concentration camp

1. A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.
2. A place or situation characterized by extremely harsh conditions.

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Literally a temporary or permanent encampment where people may be gathered together from a wide area to ‘concentrate’ them in one place. The name was first used by the Spanish in Cuba to describe the technique of withdrawing the civilian population from the countryside to deny support and ‘crowd cover’ to guerrillas. Both Britain and the USA employed the same technique in the Second Boer War and the Philippines insurrection respectively. While not intended, the massing of people without adequate sanitation and medical services led to epidemics in these camps, giving the term an early and ominous link with genocide. Not to be confused with internment camps such as those employed to quarantine Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, concentration camps are now associated with, at best, punishment and forced labour, as in what Solzhenitsyn called the ‘Gulag archipelago’ of Stalin's USSR. At worst the concentration camps of Nazi Germany were used for the systematic extermination of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Russian prisoners of war, and a variety of others.

— Hugh Bicheno

A place for assembling and confining political prisoners and enemies of a nation. Concentration camps are particularly associated with the rule of the Nazis in Germany, who used them to confine millions of Jews as a group to be purged from the German nation. Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other persons considered undesirable according to Nazi principles, or who opposed the government, were also placed in concentration camps and eventually executed in large groups. (See Holocaust.)