concentration camp

A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.

Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans 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.

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. Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".

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."

Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s, 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). The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). 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. The German Empire also established concentration camps during the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps.

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. 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, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of the Cheka. These camps, as Lenin envisioned them, had a distinctly political purpose. 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. In 1929, the distinction between criminal and political prisoners was eliminated, 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. This Gulag system consisted of several hundred camps for most of its existence and detained some 18 million from 1929 until 1953. 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.

Nazi German camps

Nazi Germany 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. 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. At its peak, the Nazi concentration camp system was extensive, with as many as 15,000 camps and . In this online site are the names of 149 camps and 814 subcamps, organized by country. and at least 715,000 simultaneous internees. 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. In addition to the concentration camps, Nazi Germany established six extermination camps, specifically designed to kill millions of people, primarily by gassing. 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.

Other camps

Before and during World War II, concentration camps were established by various authorities. In the late 1920s, the Dutch colonial government established the Boven-Digoel concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) to intern Indonesian nationalist leaders and political dissidents. 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), French camps to forcibly relocate 2 million Algerians during the Algerian War, camps set up in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). 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''. The camps were established in the late 2010s under Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping's administration. More recently, there have been instances of plots of land used as recruitment centers, for forced labor and extermination centers used by Mexican drug cartels, a prominent example being the Jalisco extermination camp, where a group looking for missing persons in Mexico found over 200 pairs of shoes and clandestine crematoriums.

File:Beriberi USNLM.jpg, Filipino man riddled with beriberi contracted in a U.S. Army concentration camp during the Philippine–American War, 1902
File:Herero Nama Shark Island Death Camp Lieutenant von Durling 05.jpg, Lieutenant von Durling with prisoners at Shark Island, one of the German concentration camps used during the Herero and Nama genocide
File:Armrefugees.jpg, Armenian refugees collected near the body of a dead horse at Deir ez-Zor, during the Armenian genocide
File:Tampere prison camp women.jpg, Women at the Kalevankangas concentration camp of Tampere in 1918, several months after the Finnish Civil War
File:Boven-Digoel.jpg, Indonesian prisoners being exiled to the Dutch camp of Boven-Digoel, 1927
File:The fence at the old GULag in Perm-36.JPG, Fence at the gulag Perm-36, opened in 1943
File:Auschwitz Resistance 280 cropped.jpg, Prisoners' bodies are burned after they are killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp
Image:Ustaše militia execute prisoners near the Jasenovac concentration camp.jpg, Ustaše soldiers kill prisoners near Jasenovac concentration camp
File:"Persons of Japanese ancestry arrive at the Santa Anita Assembly Center from San Pedro. Evacuees lived at this center at - NARA - 539960.jpg, Manzanar internment camp for Japanese-Americans in 1942
File:Japanese internment camp in British Columbia.jpg, An internment camp for Japanese-Canadians in British Columbia
File:New Village in Malaya, 1950s.jpg, A model new village, designed as part of the Briggs Plan to separate the largely Chinese Malaysian rural populace from communist guerrillas during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960)
File:Photo de l'infirmerie et des locaux disiplinaire du camp de Thol.jpg, Camp de Thol, one of the French concentration camps for Algerians used during the Algerian War
File:Manjača Camp.jpg, Bosniak civilian detainees of Bosanska Krajina in Manjača camp
File:Xinjiang Internment Map, US-Aus Gov Assessment.jpg, Map of the Xinjiang internment camps in China based on data collected by the US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute

See also

*List of concentration and internment camps
*Civilian internee
* Extermination through labor
*New village
*Bantustan
*Labor camp
* Kwalliso (North Korean political penal labour colonies)
* Laogai (Chinese, "reform through labor")
*Prisoner-of-war camp
* Prisons in North Korea
*Re-education camp (Vietnam)
*Re-education through labor

References

Further reading

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External links

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