Day: June 19, 2019

Short answer – yes, by any accepted definition.

The term is not equivalent to “death camps” or “extermination camps.” Students of history know that American officials and media used the term “concentration camp” with regard to the Japanese internment camps in the USA: President Franklin D. Roosevelt (10/20/42, 11/21/44); President Harry S. Truman (4/59); General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Assistant Chief of Staff (3/28/42); Attorney General Francis Biddle (12/3/44); Life Magazine (4/6/42); San Francisco Chronicle, front page editorial (2/1/42).

The Japanese-American “concentration camps” (terminology debate) were very similar to the camps where refugees, illegal aliens and asylum seekers are held today.

One error in the article linked above. It claims there were no internment camps for German-Americans in WW2. That is incorrect. There were many during WW1, and some during WW2. There were about 11,000 German-Americans interned during WW2, but that was a small figure compared to the massive number of Japanese-Americans who were interned, which was at least 100,000, of which some 60% or more were American citizens.

One wonders if the massive difference between Asian and European internment can be attributed to geography. The USA seemed especially worried about protecting the coastlines, and Japanese Americans were concentrated on the west coast, but realistically, it was probably anti-Asian racism that caused the USA to intern so many more Japanese than Italians or Germans.

As for the other Axis allies, I may have missed some minor details in history, but to my knowledge, the USA never interned any Americans whose ethnic roots were Hungarian, Romanian, Finnish or Bulgarian, even though their root countries were allied with the Axis at various times.