In The Gathering Storm Linus Roache plays the troubled civil servant Ralph Wigram, who passed classified Foreign Office files on the German military build-up to Winston Churchill, files that greatly helped Churchill in his warnings of the dangers of Nazi aggression during the 1930s. In a memorable - and presumably apocryphal - moment early on in the film Wigram confronts a senior German diplomat who has just complained to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin about "negative propaganda" about the new German administration in the UK media:

"Is it true that you have built a concentration camp outside Munich [this would be Dachau], to incarcerate Jews and other enemies of the Reich? Or is that also propaganda?"

Having smoothly explained the problem of Jews having too much influence in Germany, Hitler's representative goes on:

"But it was you British who invented the concentration camp, to detain your enemies the Boers during the South African war. We are merely following your good example."

Wigram had no answer in the film and, until reading Gulag, neither would I. This was just another of those known facts of history, something the history teacher of my daughter Natasha also emphasized with some apparent glee in the recent past. But it is not the whole story by any means. And that story contains some details that may be important.

I have come to admire greatly Anne Applebaum's style and precision in such horrific areas. The connections she suggests at the end of this passage seem of enormous significance.

The Soviet and Nazi camps are also related because they belong, together, to the wider history of concentration camps, which began at the end of the nineteenth century. By concentration camp, I mean camps constructed to incarcerate people not for what they have done, but for who they were. Unlike criminal prison camps, or prison-of-war camps, concentration camps were built for a particular type of non-criminal civilian prisoner, the member of an 'enemy' group, or at any rate of a category of people who, for reasons of their race or their presumed politics, were judged to be dangerous or extraneous to society.

According to this definition, the first modern concentration camps were set up not in Germany or Russia, but in colonial Cuba, in 1895. In that year, in an effort to put an end to a series of local insurgencies, imperial Spain began to prepare a policy of reconcentratión, intended to remove the Cuban peasants from their land and 'reconcentrate' them in camps, thereby depriving the insurgents of food, shelter and support. By 1900, the Spanish term reconcentratión had already been translated into English, and was used to describe a similar British project, initiated for similar reasons, during the Boer War in South Africa: Boer civilians were 'concentrated' into camps, in order to deprive Boer combatants of shelter and support.

From there the idea spread further. It certainly seems, for example, as if the term kontslager first appeared in Russian as a translation from the English 'concentration camp', probably thanks to Trotsky's familiarity with the history of the Boer War. In 1904, German colonists in German South-West Africa adopted the British model - with one variation. Instead of merely locking up the region's native inhabitants, a tribe called the Herero, they made them carry out forced labour on behalf of the German colony.

There are a number of strange and eerie links between these first German-African camps and those built in Nazi Germany three decades later. It was thanks to these southern African labour colonies, for example, that the word Konzentrationslager first appeared in the German language, in 1905. The first imperial commissioner of German South-West Africa was one Dr Heinrich Goering, the father of Hermann, who set up the first Nazi camps in 1993 [including Dachau, see above]. It was also in these first African camps that the first German medical experiments were conducted on humans: two of Joseph Mengele's teachers, Theodor Mollison and Eugen Fischer, carried out research on the Herero, the latter in an attempt to prove his theories about the superiority of the white race. But they were not unusual in their beliefs. ...

... It can be argued, therefore, that the corrupting experiences of some European colonists paved the way for the European totalitarianism of the twentieth century. And not only European: Indonesia is an example of a post-colonial state whose rulers initially imprisoned their critics in concentration camps, just as their colonial masters had. -- p19-20, Gulag

Thus Konzentrationslager first appeared in the German language in 1905. Within 15 years the Thule Society newspaper was enthusiastically recommending it as part of its Final Solution to the Jewish problem. But I had not realised what the term had come to mean already, through German praxis, by then. Forced labor and medical experimentation were already included.

The main body of this page was written on 19-20th August 2004. Two weeks later I had further cause for reflection.

It was extremely striking to read this morning that just this August a high-level German representative apologised unreservedly to the Herero people for the "genocide" committed against them (I think that this word was used) between 1904 and 1908. Timing has often been like that on Why. You can come up with any explanation you like for that. But the one I have involves someone who cares about such evils more than you or I ever can. Whatever the other weaknesses of that worldview may be, it brings enormous hope that something can be done.

It was experiences like this that led to what seems the boldest project yet expressed as a Why page: Repairing The Holocaust.