Thanks, Mike – glad you enjoy my work. Your letter inspired me to read the piece and send this one to the Guardian:
Jason Stanley (‘For Trump and Modi, ethnic purity is the purpose of power’,24 February) has some strange ideas about Nazi concentration camps. He claims that ‘the Nuremberg Laws coincided with the building of large
detention centres – concentration camps – for those affected by them’. This is wrong on several counts. The concentration camps were built in the spring of 1933, over two years before the Nuremberg Laws. The camps were
created to intimidate and punish opponents of the Nazi regime, mainly Communists and Social Democrats, who were usually arrested, brutalized and tortured for a few weeks before being released on the promise of refraining from political activity. Up to 200,000 German citizens were treated in thisway; in 1935, only about five per cent of the inmates of the camps were Jewish, – unsurprisingly, since Jews made up less than one per cent of the population of Germany. Jews were especially badly treated in the camps, but they were imprisoned not because they were Jewish, but because they were
leftists. By 1935, the camp population had dwindled to a few thousand, because the task of repression had been handed over to the regular courts and state prisons. German Jews were not imprisoned as a result of the Nuremberg Laws; they were forced, rather, to create their own, separate cultural, educational and other institutions, which they did very
successfully, under difficult circumstances, at least for a while
[LJL addition: The death camps that were central to the Holocaust, were constructed by the Nazis in Poland, and opened in 1941 and 1942]