The termconcentration camp originates from the Spanish–CubanTen 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 theSecond Boer War and the Americans during thePhilippine–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 therule of law.[2]Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as "concentration camps".[3]
TheAmerican Heritage Dictionary defines the termconcentration 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 termconcentration camp was first used in order to refer to thereconcentration camps (Spanish:reconcentrados) which were set up by theSpanish military inCuba during theTen Years' War (1868–1878).[6][7] The label was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during thePhilippine–American War (1899–1902).[8] And expanded usage of theconcentration camp label continued, when theBritish set up camps during theSecond Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interningBoers during the same time period.[6][9] TheGerman Empire also established concentration camps during theHerero and Namaqua genocide (1904–1907); the death rate of these camps was 45 per cent, twice that of the British camps.[10]
TheRussian Empire used forcedexile andforced 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 historianAnne Applebaum, katorga was not a common sentence; approximately 6,000katorga convicts were serving sentences in 1906 and 28,600 in 1916.[11] These camps served as a model for political imprisonment during theSoviet period. In the midst of theRussian Civil War,Lenin and the Bolsheviks established "special" prison camps, separate from its traditional prison system and under the control of theCheka.[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 followingWorld War 1.[15] In 1929, the distinction between criminal and political prisoners was eliminated,[16] administration of the camps was turned over to theJoint 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 theKhrushchev Thaw, the Gulag shrank to a quarter of its former size and receded in its significance in Soviet society.[20]
TheNazi Germany first established concentration camps for tens of thousands of political prisoners, primarily members of theCommunist Party of Germany and theSocial 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 includedRomani 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 abouta million died during their imprisonment. The total number of casualties in these camps is difficult to determine, but the deliberate policy ofextermination through labor in many of the camps was designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease andsummary executions within set periods of time.[25] In addition to the concentration camps, Nazi Germany established sixextermination camps, specifically designed to kill millions of people, primarily bygassing.[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]
Before and during World War II, concentration camps were established by various authorities. In the late 1920s, the Dutch colonial government established theBoven-Digoel concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) to intern Indonesian nationalist leaders and political dissidents.[29] Also during World War II, concentration camps were established byItalian,Japanese,US, andCanadian forces.
^Stone, Dan (2015).Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press. pp. 122–123.ISBN978-0-19-879070-9.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.
^James L. Dickerson (2010).Inside America's Concentration Camps: Two Centuries of Internment and Torture. Chicago Review Press. p. 29.ISBN978-1-55652-806-4.
^abThe Columbia Encyclopedia: Concentration Camp (Sixth ed.). Columbia University Press. 2008.
^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⟩
^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.
^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.ISBN978-1-135-26322-5.
^"Concentration Camp Listing". Belgium: Editions Kritak.Sourced from Van Eck, LudoLe livre des Camps andGilbert, Martin (1993).Atlas of the Holocaust. New York: William Morrow.ISBN0-688-12364-3.. In this online site are the names of 149 camps and 814 subcamps, organized by country.
^Evans, Richard J. (2005).The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin Group.ISBN978-0-14-303790-3.
^Shiraishi, Takashi (2021).The Phantom World of Digul: Policing as politics in Colonial Indonesia, 1926-1941. Singapore: NUS Press. pp. 29–35.ISBN9784814003624.
