It’s official: Our country now has its first concentration camp

Aerial photo of Dachau Concentration camp

This is one of the saddest columns I have ever had the cause to write.

I grew up in the United States Army that had just won World War II and liberated Europe from Nazi rule. The history of what the Army had done during that war was all around us on posts in the United States and especially in Germany, where my father was stationed and we moved as a family in 1955, just ten years after the end of the war.

My grandfather, General Lucian K. Truscott Jr., played a major role in that war, commanding the 3^rd Infantry Division, the VI Corps, and the 5^th Army. His units liberated parts of North Africa, Sicily, most of Italy, and Eastern France after the landing at Marseilles in 1944.

During the summers when as a boy I visited Grandpa and Grandma in Washington D.C., his study in the basement was filled with his personal library and some of the artifacts of his service. There was a Nazi helmet hanging on the wall next to the Luger pistol that was taken from the German general who surrendered to him in Italy in May of 1945. All of that fascinated my brother Frank and me as boys. But what really got to us were two large photo albums that had been presented to grandpa by the 5^th Army and the 3^rd Army, which he commanded after the war when he was appointed Military Governor of Bavaria by General Eisenhower.

The 3^rd Army album contained photos of the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich. The photos were horrifying, taken by Army photographers the day the camp was liberated, showing starving inmates in striped uniforms clinging to the wire barriers around the camp as U.S. troops approached. Then came photos of ditches filled with bodies stacked atop each other, and more photos taken inside the barracks of starving inmates huddled together on three-tiered bunk beds. And more photos of the ovens, where bodies were incinerated, and photos of German guards rounded up and arrested.

Grandpa was the court martial convening authority for Bavaria. He signed the document establishing the war trials at Nuremberg, and he established the Dachau Tribunal, which was held at the camp, where Dachau camp commanders and guards were put on trial. Nearly 1,500 were found guilty; hundreds were given life sentences, and more than 200 were executed.

Displayed alongside the photo albums was a thin volume, a pamphlet really, printed on newsprint, which Grandpa had ordered to be printed in either 1945 or 1946. Its title was “Dachau Diary.” The text was taken from a diary kept by an inmate who had written down what he experienced on scraps of paper that were recovered when the camp was searched in 1945. Along with the text, there were black and white photos showing the horrors of the camp taken by Army photographers.

I never saw another copy of “Dachau Diary” other than the one in Grandpa’s study. Frank and I would sit there in horror and read the account of the inmate, translated into English, and look at the photos. Burned into our minds were the words, “concentration camp” and “Dachau.” The Germans kept detailed records of what went on there – the number of inmates, tens of thousands over the years. Four thousand Russian prisoners of war were executed by SS firing squads at a sub-camp nearby that was run by the Dachau camp commander. Tens of thousands were either killed or died from starvation and disease. The total number of those who were killed or died from inhuman conditions at Dachau is not known, but in the final year of the camp, from the winter of 1944 to the camp’s liberation in April of 1945, it is known that there were at least 15,000 inmate deaths.

What Frank and I could never understand was how the German citizens of Bavaria had gone about their lives for the ten years Dachau existed with those horrors right there among them. Some of them worked at Dachau as guards, and some worked in administrative positions. In the early years of the camp, there were even investigations by local officials of deaths at the camp. The investigations ended by 1934, but records from that early time ended up as evidence in war crimes trials against camp officials.

Citizens of Munich and other towns in the area had to have known what was going on. In the German state of Bavaria, elaborate castles had been built by King Ludwig, filled with art and artifacts and gold, with lavish gardens and man-made waterfalls. Munich had a famous orchestra, and there were theaters and libraries and universities and a history of culture and science and intellectual study.

And yet there was the Dachau concentration camp, huge, more than 20 acres in all, the site of an SS training camp for guards destined for other concentration camps in Germany and Eastern Europe. Some of those trained there had to have come from the local populace. They had to have told their families what the training was like, what they had seen at Dachau, what, in fact, they were being trained to do.

Well, I wish my brother Frank was still alive, because the questions we had about how it was possible that Dachau happened in Germany are answered by what is happening right now in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis has built his own concentration camp, which he calls “Alligator Alcatraz,” on the land of an airport in the Everglades. Nearly 900 undocumented migrants are kept there in cages inside huge tents, 30 or more to a cage. There are only three toilets and sinks for dozens and dozens of inmates. Reports from the camp say they are being fed spoiled fruit, moldy bread, ham or cheese sandwiches and little else. Swarms of mosquitoes are everywhere. Inmates are covered in festering bites.

Florida concentration camp under construction

Florida built the camp and is filling it with migrants under a program that allows local law enforcement to pick up undocumented immigrants and detain them. Reports out of the camp say that some migrants were detained after traffic stops on highways and local roads. Some came out of local jails, having been arrested for committing crimes. DeSantis says there are plans to increase the size of the camp to a capacity of 4,000 inmates. The ACLU has filed a lawsuit alleging that detainees are being “blocked” from access to attorneys, according to the Washington Post.

The Post reported that the inmates are being housed in the Florida concentration camp at “at a cost of about $411 per bed a day. By contrast, ICE said last year that detention beds cost an average of $157.20 per day.” The large tents have air conditioners, but they are said to break down frequently.

Nobody knows what the temperature is inside the tents, because no one is allowed inside the concentration camp to inspect conditions. A few Florida lawmakers from both parties, including state representatives and members of the Florida congressional delegation, were allowed into the camp last Saturday for two hours. They were not permitted to bring phones or cameras inside. Journalists were not permitted to accompany them. Citizens from the local area, including members of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida who live nearby on land in the Everglades, are not permitted entrance to the camp.

Guards are being hired by Critical Response Strategies, a company that has been contracted to run the camp. The pay is $29 per hour, with $39 per hour for overtime. Guards are housed in narrow trailers on the camp’s grounds. They work for 21 to 28 days straight with no time off, then they are given seven to 14 days off between their shifts. One guard who worked at the concentration camp and quit told the Washington Post that she had been put to work at the camp the same day she was hired by Critical Response Strategies, which has a $78 million contract to manage the camp. The length of the company’s contract is not known. If people are being hired and put to work as guards on the same day, it does not appear that they are given training or much of a background check.

Suffice to say, a whole lot of money is being spent to keep undocumented migrants in detention in Florida. The money comes from the Department of Homeland Security. It has been reported that DHS is using FEMA money to build and run the camp.

So, that’s how it happens. A concentration camp is hurriedly built in an out of the way location – Dachau was built in the middle of an undeveloped forest in Bavaria – and local people are hired to work there. Photographs of the conditions of the camp are not permitted. Inmates are denied access to lawyers, and they cannot be visited by family members. Even local lawmakers are denied unsupervised visits to the camp.

In short, nobody knows what is going on out there in the Everglades. Donald Trump wants more camps like the Florida concentration camp built by other states. The Big Bullshit Bill just passed and signed into law provides DHS with more than $100 billion to hire as many as 10,000 new ICE agents and who knows how many concentration camp guards.

So far, there have not been any reports of deaths at the Florida concentration camp in the Everglades. With hardened criminals being thrown into cages inside the tents with migrants who have no criminal records, which appears to be the case, it’s only a matter of time before someone is going to get killed or a riot breaks out. Kristi Noem and Donald Trump have tens of billions of dollars to spend on rounding up migrants and throwing them in concentration camps before they are loaded onto planes and sent to so-called “third party” countries, from which the migrants did not come.

Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which declared that Jews and other minorities were not eligible to be citizens of Nazi Germany. That enabled the German government to begin rounding up Jews, Romani people, Blacks, intellectuals, college professors, lawyers and others declared to be “enemies of the state” and begin sending them first to Dachau, and then to other concentration camps. Trump is using immigration laws and his Big Bullshit Bill.

Everything done by Trump and Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Holman will be signed and official and legal. But they will still be putting human beings into concentration camps far from prying eyes, and they will not tell the American citizens what their tax dollars are paying for with the gigantic contracts and salaries of guards and managers and profit margins of companies like Critical Response Strategies.

Even with as little as we are being told, we know what is going on. They have built an American concentration camp in Florida. It is evidence of fascism, and it must stop.