While the matter remains one of debate, many contend that history’s first concentration camps were built in South Africa, 41 years before the Holocaust began.
These camps were built by British soldiers amid the Boer War, during which the British rounded up Dutch Boers and native South Africans and locked them into cramped camps where they died off by the thousands.
This is where the word “concentration camp” was first used – in British camps that systematically imprisoned more than 115,000 people and saw at least 25,000 of them killed.