General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It was seventy years ago today that America sent Japanese Americans to our own concentration camps. [View all]Confusious
(8,317 posts)"internment camp," unless you want to make that comparison?
"Concentration camp" is the most controversial descriptor of the camps. This term is criticized for suggesting that the Japanese American experience was analogous to the Holocaust and the Nazi concentration camps. For this reason, National Park Service officials have attempted to avoid the term. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes each referred to the American camps as "concentration camps," at the time. When the nature of the Nazi concentration camps became clear to the world, and the phrase "concentration camp" came to signify a Nazi death camp, most historians turned to other terms to describe Japanese internment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_American_internment#Conditions_in_the_camps