Concentration camp
A concentration camp is a guarded compound where political prisoners are detained. The term orginated during the Boer War,[1] but has become synonymous with the death camps of Nazi Germany and, to a lesser extent, the gulags of the Soviet Union.
Auschwitz, for example, achieved murder on an industrial scale. During World War II, 1.5 million people were systematically starved, tortured and murdered there.[2] Although Hitler was primarily focused on the extermination of the Jews, Christians, gypsies, Slavs, homosexuals, and communists also met with similar fates in the Nazi camps.
The Soviet gulags were forced labour camps, mainly in the remote regions of Siberia and the Far North. By 1934, the gulags held several million inmates (political prisoners and ordinary criminals alike) and the Soviet economy benefited considerably from this vast pool of slave labour. Conditions were brutal: prisoners received insufficient food and clothing to cope with the long working hours and severe weather, resulting in high death rates from exhaustion and disease. [3]
References
- ↑ 1900–05, applied orig. to camps where noncombatants were placed. [1]
- ↑ http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31
- ↑ http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/gula.html