Internment

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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.

Japanese internment camp in Canada, during WW2

The word "internment" is generally used to refer to 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.

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 its original relatively innocent 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.

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 1939-45

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 [link]), although at least some Spanish sources disagree with the comparison [link].

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.

Internment

Camps

Concentration Camp

See also