Over 30,000 people allegedly died in camps during the Second Boer War.
Despite what you might have read or heard, the Nazis didn’t invent the concentration camp. They did something much worse. During World War Two, Nazi Germany operated extermination camps. The camps had one objective; to kill as many enemies of the German nation as possible. Enemies included political opponents, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists.
Concentration camps, on the other hand, have a longer history. With the goal of controlling populations of people by locking them up in a confined area, evidence suggests people were doing this to each other in ancient Babylon more than 3500 years ago.
In modern times, concentration camps have been used by many governments to maintain their power. In 1838 the indigenous Cherokee population were locked up by the administration of United States President Van Buren. The Spanish established camps in Cuba as part of their “Reconcentrado” policy during the Spanish-Cuban War of the late nineteenth century. The British locked up families of South African men during the Second Boer War in South Africa to stop the families supporting the Boers. In the 1920s the Soviets set up work camps in Siberia to quash any opposition to the communist government. The United States government locked up Japanese Americans during World War Two despite there being no confirmed threat of attack.
Short answer: It’s hard to say who specifically invented the concentration camp but the term itself became popularised as a result of Britain’s policies during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War.
