History of Concentration Camps, who has asserted
that the camps on the border fall within her
definition of that term.
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments, understandably,
sparked strong reactions. When a member of its
staff tweeted in support of Ocasio-Cortez, the
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
(USHMM) issued a statement in which it
“unequivocally” rejected any form of “Holocaust
analogy” and specifically rejected “recent attempts to analogise the situation on the
United States southern border to concentration camps in Europe during the 1930s
and 1940s”. Alan Dershowitz, emeritus professor at Harvard Law School, went
even further, claiming that Ocasio-Cortez’s assertions made her a Holocaust
denier. This seemingly bizarre claim rests, one assumes, on a logical extension of
the USHMM’s objections to “Holocaust analogies” – as if even to suggest that the
Holocaust might be considered in the same breath as other genocides or human
rights violations somehow downplays or denies altogether the significance of the
Nazis’ genocide against the Jews. In response to Ocasio-Cortez’s claims, President
Trump himself tweeted that “The Border Patrol, they are great people, they are
patriots, they love our country”. The Border Patrol has rejected critics’ claims, as
has the Republican Party. Very few Republicans are willing to criticise the border
facilities, just as, more recently, the large majority have failed to reject Trump’s
attacks on ‘the squad’, the four congresswomen of colour (including Ocasio-
Cortez) whom he regards as unpatriotic because of their critical stance.
Unsurprisingly, the back and forth of social media and op-ed columns has seen
many vicious attacks as well as some more considered pieces, notably by Pitzer and
by fellow historians Waitman Wade Beorn, Emma Kuby and Timothy Snyder.
What’s interesting is that Ocasio-Cortez did not directly reference the Holo-
caust, although her use of the ‘never again’ slogan, along with an image of a
Holocaust memorial featuring the phrase in several languages, suggests that is what
she had in mind. The furious response to her tweet, however, indicates that when
most people hear the words ‘concentration camp’, they think of the Holocaust.
There are two problems with this reaction and, therefore, some of the outrage
that greeted her comments. First, the connection between the mass extermination
of the Jewish people and the concept of the concentration camp does not tell the
whole story of the horror of the Holocaust. Second, concentration camps have
a far longer and more complicated history than their use by the Nazis during the
Second World War. Only through understanding both of these histories can we
begin to make sense of what seem to be similar institutions today.As historian Timothy Snyder has noted, most Jewish people did not see a concen-
tration camp in the Second World War. Jews were present in Nazi concentration
camps from the system’s inception in 1933, but only in large numbers at specific
GE moments (such as after the November Pogrom, or Kristallnacht, of 1938). Some
TT
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MA
GE
S
US politician
Alexandria Ocasio-
Cortez, whose
comparison of
detention centres
in the United States
to historic camps
caused much debateÆ
When people think of concentration
camps, they think of the Holocaust