Concentration Camp

I

Introduction

Concentration Camp, a place where selected groups of people are confined, usually for political reasons and under inhumane conditions. Men, women, and children are confined without normal judicial trials for an indeterminate period of confinement. Camp authorities usually exercise unlimited, arbitrary power. Although many kinds of facilities have served as concentration camps, they usually consist of barracks, huts, or tents, surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire. Concentration camps are also known by various other names such as corrective labor camps, relocation centers, and reception centers. During World War II (1939-1945) more than 6 million people died in German concentration camps, but there have been other camps throughout history.

II

Western Camps

Modern concentration camps appeared at the end of the 19th century. The Spaniards used them in Cuba during the Spanish-American War (1898), and the British established them for thousands of women and children during the Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa. In the West camps have been created several times during periods of war and national emergency. In France the government committed Spanish Republican refugees to reception centers in 1938 and added Jewish and other anti-Nazi refugees the following year. In Britain the government used Defense Regulation 18B in 1939 to send potentially disloyal citizens and refugees from enemy countries to internment camps.

During World War II the U.S. Army forced approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, from their primarily West Coast homes to ten concentration camps, many in the interior of the country. The U.S. government referred to these prisonlike camps as relocation centers. See also Japanese American Internment.

III

Soviet Camps

In Russia the Bolsheviks established concentration camps for suspected counterrevolutionaries in 1918 after the Russian Revolution. During the 1920s, “class enemies” and criminals were confined in the Northern Special Purpose Camps on the Solovetskiye Islands in the White Sea and near Arkhangel’sk on the mainland. In the 1930s and 1940s, a system of corrective labor camps covered most of the Soviet Union and received millions of prisoners in successive waves of mass arrests: independent farmers (kulaks); victims of the great purges; populations deported from the Polish and Baltic territories annexed in 1939; groups such as the Volga Germans considered potentially disloyal during World War II; Axis prisoners of war; and Russians returning from German captivity. After the death of Joseph Stalin (1953), when many inmates received amnesty and were released, the camps continued on a smaller scale.

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In 1919 the Russian secret police, then known as the Cheka and later under successive other names (see KGB), was empowered to arrest “class enemies.” Commitment to a camp usually followed a hearing by the Judicial Collegium of the secret police, using elastic paragraphs of the criminal code to sentence defendants who had neither the right to be present nor to defend themselves. During the 1920s the camps were administered by various agencies, including the People’s Commissariat of Justice. In 1930 control over all camps was assumed by the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps (Russian acronym, Gulag) in the OGPU (United State Political Administration). Gulag.

Millions of camp inmates worked as forced laborers on numerous projects essential to the Soviet economy. Some of these, such as the White Sea-Baltic Canal and the Moscow-Volga Canal, claimed innumerable lives. Other projects—such as the coal mines and oil wells near Vorkuta and the gold mines on the Kolyma River—exploited the mineral wealth in the Soviet Arctic. Eventually, five major camp systems existed: (1) the Yagry near Arkhangel’sk; (2) the Pechora, including Kotlas and Vorkuta; (3) the Karaganda in Kazakhstan; (4) the Tayshet-Komsomol’sk-na-Amure in the Lake Baikal-Amur River region; and (5) the Dalstroy in the Magadan-Kolyma region.

IV

Nazi Camps

In Germany, the Nazis established concentration camps almost immediately after assuming power on January 30, 1933. A decree in February removed the constitutional protection against arbitrary arrest. The security police had the authority to arrest anyone and to commit that person to a camp for an indefinite period. The political police, known as the Gestapo, imposed “protective custody” on a wide variety of political opponents: Communists, socialists, religious dissenters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Jews. The criminal police, known as the Kripo, imposed “preventive arrest” on professional criminals and numerous groups of so-called asocials: Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, and prostitutes. The SS (Schutzstaffel, or protective units) operated the camps with brutal military discipline. During the 1930s six major camps were established: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, and, for women, Ravensbrück. In 1939 these camps held about 25,000 prisoners.

During World War II the camps increased in size and number. Important new ones included Auschwitz-Birkenau, Natzweiler, Neuengamme, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof, Lublin-Majdanek, Hinzert, Vught, Dora, and Bergen-Belsen. Millions of prisoners entered these camps from every occupied country of Europe: Jews, partisans, Soviet prisoners of war, and impressed foreign laborers. Early in 1942 the SS Central Office for Economy and Administration (Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt, or WVHA) assumed operational control of the concentration camps, and inmates were exploited as forced laborers in industrial production. In addition to the central camps, the WVHA operated hundreds of subsidiary camps, and local offices of the security police in the occupied territories maintained large numbers of forced labor camps. Inmates were worked to death in industries such as the I. G. Farben chemical works and the V-2 rocket factories. Those no longer able to work were killed by gassing, shooting, or fatal injections. Inmates were also used for “medical experiments.” Early in 1945 the camp population exceeded 700,000.

During World War II the Nazis also established extermination centers to kill entire populations. There the SS systematically gassed millions of Jews and thousands of Roma and Soviet prisoners of war. Two extermination centers operated in concentration camps under the authority of the WVHA: Auschwitz-Birkenau and Lublin-Majdanek. Five operated in camps established by regional SS and police leaders: Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka in eastern Poland; Kulmhof (Chelmno) in western Poland; and Semlin outside Belgrade, in Serbia. More than 6 million persons, the majority of whom were Jews, perished in the Nazi camps. (Millions of Jews were also exterminated outside the camps.)

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