Was Andersonville a death-camp?

by ConsideringCTT

I've heard the starvation and conditions there were not fully explained by problems with confederate logistics- were the prisoners starved intentionally? Was the goal of sending officers to Andersonville to have them die?

Jan_van_Bergen

Simply put, no, at least not in the sense of a death camp as usually used in connection with the Holocaust. Andersonville was horrific, certainly, but the purpose of the camp was not extermination, as it was in the 6 Nazi death camps (which were themselves a small portion of the thousands and thousands of Nazi concentration camps). There were lots of survivors of Andersonville, but comparatively fewer survivors from death camps. For example, a whopping 7 people survived Chelmno, out of at least 150,000 people sent there. At Treblinka II, where between 800,000 and 950,000 people were murdered, only about 70 people are known to have survived until the end of the war. Those are extermination camp numbers. Andersonville doesn't even come close by any stretch of the imagination (about a third of the prisoners who entered Andersonville died there).

The problem that arises in the popular mind is that many people are familiar with Auschwitz, which was the most famous death camp. What they don't realize is that Auschwitz was a series of camps, only Auschwitz II Birkenau was the death camp (killed about one million people in their gas chambers, more than any other camp). But there are numerous survivors from Auschwitz III Buna/Monowitz, including some of the most famous survivors, like Elie Wiesel. But Buna was NOT a death camp, it was a regular concentration/work camp.

HoldenTite

I actually had a chance when I was young to visit Andersonville. The sheer mass of people would have led to rampant diseases. 20,000 men were forced into an area about the size of a couple of football fields.

And in addition, the prisoners were basically starved. The South was not in a good way in terms of producing food for a marching army and population.

TNT did a two part movie a couple of decades back that was really good. The officials at Andersonville said they portrayed the events and conditions pretty well.