Concentration camp categories for Norwegian notable.

+10 votes
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The attached profile is of a Norwegian trade unionist, newspaper editor and politician. His Wikipedia entries are under his adoptive name of Gabrielsen. According to them he was imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of Norway at:

  • Stavanger
  • Grini concentration camp
  • Sachsenhausen concentration camp

I have only been able to find categories for Sachsenhausen: Holocaust Camps, Sachsenhausen

Given that this is a "Holocaust Camp" - is this the correct category? I have assumed the two are synonymous.

Also, do we need a new category for Grini, or have I missed it?

WikiTree profile: Elias Gabrielsen
in Genealogy Help by Chris Willoughby G2G6 Mach 2 (24.2k points)
retagged by Scott Fulkerson

Grini detention camp is documented here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grini_detention_camp

I switched a tag to holocaust as that project usually works on these areas.

1 Answer

+7 votes
I got the same conclusion, as I am about to add the victims from Televåg, most of them died in Sachsenhausen. Mostlly, Holocaust was about the Jews, but some also include Gipsies, communists, Jehova's Witnesses etc. Based on the categorization here it seems that all war prisoners are regarded as a part of Holocaust, which in my opinion is not correct.

As the Holocaust victims mostly are categorized by their fate, it should be fair to rename and restructure the categories to i.e. ''WWII Prisoner Camps, Sachsenhausen''.
by B. F. G2G3 (3.1k points)

Thanks B.F.

I personally think that all Concentration/Internment/Holocaust/Detention Camp categories need a re-think.

My approach would be by country and conflict, and have a consistent naming strategy that didn't imply that the inmate was imprisoned because they were Jewish.

There is a high level category: Category:Concentration_Camps which looks like a good start. Under this is a single country category for Concentration Camps, British which seems to make the assumption that the British only had concentration camps during the Second Boer War.

I would put, for instance, Australian Interment Camps (this one, for example) under here. And those in the US.

Let's not pretend they are different things - they are camps for the mass detention of people without trial, based solely on some demographic.

The distinction is that concentration camps may have death as a side effect, but in the Holocaust camps mass death was the deliberate and intentional outcome. The fact that Holocaust camps imprisoned people on a variety of grounds does not change that. If the Holocaust Project wishes to maintain a separate category structure, I would support their doing so.

Expansion of the Concentration Camps category to additional camps not including the Holocaust ones does make good sense.
I'm not sure that Concentration Camps should be the top category. Many prioners in the camps were not Jews, and were held as prisoners for other reasons than just belonging to a certain race. The Telavåg case is an example of this, they were all civil Norwegian men sent to Germany for punishment as a collective revenge for opposing the nazis. In the beginning of the war, the war/political prisoners and the jews were mostly kept separated, but in 1944 and 1945 the prisoners had to be evacuated from the camps in eastern Europe as the Russians made progress, and the prisoners were then mixed.

The women and children from Telavåg were sent to a school in Hardanger, also without any trial, but I don't think it should be categorized as a concentration camp, but maybe the term internment camp would fit. In some cases it can as well be difficult to differentiate between a camp and a prison. This leads me to an example of why my first thought of making categories combining the physical camp and happenings, might not be a good idea. The Abu Graib prison was used by the Iraqi state to keep political prisoners, but after the American invasion, it was used to keep war prisoners. After the German capitulation, many German soldiers were kept in the camps earlier used for Jews, communists etc.

Many of the prisoners in the nazi camps went through a trial (of course they were not fair in most cases), and some camps were just transit camps. In Norway, the camps like Ulven, Espeland and Grini were mostly used for political prisoners.

Further, we have the Russian gulags, Guantanamo, the Uyghur camps in China, and other forms of mass detention, with or without trials. We also have other means of racial seggregation without considering them as concentration camps, like the jewish ghettos in Europe, the Indian reservations and the townships in South-Africa.

In an attempt to conclude, I think we should have a top level for internment camps, subcategories for POW camps, labor camps and extermination camps. Some camps would be placed in more then one sub-category, and some camps will also be placed in the category "Holocaust Camps". Under the top category we could have the national subcategories like "Norway, Internment Camps". The categories for each camp should be renamed, i.e. from "Holocaust Camps, Bergen-Belsen" to "Bergen-Belsen Internment Camp".

Thanks B.F.,

You have obviously put more thought and research into this than I!

There is a new thread at https://www.wikitree.com/g2g/1668828/fixing-the-categorization-of-concentration-camps with a link back to here.

Hopefully, with the new tag on this post, your thoughts will be considered in the restructure.

Thanks again!

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