"Concentration Camps" (published essay ca. 1940 refuting Ribbentrop's claim that Nazi concentration camps were based on the British model used in the Boer War)
NY (?): British Library of Information; British Information Services (?), Ca. 1940. 13 x 8 inches, 9 pages, stapled at top left, probably from late 1940, after the invasion of Norway and attacks on Holland and Belgium, all of which took place in the spring of 1940. No publisher or author, but found in a box of material that was almost all from the British Library of Information, a NY based agency that published pamphlets, newsletters and papers on the British response during WW2. We have been unable to locate any other copies in institutions using OCLC, the Union Catalogue, etc. Although it was somewhat known by British and American intelligence that Jews were sent to concentration camps as early as 1938, the few books or pamphlets on Germany's concentration camps mainly concern the French camps under German occupation, not the German ones. In this paper, the anonymous author refutes the propaganda put forth by Goebbels and Ribbentrop that their concentration camps were modeled on the British concentration camps in the South African Boer War of 1901-1903, and rather defensively cites the humane arrangements for prisoners used during the South African conflict, "whereas the Reich camps, established in time of peace, have for years formed a characteristic feature of Nazi government, being designed to confine, and possibly to destroy, persecuted minorities and members of the Reich itself who have dared to oppose, by thought or word, the Nazi regime." In other words, it was all a matter of conjecture and speculation at this point in 1940, and the wholesale genocide of Jews was not yet known. The rest of the article concentrates on presenting the facts about the British system of concentration camps. Light wear, slight soil near staple. Very Good. Item #H16533
Price: $250.00