"When Democrats rush up to me at events and insist that we live in the worst of political times, that a creeping fascism is closing its grip around our throats, I may mention the internment of Japanese Americans under FDR, the Alien and Sedition Acts under John Adams, or a hundred years of lynching under several dozen administrations as having been possibly worse, and suggest we all take a deep breath. When people at dinner parties ask me how I can possibly operate in the current political environment, with all the negative campaigning and personal attacks, I may mention Nelson Mandela, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, or some guy in a Chinese or Egyptian prison somewhere. In truth, being called names is not such a bad deal."

"The following pages present a micro-history of the basic architectural element of the labour service camps created during the Great Depression in Germany and the United States. ...The work of Oliver Razec, Allen Krell, and on the history and meaning of barbed wire provided general inspiration. The barbed wire fence developed to control cattle on the American prairies, became in the twentieth century the main tool to define the perimeter of the total institutions established to protect the community... Barbed wire has no place in defining the boundaries of total institutions that are purportedly established to better the pursuit of some work-like task. ...Yet, under conditions of total war, such camps came to be used to imprison people, and the barrack-huts developed for those camps became standard-issue shelter in newly established concentration camps that have become symbolic for the twentieth century, defined by Zygmunt Bauman as "the Age of Camps." ...[A] comparative study that considers the adaptive reuse casu quo metamorphosis of all the architectural elements that became the building blocks of the concentration camp - barbed wire fence, guard tower, gate, barrack-hut, latrine, delousing shed, [etc.] - and dynamic interrelation between those elements in the camp, will make an interesting dissertation on the history of modern architecture."

"... took upon herself the job of informing the British people and the world of the atrocities the Empire was committing in its South African concentration camps during the Second Boer War. The parallels to the news of the day seemed obvious. ...[T]he camps that so horrified Hobhouse consisted of women and children living in tents. So imagine my non-surprise to discover that... the administration decided to move some of the kids out of some of the worst conditions... to another site to live...in tents!... because this is America, where the enterprise is always free, and... almost a decade after the Supreme Court legalized influence-peddling, our politicians are free to take money from those who make money off facilities like these... There is a historic exercise in human misery being undertaken by the United States government in South Texas... and if you take money from people making a pile out of that misery, you're complicit. Sorry, but that's the iron logic of atrocities."

"Influenced by Arendt and by Wolfgang Sofsky's... The Order of Terror... Giorgio Agamben... [defines] the camp as a paradigmatic state of exception and symbol of totalitarianism... Agamben defines "modern totalitarianism... " as the establishment, by means of the state of exception, of a legal civil war that allows for the physical elimination not only of political adversaries but of entire categories of citizens who... cannot be integrated into the political system." ...[T]he state of exception, embodied by the proliferation of the camp, constitutes a pillar of modernity's exclusionary strategies and forms the basis of universal history. There is a... road not quite taken in Agamben's... camp as... exception. Noting the debate about modernity's first... camps... the Spanish campos de concentraciones in Cuba in 1896 or the English concentration camps designed for the Boers... Agamben writes: "... both [represent] extension to an entire civilian population of a state of exception linked to a colonial war." But... critics have observed, despite his emphasis on "the camp as the 'nomos' of the modern," [he] ignores colonialism, even Italy's... Implementing spatial control, surveillance, and mass violence, Italy's concentration camps in interwar ... manifest all the features that define bare life for Agamben, but... elude his representations as state of exception. A fog cloaks Mussolini's brutal invasion of Ethiopia... If the omission of these presumably peripheral iterations of the totalitarian "promulgates the myth of... the Italians as 'good' and 'decent' colonisers"—it also forecloses a truly universal account of the camp as the fundamental biopolitical space of modernity that Agamben gestures toward."

"The world of death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelties are antitheses... Both creation and destruction are inseparable parts of what we call civilization."

"The first concentration camps sprang up like mushrooms during Hitler's first year of power. By the end of 1933 there were some fifty... mainly set up by the S.A. to give its victims a good beating and then ransom them to their relatives of friends for as much as the traffic would bear. It was largely a crude form of blackmail. Sometimes, however, the prisoners were murdered, usually out of pure sadism and brutality. ...[B]efore the end mercifully came, millions of hapless persons were done to death and millions of others subjected to debasement and torture more revolting than all but a few minds could imagine. But at the beginning—in the Thirties—the population of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany probably never numbered more than from twenty to thirty thousand at any one time, and many of the horrors later invented and perpetrated by Himmler's men were as yet unknown. The extermination camps, the slave labor camps, the camps where the inmates were used as guinea pigs for Nazi "medical research," had to wait for the war."

"More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn’t the facilities to kill. . . . The gas chambers couldn’t handle the load."

"Just as we went by, they were opening the gas-chamber doors, and people fell out like potatoes. ... Each day one hundred Jews were chosen to drag the corpses to the mass graves. In the evening the Ukrainians drove those Jews into the gas chambers or shot them. Every day! ... More people kept coming, always more, whom we hadn't the facilities to kill. ... The gas chambers couldn't handle the load."

"The hallmarks of a regime which flouts the rule of law are, alas, all too familiar: the midnight knock on the door, the sudden disappearance, the show trial, the subjection of prisoners to genetic experiment, the confession extracted by torture, the gulag and the concentration camp, the gas chamber, the practice of genocide or ethnic clansing, the waging of aggressive war. The list is endless, Better to put up with some choleric judges and greedy lawyers."

"Moira MacTaggert: Registration today, gas chambers tomorrow."

"Though it was the most efficient, Auschwitz was not necessarily the cruellest of the Nazi death camps. The first people to be gassed by the Third Reich were, as we have seen, German mental patients; they had been asphyxiated with pure carbon monoxide gas. This method was then exported to Eastern Europe, but using exhaust fumes, first in specially converted vans, then in static gas chambers equipped with large diesel engines. This was how people were killed at Sobibor, Treblinka and Belzec, the camps set up to implement the 'Action Reinhard' in the autumn of 1941. Compared with inhaling Zyklon B, which killed most victims within five to ten minutes, this was a slow way to die. Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, regarded his own methods as 'humane' compared with those of his counterpart at the last of these camps, the notoriously sadistic Christian Wirth."

"They developed out of the situation. The courts brought in a lot of people who had to be shot. I always objected to having to use the same men for firing squadrons over and over again. During that period one day my camp leader, Karl Fritzsch, came to me and asked me whether I could try to execute people with Zyklon B gas. Until that time, Zyklon B was used only to disinfect barracks which were full of insects, fleas, et cetera. I tried it out on some people sentenced to death in the cell prison and that is how it developed. I didn't want any more shootings, so we used gas chambers instead."

"I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness."

"Nor did extermination policies arise from concentration policies. The Soviet concentration camp system was an integral part of a political economy that was meant to endure. The Gulag existed before, during, and after the famines of the early 1930s, and before, during, and after the shooting operations of the late 1930s. It reached its largest size in the early 1950s, after the Soviets had ceased to kill their own citizens in large numbers—in part for that very reason. The Germans began the mass killing of Jews in summer 1941 in the occupied Soviet Union, by gunfire over pits, far from a concentration camp system that had already been in operation for eight years. In a matter of a given few days in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews in the east than they had inmates in all of their concentration camps. The gas chambers were not developed for concentration camps, but for the medical killing facilities of the “euthanasia” program. Then came the mobile gas vans used to kill Jews in the Soviet east, then the parked gas van at Chełmno used to kill Polish Jews in lands annexed to Germany, then the permanent gassing facilities at Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka in the General Government. The gas chambers allowed the policy pursued in the occupied Soviet Union, the mass killing of Jews, to be continued west of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line. The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp. The image of the German concentration camps as the worst element of National Socialism is an illusion, a dark mirage over an unknown desert.."

"The prisoners [transferred to labor camps] would have been spared a great deal of misery if they had been taken straight into the gas chambers at Auschwitz."

"Believe me, it wasn’t always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the perpetual burning."

"Auschwitz, the meaning of pain The way that I want you to die Slow death, immense decay Showers that cleanse you of your life Forced in like cattle You run stripped of your life's worth Human mice, for the Angel of Death Four hundred thousand more to die."

"On May 28 of last year, President Obama stood next to Prime Minister of Poland in Warsaw and declared he would support new rules to help more Poles get tourist visas to the United States. “If you’ve lived in Chicago and you haven’t become a little bit Polish,” Mr. Obama joked, “there’s something wrong with you.”A year later, the president made himself the target of a searing denunciation by Mr. Tusk after he referred on Tuesday to a “Polish death camp,” instead of a Nazi death camp in Poland, in bestowing a Presidential Medal of Freedom on , a hero of the Polish resistance to the Germans during World War II. Mr. Obama was guilty of “ignorance, lack of knowledge, bad intentions,” Mr. Tusk said."