Madam, - Responding to Kate Holmquist's article on Nazi propaganda films which exploited Ireland's independence struggle ( Weekend Review, January 27th), in which she averred that it was Germany which first invented concentration camps, Tim O'Sullivan seeks to correct this notion (January 31st).
He writes that this unlovely distinction may belong to the Spanish occupation forces in Cuba during that island's war of independence in the 1890s, but goes on to discuss the likelihood that the concentration camps set up by the British during the Boer War would claim precedence, due to their enormous rates of death and disease.
In fact, it is to the United States of America that this horror must most accurately be attributed. In 1864, during the American Civil War, the Confederate forces set up the first true concentration camp in Andersonville, Sumter County, in the state of Georgia. Here was built a huge enclosure in which thousands of captured Union soldiers, along with many of their accompanying families, were incarcerated in appallingly unsanitary and repressive conditions, inevitably resulting in disease, starvation and a very high death rate.This lasted from February 1864 up to May 1865, and was the South's largest prison for captured Union soldiers and their camp followers.
Tim O'Sullivan ends his letter by telling us that he," being Irish, is at ease accepting the concentration camp as a British invention". I am sorry if the true facts may disturb his somewhat curious sense of satisfaction in this matter.
- Yours, etc,
DAVID GRANT, Mount Pleasant, Waterford.
Madam, - Kate Holmquist's interesting article on the Irish dimension in the Third Reich's anti-British film propaganda ( Weekend Review, January 27th) contains the comment: "The Germans, who invented concentration camps, created the fiction that it was actually a British invention during the Boer war".
But if Churchill's A History of the English-Speaking Peoplesis correct, then perhaps it was not so much a fiction after all. In the chapter on South Africa Churchill wrote: "Blockhouses were built along the railway lines; fences were driven across the countryside; then more blockhouses were built along the fences. . .Then, area by area, every man, woman and child was swept into concentration camps . . . Nothing, not even the incapacity of the military authorities when charged with the novel and distasteful task of herding large bodies of civilians into captivity, could justify the conditions in the camps themselves. By February 1902 more than 20,000 of the prisoners, or nearly one in six, had died, mostly of disease."
- Yours, etc,
MICHAEL TATHAM, Harrold, Bedford, England.
Madam, - If being born in Kerry makes Lord Kitchener an Irishman, as Geoffrey Roberts suggests (February 1st), then being born in India must make George Orwell and Spike Milligan Indian writers.
Kitchens appears never to have identified with Ireland or with Kerry.
- Yours, etc,
TIM O'SULLIVAN, Homefarm Park, Dublin 9.