Closure of Soviet Concentration Camps Where ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ First Appeared Recalled

Moscow Times | 12/23/09 | Paul Goble

[SkyDancer]

Ok well I haven't come across anything like that as yet. It seems strictly a German concept - Soviets were into indoctrination or flat out executing the opposition ....

[denydenydeny]

As I recall from The Gulag Archipelago, "SLON" is the Russian word for "elephant" and the Soloveysky Camps used a stylized picture of an elephant as their symbol. Today we'd use a picture of a cute polar bear.

[antiRepublicrat]

I still don’t think the Brits were going for purposeful extermination. The military commanders just didn’t care what happened to the people initially and were ill-prepared to keep them. It was an expedient of war. The main reason the Boer army didn’t hold out another year or two was because of the camps, since they couldn’t stand to see their people suffering. But the government did try to fix things once the British people found out what was going on, although it pretty much failed.

What the British did was bad, but it’s still not in the same class as Stalin and Hitler, who both made camps purposely designed to kill by starvation, disease, and just plain execution.

If you want an earlier precedent to the British, you could probably look at what we did to the Indians in the 1800s. Go back to the 1600s and the Puritans stuck 500 Christian Indians who had allegiance to the English on the barren Deer Island in New England during Winter without food or shelter. More than half died. It would have been more, except a bunch of the “Praying Indian” towns took off when they heard of their impending internment.

We did almost exactly the same thing centuries later to the Japanese in WWII, although with far fewer casualties.

[Riodacat]

I still don’t think the Brits were going for purposeful extermination

Really? Tell Lizzie that she's have been worse off in a Nazi or Soviet concentration camp..

Lizzie van Zyl
Emily Hobhouse tells the story of the young Lizzie van Zyl who died in the Bloemfontein concentration camp: “She was a frail, weak little child in desperate need of good care. Yet, because her mother was one of the ‘undesirables’ due to the fact that her father neither surrendered nor betrayed his people, Lizzie was placed on the lowest rations and so perished with hunger that, after a month in the camp, she was transferred to the new small hospital. Here she was treated harshly. The English disposed doctor and his nurses did not understand her language and, as she could not speak English, labelled her an idiot although she was mentally fit and normal. One day she dejectedly started calling: "Mother! Mother! I want to go to my mother!" One Mrs Botha walked over to her to console her. She was just telling the child that she would soon see her mother again, when she was brusquely interrupted by one of the nurses who told her not to interfere with the child as she was a "nuisance.” Shortly afterwards, Lizzie van Zyl died.

[antiRepublicrat]

I’m not saying the results were any less immoral. I’m saying the Brits weren’t going for extermination. The captive civilians were a bargaining chip in the war against the Boers, not a “sub-human” or “counter-revolutionary” class that needed to be exterminated.

[dfwgator]

Also, after the war the Soviets continued to use Buchenwald as a Concentration Camp. Something Obama didn’t mention when he visited there.

[Brugmansian]

He didn't promise freedom but Naftaly Frenkel came up with the idea of tying labor to food in the camps. Worked for him. He started as a prisoner and ended up a camp commander. Naftaly Frenkel