Concentration camp

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Boer women and children in a Second Boer War concentration camp in South Africa (1899-1902) Boercamp1.jpg
Boer women and children in a Second Boer War concentration camp in South Africa (1899–1902)

A concentration camp is a form of internment camp for confining political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or minority ethnic groups, on the grounds of state security, or for exploitation or punishment. [1] Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-American citizens by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag. [1]

Contents

History

Definition

The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over the following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps.

The term "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law. [2] Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps". [3]

Cuban victims of Spanish reconcentration policies, 1896 Weyler reconcentrados.png
Cuban victims of Spanish reconcentration policies, 1896
Ten thousand inmates were kept in El Agheila, one of the Italian concentration camps in Libya during the Italian colonization of Libya. Al-Magroon Concentration Camp.jpg
Ten thousand inmates were kept in El Agheila, one of the Italian concentration camps in Libya during the Italian colonization of Libya.
Women at the Kalevankangas concentration camp of Tampere in 1918, several months after the Finnish Civil War Tampere prison camp women.jpg
Women at the Kalevankangas concentration camp of Tampere in 1918, several months after the Finnish Civil War
Jewish slave laborers at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar photographed after their liberation by the Allies on 16 April 1945 Buchenwald Slave Laborers Liberation.jpg
Jewish slave laborers at the Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar photographed after their liberation by the Allies on 16 April 1945

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable." [4]

Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s, [5] the English term concentration camp was first used in order to refer to the reconcentration camps (Spanish:reconcentrados) which were set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878). [6] [7] The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). [8] And expanded usage of the concentration camp label continued, when the British set up camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning Boers during the same time period. [6] [9] The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps. [10]

Russian camps

The Russian Empire used forced exile and forced labour as forms of judicial punishment. Katorga, a category of punishment which was reserved for those who were convicted of the most serious crimes, had many of the features which were associated with labor-camp imprisonment. According to historian Anne Applebaum, katorga was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000 katorga convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 in 1916. [11] These camps served as a model for political imprisonment during the Soviet period. In the midst of the Russian Civil War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks established "special" prison camps and "special" gas chambers, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the Cheka. [12] [13] These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had a distinctly political purpose. [14] These concentration camps were not identical to the Stalinist, but were introduced to isolate war prisoners given the extreme historical situation following World War 1. [15] In 1929, the distinction between criminal and political prisoners was eliminated, [16] administration of the camps was turned over to the Joint State Political Directorate, and the camps were greatly expanded to the point that they comprised a significant portion of the Soviet economy. [17] This Gulag system consisted of several hundred [18] camps for most of its existence and detained some 18 million from 1929 until 1953. [19] As part of a series of reforms during the Khrushchev Thaw, the Gulag shrank to a quarter of its former size and receded in its significance in Soviet society. [20]

Nazi camps

The Nazis first established concentration camps for tens of thousands of political prisoners, primarily members of the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in 1933, detaining tens of thousands of prisoners. [21] Many camps were closed following releases of prisoners at the end of the year, and the camp population would continue to dwindle through 1936; this trend would reverse in 1937, with the Nazi regime arresting tens of thousands of "anti-socials", a category that included Romani people as well as the homeless, mentally ill, and social non-conformists. Jews were increasingly targeted beginning in 1938. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II, the camps were massively expanded and became increasingly deadly. [22] At its peak, the Nazi concentration camp system was extensive, with as many as 15,000 camps [23] and at least 715,000 simultaneous internees. [24] About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment. The total number of casualties in these camps is difficult to determine, but the deliberate policy of extermination through labor in many of the camps was designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions within set periods of time. [25] In addition to the concentration camps, Nazi Germany established six extermination camps, specifically designed to kill millions of people, primarily by gassing. [26] [27] As a result, the term "concentration camp" is sometimes conflated with the concept of an "extermination camp" and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or the term "internment camp" should be used to describe other examples of civilian internment. [28]

Other camps

Also during World War II, concentration camps were established by Italian, Japanese, US, and Canadian forces.

The former label continues to see expanded use for cases post-World War II, for instance in relation to British camps in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), [29] [30] and camps set up in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). [31] According to the United States Department of Defense as many as 3 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups are being held in China's internment camps which are located in the Xinjiang region and which American news reports often label as concentration camps. [32] [33] The camps were established in the late 2010s under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's administration. [34] [35]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extermination camp</span> Nazi death camps established to systematically murder

Nazi Germany used six extermination camps, also called death camps, or killing centers, in Central Europe, primarily Occupied Poland, during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million people – mostly Jews – in the Holocaust. The victims of death camps were primarily murdered by gassing, either in permanent installations constructed for this specific purpose, or by means of gas vans. The six extermination camps were Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Extermination through labour was also used at the Auschwitz and Majdanek death camps. Millions were also murdered in concentration camps, in the Aktion T4, or directly on site.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gulag</span> Soviet forced penal labour camp system

The Gulag was a system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union. The word Gulag originally referred only to the division of the Soviet secret police that was in charge of running the forced labor camps from the 1930s to the early 1950s during Joseph Stalin's rule, but in English literature the term is popularly used for the system of forced labor throughout the Soviet era. The abbreviation GULAG (ГУЛАГ) stands for "Гла́вное Управле́ние исправи́тельно-трудовы́х ЛАГере́й", but the full official name of the agency changed several times.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internment</span> Imprisonment or confinement of groups of people without trial

Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word internment is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katorga</span> System of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union

Katorga was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Labor camp</span> Type of detention facility

A labor camp or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, intended to abolish camps of forced labor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German camps in occupied Poland during World War II</span>

The German camps in occupied Poland during World War II were built by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945 throughout the territory of the Polish Republic, both in the areas annexed in 1939, and in the General Government formed by Nazi Germany in the central part of the country (see map). After the 1941 German attack on the Soviet Union, a much greater system of camps was established, including the world's only industrial extermination camps constructed specifically to carry out the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nazi concentration camps</span> Concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany

From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Penal labour</span> Type of forced labour performed by prisoners

Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extermination through labour</span> Killing prisoners by means of forced labour

Extermination through labour is a term that was adopted to describe forced labor in Nazi concentration camps whose inmates were held in inhumane conditions and suffered a high mortality rate; in some camps most prisoners died within a few months of incarceration. In the 21st century, research has questioned whether there was a general policy of extermination through labor in the Nazi concentration camp system because of widely varying conditions between camps. German historian Jens-Christian Wagner argues that the camp system involved the exploitation of forced labor of some prisoners and the systematic murder of others, especially Jews, with only limited overlap between these two groups.

A civilian internee is a civilian detained by a party to a war for security reasons. Internees are usually forced to reside in internment camps. Historical examples include Japanese American internment and internment of German Americans in the United States during World War II. Japan interned 130,000 Dutch, British, and American civilians in Asia during World War II.

Holocaust victims were people targeted by the government of Nazi Germany based on their ethnicity, religion, political beliefs, disability or sexual orientation. The institutionalized practice by the Nazis of singling out and persecuting people resulted in the Holocaust, which began with legalized social discrimination against specific groups, involuntary hospitalization, euthanasia, and forced sterilization of persons considered physically or mentally unfit for society. The vast majority of the Nazi regime's victims were Jews, Sinti-Roma peoples, and Slavs but victims also encompassed people identified as social outsiders in the Nazi worldview, such as homosexuals, and political enemies. Nazi persecution escalated during World War II and included: non-judicial incarceration, confiscation of property, forced labor, sexual slavery, death through overwork, human experimentation, undernourishment, and execution through a variety of methods. For specified groups like the Jews, genocide was the Nazis' primary goal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Japanese prisoners of war in the Soviet Union</span>

After World War II there were from 560,000 to 760,000 Japanese personnel in the Soviet Union and Mongolia interned to work in labor camps as POWs. Of them, it is estimated that between 60,000 and 347,000 died in captivity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German atrocities committed against Soviet prisoners of war</span> WWII Nazi abuse of Soviet POWs

During World War II, Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) held by Nazi Germany and primarily in the custody of the German Army were starved and subjected to deadly conditions. Of nearly six million who were captured, around three million died during their imprisonment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Sgovio</span> American artist, ex-Communist and former inmate of a Soviet Union Gulag camp

Thomas Sgovio was an American artist, ex-Communist, and former inmate of a Soviet Union GULAG camp in Kolyma. His father was an Italian American communist, deported by the US authorities to the USSR because of his political activities.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Forced labour under German rule during World War II</span>

The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe. The Germans abducted approximately 12 million people from almost twenty European countries; about two thirds came from Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Many workers died as a result of their living conditions – extreme mistreatment, severe malnutrition and abuse were the main causes of death. Many more became civilian casualties from enemy (Allied) bombing and shelling of their workplaces throughout the war. At the peak of the program, the forced labourers constituted 20% of the German work force. Counting deaths and turnover, about 15 million men and women were forced labourers at one point during the war.

Forced labour was used extensively in the Soviet Union and the following categories may be distinguished.

<i>Gulag: A History</i> 2003 book by Anne Applebaum

Gulag: A History, also published as Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps, is a nonfiction book covering the history of the Soviet Gulag system. It was written by American author Anne Applebaum and published in 2003 by Doubleday. Gulag won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the 2004 Duff Cooper Prize. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle prize and for the National Book Award.

Yertsevo is a rural locality in Konoshsky District of Arkhangelsk Oblast, Russia, located west of Lake Vozhe. Population: 4,201 (2010 Census); 4,013 (2002 Census); 4,683 (1989 Soviet census).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Occupation of Poland (1939–1945)</span> Occupation of Poland during WWII

The occupation of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II (1939–1945) began with the Invasion of Poland in September 1939, and it was formally concluded with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in May 1945. Throughout the entire course of the occupation, the territory of Poland was divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (USSR), both of which intended to eradicate Poland's culture and subjugate its people. In the summer-autumn of 1941, the lands which were annexed by the Soviets were overrun by Germany in the course of the initially successful German attack on the USSR. After a few years of fighting, the Red Army drove the German forces out of the USSR and crossed into Poland from the rest of Central and Eastern Europe.

References

  1. 1 2 "Concentration camp | Facts, History, Maps, & Definition | Britannica". www.britannica.com.
  2. ↑ Stone, Dan (2015). Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. pp. 122–123. ISBN   978-0-19-879070-9. Concentration camps throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by no means all the same, with respect either to the degree of violence that characterizes them or the extent to which their inmates are abandoned by the authorities... The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto 'enemies', in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended.
  3. ↑ "Nazi Camps". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  4. ↑ "Concentration camp". American Heritage Dictionary. Retrieved 22 July 2014.
  5. ↑ James L. Dickerson (2010). Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture. Chicago Review Press. p. 29. ISBN   978-1-55652-806-4.
  6. 1 2 The Columbia Encyclopedia: Concentration Camp (Sixth ed.). Columbia University Press. 2008.
  7. ↑ "Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz". Smithsonian . 2 November 2017.
  8. ↑ Storey, Moorfield; Codman, Julian (1902). Secretary Root's record. "Marked severities" in Philippine warfare. An analysis of the law and facts bearing on the action and utterances of President Roosevelt and Secretary Root. Boston: George H. Ellis Company. pp. 89–95.
  9. ↑ "Documents re camps in Boer War". sul.stanford.edu. Archived from the original on 9 June 2007.
  10. ↑ Stone, Dan (2017). Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. pp. 19–20. ISBN   978-0-19-103502-9.
  11. ↑ Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. Anchor, 2004, pp. xxxi
  12. ↑ Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 12
  13. ↑ The Lost Literature of Socialism, George Watson
  14. ↑ Applebaum, Anne. "Gulag: A History." Anchor, 2003, pp. 5
  15. ↑ Krausz, Tamás (27 February 2015). Reconstructing Lenin: An Intellectual Biography. NYU Press. p. 512. ISBN   978-1-58367-449-9.
  16. ↑ Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. Anchor, 2003, pp. 50.
  17. ↑ Ellman, Michael (2002). "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments" (PDF). Europe-Asia Studies. 54 (2): 1151–1172. doi:10.1080/0966813022000017177. S2CID   43510161 . Retrieved August 14, 2011.
  18. ↑ "Gulag | Definition, History, Prison, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. 2024-06-21. Retrieved 2024-07-15.
  19. ↑ "Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday)". The Pulitzer Prizes. 2004. Retrieved 2019-11-13.
  20. ↑ Marc Elie. Khrushchev's Gulag: the Soviet Penitentiary System after Stalin's death, 1953-1964. Denis Kozlov et Eleonory Gilburd. The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s , Toronto University Press, pp.109-142, 2013, 978-1442644601. ⟨hal-00859338⟩
  21. ↑ White, Joseph Robert (2009). "Introduction to the Early Camps". Early Camps, Youth Camps, and Concentration Camps and Subcamps under the SS-Business Administration Main Office (WVHA). Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945. Vol. 1. Indiana University Press. pp. 3–16. ISBN 978-0-253-35328-3.
  22. ↑ Wachsmann, Nikolaus (2009). "The Dynamics of Destruction: The Development of the Concentration Camps, 1933–1945". In Jane Caplan; Nikolaus Wachsmann (eds.). Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge. pp. 17–43. ISBN 978-1-135-26322-5.
  23. ↑ "Concentration Camp Listing". Belgium: Editions Kritak. Sourced from Van Eck, Ludo Le livre des Camps and Gilbert, Martin (1993). Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: William Morrow. ISBN   0-688-12364-3.. In this online site are the names of 149 camps and 814 subcamps, organized by country.
  24. ↑ Evans, Richard J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin Group. ISBN   978-0-14-303790-3.
  25. ↑ Marek Przybyszewski. IBH Opracowania – Działdowo jako centrum administracyjne ziemi sasińskiej [Działdowo as the centre of local administration] (in Polish). Archived from the original on 2010-10-22 – via Internet Archive.
  26. ↑ Robert Gellately; Nathan Stoltzfus (2001). Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. p. 216. ISBN   978-0-691-08684-2.
  27. ↑ Anne Applebaum (18 October 2001). "A History of Horror| Review of Le Siècle des camps by Joël Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot". The New York Review of Books .
  28. ↑ Schumacher-Matos, Edward; Grisham, Lori (10 February 2012). "Euphemisms, Concentration Camps And The Japanese Internment". npr.org.
  29. ↑ "Museum of British Colonialism releases online 3D models of British concentration camps in Kenya". Morning Star. 27 August 2019.
  30. ↑ "The Mau Mau Rebellion". The Washington Post. 31 December 1989.
  31. ↑ "Chilean coup: 40 years ago I watched Pinochet crush a democratic dream". The Guardian. 7 September 2013.
  32. ↑ "As the U.S. Targets China's 'Concentration Camps', Xinjiang's Human Rights Crisis is Only Getting Worse". Newsweek. 22 May 2019.
  33. ↑ "Uighurs and their supporters decry Chinese 'concentration camps', 'genocide' after Xinjiang documents leaked". The Washington Post . 17 November 2019.
  34. ↑ Ramzy, Austin; Buckley, Chris (2019-11-16). "'Absolutely No Mercy': Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims". The New York Times . ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved 2019-11-16.
  35. ↑ Kate O'Keeffe and Katy Stech Ferek (14 November 2019). "Stop Calling China's Xi Jinping 'President', U.S. Panel Says". The Wall Street Journal .

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