Camp Determination (Harry Turtledove)

A Confederate 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, Camp Determination was built with the sole intent of mass murder in mind.

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 (like Treblinka and Auschwitz in Poland). 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 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 insecticide, and ordered “bathhouses” and “delousing stations” installed outside the main camp. They were ready in late autumn of 1942 when 25,000-30,000 blacks (the entire black population of Jackson, Mississippi) arrived and executed en masse on Jake Featherston’s personal orders. 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.