Today in Labor History May 12, 1940: Edgar Lion, a 20-year-old Austrian Jewish student at the University of Edinburgh, was arrested by British police and shipped off to the Isle of Man with thousands of other Jewish detainees. The British government locked them all up in hotels surrounded by barbed wire. He was later deported to Canada, where he was interned with 2,300 other Jewish refugees in camps alongside German Nazis and forced to perform brutal physical labor for virtually no pay. “There were real Nazis interned with us! They were Nazis who happened to be caught by the war in Great Britain. They were bragging, and they kept telling us, ‘wait till Hitler wins the war, we’ll cut all your throats!’”
As appalling as the Trump administration is, with its arrests, deportations, and use of brutal concentration camps for innocent immigrants, as well as many legal residents and citizens, it is a misrepresentation of history to suggest that this sort of behavior is similar only to that of the Nazis, and is somehow extraordinary for modern democracies like the U.S., Britain and Canada. Concentration Camps, with forced labor, brutal living conditions, and sometimes torture and violence against inmates were operated by numerous so-called democratic Western nations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and even today. Australia used them during both World Wars, and currently runs some for refugees on Nauru and Manus Islands. During both World Wars, Canada imprisoned 8,579 male "aliens of enemy nationality" in concentration camps with forced labor, including thousands of Jews. They also interned Japanese residents. Denmark, Sweden and Finland also had concentration camps. French concentration camps, along with the torture and starvation inflicted on their inmates, and the casualties from its war of conquest in Algeria, resulted in up to 1 million deaths. And then there were thousands of Jews who were imprisoned in concentration camps under the Vichy government, most ultimately deported to Germany, where they were executed. Even Germany’s legacy of concentration camps predates Hitler, with deadly concentration camps utilized during the Herero and Namaqua genocide they committed in Africa (1904-1908). In addition to their internment of Jews during World War II, Britain also ran offshore and land-based gulags in Ireland in the 1920s, which housed over 500 men, under brutal conditions, without charge or trial. They also ran concentration camps on the Isle of Man during both world wars.
The U.S., in particular, has a long, sordid history of using concentration camps that precede the ones they used during World War II to imprison Japanese-Americans. The first documented U.S. concentration camps used for a specific ethnic group occurred in 1838, when President Van Buren imprisoned Cherokee in camps at Ross's Landing (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Fort Payne, Alabama, and Fort Cass (Charleston, Tennessee). Many died in these camps from disease and hunger. In 1862, Minnesota executed 38 Dakota warriors in the largest single-day mass execution in U.S. history. President Lincoln pardoned another 361, but placed them in a concentration camp. And in the following winter, another 1600 Dakota men, women and children were forced into other concentration camps. Up to 300 died from disease in these camps. Thousands of other indigenous people were forced into U.S. concentration camps throughout the 1800s and early 1900s. The U.S. also operated brutal concentration camps for prisoners and civilians during its war on the Philippines in 1901. During the 1950s-1960s, the U.S. maintained concentration camps for political dissidents, primarily communists, but officially never used them. More recently, there are the examples of Abu Ghraib, in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Under Reagan, there were plans to imprison thousands of Central American Solidarity activists in concentration camps. And today, Trump continues to talk about sending “homegrowns” to offshore gulags in El Salvador, Guantanamo Bay, and Africa.
Image: Edgar Lion, age 98, in red, with gray hair and glasses, at a podium, with the quote told to him by Nazis, who were interned with him in Canada: "Wait till Hitler wins the war, we will cut out all your throats."
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Gary Hall
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