Although monstrous for most observers, totalitarianism and concentration camps belong to the same family, forming a coherent and in some sense logical entity. Concentration camps were not created ex nihilo by totalitarianism. They appeared for the first time in 1896 in Cuba, at the time of an armed insurrection against the Spanish Crown. Valeriano Wyler y Nicolau, the capitan general of the island, decided to lock up a large portion of the peasant population in so-called camps of reconcentration, in order to isolate the guerrillas totally. Four years later, Lord Horatio Kitchener would take this as his model during the Boer War in South Africa.

The first camps were temporary, but all the ingredients of what would become the scandal of the concentration camp were nonetheless present: the notion of collectively punishing an entire group; the idea of preemption (with most of the interned being innocent); administrative...