I encourage you to read this fascinating essay by Gina McAfee, statewide coordinator of the Immigrant Partnership Teams, who wrote this essay about her father’s experience at Ohrdruf, which was the first concentration camp in Germany liberated by the Americans in 1945. She has generously allowed me to reprint it. These concentration camps, because that’s what they are, are being built from scratch and by repurposing existing facilities and old, unused warehouses not only in Colorado, but around the country. In another article, I will explain in more detail that these facilities are NOT housing immigrant felons, of which there are very few, in spite of the lies being told.
“It took Heather Cox Richardson’s essay of February 7, 2026, to identify the parallels between the situation we are in right now – and those my father encountered on April 4, 1945. My father, John A. McAfee Jr. was a part of Patton’s Third Army (in the 93rd Chemical Mortar Battalion) when that battalion liberated Ohrdruf. It was that act that provided the first real evidence of the horrors which had been going on in the concentration camps in Germany.
My father (who was 21 years old at the time) described entering the camp to find out all the Nazis had escaped and only one man left alive. There was evidence that the Nazis had very recently murdered many, many people and the ‘open courtyard was absolutely jammed with bodies.’ What caused my father to have nightmares for the rest of his life were the ‘shed-like buildings that had naked bodies in them, stacked like cordwood. A row of bodies, a sprinkling of lime, another row of bodies, more lime, more bodies, stacked perhaps six feet high.’
My father reported that late that day, Colonel Jacquard Rothschild “rounded up the populace of the town of Ohrdruf and force marched them through the camp, so that they could see for themselves what had happened on the hill just outside their town. That night, the Burgermeister of Ohrdruf, and his wife, hanged themselves.
The Nazi concentration camps did not start out as death camps. They started out in 1933 to 1939 as camps used to silence political opposition. Conditions in them were brutal, inhumane and often fatal. Conditions in them are not unlike the conditions in immigrant detention facilities all over the US today: inadequate food, no blankets in freezing temperatures, widespread illnesses, and no access to medical treatment. All of these conditions (including fatalities) have been reported at the immigrant detention facility in Aurora, run by the GEO Group.
The elected officials in Hudson and Walsenburg tell us that GEO Group (in Hudson) or Core Civic (in Walsenburg) can do whatever they want on that land, that they have no say in how those abandoned prisons are used, that they have no power to influence what happens in these facilities.
Like Heather Cox Richardson referencing the speaker in Surprise, AZ who was describing what happened in Ohrdruf, I also wonder, a few years from now, how local elected officials might feel about what ultimately happens in these concentration camps (now called immigrant detention facilities) within their city limits. Will they question their decisions to turn a blind eye to what was going on behind those walls? Will they feel a tiny bit of remorse knowing that there were steps they could have taken to protect the people in those immigrant detention facilities?
I urge folks to join our No Concentration Camps Colorado coalition. I urge folks to call Governor Jared Polis and demand he take a public stand to denounce ICE’s plans for new detention facilities in Hudson and Walsenburg and also that he support the closure of the GEO Detention Facility in Aurora. I urge folks to call the Mayors of Aurora, Hudson and Walsenburg and demand they do the same. And I urge folks to call Senators Hickenlooper and Bennet and your own US House member to demand the same.
History will remember how we all respond to these alarming conditions in our country.”
Gina McAfee, statewide coordinator of the Immigrant Partnership Teams
