n.
- A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.
- A place or situation characterized by extremely harsh conditions.
| Dictionary: concentration camp |
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| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: concentration camp |
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| Military History Companion: concentration camp |
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
| Columbia Encyclopedia: concentration camp |
During World War II concentration camps were established throughout Europe by the Nazis, and throughout Indochina and Manchuria by the Japanese. Of the millions of people of many nationalities detained in them, a large proportion died of mistreatment, malnutrition, and disease. In both Nazi and Japanese camps inmates were exploited for slave labor and medical experimentation, but the Nazis also established extermination camps. In the best known of these-Majdanek, Treblinka, and Oświęcim (Auschwitz), in Poland-more than six million mainly Jewish men, women, and children were killed in gas chambers. Among the most notorious Nazi camps liberated by U.S. and British troops in 1945 were Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen.
The term has also been applied to the U.S. relocation centers for American citizens of Japanese origin and others interned in the W United States during World War II. In China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-69) millions were sent to euphemistically named "reeducation" camps, and in Cambodia after Pol Pot came to power (1976) an estimated one million civilians died in "reeducation" camps. North Korea maintains a system of political and criminal prison camps in which inmates are sentenced to harsh physical labor and are underfed and mistreated. In 1992, reports of malnutrition and killings in concentration camps for Muslim, Croat, and Serb male civilians in Bosnia led to attempts by international organizations to identify the location of the camps and inspect them.
| History Dictionary: concentration camp |
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.)
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| Auschwitz (History) | |
| Dachau (History) |
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