British Concentration Camps in South Africa Were Equivalent

The British camps in South Africa during the Second Boer War were a serious moral failing of the British wartime administration. Approximately 26,000 Boer women and children died in them, mostly of disease and malnutrition; approximately 14,000 to 20,000 Black Africans (held in separate camps that were even less adequately provisioned) also died. The figures are real and the historiography is settled enough to say so. Emily Hobhouse’s reports in 1901 brought the conditions to public attention in Britain, prompted reform of the camps’ operation, and led to a substantial reduction in the death rate in the final months of the war. The episode is part of the legitimate historical record of British imperial military practice and is properly criticised in the scholarship. The denier argument is not about whether the camps existed (they did) or whether they should be remembered (they should). The argument is about what the existence of the British camps implies for the German camps. The implication is that the two are equivalent, that the British had no standing to condemn the Germans, and that the moral case against the Holocaust is partly cancelled by the prior British example. The implication does not survive any close examination of what the two systems actually were.

What the British camps were

The British camps in South Africa were established in 1900 to 1901 as part of the British counter-insurgency strategy against the Boer guerrilla forces. The British army had developed a “scorched earth” policy that involved burning Boer farms, destroying crops and livestock, and removing the women and children from the cleared areas. The displaced families were placed in concentration camps, partly to deny the guerrillas a logistical base and partly because the army had nowhere else to put them. The camps were tented or wooden barracks, with rations supplied by the British army at sub-survival levels in the early period (the rations were calibrated for adult workers; the camps held mostly women and children, who needed different nutritional provision). Sanitation was inadequate, medical care was limited, and disease epidemics broke out in many of the camps. The British camp commandant, Lord Kitchener, did not personally design the death-causing conditions, but he authorised the system that produced them. Approximately 26,000 of the approximately 116,000 Boers held in the camps died, principally of measles, typhoid, dysentery and pneumonia.

The British government received internal reports of the conditions in late 1900 and early 1901 but treated the matter as a military operational issue. The conditions came to public attention through the campaigning of Emily Hobhouse, an English social reformer who had visited the camps in early 1901 and reported on the conditions to the British public on her return. Her reports were initially dismissed by the government but were corroborated by an official commission of inquiry chaired by Millicent Fawcett (the Fawcett Commission, sent to South Africa in mid-1901), which confirmed Hobhouse’s findings. The reforms that followed, including the recruitment of female nurses, improved rations, better sanitation and a separated medical service, reduced the death rate substantially in the last six months of the camps’ operation.

The structural comparison

The British camps in South Africa were, in the relevant structural sense, a calamitous administrative failure within a wartime counter-insurgency operation. They were not designed to kill the inmates. The mortality was a foreseeable but not intended consequence of inadequate planning, inadequate rations, inadequate medical provision and inadequate hygiene, in a system that was modified once the failures became publicly known. The reform programme of mid-1901 onwards is itself the most concise refutation of the equivalence-claim with the Nazi camps: the Nazi system was not subject to corrective reform when its mortality became public; on the contrary, the regime made every effort to conceal the mortality, and where the mortality was a feature of the killing programme rather than an unintended consequence (as in the Operation Reinhard camps and the gas chambers), the regime was actively pleased with the operational success.

The structural differences are: (a) the British camps were administered under a system that responded to public criticism by modifying the operation; the Nazi camps were not; (b) the British camps were intended as detention facilities, with the deaths a consequence of operational failure; the Nazi killing centres were intended as killing facilities, with the deaths the operational purpose; (c) the British camps had a lifespan of approximately two years and ended when the war ended; the Nazi killing operation continued for years independently of the military situation; (d) the British operation killed approximately 26,000 Boer civilians and approximately 20,000 Africans, totalling approximately 46,000; the Nazi operation killed approximately six million Jews and approximately five million other civilians, totalling approximately eleven million; (e) the British camps were not racially or biologically defined; the Nazi system was. Each of these differences is structurally significant; together they make the comparison rhetorical rather than analytical.

The denier’s argument and its purpose

The deniers’ use of the South African camps follows the same pattern as the use of Dresden, the Soviet violence and the Bengal famine: a real Allied or imperial wrong is used as a rhetorical balance against the Holocaust. The implicit goal is the relativisation of Nazi atrocity rather than the addressing of British wrongs on their own terms. The proper response to the British wrongs is to acknowledge them, study them, criticise them and remember them, none of which is in tension with the moral case against the Holocaust. The deniers’ move is to use the British episode to flatten the comparative moral landscape, on the assumption that if the British did wrong then the Germans did less wrong, or did wrong of a comparable kind. Neither follows.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it uses an episode of British imperial wrongdoing to insinuate that the Holocaust was just an industrialised version of standard imperial-era atrocity, with the moral asymmetry between the British camps and the Nazi camps thereby reduced to a matter of scale rather than of kind. The kind matters. The British camps were a counter-insurgency detention system that produced unintended mass mortality and was reformed when the mortality became public; the Nazi system was a designed killing apparatus that pursued its purpose against decreasing military rationale and made no attempt to reduce mortality. To equate the two is to misread both. To condemn the British operation is fully consistent with recognising the Nazi operation as a different kind of thing.

What were the British camps designed to do? What was the response when their mortality became public? Were the Nazi camps subject to comparable reform when their mortality became known?

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Sources

• Emily Hobhouse, Report of a Visit to the Camps of Women and Children in the Cape and Orange River Colonies, London, 1901
• Millicent Fawcett et al., Report on the Concentration Camps in South Africa, by the Committee of Ladies Appointed by the Secretary of State for War, HMSO, 1902 (the Fawcett Commission report)
• Stowell V. Kessler, The Black Concentration Camps of the Anglo-Boer War 1899 to 1902, War Museum of the Boer Republics, 2012, on the Black African camps
• Bill Nasson, The South African War 1899 to 1902, Arnold, 1999
• Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, Random House, 1979
• S. B. Spies, Methods of Barbarism? Roberts and Kitchener and Civilians in the Boer Republics, January 1900 to May 1902, Human and Rousseau, 1977
• Iain R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War 1899 to 1902, Longman, 1996
• Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes…: Post/Memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War, Manchester University Press, 2006
• Andreas Stucki, “Frequent Deaths: The Colonial Camps of the Spanish, the United States and the British (Cuba, the Philippines, the South African War)”, in Journal of Genocide Research, 19:3, 2017
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, 9 December 1948
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “What Made the Holocaust Distinctive”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org