Thousands of internees in the camps in South Africa and German South West Africa died, with some losing their entire families within a few weeks. The survivors were traumatized by the experiences of deportation, deprivation, disease, violence, and death. "The whole thing was a sad fiasco," admitted Sir Alfred Milner in a confidential letter on December 8, 1901. From the perspective of the colonizers, the concentration camps were also a fiasco in terms of failure, as in none of the cases examined by Jonas Kreienbaum was the mass death of the internees intended. The camps were not designed as extermination camps, but primarily as military instruments intended to contribute to the end of protracted colonial wars through the concentration and thus control of the population. They also served the purpose of effectively penetrating the colony by the state.