4/16/25
Post By Lee Goodman
Eighty years ago today, the Nazi camp known as Bergen-Belsen was liberated. Kind of. There was no battle. The Nazis were retreating in the final days of WWII. By the time the British troops arrived, the Nazis had already abandoned the camp, leaving behind about 55,000 prisoners, most of whom were too sick to escape on their own. They also left behind thousands of unburied corpses. More than 50,000 prisoners died while the camp was operational.
Now seems to be a good time to consider whether the migrants Trump is sending to El Salvador are being held in a concentration camp.
Bergen-Belsen wasn't always called a concentration camp. At first, it was called a prisoner-of-war camp. Even then, the prisoners were not adequately housed or fed. Within a short time, thousands were dying of exposure, disease, and starvation.
Over time, Bergen-Belsen became a camp where Jews were imprisoned. In theory, they were held there in anticipation of swapping them for Nazi prisoners, but few of those Jews ever made it out alive. After a while, the notion of exchanging Bergen-Belsen prisoners was dropped, and the treatment of the prisoners got worse. Beatings were routinely administered and prisoners were starved to death or died of diseases. In the month before the camp was “liberated,” 18,000 prisoners died.
The Nazis operated thousands of concentration camps. A few were the death camps that we usually think of, with gas chambers and crematoria. Most were slave labor camps that supplied the workforce needed to produce munitions and other supplies for the Nazi military. Some of the camps were actually labeled as concentration camps, but others were known by other names, including relocation, transport, assembly, residential, internment, special, recovery, and holding camps.
El Salvador does not call the prison where deportees from the U.S. are being held a concentration camp. It calls it a Confinement Center. It has a capacity of 40,000. Bergen-Belsen was built to accommodate 10,000. The largest federal prison in the U.S. today has a capacity of just under 6,200. People who study prisons generally agree that the larger a prison gets, the worse things are for the prisoners.
By law, people confined in U.S. prisons are entitled to visit with relatives, to consult with attorneys, to have their religious affiliations and dietary restrictions accommodated, to possess reading materials, to correspond with people on the outside, to have the conditions of their confinement explained to them, to report any infractions of the rules by the guards, to exercise and breathe fresh air, to be provided sanitary toilet and bathing facilities, to have at least a minimum amount of sleeping and personal space, to receive medical care, to be paid for any work they do, and generally to be treated in a humane way.
Prisoners in El Salvador get none of this. None of the American deportees has been heard of since they were sent to El Salvador. We don't know if they are alive or dead, and we may never find out. El Salvador boasts that no one has ever left its confinement center alive. Salvadoran prisons are notorious for their poor treatment of prisoners, which includes torture. Prisoners who die are buried in unmarked mass graves. The photos of prisoners having to share sleeping space on shelves, like the floor-to-ceiling lumber racks at Home Depot, look almost identical to the photos from the Nazi camps.
In a White House meeting, Trump and El Salvador's self-described dictator joked about sending more American deportees to El Salvador. Trump said El Salvador should build more confinement centers and that the U.S. should start sending U.S. citizens there. Once there, they would have no rights and no hope. If there is something that distinguishes the El Salvador confinement center from the Nazi concentration camps, it is not obvious. If there is something that distinguishes what Trump is doing from what Hitler did, that's not apparent, either.
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