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Concentration camp

Not to be confused with Extermination 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 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-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.[1]

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

History

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Definition

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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
 
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
 
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

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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

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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

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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

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References

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  1. ^ a b "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. ^ a b 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.

Further reading

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