“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Historians use a broader definition of concentration camps, as well.

„What‘s required is a little bit of demystification of it,“ says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. „Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz.