Before the Smoke
There is a comforting lie people tell themselves about how horror begins. It arrives, we imagine, fully formed, barbed wire glinting in the sun, smokestacks announcing their purpose, evil wearing a uniform so obvious that any decent citizen would recoil on sight. History tells a different story. It begins instead with paperwork, appropriations bills, executive orders, euphemisms. It begins with “temporary,” “necessary,” “for security.” It begins quietly.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators constructed a sprawling universe of captivity, an estimated 40,000 to 44,000 camps, ghettos, labor sites, transit centers, POW camps, and killing facilities scattered across Europe. Even when narrowed to the formal SS concentration camp system, historians still identify roughly 27 to 30 main camps, with hundreds of subcamps feeding an industrialized machinery of repression. Dachau opened in March 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, not as an extermination center, but as a place to warehouse “undesirables”: communists, social democrats, trade unionists. Sachsenhausen followed. Then Buchenwald. Mauthausen. Ravensbrück. Auschwitz would come later. The genocide was not the opening act. It was the endgame.
This is the part modern democracies prefer to forget: the camps came first, the mass murder later.
Fast-forward nearly a century, and the United States, under Donald Trump’s renewed presidency finds itself embarking on a detention expansion of historic scale, cloaked in the language of border control and public safety. With a $45 billion funding surge, ICE is moving to convert approximately 23 industrial warehouses into detention centers, each capable of holding anywhere from 500 to 9,500 people. Maryland. Arizona. Minnesota. Indiana. Louisiana. Virginia. The map spreads outward, quietly, methodically. FOIA documents reveal at least seven specific facilities under consideration, including the reopening of sites previously shuttered for abuse and mismanagement. The ambition is unmistakable: 76,000 to 80,000 new beds, on top of an existing system already detaining over 70,000 people across 250–300 facilities.
This is not a metaphor. It is infrastructure.
The comparison that makes people flinch, Trump and Hitler is also the one history insists we confront honestly. Hitler did not seize power in a coup. He was legally appointed Chancellor on January 30, 1933, through constitutional mechanisms. Trump, too, assumed power legally—first in 2017, again after reelection in 2024. Within days of taking office, both men moved aggressively to consolidate authority. Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to suspend civil liberties, followed by the Enabling Act to rule by decree. Trump, within his first week in 2017, signed executive orders mandating mass detention, ending “catch and release,” expanding enforcement authority, and deputizing local police as immigration agents. Due process narrowed. The machinery accelerated.
In Trump’s current term, with unified GOP control of Congress, the escalation has gone from aggressive to alarming. Travel bans on 19 countries. The revocation of parole and TPS protections for more than a million people. A nationwide immigrant registry requiring fingerprints and proof of status. Tent camps reactivated at Fort Bliss. Attempts to nullify birthright citizenship by executive order. Each move is defended as administrative necessity. Each one lowers the threshold of who can be detained—and for how long.
This is where history stops being abstract.
When American forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, they encountered not just piles of corpses and skeletal survivors, but something equally grotesque: denial. Local officials claimed ignorance. Civilians insisted they “didn’t know.” They said the SS hid it all from them, despite the smoke, the trains, the screams that had drifted over the town for years. U.S. officers, including those under General Eisenhower, found these claims “incredible.” Similar scenes played out at Buchenwald and beyond. The script was always the same. We thought it was a work camp. We were told it was re-education.
History recorded those words. History did not absolve them.
The United States is not Nazi Germany. That sentence is both true and insufficient. Germany in 1933 was not Nazi Germany either. It was a constitutional republic with elections, courts, and citizens who believed there were limits that could not be crossed. What made the catastrophe possible was not sudden madness, but gradual normalization, the slow expansion of detention, the erosion of rights for a designated “other,” the public’s willingness to look away so long as the suffering remained out of sight.
Trump has not been in office a year into this second term. Hitler’s camps existed for seven years before the gas chambers reached their peak efficiency. The timeline matters. The pattern matters more.
One day, if history continues its cruel habit of repeating itself, journalists, inspectors, or foreign observers will walk through these American detention facilities with cameras rolling. They will document overcrowding, abuse, deaths, families shattered by bureaucratic indifference. And when that happens, a familiar chorus may rise: We didn’t know. We were told it was necessary. We trusted the authorities.
The question is whether Americans will accept that excuse from themselves.
Because once the machine is fully built, once the warehouses are converted, the budgets normalized, the registries populated, it does not stop on its own. It never has. The only force that has ever halted it is public refusal: citizens who recognize the early warning signs and decide, collectively, that history will not be allowed to clear its throat again.
The camps always begin as policy. They end as shame.
Why It Matters
History does not begin with atrocities, it begins with permission. This piece matters because it exposes the earliest, most easily rationalized stages of state violence: paperwork, euphemisms, and “temporary” measures. Democracies rarely collapse in spectacle; they decay through administrative normalization. By the time horror is undeniable, resistance is already late.
Key Takeaways
- Concentration camps historically began as detention sites justified by “security” and legality.
- Nazi Germany built thousands of camps years before mass extermination began.
- The U.S. is rapidly expanding detention infrastructure under legal and bureaucratic cover.
- Legal appointment and constitutional process do not prevent authoritarian outcomes.
- Public denial and “we didn’t know” are recurring historical patterns—not absolutions.
Further Reading – Bookshop.org
- They Thought They Were Free — Milton Mayer. How ordinary citizens rationalized early Nazi policies before catastrophe unfolded. https://civilheresy.com/thought they were free
- The Origins of Totalitarianism — Hannah Arendt. A foundational analysis of how mass detention and dehumanization become normalized. https://civilheresy.com/The Origins of Totalitarianism Expanded Edition
- One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This — Omar El Akkad. On moral cowardice, hindsight, and the illusion of innocence during unfolding injustice. https://civilheresy.com/one day everyone will have always been against this
History does not repeat itself loudly, it repeats itself legally. Read. Share. Refuse to look away.
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