4. The Gulag

‘The Gulag’ examines the Stalinist system of camps and ‘special settlements’ that developed through different phases of deportation from 1929–30 through to the late 1950s, although the camp system prevailed until the end of the USSR. Many of these camps were remote, where workers were needed for large mining or factory operations. Throughout the Gulag, the phenomenon of ‘de-convoyed’ prisoners permitted interaction between inmates and those ‘outside the zone’ to a surprisingly large extent. Prisoners in the Gulag could survive for many years and there was a constant stream of prisoners being released. However, in terms of numbers, far more people suffered in the Gulag than in the Nazi camps.

2. Origins

‘Origins’ traces the concentration camp’s origins in 19th- and early 20th-century colonial settings in Australia, the United States, Cuba, South Africa, and German South-West Africa (today Namibia), and in the Armenian genocide at the end of the Ottoman Empire. By studying the early concentration camps, we can understand how and why the camps emerged when they did, and clarify the links and differences between them and the fascist and communist concentration camps of the mid-20th century. European racism, military culture, more rapid forms of communication, and increasingly available print media all contributed to the global diffusion of concentration camp concept, which by the end of World War I became accepted as a technique of rule.

1. What is a concentration camp?

In order to consider why concentration camps are so important to modern consciousness and identity, we need to understand what they are and how they have developed. ‘What is a concentration camp?’ provides a working definition: it is an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians. The Holocaust has confused our understanding of concentration camps in that a concentration camp is not normally a death camp. They are the consequences of large numbers of opponents, far too many for the discipline, order, and expense of prisons. When the concentration camp becomes a permanency, it is the sign of a regime that knows it cannot command national support or even tolerance.

3. The Third Reich’s world of camps

‘The Third Reich’s world of camps’ examines the history of the Nazi camp system, comparing labour camps devised to build the ‘racial community’ with concentration camps set up to exclude political opponents and eventually to eradicate unwanted others—‘asocials’ and then Jews. The SS concentration camps at Buchenwald, Dachau, and Sachsenhausen, which were designed to brutalize the inmates and at which death was common, can be distinguished from the death camps at Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Exceptions were Majdanek and Auschwitz, which by 1942 combined the functions of concentration and death camps. The images and testimonies of the liberation of the Nazi camps have shaped our definition of concentration camps.

6. ‘An Auschwitz every three months’

‘ “An Auschwitz every three months”: to society as camp?’ examines the meaning and significance of the concentration camp. There is no single type of concentration camp and no clear dividing line between a concentration camp and other sites of incarceration. Are concentration camps ‘states of exception’ divorced from society and the rule of law, and, if so, do they therefore function as windows onto the deeper desires of modern states’ leaders or are they aberrant sites? Can a meaningful comparison be made between concentration camps such as those under the Nazi regime and refugee camps or detention centres? What about contemporary settings such as favelas, shanty-towns, and sweatshops in the global south?

5. The wide world of camps

Concentration camps constitute a worldwide phenomenon that has developed over time as different states and regimes have learned from others in other parts of the world. ‘The wide world of camps’ considers some of the less well-known settings: the American internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II; Franco’s camps during and after the Spanish Civil War; Britain’s use of camps for Jewish displaced persons in Cyprus; the colonial powers’ camps during the wars of decolonization in Algeria, Malaya, and Kenya; the Chinese Maoist camps; the Khmer Rouge’s camps in Cambodia in the 1970s; the camps during the genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s; and the contemporary camp system in North Korea.