The Battle of Britain Was The First Defeat For The German Luftwaffe.

[Al Schlageter]

Originally Posted by Bewolf

I mean, look at it this way. From a continental perspecitve, in general the british ran the largest conquest in history all over the world, they invented the concentration camps, they have a history of putting down resistance to their empirial ambitions in sometimes brutal ways and specifically in regards to WW2, they allied with the Russians, who were at least as agressive as the germans, they've had no problems with reducing all german cities above 100.000 citiziens to rubble and a lot of even smaller towns and villages (sometimes for the single reason that and old rugged road ran through them which made them "strategic important".) and put their inhabitants to the cruelest of deaths. And after the war there is the Rheinwiesen issues and the lack of support for german resistance goups.

It was a Spanish general, Valeriano Weyler, who established the first reconcentrados or “concentration centers” in Cuba in his drive to suppress the 1895 rebellion. Britain introduced concentration camps on a massive scale during the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. To deny the Boer guerrillas food and intelligence, Gen. Lord Kitchener ordered the British Army to sweep the Transvaal and Orange River territories of South Africa “clean.” Civilians—women, children, the elderly, and some men of fighting age—were herded from their homes and concentrated in camps along railway lines, with a view to their eventual removal from the territory. The Boers, to whom these camps became a symbol of genocide, called them laagers.

Polish historian Władysław Konopczyński has suggested the first concentration camps were created in Poland in the 18th century, during the Bar Confederation rebellion, when the Russian Empire established three concentration camps for Polish rebel captives awaiting deportation to Siberia.

The earliest of these camps may have been those set up in the United States for Cherokee and other Native Americans in the 1830s; however, the term originated in the reconcentrados (reconcentration camps) set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–187 and by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902).

The CCs in South Africa were not established with the sole purpose of exterminating the inmates like the CCs established 40 years later in Germany. Were the conditions in the SA CCs atrocious? Yes but when it became known there was an effort to improve the conditions which certainly not the case in the German CCs.