract, which is normally for doing expeditionary stuff outside the US, but it's for inside the US. And once you get approved as a vendor, you can be assigned new projects. in some cases, because this is all about corruption in part as well, which we didn't talk about today, in some cases, somebody with no experience is gonna be brought in to do that because they have the connections to get the contract.

But in other cases, you're gonna have somebody who's been a Navy procurement guy for 30 years, who's gonna be at the head of maybe ordering that stuff. You're gonna get better systems people in because of the sheer money that they have alongside the corruption. And then you worry because the shift from the Yehous with the Nazis to the professionals was not a good shift, right? It was not, that was what over time enabled.

Waitman Beorn (01:33:35.374)
Right.

Andrea (01:33:38.992)
this more scientific approach to it. And while I do not think that anyone except perhaps Stephen Miller is thinking about how many of these people can we kill tomorrow or the next day, the other lesson from my book, a big lesson is just that when you leave these in place, not only is there continuity of camp to camp to camp, but conditions worsen. The overall trend is almost always for conditions to worsen and worsen drastically the less oversight there is.

Waitman Beorn (01:34:08.654)
That's right. I mean, and even in the Nazi context, I mean, there's a reason why they took the camps away from, you know, the police and gave them to, you know, the SS because, you know, the police even, you know, even, yes, they were not sympathetic, but they had experience and rules and like, this is how we behave. And that was not conducive to what the Nazis wanted them to do. Yeah.

Andrea (01:34:24.557)
And they were still part of, yeah, they were still part of that rule of law model, right? That's what they had come. And inherently the concentration camp model is an extra legal. Even when it's made legal, the whole premise of it is that it will exist outside the regular judicial system and it will have its own rules. And so there will always rise up a core of people that that's what the rules they go by and they're quite different.

Waitman Beorn (01:34:51.34)
Yeah, I mean, and just as a final thing, we absolutely it's a great example because we talked about corruption and and the financial incentives, opportunities that these places allow. And we didn't talk about that at all, which is a great pitch for why you should go out and get this book. Because again, like all of all of these threads, you know, I've tried I've tried to pull a number, excuse me, a number of threads through here of like sort of commonalities that we see.

But they run throughout the history. I think Andrew has done a really good job. He's done a really good job of sort of showing what those look like while also maintaining the humanity of the people that are going through the system. So we probably should begin to close a little bit here just because I could go for two hours. I'm not sure listeners want to spend two hours, but I could go for two hours. But before we let you go, what is one book on

Holocaust that you as someone who's done sort of this global history of concentration camps would recommend to our listeners.

Andrea (01:35:56.816)
You know, it's always tempting, because I do think the personal stories are so important. It's always tempting to go that direction. But when you're dealing with something the magnitude that the Holocaust represents, I would say Nicholas Wachsmann's KL, because it was, I had already done a lot of research on the Nazi camps, because there's a lot of stuff out there. And it was a revelation to me how they grew from this thing that looks very familiar.

from World War I, I think I suffered from what is a common misconception still that those 1930s camps were somehow still already really distinct from other camp systems and that they didn't look like anything that had been before. And in fact, they look pretty familiar compared to other camp systems. And not only that, it takes years of abuse, of camps existing, of propaganda.

know, nonstop propaganda on the German people and sort of invention in horrific ways on the parts of camp administrators to even begin to imagine the things that Nazi camps become. And then you throw in war, of course, and that's a whole additional level of what makes them as horrific as they were. But his time spent on those early years to show the slow sort of degradation of the country through these camps.

was extraordinary to me. I just thought that the research was stellar, the writing was strong, and it was just a story that I hadn't seen told as well. But yet, at same time, does not give short shrift to the Holocaust itself, to the extermination camps. It more helps you understand how such a thing became possible.

Waitman Beorn (01:37:43.736)
I mean, that's a great recommendation. I second that. mean, Nick's works is really good. And again, there were probably around 40,000 different concentration camps just from the Nazis. they were, I mean, the diversity of those places is incredible. And so what he does really well in that book as well is sort of is show this constellation, the system of camps, you know, where you have at one end of the spectrum, you you have a Treblinka, but you also have

You know, at the end of Spectum, have the camp near, I think, Hanover, which was on a barge. I mean, like in the very beginning, because they were just these it was the amateur hour and you just have the essay, you know, locking people in basements and calling it a camp. Andrea, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. This has been really fascinating into our listeners. Please. I mean, I recommend all the books of our guests, but this one really.

helps to place this phenomenon, this institution in a global context in a way that is quite remarkable. And if you're listening still, which is great, feel free to give us a like and subscribe and a comment. If you have suggestions for topics or for guests, you have an email on the website. You're welcome to send me an email there. And Andrea, again, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this with us.

Andrea (01:39:08.708)
Thank you so much for having me. know we've talked a long time, so I hope it's been interesting, but I do think it's so important. So you're doing really great yeoman service here.