Not offering any opinion . . . . but the thread was on 99 replies and was bugging me so I thought I'd make it a nice round 100.
Re: One thing that can't be denied though Concentration camps were first used in Cuba by the Spanish before the Spanish-American War.
Re: One thing that can't be denied though The term 'Concentration camp' dates to the American Indian Wars. It describes a means of keeping an opposing group in some temporary form of internment, without that group being guilty of any crime. I always thought the term meant a 'concentrated' number of people in a limited space, but that's probably wrong. The term may only date back this far, but without even conducting any research, I can think of no end of instances this form of repression has been used, as far back as the Romans even.
Re: One thing that can't be denied though Didn't the British build Concentration camps during the Boer War to house the (mostly) women and children Afrikaans displaced during Kitcheners 'scorched earth' policy, when they destroyed their farms? Conditions were so good 26,000 were to die in them. As for Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss the SS Obersturmbannführer who ran the place clearly states in his affidavit "I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% or 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers and men. The remainder of the total number of victims included about 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens (mostly Jewish) from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944." Why would he lie? It wasn't a plea bargain, he knew they'd hang him.