Internment
This page is about the usage and history of the terms concentration camp, internment camp and internment. For a listing of individual camps, please see List of concentration and internment camps. Or, for concentration camps during World War II, see Extermination camps in the Holocaust"Internment" is the imprisonment or confinement of people, commonly in large groups, without due process of law and a trial. It also refers to the practice of
neutral countries in time of
war to hold belligerent
armed forces and equipment which enter their territory, under the
Second Hague Convention.
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. The most notorious of such prison camps were the
Nazi concentration camps.
An internment camp or 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 is used for facilities whose inmates are selected according to some criteria, rather than individuals who are incarcerated after
due process of law fairly applied by a
judiciary.
Prisoner-of-war camps are not usually called
concentration camps although informally, and in some languages, they may be.
Use of the word
concentration comes from the idea of
concentrating a group of people who are in some way undesirable in one place, where they can be watched by those who incarcerated them. For example, in a time of
insurgency, potential supporters of the insurgents are placed where they cannot provide them with supplies or information.
The term
concentration camp lost some of its original meaning after
Nazi concentration camps were discovered, and has ever since been understood to refer to a place of mistreatment, starvation, forced labour, and murder. The expression since then has only been used in this extremely pejorative sense; no government or organization has used it to describe its own facilities, using instead terms such as
internment camp,
resettlement camp,
detention facility, etc, regardless of the actual circumstances of the camp, which can vary a great deal.
Concentration camp
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 1939-45In 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. It is believed that 27,000 Boer women and 24,000 Boer children died
citation needed from such causes in the camps during the Boer War. 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].
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Buchenwald concentration camp |
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
Nazi concentration camps and the practice of
genocide in
Nazi extermination camps, 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. For example, many of the slave-labor concentration camps were used by major German corporate manufacturers as cheap or free sources of factory labor.
Since the nature of Germany's so-called "concentration camps" (Konzentrationslager, abbreviated KZ) 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.
*
List of concentration and internment camps*
Prisoner-of-war camp
