Camp Determination (Harry Turtledove)

Camp Determination is a fictional Confederate concentration camp built with the sole intent of mass murder in mind, unlike Camp Dependable and other, earlier concentration camps, which were used for imprisonment (and inefficiently designed for genocide on a massive scale). It is an analog in Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 series of fiction books to the real extermination camps used by Nazi Germany on Jews and other prisoners.

Overview

Standard Leader Jefferson Pinkard of the Freedom Party guards was given plenty of leeway by C.S. Attorney General Ferdinand Koenig to design the camp in a way that would efficiently murder tens of thousands of black prisoners at a time. Suitably located near Snyder, Texas, in a very expansive and unpopulated stretch of prairie, the massive Camp Determination was served by a rail spur that brought in thousands of prisoners into either a men’s camp or a women’s camp. When orders arrived from Richmond, Virginia, prisoners were goaded into "transport trucks", with lies about transfers and were then gassed to death.

After a while, a new method to kill the inmates was discovered when Pinkard exterminated vermin and little bugs in guard barracks using Cyclone insecticide (an analog of the Zyklon B insecticide used by the Nazis. Zyklon is the German word for Cyclone), and ordered "bathhouses" and "delousing stations" installed outside the main camp. They were ready in late autumn of 1942 when the entire black population of Jackson, Mississippi (some 25,000-30,000 people) arrived and were executed en masse on Jake Featherston’s personal order. Even with a US force advancing on nearby Lubbock, and the mass graves prepared for demolition in case of discovery, Camp Determination’s commandant and his bosses in the Freedom Party remained determined to murder as many prisoners as possible.

In , the United States Army mounts an offensive on western Texas with the goal of reaching and shutting down Camp Determination. When it is clear that the Confederate forces cannot stop the attack, Pinkard and his underlings abandon the camp and build a replacement, Camp Humble, farther east.

A rather morbid though possibly unintentional sidenote is that Determination rhymes with "Extermination". It could also be a play on words- "Camp de Termination" would be French for "camp of termination", or "camp of death".