@coldjoint,
The British the first concentration camps of the 20th century during the Anglo-Boer War - the Germans followed immediately in 1904 with the Shark Island Concentration Camp in Lüderitz.
The idea was not new at all, e.g. the first American concentration camp was established in 1838 by order of the then US President Andrew Jackson to enforce the Indian Removal Act for members of the Cherokee.
The actual history of the term "concentration camp", however, begins only in the Cuban struggle for independence against Spain in 1868-1898, when the Spanish general Valmaseda and later, in 1896, the Spanish governor Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau ordered on a much larger scale that all those inhabitants who do not want to be treated as insurgents must stay in fortified camps, the so-called campos de reconcentración. These were explicitly civilians: "old people, women and children".
No other country but Germany, however, established such a great number of concentration camps: in total, there were 24 independent concentration camp main camps, to which a network of well over 2,000 external or subcamps was last organizationally subordinated.
Additionally, the Germany created the extermination camps (aka "death camps") during the Holocaust in World War II. (The Nazis distinguished between extermination and concentration camps, although the terms extermination camp (
Vernichtungslager) and death camp (
Todeslager) were interchangeable.)
