Re: Concentration camp

Arndt Jonasson wrote:

benlizross <benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I tried posting this twice to the "Strange land" thread, but for some
reason it did not seem to move beyond my local server.

The question being discussed there was whether "concentration camp" was
a phrase or concept known in the USA before 1945. I now have some
positive evidence, thanks to ProQuest's files of the NY Times.

One interesting finding is that there is a strictly military sense (not
recognized by OED) of "camp where troops are concentrated", and this
first appears in the NYT in 1898, with reference to the Spanish-American
War. It also turns up in the 1920s in an account of an unsuccessful
military coup attempt in Mexico.

The term was used in the Boer war too (1899-1902). Whether that made
the term known in the US, I don't know.

You come rather late to the thread.

Ross has been trying to collect evidence that it was used in the US. It
was not, however, used in the US in anything like its post-1945 sense,
because the phenomenon as now known did not exist before the Nazi era,
with the possible exception of the Stalin attestation he dug up.

To note that refugee camps and disaster-relief camps were occasionally
called "concentration camps" merely shows that the phrase existed
(marginally) in completely other senses.

Only the post-1945 sense is relevant in the context of the original
ditty posted by Joe Fineman, who knew it in high school in either 1952
or 1956 (depending which of his two postings you read).

By the way, is the German abbreviation for it, KZ (pronounced
kah-tsett in German), known in the English speaking world?

No.

KZ is "Kuhns Zeitung," the universally used nickname for the principal
journal of Indo-European philology, which was actually called
Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung (a few years ago, it
changed its title slightly).
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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