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A concentration camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, enemy aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. The term refers to situations where the internees are persons selected for their conformance to broad criteria without due process of law by a judiciary, rather than having been judged as individuals. Camps for prisoners of war are usually considered separately from this category, although informally, and in some other languages, they may also be called concentration camps. The word "concentration" indicates a regional concentration, or to collect the group desired, but it also implies the crowded, and often unhealthy, state of the facilities.

The concentration camps were invented by the British Empire during the Boer War. Until Nazi Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union set up camps whose objective was to eliminate ethnic and political groups (Stalin's gulags were used to work and starve millions to death, while Hitler's camps added the innovation of medical experiments and mass ovens), the term was used relatively literally to mean simply a camp where a group of prisoners were concentrated, although conditions may have been less than ideal. Now, the term is often used to refer specifically to the camps like those of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany or Communist Poland, or similar facilities by other governments. Since then, no government or organization has used the term "concentration camp" to describe their own facilities, instead using other terms: internment camps, resettlement camps, etc.

Contents 1 History and usage of the term 1.1 Argentina 1.1.1 External links 1.2 Austria-Hungary 1.3 Bosnia and Herzegovina 1.4 The British 1.5 Cambodia 1.6 Canada 1.7 Chile 1.8 Croatia 1.9 Finland 1.10 France 1.11 Germany 1.12 Italy 1.13 People's Republic of China 1.14 Russia and the Soviet Union 1.15 Serbia 1.16 Slovakia 1.17 Netherlands 1.18 North Korea 1.19 United States 2 See also 3 External links 4 Notes

History and usage of the term

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as:

a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45

Early civilisations such as the Assyrians used forced resettlement of populations as a means of controlling territory, but it was not until much later that records exist of groups of civilians being concentrated into large prison camps.

In the English-speaking world, the term "concentration camp" was first used to describe camps operated by the British in South Africa during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. Originally conceived as a form of humanitarian aid to the families whose farms had been destroyed in the fighting, the camps were later used to confine and control large numbers of civilians in areas of Boer guerilla activity. Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, and black workers from their farms, died as a result of diseases developed due to overcrowding, inadequate diets and poor sanitation. The term "concentration camp" was coined at this time to signify the "concentration" of a large number of people in one place, and was used to describe both the camps in South Africa (1899-1902) and those established by the Spanish to support a similar anti-insurgency campaign in Cuba (circa 1895-1898 [1]), although at least some Spanish sources disagree with the comparison [2].

Over the course of the twentieth century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the authority of the state became more common and reached a climax with the practice of genocide in the death camps of the Nazi regime in Germany, and with the Gulag system of forced labor camps of the Soviet Union. As a result of this trend, the term "concentration camp" carries many of the connotations of "extermination camp" and is sometimes used synonymously. A concentration camp, however, is not by definition a death-camp.

Since the nature of Germany's so-called "concentration camps" became known, the term is sometimes used as propaganda, with greater or lesser justification, to imply that a camp is designed to exterminate, rather than merely to concentrate, its inmates. For example, many of the slave-labor concentration camps were used by major German corporate manufacturers as cheap or free sources of factory labor.

The term is not often applied to camps such as Andersonville during the American Civil War. Although large numbers of prisoners were concentrated there in horrific conditions from 1863 to 1865, and perhaps a quarter of them died, the prisoners were combatants and the camp is generally classified as a POW camp.

What follows is a brief history of concentration camps established by various countries and regimes.

Argentina

During the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, there were about 100 places throughout the country that served as concentration camps in the Nazi sense, where people were interrogated, tortured, and killed, but not forced to work or concentrated for eventual release. Prisoners were often forced to hand and sign over property, in acts of individual, rather than official and systematic, corruption. Small children who were taken with their relatives, and babies born to prisoners, were frequently given for adoption to politically acceptable, often military, families. This is documented by a number of cases dating since the 1990s in which adopted children have identified their real families.

These were secret detention centres rather than actual camps. The peak years were 1976-78. Nearly 9,000 people are definitely known to have been killed: see the authoritative 1984 CONADEP (Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) Report. It states that "We have reason to believe that the true figure is much higher"; a figure of 30,000 is often quoted. A list of camps, full details, and documentation are to be found in the Report.

External links

• Report of Conadep (Argentine National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons) - 1984. English translation

Austria-Hungary

During the First World War, internment camps were set up, mostly for Serbs and other pro-Serbian Yugoslavs. Men, women, the children and the elderly were displaced from their homes and sent to concentration camps all over the Empire such as Doboj (46,000), Arad, Győr, Neusiedl am See.

Some 20 thousand pro-Russian Ukrainians were incarcerated in concentration camp Talerhof (Austrian province of Styria) from September 4, 1914 until May 10 1917. A full third of the prisoners held died.

Bosnia and Herzegovina

According to the Alliance of Detainees of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the period between 1992 and 1995, 520 camps and detention facilities existed under Serb control, which were active in 50 different municipalities in Bosnia. Estimates of how many people were detained there range from a provisional minimum estimate by the Alliance of Detainees of 100,000 people and up to 200,000 people reported by other sources, including non-governmental organizations ¹. Following are some of the detention camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina operated by one of the three armies, sorted in alphabetical order:

Detention camp	Ran by	Held	Number of detainees	Number killed
Batkovic	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	no data	no data
Čelebići	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	350 - 500	15
Dretelj	Bosnian Croat Army	Bosniaks	1,900	no data
Hrasnica	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	no data	no data
Igman	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	13 - 15	no data
Karakaj	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	4,000	400 1
Keraterm	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	1,000 - 3,500	300 1
Kozarac	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	no data	no data
Luka Brčko	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	5,000	200 - 500 1
Ljubuški	Bosnian Croat Army	Bosniaks	500	no data
Manjača	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	4,500 - 6,000	175 - 1,000
Mostar	Bosnian Croat Army	Bosniaks	2,000 - 3,000	no data
Omarska	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	3,000 - 5,000	773 - 5,000 1
Potočari	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	20,000 - 25,000	2,000 - 4,000 1
Tarčin-Silos	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	1,000	no data
Trnopolje	Bosnian Serb Army	Bosniaks	6,000	200 - 500 1
Visoko	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	150 - 200	no data
Zenica	Bosnian Muslim Army	Serbs	450 - 2,000	no data

Numerous atrocities were committed against prisoners, subject to ICTY prosecution. Some indictments include war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

The British

Image:LizzieVanZyl.jpg The term concentration camp was first used by the British military during the Boer War (1899-1902). Facing attack by Boer guerrillas, British forces rounded up the Boer women and children as well as black people living on Boer land, and sent them to 34 tented camps scattered around South Africa. This was done as part of a scorched earth policy to deny the boer guerrillas access to the supplies of food and clothing they needed to continue the war.

The camps were situated at Aliwal North, Balmoral, Barberton, Belfast, Bethulie, Bloemfontein, Brandfort, Heidelberg, Heilbron, Howick, Irene, Kimberley, Klerksdorp, Kroonstad, Krugersdorp, Merebank, Middelburg, Norvalspont, Nylstroom, Pietermaritzburg, Pietersburg, Pinetown, Port Elizabeth, Potchefstroom, Springfontein, Standerton, Turffontein, Vereeniging, Volksrust, Vredefort and Vryburg.

Though they were not extermination camps, the women and children of Boer men who were still fighting were given smaller rations than others. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths — a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boers (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the camps. In all, about 25% of the Boer inmates and 12% of the black African ones died (although recent research suggests that the black African deaths were underestimated and may have actually been around 20,000).

A delegate of the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund, Emily Hobhouse, did much to publicise the distress of the inmates on her return to Britain after visiting some of the camps in the Orange Free State. Her fifteen-page report caused uproar, and led to a government commission, the Fawcett Commission, visiting camps from August to December 1901 which confirmed her report. They were highly critical of the running of the camps and made numerous recommendations, for example improvements in diet and provision of proper medical facilities. By February 1902 the annual death-rate dropped to 6.9 % and eventually to 2 %. Improvements made to the white camps were not as swiftly extended to the black camps. Hobhouse's pleas went mostly unheeded in the latter case.

During World War I, South African troops (then a part of the British Empire) invaded neighboring German South-West Africa. German settlers were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Pretoria and later in Pietermaritzburg.

The British interned German and Austrian aliens that they rounded up after the start of World War II, many being held in Douglas on the Isle of Man. The vast majority of them were freed within six months, having been found to be "friendly aliens" (mostly Jews); examples include Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold and members of the Amadeus Quartet.

After World War II British efforts to prevent Jewish emigration into Palestine led to the construction of camps in Cyprus where up to 30,000 Holocaust survivors were held at any one time to prevent their entry into Palestine. Over time 50,000 people were imprisoned in the camps and over 2,000 children born there. After the creation of the state of Israel the British government continued to hold 8,000 Jews of 'military age' and 3,000 of their wives in order to prevent them joining the fighting. They were released in February 1949 (Source: N. Bogner, The Deportation Island: Jewish Illegal Immigrant Camps on Cyprus 1946-1948, Tel-Aviv 1991 in Hebrew).

During the 1954-60 Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya, camps were established to hold suspected rebels. It is unclear how many were held but estimates range up to 1.5 million - or practically the entire Kikuyu population. Between 130,000 and 300,000 are thought to have died as a result. Maltreatment is said to have included torture and summary executions. In addition as many as a million members of the Kikuyu tribe were subjected to ethnic cleansing. (Sources: . R. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible, London 1990 page 180; C. Elkins,“Detention, Rehabilitation & the Destruction of Kikuyu Society”in Mau Mau and Nationhood, Editors Odhiambo and Lonsdale, Oxford 2003 pages 205-7; C. Elkins, "Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End Of Empire In Kenya", 2005).

Alderney in the Channel Islands was the only place in the British Isles where German concentration camps were established during the Occupation of the Channel Islands. In January 1942, the occupying German forces established four camps, called Helgoland, Norderney, Borkum and Sylt (after the German North Sea islands), where captive Russians and other east Europeans were used as slave labour to build Atlantic Wall defences on the island. Around 460 prisoners died in the Alderney camps.

During the Anglo-Irish War 12,000 Irishmen were held without trial. Between 1971 and 1976 the British had a policy of internment in Northern Ireland and used Long Kesh as an internment camp to house people believed by the government to be members of paramilitary organisations.

Cambodia

Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime: see the article Democratic Kampuchea.

Canada

During World War II, Canada followed the U.S. lead in interning residents of Japanese and Italian ancestry. The Canadian government also interned citizens it deemed dangerous to national security. This included both fascists (including Canadians such as Adrien Arcand who had negotiated with Hitler to obtain positions in the government of Canada once Canada was conquered), Montreal mayor Camilien Houde (for denouncing conscription) and union organizers and other people deemed to be dangerous Communists. Such internment was made legal by the Defence of Canada Regulations, Section 21 of which read:

The Minister of Justice, if satisfied that, with a view to preventing any particular person from acting in a manner prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the State, it is necessary to do so, may, notwithstanding anything in these regulations, make an order [...] directing that he be detained by virtue of an order made under this paragraph, be deemed to be in legal custody.

There were internment camps near Petawawa, Ontario; Kananaskis, Alberta;and Hull, Quebec.

See Dangerous Patriots: Canada's Unknown Prisoners of War, by William Repka and Kathleen Repka, New Star Books, Vancouver, 1982 (ISBN 0-919573-06-1 or ISBN 0-919573-07-X). This book is a collection of first-hand stories from Canadian political prisoners during World War Two.

Chile

Under Pinochet's dictatorship, the Santiago stadium served as a concentration camp for political opponents.

Croatia

The Ustaše established concentration camps for Serbs.

Name of the camp	Date of establishment	Date of liberation	Estimated number of prisoners	Estimated number of deaths
Jasenovac	August 23, 1941	April 22, 1945	59,188-700,000Template:Ref
Stara Gradiška	1941	1945
Pag	1941	None			8,500

Template:Note Martin Gilbert The Holocaust Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, New York, 1985. pp. 797-798 Template:Note These numbers vary widely, and were frequently manipulated by various sides during Yugoslavia's history, see Jasenovac concentration camp.

Finland

In the aftermath of the Finnish Civil War of 1918, some 75,000 enemy prisoners of war of the losing side and suspected Communists were incarcerated in camps. While 125 Communist prisoners were convicted of treason and executed, an estimated 12,000 died of disease and starvation and an unknown number lost their lives after release, some of them shot after return to their home villages.

When the Finnish Army during the Continuation War occupied East Karelia 1941–1944 that was inhabited by ethnically related Finnic Karelians (although it never had been a part of Finland — or before 1809 of Sweden-Finland), several concentration camps were set up for Russian civilians. The first camp was set up on 24 October, 1941, in Petrozavodsk. The two largest groups were 6,000 Russian refugees and 3,000 inhabitants from the southern bank of River Svir forcibly evacuated because of the closeness of the front line. Around 4,000 of the prisoners perished due to malnourishment, 90% of them during the spring and summer 1942. The ultimate goal was to move the Russian speaking population to German-occupied Russia in exchange for any Finnic population from these areas, and also help to watch civilians.

Population in the Finnish camps:

• 13,400 — December 31, 1941
• 21,984 — July 1, 1942
• 15,241 — January 1, 1943
• 14,917 — January 1, 1944

France

Under Nazi occupation, the Natzweiler-Struthof camp, in Alsace, was one Nazi-run concentration camp on French soil during the Second World War -- the three departments of Alsace-Lorraine (Haut-Rhin, Bas-Rhin and Moselle) had been annexed and incorporated into the Third Reich. The French authorities also ran deportation camps such as the one at Drancy. Camps also existed in the Pyrenees, on the border with pro-Nazi Spain, one of which was called Camp De Gurs.

During France's occupation of Algeria, large numbers of Algerians were forced into "tent cities" and concentration camps both during the initial French invasion in 1830s, and particularly during the Algerian War of Independence.

During the early part of the colonial period, camps were used mostly to forcibly remove Arabs, Berbers and Turks from fertile areas of land and replace them by primarily French, Spanish, and Maltese settlers. It has been estimated that from 1830 to 1900, between 15 and 25% of the Algerian population died in such camps.

During the Algerian War of Independence the populations of whole villages which were suspected to have supported the rebel FLN were incarcerated in such camps.

Germany

Main article: Nazi concentration camps. See also: List of concentration camps of Nazi Germany, Holocaust Image:Buchenwald.jpg Image:Majorcampseurope.gif

Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager or KZ) rose to notoriety during their use in Germany during the Nazi era. The general populace referred to them as Kah-Tzets (the initials KZ in German). The Nazi regime maintained concentration camps as labor camps and prisons since the beginning of their regime in 1933. After the beginning of the war, they also established extermination camps for the industrialized mass murder of the Jews of Europe, called the Holocaust, starting in 1941. Over three million Jews would die in these extermination camps, which included Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. The victims were primarily killed by gassing, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were murdered in mass shootings or perished from hard labor and a starvation diet.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration and labor camps were also treated horrifically, and many died: worked to death on short rations and in bad conditions, or killed if they became unable to work. Slave labor was used by many German companies, who established their own sub-camps. Guards were known to engage in target practice, using their prisoners as targets. During World War II, these concentration camps for "undesirables" were spread throughout Europe, with new camps being created near centers of dense "undesirable" populations, often focusing on areas with large populations of Jews, Polish intelligentsia, communists, or Roma. Most of the camps were located in the area of the General Government in occupied Poland. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before they reached their destination. Concentration camps for Jews and other "undesirables" also existed in Germany itself, and while not specifically designed for systematic extermination, like the extermination camps, many concentration camp prisoners died because of harsh conditions or were executed. From population of people who died in Concentration camp, 6 million of Jews were died in Concentration Camps total 11 million Jewws.

It is estimated that up to ten million people died in Nazi concentration camps, of them six million were killed in the 15 larger ones.

Italy

Name of the camp	Date of establishment	Date of liberation	Estimated number of prisoners	Estimated number of deaths
Baranello near Campobasso
Campagna near Salerno
Casolli near Chieti
Chiesanuova near Padua	June 1942
Cremona
Ferramonti di Tarsia near Cozenza	summer 1940	September 4, 1943	3,800
Finale Emila near Modena
Gonars near Palmanova	March 1942	September 8 1943	7,000	453; >500
Lipari
Malo near Venice
Molat
Monigo near Treviso	June 1942
Montechiarugolo near Parma
Ponza
Potenza
Rab (on the island of Rab)	July 1942	September 11 1943	15,000	2,000
Renicci di Anghiari, near Arezzo	October 1942
Sepino near Campobasso
Treviso
Urbisaglia
Vestone
Vinchiaturo near Campobasso
Visco near Palmanova	winter 1942

People's Republic of China

Concentration camps in the People's Republic of China are called Laogai, which means "reform through labor". The communist-era camps began at least in the 1960s and were filled with anyone who had said anything critical of the government, or often just random people grabbed from their homes to fill quotas. The entire society was organized into small groups in which loyalty to the government was enforced, so that anyone with dissident viewpoints was easily identifiable for enslavement. These camps were modern slave labor camps, organized like factories.

There are accusations that Chinese labor camp produce products are often sold in foreign countries with the profits going to the PRC government. Products include everything from green tea to industrial engines to coal dug from mines.

The use of prison labor is an interesting case study of the interaction between capitalism and prison labor. On the one hand, the downfall of socialism has reduced revenue to local governments increasing pressure for local governments to attempt to supplement their income using prison labor. On the other hand, prisoners do not make a good workforce, and the products produced by prison labor in China are of extremely low quality and have become unsellable on the open market in competition with products made by ordinary paid labor.

An insider's view from the 1950s to the 1990s is detailed in the books of Harry Wu, including Troublemaker and The Laogai. He spent almost all of his adult life as a prisoner in these camps for criticizing the government while he was a young student in college. He almost died several times, but eventually escaped to the US. Party officials have argued that he far overstates the present role of Chinese labor camps and ignores the tremendous changes that have occurred in China since then.

See also: human rights in the People's Republic of China

External Link: Report about products produced under forced labor (focuses on the persecution of Falun Gong)

Russia and the Soviet Union

In Imperial Russia, labor camps were known under the name katorga.

In the Soviet Union, concentration camps were called simply camps, almost always plural ("lagerya"). These were used as forced labor camps, and were often filled with political prisoners. After Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book they have become known to the rest of the world as Gulags, after the branch of NKVD (state security service) that managed them. (In the Russian language, the term is used to denote the whole system, rather than individual camps.)

In addition to what is sometimes referred to as the GULAG proper (consisting of the "corrective labor camps") there were "corrective labor colonies", originally intended for prisoners with short sentences, and "special resettlements" of deported peasants. At its peak, the system held a combined total of 2,750,000 prisoners. The total number of people who passed through the camps is, of course, much larger.

There are records of reference to concentration camps by Soviet officials (including Lenin) as early as December 1917. While the primary purpose of Soviet camps was not mass extermination of prisoners, in many cases the outcome was death or permanent disabilities. The total documentable deaths in the corrective-labor system from 1934 to 1953 amount to 1,054,000, including political and common prisoners; this does not include nearly 800,000 executions of "counterrevolutionaries" outside the camp system. From 1932 to 1940, at least 390,000 peasants died in places of peasant resettlement; this figure may overlap with the above, but, on the other hand, it does not include deaths outside the 1932-1940 period, or deaths among non-peasant internal exiles. Indirect estimates by some authors state that as many as 40,000,000 Soviet civilians died in camps, starved, or were executed between 1917 and 1957.Template:Fact For example, in some uranium mines the average life expectancy of a prisoner, forced to mine radioactive ore, was as low as 6 months. During the war years 1941-1945 the life expectancy of a prisoner was even shorter.

After the WWII, some 3,000,000 German soldiers and civilians were sent to Soviet labor camps, as part of reparations by labor force. Only about 2,000,000 returned to Germany.

A special kind of forced labor, informally called sharashka, was for engineering and scientific labor. The famous Soviet rocket designer Sergey Korolev worked in a "sharashka", as did Lev Termen and many other prominent Russians. Solzhenitsyn's book The First Circle describes life in a sharashka.

An extensive List of Gulag camps is being compiled based on official sources.

Serbia

• Banjica concentration camp (near Belgrade)
• Sajmište concentration camp (near Belgrade)
• Crveni krst (in Niš)
• Dulag 183 (in Šabac)
• Svilara (Pančevo)
• Paračin

Slovakia

During the Second World War, the Slovak government made a small number (Novaky, Sered) of transit camps for Jewish citizens. They were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and Ravensbruck concentration camps. For German help with Aryanization of Slovakia, the Slovak government paid a fee of 500 Reichsmark per Jew.

Netherlands

During WWII, one of few official Nazi concentration camp complexes in western Europe located outside of Germany and Austria was near 's-Hertogenbosch, known in German as Herzogenbusch, see List of subcamps of Herzogenbusch. Still another one was camp Westerbork, which served as a transit camp (Durchgangslager) of Jews (Dutch and refugees) and Gypsies to extermination camps of Auschwitz and Sobibór. (Westerbork had been built in 1939 by the Dutch government for interning Jewish refugees.)

North Korea

Main article: Human rights in North Korea

North Korea is known to operate five concentration camps, currently accommodating a total of over 200,000 prisoners, though the only one that has allowed outside access is Camp #15 in Yodok, South Hamgyong Province. Once condemned as political criminals in North Korea, the defendant and his or her family are incarcerated in one of the camps without trial and cut off from all outside contact. Prisoners reportedly work 14 hour days at hard labor and/or ideological re-education. Starvation and disease are commonplace. Political criminals invariably receive life sentences, however their families are usually released after 3 year sentences, if they pass political examinations after extensive study.

Concentration camps came into being in North Korea in the wake of the country's liberation from Japanese colonial rule at the end of World War II. Those persons considered "adversary class forces", such as landholders, Japanese collaborators, religious devotees and families of those who migrated to the South, were rounded up and detained in a large facility. Additional camps were established later in earnest to incarcerate political victims in power struggles in the late 1950s and 60s and their families and overseas Koreans who migrated to the North. The number of camps saw a marked increase later in the course of cementing the Kim Il Sung dictatorship and the Kim Jong-il succession. About a dozen concentration camps were in operation until the early 1990s, the figure of which is believed to have been curtailed to five today due to increasing criticism of the North's perceived human rights abuses from the international community and the North's internal situation.

Perhaps the most well-known depiction of life in the North Korean camps has been provided by Kang Chol-hwan in his memoir The Aquariums of Pyongyang.

United States

The first large-scale confinement of a specific ethnic group in detention centers began in the summer of 1838, when President Martin Van Buren ordered the U.S. Army to enforce the Treaty of New Echota (an Indian Removal treaty) by rounding up the Cherokee into prison camps before relocating them. Although these camps were not intended to be extermination camps, and there was no official policy to kill people, some Indians were raped and/or murdered by US soldiers. Many more died in these camps due to disease, which spread rapidly because of the close quarters and bad sanitary conditions: see the Trail of Tears.

Throughout the remainder of the Indian Wars, various populations of Native Americans were rounded up, trekked across country and put into detention, some for as long as 27 years.

On December 7, 1901 During the Philippine-American War General J. Franklin Bell began a concentration camp policy in Batangas - everything outside the "dead lines" was systematically destroyed--humans, crops, domestic animals, houses, and boats. A similar policy had been quietly initiated on the island of Marinduque some months before.Template:Ref

Between 1935 and 1937, the National Park Service forcibly relocated 437 families from what is now Shenandoah National Park into "resettlements" administered by the Department of Agriculture's Resettlement Administration, then burned or removed their homes.

The term Internment Camp is often used as a euphemistic equivalent in other historical contexts, such as the imprisonment by the United States of German American people during both World War I and World War II, the internment of enemy aliens, and the exclusion and relocation (much of it forced) of American citizens born of enemy-related ancestry (including Japanese Americans) during World War II. The relocation camps (such as Manzanar) in the 1940s did not involve extermination like Nazi death camps. Nevertheless, they remain a severe blot on the human rights record of the United States.

Some critics have described the incarceration facility for detainees stated to be enemy combatants or associated with terrorism (but not formally accused, or subject to legal process) at Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay as a concentration camp. No government, and few organizations, seem willing to use these words; for instance, Amnesty International has criticized the U.S. treatment of detainees, but does not refer to Camp X-Ray as a concentration camp.

In February 2006 a United Nations report called on the United States to immediately close the Guantánamo Bay facility, listing abuses and violations of human rights and of medical ethics, and saying that certain practices at the prison camp "must be assessed as amounting to torture" and go beyond what international law permits. The U.S. rejected the report's findings[3].

See also

• Holocaust
• Indian Removal
• Japanese American internment
• Nazi concentration camp badges
• List of concentration camps of Nazi Germany
• List of concentration camps for Poles

External links

• Audio Testimony of Dr. Walter Ziffer Dr. Walter Ziffer, the last Holocaust survivor in Asheville, North Carolina as of April 11, 2004, discusses his interment in several camps on, as well as the theological implications of the Holocaust. Recording made in April 11th, 2004.
• Nazi Killing and Atrocity Centers: Summaries
• Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects - The Washington Post (January 1, 2005)
• A global gulag to hide the war on terror's dirty secrets - The Guardian (January 14, 2005)
• European Holocaust Memorial
• Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag - The Guardian (Feb. 1, 2004) (discusses Camp 22 in North Korea)
• A Voice From North Korea Echoes in the White House - The New York Times (June 18, 2005)
• Prison camps during Bosnian War
• Gulag Museum

Notes

1. Template:Note Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903, Stuart Creighton Miller, (Yale University Press, 1982). p. 208

• Alexander Jakowlew A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, (Yale University Press, New Haven/London, 2002)
• Ralf Stettner Archipel GULag, Stalins Zwangslager-Terrorinstrument und Wirtschaftsgigant, Schöningh, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3506787543
• Joel Kotek, Pierre Rigoulot Das Jahrhundert der Lager, Propyläen 2001, ISBN 3549071434, (Le siècle des Camps), ISBN 0297829955ar:معسكر اعتقال

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