Concentration camp
From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A concentration camp is a place which a government uses to keep people who are either against that government or who it thinks are too dangerous to remain free. Sometimes these are called internment camps, where a large number of people are put in prison without a trial.
The people who are locked away in such a prison, are not usually yet found guilty of a crime, but may be politically against the leaders of a region, people who are of a certain race or religion, or non-military prisoners of war.
[edit] History of concentration camps
Many countries have used concentration camps often during wars or times of trouble and fighting.
The English words concentration camps were first used by the British in the Second Boer War in Africa around 1900. The families of South African men fighting against the British were put in camps to stop them from giving food and help to the fighters. Their houses and farms were burned. At least 30,000 people, mostly children, died in these camps from sickness or hunger.
Concentration camps became more famous and hated after 1936 when Nazi Germany's leader, Adolf Hitler, thought certain groups of people should be killed (including Jews, Roma people, and homosexuals) and others were politically dangerous (socialists, communists or religious persons who disagreed with the Nazis). People were often sent to these camps to work. After a few years, some camps were set up to kill people. These are now called "extermination camps" or "death camps". People were gassed, shot, or sometimes worked to death. Some of these people were given a trial, but these trials were very unfair.
The Nazi gas chambers reportedly killed up to 20,000 people a day, towards the end of World War II. Over half of the people who died in the Holocaust, died at such concentration camps, at least 1.1 million people at the camps of Auschwitz alone.
Prison camps had been in use in Russia for many years, especially in places in the Arctic or Siberia, a long way from any cities. From the 1920's under the Soviet Union many more people were sent to such camps and they were very badly treated there. One might still die there, but would most likely be used to work first. That is called a labour camp. These camps are sometimes called gulags, the Russian name for them. Anyone who was seen as a threat to the government was sent there. In 1939, there were about 1,300,000 people working as slaves in these camps. The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote a book called The Gulag Archipelago by which many people realized what crimes the communist Soviet Union government had done.
In the United States during the American Civil War in the 1860's soldiers who been captured were sometimes all crowded together in bad conditions. These were meant to be prisoner of war camps with good conditions, but many men died from sickness or hunger. At Andersonville prison about 12,000 men died (out of about 45,000 who were in prison there). This camp was not meant to be so bad, and the man in charge was later tried and killed for war crimes.
During the so-called Indian Wars (1870's and later) the United States made many enemies who were Native Americans. These people were forced to leave their land and were often put into camps where they could not leave. In some cases, many people, especially children, died from hunger and sickness. These camps were called reservations, in that some land had been set aside, or reserved for the Native Americans. Again these camps were not meant to be so bad, but many things went wrong.