While concentration camps have historical roots in earlier forms of mass detention, they themselves are modern. The patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons over a century ago made it possible to detain large groups with a small guard force for the first time.
At the turn of the twentieth century, imperial powers such as Spain and Britain set up concentration camps in colonial regions. The camps had staggering death tolls that made early systems unpopular. But World War I led to a revival of the concept, with nearly a million people detained globally. The wartime camps paved the way for similar systems after the conflict ended, such as the Soviet Gulag and the detention of homeless people in multiple countries.
Those were all in place before the Nazis came to power, so Hitler’s camps aren’t the lone precedent for the Everglades project. But even the extreme case of Germany offers disturbing parallels — and not just because the Nazis also allowed reporters to tour their camps.
Some defenders of current immigration policy say that arbitrary detention or abuse of foreigners isn’t like what Hitler did to citizens. Years before he came to power, however, Hitler wrote about his goal of stripping German Jews of legal protections so that they would have no more rights than aliens and could be put into camps.
In 1935, at Hitler’s behest, the German Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, a focus of which was to identify German Jews and revoke their citizenship, with countless other regulations restricting them. Dreaming of a pure Aryan nation, the Nazis initially imagined their targets would self-deport. Once the myth of self-deportation collapsed, they turned to more punitive measures.
On Tuesday, Noem similarly noted that the Everglades camp was meant to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. “If you don’t,” she said, “you may end up here.”
What will happen in the U.S. if the pressure to self-deport fails, as it did nearly a century ago? We’re already seeing aggressive moves against people living in the U.S. legally. The administration is still trying to strip legal status from half a million Haitians who were allowed in before Trump’s return. The DOJ is prioritizing cases involving the possible revocation of citizenship, working to undo birthright citizenship itself and targeting the citizenship of political enemies. The administration wants to define who can be an American in ways that appear profoundly racist, and it seems immigrants are the most politically advantageous large population to target.