World War I

During World War I, 2,940 German and Austrian men were interned in ten different camps in Australia. Almost all of the men listed as being Austrians were from the Croatian coastal region of Dalmatia, then under Austrian rule.

In 1915 many of the smaller camps in Australia closed, with their inmates transferred to larger camps. The largest camp was Holsworthy Internment Camp at Holsworthy.^[5] Families of the interned men were placed in a camp near Canberra.

World War II

During World War II, internment camps were established at Orange and Hay in New South Wales for ethnic Germans in Australia whose loyalty was suspect; German refugees from Nazism including the "Dunera boys"; and Italian immigrants, many were later transferred to Tatura in Victoria (4,721 Italian immigrants were interned in Australia^[6]).

Modern day

The Department of Immigration and Border Protection currently jointly manages two immigration centres on Nauru and Manus Islands with the host governments of Nauru and Papua New Guinea, for the indefinite detention of asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat. The claims of the asylum seekers to refugee status are processed in these centres. They are a part of the Australian government's policy that asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat will never be permitted to settle in Australia, even if they are found to be refugees, but may be settled in other countries. The clear intention of the Australian government's policy is to deter asylum seekers attempting to reach Australia by boat. The great majority of boats come from Indonesia, which is used as a convenient jumping-off point for asylum seekers from other countries who want to reach Australia.

These centres are not United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-endorsed refugee camps,^[7] and the operation of these facilities has caused controversy, such as allegations of torture and other breaches of human rights.^[8]

World War I (Austria-Hungary)

Starting in 1914, 16 camps were built in the Austrian regions of Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Salzburg and Styria. The majority of prisoners came from Russia, Italy, Serbia and Romania. Citizens deemed enemies of the state were displaced from their homes and sent to camps throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire.^[9] In addition of Internierungslager (internment camp) for civilians of enemy states, Austria-Hungary incarcerated over one million Allied prisoners of war.^[10]

Austria

The Thalerhof internment camp in Styria, Austria.

The Steinklamm Internment camp in Lower Austria.

• Braunau in Bohemia (today: Broumov in the Czech Republic), formed on 11. June 1915. Housed Serbian and Russian POWs and civilian internees, including underage Serbian children.^[11]
• Mauthausen, formed 22. September 1914. Housed Serbian and Italian POWs and Serbian civilian internees.^[11]
• Aschach an der Donau, Housed Serbian and Montenegrin POW officers and soldiers and civilian internees.^[11]
• Drosendorf internment camp
• Grossau internment camp
• Heinrichsgrün (today: Jindřichovice Czech Republic), formed beginning of June 1915, received first internees 17. June 1915. Housed Russian, Italian, Montenegrin and Serbian POWs and Montenegrin and Serbian civilian internees.^[11]
• Illmau internment camp - in the Waldviertel
• Katzenau - The largest internment camp in the territory of the monarchy, located on the right bank of the Danube near Linz, was used as an internment camp for civilians after Italy entered the war.^[12]
• Karlstein an der Thaya internment camp
• Kirchberg an der Wild internment camp - in the Zwettl district
• Markl internment camp - In Windigsteig in the Waldviertel region
• Neulengbach internment camp
• Sittmannshof internment camp - located near Loibes in Lower Austria's Waldviertel region between 1915 and 1916.
• Steinklamm internment camp - located in the municipality of Rabenstein an der Pielach in Lower Austria.
• Thalerhof internment camp - Between 1914 and 1917, around 30,000 people from Eastern Europe (mainly Ukrainians) were interned in the Thalerhof camp near Feldkirchen, south of Graz.

Hungary

The Nezsider concentration camp in Hungary.

• Arad (today in Romania)
• Sopronnyék (today: Samersdorf, Austria), formed on 5. April 1915. Housed Serbian and Montenegrin POWs and civilian internees, including underage children.^[11]
• Boldogasszony (today: Frauerkirchen, Austria), formed in February 1915. Housed Russian, Italian, Romanian, Serbian and Montenegrin POWs and Serbian and Montenegrin civilian internees.^[11]
• Budapest
• Cegléd
• Csót
• Esztergom
• Győr
• Keczkemét
• Kenyérmező
• Nagymegyer (today Veľký Meder Slovakia)
• Nezsider - The Nezsider concentration camp in Hungary, about 17,000 internees, mostly from Serbia and Montenegro, were held throughout the war.^[13]
• Tápiósüly (today part of Sülysáp) - internment camp for civilians, including women and children, 45 km East of Budapest^[12]

Bosnian war

In a UN report, 381 out of 677 alleged camps have been corroborated and verified, involving all warring factions during the Bosnian War.^[14]

Bosniak civilian detainees of Bosanska Krajina, mainly from the Prijedor region, in Manjača camp.

World War I (Bulgaria)

During World War I, Bulgaria was part of the Central Powers with Germany, Austria Hungary and Turkey. The Bulgarians established their largest prison camps in Sofia as well as smaller working camps across the kingdom but also military prison camps in Bulgarian occupied Serbia.^[20]

• Dobritch (Bazargic)
• Gorno Panicherevo - Located near Stara Zagora, holding prisoners of war and Serbian civilian internees, including women, children, a French school teacher and 84 Orthodox priests (according to Red Cross inspection of 11 May 1917)^[21]
• Haskovo - This prison camp held both Serbian prisoners of war and civilian internees,^[20] including women, children, and priests.^[21]
• Orhanie (today called Botevgrad)^[22] held both prisoners of war and civilian internees, mostly Serbian but also Russian.^[21]
• Philippopolis - The camp was established on the site of a former cholera hospital and incarcerated approximately 5,250 Serbian, British, and French with a majority of Serbian civilians.^[20]
• Rakhovo (today Slovakia)
• Sliven - Sliven held approximately 19,900 Serbian, Romanian, Russian, British, and French prisoners, including sixteen Serbian Orthodox priests.^[20]
• Sofia - The Bulgarian army maintained three prison camps around the city, holding a total of 20,000 prisoners of war and civilian internees.^[20]
  • Camp 1 - Mostly French prisoners^[21]
  • Camp 2 - Mostly Serbian prisoners^[21]
  • Camp 3 - Mostly Serbian prisoners with some Russians, Romanians and Italians^[21]

World War I (Canada)

World War II (Canada)

During the World War II, the Canadian government interned people of German, Italian and Japanese ancestry, besides citizens of other origins it deemed dangerous to national security. This included both fascists (including Canadians such as Adrien Arcand who had negotiated with Hitler to obtain positions in the government of Canada once Canada was conquered), Montreal mayor Camillien Houde (for denouncing conscription) and union organizers and other people deemed to be dangerous Communists. Such internment was made legal by the Defence of Canada Regulations, passed 3 September 1939. Section 21 of which read:

The Minister of Justice, if satisfied that, with a view to preventing any particular person from acting in a manner prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the State, it is necessary to do so, may, notwithstanding anything in these regulations, make an order [...] directing that he be detained by virtue of an order made under this paragraph, be deemed to be in legal custody.

Laogai

Laogai (Chinese: 劳改; pinyin: Láogǎi), the abbreviation for Láodòng Gǎizào (劳动改造), which means reform through labor, is a criminal justice system involving the use of penal labour and prison farms in the People's Republic of China (PRC). Láogǎi is different from láojiào, or re-education through labor, which was the abolished administrative detention system for people who were not criminals but had committed minor offenses, and was intended to "reform offenders into law-abiding citizens".^[47] Persons who were detained in the laojiao were detained in facilities that were separate from those which comprised the general prison system of the laogai. Both systems, however, were based on penal labour. The system has been estimated to have caused tens of millions^[48][49][50] of deaths and it has also been likened to slavery by its critics.^[51][52][53] The memoirs of Harry Wu describe his experience in reform-through-labor prisons from 1960 to 1979. Wu recounts his imprisonment for criticizing the government while he was in college and his release in 1979, after which he moved to the United States and eventually became an activist. Officials of the Chinese Communist Party have argued that Wu far overstates the present role of Chinese labor camps and ignores the tremendous changes that have occurred in China since the 1970s.

Falun Gong

The Chinese-language word laogai, short for Láodòng Gǎizào ("reform through labor"), referred to penal labour or to prison farms in the People's Republic of China. Chinese authorities dropped the word laogai itself in 1994 and replaced it with the label "prison".^[54] In the 1960s, critics of the government were arrested and sent to the prisons which were organized like factories. There are accusations that the products of penal labor are sold for profit by the government.^[55]

There are also accusations that Chinese labor-camps^[55] produce goods which are often sold in foreign countries with the profits going to the PRC government. The products include everything from green tea to industrial engines to coal dug from mines.^[56]

There have been reports of Falun Gong practitioners being detained at the Sujiatun Thrombosis Hospital, or at the "Sujiatun Concentration Camp". It has been alleged that Falun Gong practitioners are killed for their organs, which are then sold to medical facilities.^[57] The Chinese government rejects these allegations.^[58] The US State Department visited the alleged camp on two occasions, first unannounced, and found the allegations not credible.^[59][60] Chinese dissident and executive director of the Laogai Research Foundation, Harry Wu, having sent his own investigators to the site, was unable to substantiate these claims, and he believed the reports were fabricated.^[61]

Xinjiang

As of 2018 at least 120,000 members of China's Muslim Uyghur minority were held in mass-detention camps, termed by Chinese authorities "re-education camps", which aim to change the political thinking of detainees, their identities and religious beliefs.^[62][63] According to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as many as 1 million people have been detained in these camps,^[64] which are located in the Xinjiang region.^[65] International reports state that as many as 3 million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities may have been detained China's re-education camps in the Xinjiang region.^[66]

World War II (Croatia)

An estimated 320,000–340,000 Serbs, 30,000 Croatian Jews and 30,000 Roma were killed during the Independent State of Croatia, including between 77,000 and 99,000 Serbs, Bosniaks, Croats, Jews and Roma killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.^[67][68]

Yugoslav wars

• Kerestinec prison^[69]
• Lora prison camp, Split
• Ovčara camp

Cuban War of Independence

Cuban victims of Spanish reconcentration policies, 1896

After Marshal Campos had failed to pacify the Cuban rebellion, the Conservative government of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo sent out Valeriano Weyler. This selection met the approval of most Spaniards, who thought him the proper man to crush the rebellion. While serving as a Spanish general, he was called "Butcher Weyler" because hundreds of thousands of people died in his concentration camps.

He was made governor of Cuba with full powers to suppress the insurgency (rebellion was widespread in Cuba) and restore the island to political order and its sugar production to greater profitability. Initially, Weyler was greatly frustrated by the same factors that had made victory difficult for all generals of traditional standing armies fighting against an insurgency. While the Spanish troops marched in regulation and required substantial supplies, their opponents practiced hit-and-run tactics and lived off the land, blending in with the non-combatant population. He came to the same conclusions as his predecessors as well—that to win Cuba back for Spain, he would have to separate the rebels from the civilians by putting the latter in safe havens, protected by loyal Spanish troops. By the end of 1897, General Weyler had relocated more than 300,000 into such "reconcentration camps." Weyler learned this tactic from the American Civil War campaign of General Sherman while assigned to the post of military attaché in the Spanish Embassy in Washington D.C.. However, many mistakenly believe him to be to the origin of such tactics after it was later used by the British in the Second Boer War and later evolved into a designation to describe the concentration camps of the 20th century regimes of Hitler and Stalin. Although he was successful moving vast numbers of people, he failed to provide for them adequately. Consequently, these areas became cesspools of hunger and disease, where many hundreds of thousands died.

Weyler's "reconcentration" policy had another important effect. Although it made Weyler's military objectives easier to accomplish, it had devastating political consequences. Although the Spanish Conservative government supported Weyler's tactics wholeheartedly, the Liberals denounced them vigorously for their toll on the Cuban civilian population. In the propaganda war waged in the United States, Cuban émigrés made much of Weyler's inhumanity to their countrymen and won the sympathy of broad groups of the U.S. population to their cause. He was nicknamed "the Butcher" Weyler by journalists like William Randolph Hearst.

Weyler's strategy also backfired militarily due to the rebellion in the Philippines that required the redeployment by 1897 of some troops already in Cuba. When Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was assassinated in June, Weyler lost his principal supporter in Spain. He resigned his post in late 1897 and returned to Europe. He was replaced in Cuba by the more conciliatory Ramón Blanco y Erenas.

Rule of Fidel Castro

Military Units to Aid Production were forced labor concentration camps which were established by Fidel Castro's communist government, from November 1965 to July 1968.

They were used to brainwash the Cuban population and force it to renounce alleged "bourgeois" and "counter-revolutionary" values. First, people were thrown into overcrowded prison cells which were located in police stations and later they were taken to secret police facilities, cinemas, stadiums, warehouses, and similar locations. They were photographed, fingerprinted and forced to sign confessions which declared that they were the "scum of society" in exchange for their temporary release until they were summoned to the concentration camps.^[70] Those who refused to sign the confessions were physically and psychologically tortured.^[70]

Beginning in November 1965, people who were already classified as the "scum of society" started to arrive in the concentration camps by train, bus, truck and other police and military vehicles.^[70]

"Social deviants" such as homosexuals, vagrants, Jehovah's Witnesses and other religious missionaries were imprisoned in these concentration camps, where they would be "reeducated".^[71]

Before and during World War II

• Horserød camp – established during World War I as a camp for war prisoners in need of treatment, it was used during World War II as an internment camp. It is now an open prison.
• Frøslev Prison Camp – established during World War II as an internment camp by the Danish government in order to avoid deportation of Danish citizens to Germany. Used after the war to house Nazi collaborators and later students of a continuation high school located inside the camp.

After World War II

Denmark received about 240,000 refugees from Germany and other countries after the war. They were put into camps guarded by the reestablished army. Contact between Danes and the refugees were very limited and strictly enforced. About 17,000 died in the camps due to injuries and illness resulting from their escape from Germany or poor camp conditions.^[72] Known camps were

• Dragsbæklejren – a base for seaplanes, later converted into an internment camp for refugees. It is now used by the army^[73]
• Gedhus – located on an area which now is home to Karup Airport
• Grove – located on an area which now is home to Karup Airport
• Rye Flyveplads – a small airfield in Jutland^[74]
• Kløvermarken – is now a park in Copenhagen
• Oksbøl Refugee Camp – now belongs to the Danish Army
• Skallerup Klit – was developed into an area for summer houses

Finnish Civil War

In the Finnish Civil War, the victorious White Army and German troops captured about 80,000 Red prisoners by the end of the war on 5 May 1918. Once the White terror subsided, a few thousand including mainly small children and women, were set free, leaving 74,000–76,000 prisoners. The largest prison camps were Suomenlinna (an archipelago just offshore from the center of Helsinki), Hämeenlinna, Lahti, Viipuri, Ekenäs, Riihimäki and Tampere. The Senate made the decision to keep these prisoners detained until each person's guilt could be examined. A law for a Tribunal of Treason was enacted on 29 May after a long dispute between the White army and the Senate of the proper trial method to adopt. The start of the heavy and slow process of trials was delayed further until 18 June 1918. The Tribunal did not meet all the standards of neutral justice, due to the mental atmosphere of White Finland after the war. Approximately 70,000 Reds were convicted, mainly for complicity to treason. Most of the sentences were lenient, however, and many got out on parole. 555 persons were sentenced to death, of whom 113 were executed. The trials revealed also that some innocent persons had been imprisoned.^[75]

Combined with the severe food shortage, the mass imprisonment led to high mortality rates in the camps, and the catastrophe was compounded by a mentality of punishment, anger and indifference on the part of the victors. Many prisoners felt that they were abandoned also by their own leaders, who had fled to Russia. The condition of the prisoners had weakened rapidly during May, after food supplies had been disrupted during the Red Guards' retreat in April, and a high number of prisoners had been captured already during the first half of April in Tampere and Helsinki. As a consequence, 2,900 starved to death or died in June as a result of diseases caused by malnutrition and Spanish flu, 5,000 in July, 2,200 in August, and 1,000 in September. The mortality rate was highest in the Ekenäs camp at 34%, while in the others the rate varied between 5% and 20%. In total, between 11,000 and 13,500 Finns perished. The dead were buried in mass graves near the camps.^[76] The majority of the prisoners were paroled or pardoned by the end of 1918 after the victory of the Western powers in World War I also caused a major change in the Finnish domestic political situation. There were 6,100 Red prisoners left at the end of the year,^[77] 100 in 1921 (at the same time civil rights were given back to 40,000 prisoners) and in 1927 the last 50 prisoners were pardoned by the social democratic government led by Väinö Tanner. In 1973, the Finnish government paid reparations to 11,600 persons imprisoned in the camps after the civil war.^[78]

World War II (Continuation War)

Russian children at a Finnish-run transfer camp in Petrozavodsk. The sign reads, in Finnish and Russian: "Transfer camp. Entry to the camp and conversations through the fence are forbidden under the penalty of death."^[79]

When the Finnish Army during the Second World War occupied East Karelia from 1941–1944, which was inhabited by ethnically related Finnic Karelians (although it never had been a part of Finland—or before 1809 of Swedish Finland), several concentration camps were set up for ethnically Russian civilians. The first camp was set up on 24 October 1941, in Petrozavodsk. The two largest groups were 6,000 Russian refugees and 3,000 inhabitants from the southern bank of River Svir forcibly evacuated because of the closeness of the front line. Around 4,000 of the prisoners perished due to malnourishment, 90% of them during the spring and summer 1942.^[80] The ultimate goal was to move the Russian speaking population to German-occupied Russia in exchange for any Finnish population from these areas, and also help to watch civilians.

Population in the Finnish camps:

• 13,400 – 31 December 1941
• 21,984 – 1 July 1942
• 15,241 – 1 January 1943
• 14,917 – 1 January 1944

Devil's Island

The Devil's Island was a network of prisons in French Guiana that ran from 1852 to 1953 used to intern petty criminals and political prisoners in which up to 75% of the 80,000 interned perished.

Algeria

During the French conquest of Algeria, which began in 1830 was and fully completed by 1903, the French used the camps to hold Arabs, Berbers and Turks they had forcibly removed from fertile areas of land, in order to replace them by primarily French, Spanish, and Maltese settlers.^[81] The conquest led to the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million of an estimated 3 million Algerians from famine, disease, and war.^[82] Historian Ben Kiernan wrote on the conquest of Algeria: "By 1875, the French conquest was complete. The war killed approximately 825,000 indigenous Algerians since 1830,"^[83]

During the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), the French military created centres de regroupements (regrouping centres), which were built settlements for forcibly displaced civilian populations, in order to separate them from National Liberation Front (FLN) guerilla combatants.^[84] According to civil servant Michel Rocard, 1,000,000 Algerians were sent to regrouping camps (including children).^[85]

In 1959, Michel Rocard denounced the appalling conditions of many of those camps in a report, leaked and published in Le Monde.^[86] As a consequence the camps were modernized and became part of a large rural renovation program called Les Milles Villages (One Thousand Villages).^[87]

Spanish Republicans

After the end of Spanish Civil War, there were harsh reprisals against Franco's former enemies.^[88] Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled abroad, especially to France and Mexico.^[89] On the other side of the Pyrenees, refugees were confined in internment camps of the French Third Republic, such as the Rieucros Camp, Camp de Rivesaltes, Camp Gurs or Camp Vernet, where 12,000 Republicans were housed in squalid conditions (mostly soldiers from the Durruti Column^[90]). The 17,000 refugees housed in Gurs were divided into four categories (Brigadists, pilots, Gudaris and ordinary Spaniards). The Gudaris (Basques) and the pilots easily found local backers and jobs, and were allowed to quit the camp, but the farmers and ordinary people, who could not find relations in France, were encouraged by the Third Republic, in agreement with the Francoist government, to return to Spain. The great majority did so and were turned over to the Francoist authorities in Irún. From there they were transferred to the Miranda de Ebro camp for "purification".

After the proclamation by Marshal Philippe Pétain of the Vichy regime, the refugees became political prisoners, and the French police attempted to round-up those who had been liberated from the camp. Along with other "undesirables", they were sent to the Drancy internment camp before being deported to Nazi Germany. About 5,000 Spaniards thus died in Mauthausen concentration camp^[91]

Vichy France

During World War II, The French Vichy government ran what were called "detention camps" such as the one at Drancy. Camps also existed in the Pyrenees on the border with pro-Nazi Spain, among them Camp de Rivesaltes, Camp du Récébédou, Camp Gurs and Camp Vernet. From these, the French cooperated in deporting about 73,000 Jews to Nazi Germany.

In addition, in areas which Germany formally annexed from France, such as Alsace-Lorraine, concentration camps were built, the largest being Natzweiler-Struthof.

The Vichy French also ran camps in North and West Africa, and possibly French Somaliland and Madagascar. The following are the locations of concentration camps, POW camps, and internment camps in (Vichy) West and (Vichy) North Africa:

The camps were located at:

West Africa:

• Conakry
• Timbuctoo
• Kankan
• Koulikoro, Mali
• Dakar

North Africa:

• Sfax
• El Kef
• Laghouat
• Geryville.

Also camps connected to the Laconia incident:

• Mediouna (near Casablanca)
• Qued-Zen, Morocco (near Casablanca)
• Sidi-el-Avachi, Morocco (near Azemmour)

The following camps which are under investigation:

• Taza
• Fes
• Oujda
• Sidi-bel-Abbes
• Berguent
• Settat
• Sidi-el-Ayachi
• Qued Zem
• Mecheria

The camps at Conakry, Timbuctoo, and Kankan had no running water, no electricity, no gas, no electric light, no sewers, no toilets and no baths. The prisoners (mainly British and Norwegian) were housed in native accommodation—mud huts and houses, and a tractor shed. The Vichy French authorities in West Africa called these camps "concentration camps".

German South West Africa, 1904–1908

Between 1904 and 1908, following the German suppression of the Herero and Nama in the Herero and Namaqua genocide, survivors were interned^[92] at the following locations in German South-West Africa (now Namibia):

• Shark Island Concentration Camp^[93]
• Windhoek Concentration Camp
• Okahandja Concentration Camp
• Karibib
• Swakopmund Concentration Camp
• Omaruru^[94]

World War I (Germany)

In World War I male (and some female) civilian nationals of the Allies caught by the outbreak of war on the territory of the Germany were interned. The camps (Internierungslager) included those at:

• Ruhleben, for up to 4,500 internees, on a horse race-track near Berlin.^[95]
• Holzminden in Lower Saxony, for up to 10,000 internees.
• Havelberg, in Saxony-Anhalt, for 4,500 internees, including nearly 400 British Indians.
• Celle Castle in Lower Saxony.
• Rastatt Camp, for French civilians.

Nazi era

Buchenwald concentration camp, Weimar, Nazi Germany

On 30 January 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Weimar Republic's weak coalition government. Although the Nazi party (NSDAP) was in a minority, Hitler and his associates quickly took control of the country.^[96] Within days the first concentration camp (Konzentrationslager), at Dachau, Nazi Germany, was built to hold persons considered dangerous by the Nazi administration—these included suspected communists, labor union activists, liberal politicians and even pastors. This camp became the model for all later Nazi concentration camps. It was quickly followed by Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen which became a facility for the training of SS-Death's Head officers in the operation of concentration camps.

Theodor Eicke, commandant of the Dachau camp, was appointed Inspector of Concentration Camps by Heinrich Himmler on 4 July 1934. By 1934 there were eight major institutions. This started the second phase of development. All smaller detention camps were consolidated into six major camps: Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Flossenburg, and after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Mauthausen; finally in 1939 Ravensbrück (for women). The pajama type blue-striped uniforms were introduced for inmates as well as the practice of tattooing the prisoner's number on his fore-arm. Eicke started the practice of farming out prisoners as slave-labor in German industry, with sub-camps or Arbeitskommandos to house them. The use of common criminals as Kapo, to brutalize and assist in the handling of prisoners, was instituted at this time. In November 1938 the massive arrests of German Jews started, with most of them being immediately sent to the concentration camps, where they were separated from other prisoners and subjected to even harsher treatment.

The third phase started after the occupation of Poland in 1939. In the first few months Polish intellectuals were detained, including nearly the entire staff of Cracow University arrested in November 1939.^[97] Auschwitz-I and Stutthof concentration camp were built to house them and other political prisoners. Large numbers were executed or died from the brutal treatment and disease. After the occupation of Belgium, France and Netherlands in 1940, Natzweiler-Struthof, Gross Rosen and Fort Breendonk, in addition to a number of smaller camps, were set up to house intellectuals and political prisoners from those countries who had not already been executed.^[98] Many of these intellectuals were held first in Gestapo prisons, and those who were not executed immediately after interrogation were sent on to the concentration camps.

Initially, Jews in the occupied countries were interned either in other KZ, but predominantly in Ghettos that were walled off parts of cities. All the Jews in western Poland (annexed into the Reich) were transported to ghettos in the General Government. Jews were used for labour in industries, but usually transported to work then returned to the KZ or the ghetto at night. Although these ghettoes were not intended to be extermination camps, and there was no official policy to kill people, thousands died due to hunger, disease and extreme conditions. In occupied Czechoslovakia, Lety concentration camp was constructed to hold Romani people from Bohemia and Moravia. Following the Nazi advance into the Soviet Union in 1941 and 1942, camps were set up in Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, which consisted of Janowska concentration camp, Salaspils camp, Ninth Fort and Vaivara concentration camp. During this period, Jewish soldiers and civilians were systematically executed by the Einsatzgruppen of the S.S. that followed the front-line troops. At the Wannsee Conference on 20 January 1942 the "Final Solution" was decreed to exterminate all of the remaining Jews in Europe, Heydrich stated that there were still 11 million to be eliminated.^[99] To accomplish this special Vernichtungslager (extermination camps) were organized. The first was Chełmno in which 152,000, mainly from the Łódź ghetto, were killed. The method for carrying out mass murder was tested and perfected here. During 1942 and 1943 further camps Auschwitz-Birkenau II, part of Majdanek, Treblinka, Bełżec and Sobibor were built for this purpose. Jews from other concentration camps, and from the ghettos, were transported to them from all over occupied Europe. In these six camps alone, an estimated 3.1 million Jews were killed in gas chambers and the bodies burned in massive crematoria. The Nazis realized that this was a criminal act and the action was shrouded in secrecy. The extermination camps were destroyed in 1944 and early 1945 and buried. However the Soviet armies overran Auschwitz and Majdanek before the evidence could be totally destroyed.

U.S. Senator Alben W. Barkley views the bodies of prisoners at a liberated Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945

Another category of internment camp in Nazi Germany was the Labor camp (Arbeitslager). They housed civilians from the occupied countries that were being used to work in industry, on the farms, in quarries, in mines and on the railroads. Approximately 12,000,000 forced laborers, most of whom were Eastern Europeans, were enslaved in the German war economy inside the Nazi Germany.^[100][101] The workers were mostly young and taken from the occupied countries, predominantly eastern Europe, but also many French and Italian. They were sometimes taken willingly, more frequently as a result of lapanka in Polish, or rafle in French language, in which people were collected on the street or in their home by police drives. However, for often very minor infractions of the rules, workers were imprisoned in special Arbeitserziehungslager, German for worker re-education camp (abbreviated to AEL and sometimes referred to as Straflager).^[102] These punishment camps were operated by the Gestapo and many of the inmates were executed or died from the brutal treatment.

Finally there was one category of internment camp, called Ilag in which Allied (mainly British and American) civilians were held. These civilians had been caught behind front lines by the rapid advance of the German armies, or the sudden entry of the United States into the war. In these camps the Germans abided by the rules of the Third Geneva Convention. Deaths resulted from sickness or simply old age.

After World War II, internment camps were used by the Allied occupying forces to hold suspected Nazis, usually using the facilities of previous Nazi camps. They were all closed down by 1949. In East Germany the communist government used prison camps to hold political prisoners, opponents of the communist regime or suspected Nazi collaborators.

• Bad Nenndorf interrogation centre

World War II (Japanese)

During the Second World War the Japanese, during their occupation of Hong Kong, interned enemy nationals (mostly British, Canadian, American and Dutch), in several internment camps in Hong Kong. Camps existed at:

• Sham Shui Po – A concentration camp was maintained here for most of the duration of the Second World War.
• Stanley Internment Camp – Located primarily on the grounds of St. Stephen's College. Shortly after surrendering, the Imperial Japanese Army broke into the St. Stephen's (which had served as a military hospital during the battle) and murdered the wounded soldiers of the Allied forces. The Japanese later merged the college with part of Stanley Prison to form the full Stanley Internment Camp.
• Stanley Prison – Located primarily in the Officer's housing blocks at the prison. During the Japanese occupation, the grounds of the prison were used as part of Stanley Internment Camp. Nearly 600 prisoners of war and civilians, killed by the Japanese during the occupation, are buried in the nearby Stanley War Cemetery (which is NOT part of the prison itself but adjacent to it).

World War I (India)

• Ahmednagar, also for internees from German East Africa; Sections A abysmally overcrowded with more than 1000 inmates in "medically condemned" old barracks and B for privileged (read: monied) prisoners and officers. In 1915 a parole camp was set up.
• Diyatalawa (Ceylon)
• Belgaum for women; set up late 1915; March 1917: 214 inmates
• Kataphar for families

World War II (India)

• Ahmednagar (Central Internment Camp) inmates transferred to Dehradun February 1941.
• Diyatalawa (Ceylon). Aliens from Ceylon, Hong Kong and Singapore. Many German sailors, 756 of them sent to Canada in June 1941 (Camp 33); other males to Dehradun, females to parole camps, when camp was closed 23. February 1942
• Deolali from February 1941, later also transferred to Dehradun. 11 August 1941: 604 Germans.
• Dehradun main camp for males from September 1941. Sensibly separated in Wings 1: pro-Nazi, 2: anti-Nazi, 3: Italians. From this camp the SS mountaineer Heinrich Harrer escaped to Tibet.
• Yercaud for females from Madras Presidency. Summer 1941: 98 inmates, closed late 1942.
• Ft. Williams (Calcutta), army camp, closed early 1940, males were sent to Ahmednagar, females to Katapahar parole camp.
• Camp 17 initially in Ramgarh (Bihar), from July 1942 at Deoli (Rajputana). For the surviving internees from the Dutch Indies.
• Hazaribagh: in then Bihar; now in Jharkhand
• Smaller Parole Camps at Naini Tal, Kodaikanal and Katapahar (near Darjeeling), were all closed by late 1942. Inmates transferred to (family reunions) to the camps near Poona:
  • Satara from May 1940
  • Purandhar (lower Fort), initially for Jewish refugees, later also other Germans, many missionaries with families. In August 1945 116 Germans (45 children, 19 missionaries), 26 Italians (5 children), 68 other nationals (11 children)^[103]

Most internees were deported late 1946. Germans shipped to Hamburg were sent to the former Neuengamme concentration camp for de-Nazification.^[31][104]

Sino-Indian War

During the Sino-Indian War in 1962, the Indian government interned and incarcerated 3000 Chinese-Indian civilians in the desert internment camp in Deoli, Rajasthan,^[105][106] built by the colonial authorities in 1942 as a POW camp for Japanese, German, and Italian prisoners of war during the Second World War. The Indian government has not apologised or offered compensation to the internees as of 2020.^[107][108]

World War II (Ireland)

During World War II, known in Ireland as the "Emergency", "K-Lines" was the part of the Curragh Camp used as an internment camp. It was used to house German soldiers, mainly navy personnel stranded in neutral Ireland. A separate section was created for Allied military, mostly British soldiers, who entered Irish territory in violation of the neutrality policy. No.1 Internment camp, that had been built by the British pre-1922, held republicans who had a suspected link to the IRA.^[110]

Later in the war, Gormanston Camp, near Balbriggan, was used to house eleven Allied airmen from operational flights, but eight were released in June 1944; three Germans were kept there for a short period in 1945.^[111]

World War I (Isle of Man)

During World War I the United Kingdom government interned male citizens of the Central Powers, principally Germany, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey in this crown dependency.^[112] They were held mainly in internment camps at Knockaloe, close to Peel, and a smaller one near Douglas.

World War II (Isle of Man)

During World War II the Isle of Man was used as the primary site for the internment of civilian enemy aliens, both male and female. The camps were predominantly in commandeered hotels and boarding houses in seaside towns on the island. Around the camps for males, barbed wire fences were erected and military guard was brought over from England. The low-risk internees were, however, allowed to work on farms on the island and to go on excursions such as for walks or to swim in the sea. The camps were in operation from 27 May 1940 to 5 September 1945.^[113] The largest recorded number of internees on the island was roughly 14,000, reached in August 1940.^[114]

There were ten camps on the island:

• Mooragh Camp, Ramsey
• Peveril Camp, Peel
• Onchan Camp, Onchan
• Rushen Camp, Port St Mary and Port Erin (for female and family internees only)
• Central Camp, Douglas
• Palace Camp, Douglas
• Metropole Camp, Douglas
• Hutchinson Camp, Douglas
• Granville Camp, Douglas
• Sefton Camp, Douglas

World War II (Japan)

Japan conquered south-east Asia in a series of victorious campaigns over a few months from December 1941. By March 1942 many civilians, particularly westerners in the region's European colonies, found themselves behind enemy lines and were subsequently interned by the Japanese.

The nature of civilian internment varied from region to region. Some civilians were interned soon after invasion; in other areas the process occurred over many months. In total, approximately 130,000 Allied civilians were interned by the Japanese during this period of occupation. The exact number of internees will never be known as records were often lost, destroyed, or simply not kept.

Liberated Dutch prisoners in Indonesia (Dutch East Indies) in 1945

The backgrounds of the internees were diverse. There was a large proportion of Dutch from the Dutch East Indies, but they also included Americans, British, and Australians. They included missionaries and their families, colonial administrators, and business people. Many had been living in the colonies for decades. Single women had often been nuns, missionaries, doctors, teachers and nurses.

Civilians interned by the Japanese were treated marginally better than the prisoners of war, but their death rates were the same. Although they had to work to run their own camps, few were made to labour on construction projects. The Japanese devised no consistent policies or guidelines to regulate the treatment of the civilians. Camp conditions and the treatment of internees varied from camp to camp. The general experience, however, was one of malnutrition, disease, and varying degrees of harsh discipline and brutality from the Japanese guards. Some Dutch women were forced into sexual slavery.^[116][117]

The camps varied in size from four people held at Pangkalpinang in Sumatra to the 14,000 held in Tjihapit in Java. Some were segregated according to gender or race, there were also many camps of mixed gender. Some internees were held at the same camp for the duration of the war, and others were moved about. The buildings used to house internees were generally whatever was available, including schools, warehouses, universities, hospitals, and prisons.

Jean-Marie Faggiano receives a doll from Private First Class Theo Tanner of the U.S. First Cavalry. Tanner had just removed the doll from a dead Japanese soldier, killed during the liberation of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila, Philippines in February 1945

Organisation of the internment camps varied by location. The Japanese administered some camps directly; others were administered by local authorities under Japanese control. Korean POWs of the Japanese were also used as camp guards. Some of the camps were left for the internees to self-govern. In the mixed and male camps, management often fell to the men who were experienced in administration before their internment. In the women's camps the leaders tended to be the women who had held a profession prior to internment. Boys over the age of ten were generally considered to be men by the Japanese and were often separated from their mothers to live and work in male camps.

One of the most famous concentration camps operated by the Japanese during World War II was at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, the Philippines, the Santo Tomas Internment Camp. The Dominican university was expropriated by the Japanese at the beginning of the occupation, and was used to house mostly American civilians, but also British subjects, for the duration of the war. There, men, women and children suffered from malnutrition and poor sanitation. The camp was liberated in 1945.

The liberation of the camps was not a uniform process. Many camps were liberated as the forces were recapturing territory. For other internees, freedom occurred many months after the surrender of the Japanese, and in the Dutch East Indies, liberated internees faced the uncertainty of the Indonesian War of Independence.

Civilian internees were generally disregarded in official histories, and few received formal recognition. Ironically, however, civilian internees have become the subject of several influential books and films. Agnes Newton Keith's account of internment on Berhala Island in Sandakan Harbour and Batu Lintang camp, Kuching, Three Came Home (1947), was one of the first of the memoirs. More recent publications include Jeanne Tuttle and Jolanthe Zelling's "Mammie's Journal of My Childhood" (2005); (Shirley Fenton-Huie's The Forgotten Ones (1992) and Jan Ruff O'Herne's Fifty Years of Silence (1997). Nevil Shute's novel A Town Like Alice was filmed in 1956, and J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun in 1987. Other films and television dramas have included Tenko and Paradise Road.^{[118][119][120]}

World War I (Netherlands)

During World War I, all foreign soldiers and ship crews that illegally entered the neutral Netherlands were interned in a specific camp based on their nationality (to avoid conflict). By far the largest camp was the one for British sailors and soldiers in Groningen. Unlike the Prisoners of War in the neighbouring countries at the time, Dutch prisoners had plenty of food, and tradesmen often came to the camp with a wide range of goods. The interned were paid a certain amount of compensation money by the Dutch authorities on top of any British aid that was channeled to them through the Dutch government. One prisoner later commented: "... we were quite well off, and the local people were very good to us."^[125]

After a revolt in 1926 in the Dutch East Indies, a concentration camp for political prisoners was set up in what then was called Netherlands New Guinea, in the very remote jungle at Boven-Digoel (Upper Digul).^[126] More camps were established for supposed German sympathizers at the start of World War II, including one at Onrust Island and one in Ngawi Regency. In Surinam, they also built camps for German nationals and German sympathizers, including one at Jodensavanne and one at Copieweg.

World War II (Netherlands)

Just before World War II engulfed the Netherlands, a camp was built in 1939 at Westerbork by the Dutch government for interning Jewish refugees who had fled Nazi Germany. During the German occupation this camp was used as a transit camp for Dutch Jews eventually deported to extermination camps in the East. Amersfoort (1941–1945) (in German: Polizeiliches Durchgangslager) was also a transit camp. The Herzogenbusch camp (1943–1944, known as Kamp Vught because of its location in that town) was a concentration camp, the only one in Western Europe outside Germany set up as well as run by the SS.^[126]

Other camps were Camp Schoorl near Schoorl and Camp Erika near Ommen. Before the Shoah began, some two dozen labor camps for Jewish men were operated fulfilling an order of the German occupiers. In the Dutch East Indies, after the occupation of the Netherlands by the Germans in Europe started on 15 May 1940, Germans living in the Indies were rounded up and interned there. Almost all camps also had field offices for forced labor. In the cases of Vught as well as Amersfoort, there were work details for Philips factories, often under relatively favourable circumstances. Also, the huge construction activities for the 30 German airfields in the Netherlands relied partly upon labour from camps.^[126]

After the war, the Dutch government launched Operation Black Tulip and started to gather the civil population of German background in concentration camps near the German border, especially Nijmegen, in order to deport them from the country. In total around 15% of the German population in the Netherlands was deported.

Numerous improvised and official camps were set up after the war, to keep Dutch who were suspected of collaboration with the Germans. Kamp Westerbork at one point housed some Jews as well as suspected collaborators and Germans. In these camps, a history of maltreatment by the guards, sometimes leading to death, has been collected.^[126]

Indonesian National Revolution

During the Indonesian National Revolution, the war between the Netherland and Indonesia after World War II, the Dutch once again set up internment camps on territory they controlled in Indonesia, to detain Indonesian nationalists and captured members of the Indonesian armed forces.

After the 1990s

During the Second Chechen War, the Russian forces used the Chernokozovo internment camp as the main center of their filtration camp system in Chechnya from 1999 to 2003 to suppress Chechnya's independence movement. Tens of thousands of Chechens were arrested and detained in these camps. According to Chechen witnesses, the inmates were beaten while girls as young as 13 were raped by Russian soldiers.^[148][149]

Since early 2017, there have been reports of gay concentration camps in Ramzan Kadyrov's Chechnya, which are allegedly being used for the extrajudicial detention and torture of men who are suspected of being gay or bisexual. Around 100 men have been imprisoned and at least three people have already died.^[150] Chechnya is a predominantly Muslim, ultra-conservative society in which homophobia is widespread and homosexuality is taboo, and where having a gay relative is seen as a "stain on the entire extended family".^[151]

An extensive list of Gulag camps is being compiled based on official sources.

Bermuda

During the Second Boer War, several small islands in Bermuda's Great Sound were used as natural concentration camps, despite protests by the local government. 4,619 Boers were interned on these islands, compared to Bermuda's total population of around 17,000; at least 34 Boers died in transit to Bermuda.^[188]

Cyprus

After World War II, British efforts to prevent Jewish emigration into their Palestine Mandate led to the construction of internment camps in Cyprus where up to 30,000 Holocaust survivors were held at any one time to prevent their entry into the country. They were released in February 1949 after the founding of Israel.^[189]

England

During World War I Irish republicans were imprisoned in camps in Shrewsbury and Bromyard.

During World War II, initially, refugees who had fled from Germany were also included, as were suspected British Nazi sympathisers such as British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley. The British government rounded up 74,000 German, Austrian and Italian aliens. Within 6 months the 112 alien tribunals had individually summoned and examined 64,000 aliens, and the vast majority were released, having been found to be "friendly aliens" (mostly Jews); examples include Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold and later members of the Amadeus Quartet. British nationals were detained under Defence Regulation 18B. Eventually only 2,000 of the remainder were interned. Initially they were shipped overseas, but that was halted when a German U-boat sank the SS Arandora Star in July 1940 with the loss of 800 internees, though this was not the first loss that had occurred. The last internees were released late in 1945, though many were released in 1942. In Britain, internees were housed in camps and prisons. Some camps had tents rather than buildings with internees sleeping directly on the ground. Men and women were separated and most contact with the outside world was denied. A number of prominent Britons including writer H. G. Wells campaigned against the internment of refugees.

Ireland: pre-1922

During the Irish war of independence of 1919 to 1921, 12,000 Irish people were held without trial. During this war Ballykinlar Barracks Internment Camp, County Down held over 2,000 men from all 32 Counties of Ireland.^[190]

Kenya

During the 1954–60 Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, camps were established to hold suspected rebels. It is unclear how many were held, but estimates range from 80,000^[191] to 160,000^[192][193] of the Kikuyu population, with 1,090 Mau Mau detainees sentenced to death and executed by hanging.^[193][191] Maltreatment is said to have included torture and summary executions.^[194][195]

Malaya

Civilians forcefully relocated by the British military as part of the Briggs Plan

Beginning in 1950, under the Briggs Plan (a response to the Malayan Emergency) Chinese squatters were relocated to hundreds of internment camps in various areas of the Malay Peninsula. Known as New Villages, these camps were intended to become permanent settlements. As attacks by the Malayan Communist Party declined, the curfews were lifted, fences removed, and the camps gradually ceased to be internment camps. To this day many villages founded in this way are known as New Villages and remain ethnically Chinese.

Northern Ireland

One of the most famous example of modern internment (and one which made world headlines) occurred in Northern Ireland in 1971, when hundreds of nationalists and Irish Republicans were arrested by the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the orders of then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Brian Faulkner, with the backing of the British government. Historians generally view that period of internment as inflaming sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland while failing in its stated aim of arresting members of the paramilitary Provisional IRA. Many of the people arrested were completely unconnected with the Provisional IRA but, through bungling and incompetence, had their names appear on the list of those to be interned, while over 100 IRA men escaped arrest. The backlash against internment and its bungled application contributed to the decision of the British government under Prime Minister Edward Heath to suspend the Stormont governmental system in Northern Ireland and replace it with Direct rule from London, under the authority of a British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

From 1971 internment began, beginning with the arrest of 342 suspected republican guerrillas and paramilitary members on 9 August. They were held at HM Prison Maze then called Long Kesh Detention Centre. By 1972, 924 men were interned. Serious rioting ensued, and 23 people died in three days. The British government attempted to show some balance by arresting some loyalist paramilitaries later, but out of the 1,981 men interned,^[196] only 107 were loyalists. Internment was ended in 1975, but had resulted in increased support for the IRA and created political tensions which culminated in the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike and the death of Bobby Sands, member of British Parliament (Anti H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner Party.)^[197][198] His death resulted in a new surge of IRA recruitment and activity. The imprisonment of people under anti-terrorism laws specific to Northern Ireland continued until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, but these laws required the right to a fair trial be respected. However non-jury Diplock courts tried paramilitary-related trials, to prevent jury intimidation.

Many of those interned were held in a detention facility located at RAF Long Kesh military base, later known as Long Kesh Detention Centre and eventually becoming Her Majesty's Prison Maze, outside Belfast. Internment had previously been used as a means of repressing the Irish Republican Army. It was used between 1939–1945 and 1956–1962. On all these occasions, internment has had a somewhat limited success.

Scotland

During the Second World War the British government allowed the Polish Government in Exile to establish and run its own internment camps in Scotland. Locations as identified by the historian Simon Webb include Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, and Tighnabruaich on the Scottish mainland. Rothesay was used to house the political enemies of the leader of the Polish Government in Exile, Władysław Sikorski, as well as Poles considered by Sikorski's Government in Exile of being morally dubious. Tighnabruaich held criminals under the jurisdiction of the Polish Government in Exile. Webb claims the Poles were later allowed to open further camps at Kingledoors, Auchterarder and Inverkeithing near Edinburgh. Although deaths, and claims of torture and privations were made by numerous British Members of Parliament against the internment camps, the camps treated as sovereign Polish territory and local Scottish police forces were unable to investigate what happened in them. Webb also suggests that being Jewish or a suspected Communist was often enough to lead to Polish citizens under the jurisdiction of the Polish Government in Exile being sent to one of the internment camps.^[199]

South Africa

Lizzie van Zyl, shortly before her death in Bloemfontein Concentration Camp

The term concentration camp was first used by the British military during the Boer War (1899–1902). Facing attack by Boer guerrillas, British forces rounded up the Boer women and children as well as black people living on Boer land, and sent them to 34 tented camps scattered around South Africa. Altogether, 116,572 Boers were interned, roughly a quarter of the population.^[200] This was done as part of a scorched earth policy to deny the Boer guerrillas access to the supplies of food and clothing they needed to continue the war.^[201]

One such camp was situated at East London, South Africa.^[202] Though they were not extermination camps, the women and children of Boer men who were still fighting were given smaller rations. The poor diet and inadequate hygiene led to contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid and dysentery. Coupled with a shortage of medical facilities, this led to large numbers of deaths—a report after the war concluded that 27,927 Boer (of whom 22,074 were children under 16) and 14,154 black Africans had died of starvation, disease and exposure in the camps.^[200]

In contrast to these figures, during the war the British, Colonial and South African forces' casualties included 5,774 killed in action and 13,250 deaths from disease, while the Boers' casualties in the Transvaal and Orange Free State up to December 1901, included 2640 killed in action and 945 deaths from disease.^[203]

During World War I, South African troops invaded neighboring German South-West Africa. German settlers were rounded up and sent to concentration camps in Pretoria and later in Pietermaritzburg.

Soviet Russia

During its 1918 invasion of Soviet Russia, the UK built two concentration camps: Mudyug island^[204] and Iukang on Ostrovnoy island.^[205]

Wales

During World War I, there was a concentration camp in Frongoch, Merionethshire. First German POWs were held here until 1916, then 1,800 Irish political prisoners were held there following the Easter Rising, including Michael Collins. The prisoners were very poorly treated and Frongoch became a breeding ground for Irish revolutionaries.

Indigenous people

Philippines

On 7 December 1901, during the Philippine–American War, General J. Franklin Bell began a concentration camp policy in Batangas—everything outside the "dead lines" was systematically destroyed: humans, crops, domestic animals, houses, and boats. A similar policy had been quietly initiated on the island of Marinduque some months before.^[215][216]

World War I (United States)

Several Germans in an internment camp at Fort Douglas during World War I

At the height of the First World War, many of German descent became the target of two regulations passed by President Woodrow Wilson.^[217] Two of the four main World War I-era internment camps were located in Hot Springs, N.C., and Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia.^[218] Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer wrote that "All aliens interned by the government are regarded as enemies, and their property is treated accordingly."

World War II (United States)

In reaction to the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan in 1941, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942, which allowed military commanders to designate areas "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Under this order all Japanese and Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from Western coastal regions to concentration camps in Arkansas, California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and Idaho; German and Italian citizens, permanent residents, and American citizens of those respective ancestries (and American citizen family members) were removed from (among other places) the West and East Coast and relocated or interned, and roughly one-third of the US was declared an exclusionary zone.

The Fort Lincoln, North Dakota internment camp opened in April 1941 and closed in 1945. It had a peak population of 650. Today (2014) it houses the United Tribes Technical College. Some CCC barracks buildings and two brick army barracks were fenced and used to house the internees. The first internees were Italian and German seamen. 800 Italians arrived, but they were soon sent to Fort Missoula in Montana. The first Japanese American Issei arrived in 1942, but they were also transferred to other camps. The Germans were the only internees left at the camp until February 1945, when 650 more Japanese Americans were brought in. These Japanese Americans had previously renounced their U.S. citizenship and were left waiting to be deported to Japan. The brick buildings remain, but others are gone. A newspaper article from The Bismarck Tribune, 2 March 1946, stated that 200 Japanese were still being held at Fort Lincoln.

The locations of internment camps for German-Americans during World War II

Oklahoma housed German and Italian POW's at Fort Reno, located near El Reno, and Camp Gruber, near Braggs, Oklahoma.

Almost 120,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese aliens would eventually be removed from their homes and relocated.

About 2,200 Japanese living in South America (mostly in Peru) were transported to the United States and placed in internment camps.^[219]

Approximately 5,000 Germans living in several Latin American republics were also removed and transported to the United States and placed in internment camps.^[220] In addition, at least 10,905 German Americans were held in more than 50 internment sites throughout the United States and Hawaii.

Aleut peoples living on the Aleutian Islands were also interned during the war. Funter Bay was one such camp.^[221] Restitution was paid by the US government in 1987 and 1993.

Political dissidents

Per the Emergency Detention Act (Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950), six concentration camps were constructed in 1952 with the expectation that they would need to be used to detain political dissidents in the event that the U.S. government was forced to declare a state of emergency. They were originally intended to hold alleged communists, anti-war activists, civil rights 'militants,' and other dissidents. They were maintained from the 1950s to the 1960s, but they were never used for their intended purpose.^[222]

Afghan War and the occupation of Iraq

Guantánamo force-feeding restraint chair

In 2002, the United States opened the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba and the Parwan Detention Facility in Afghanistan. Both facilities were established in order to detain people captured during the Afghan War. In 2003, in order to detain people captured during the Occupation of Iraq, the United States transformed an Iraqi prison into an internment and detention camp commonly referred to as Baghdad Central Prison or Abu Ghraib Prison. Guantanamo Bay has been called an "Internment Camp" by The Intercept^[223] and a "Concentration Camp" by the Los Angeles Times.^[224]

Due to the American government's policy of holding detainees indefinitely,^[225][226] a number of captives have been held for extended periods without being legally charged, including Ayman Saeed Abdullah Batarfi who was captured in 2001 and released from the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in 2009. A document leaked from the International Committee of the Red Cross was published by The New York Times in November 2004, which accused the U.S. military of cruelty "tantamount to torture" against detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay facility.^[227][228] In May 2005, the human rights group Amnesty International referred to the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp as "the Gulag of our times."^[229]

In September 2006, after a series of abuses including the rape and murder of prisoners was reported to the public,^[230] control of the Baghdad Central Prison was transferred to the Iraqis. Subsequent investigative reports suggest that the United States continued to directly influence and oversee a campaign of torture carried out inside Iraqi facilities even after the handover of Iraq and related facilities was finalized.^[231] In March 2013 it was revealed that American officials, under pressure from Afghan officials, reached an agreement after more than a year of negotiations to hand over control of Bagram Theater Internment Facility to the Afghan government. In the deal, Bagram Theater Internment Facility, called "the other Guantanamo," "Guantanamo's evil twin" or "Obama's Gitmo" by human rights groups after reports of systematic abuse,^[232] was renamed the Afghan National Detention Facility at Parwan. Additionally, the agreement extended authority for American officials to have say over which detainees could be released from the facility, containing guarantees from the Afghan government that certain detainees would not be released regardless of whether or not they could be tried for circumstances related to their individual detentions. The Afghans formally took over control of other day-to-day operations.^{[233][234][235]} Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp remains open and fully operated by Americans.^{[236][237][238][239][240][241][242][243][244][245]}

Migrants on the Mexico–United States border

In 2018, Donald Trump instituted a "zero tolerance" policy which mandated the criminal prosecution of all adults who were accused of violating immigration laws by immigration authorities.^{[246][247][248]} This policy directly led to the large-scale,^[249][250] forcible separation of children and parents arriving at the United States-Mexico border,^[251] including those who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries.^[252] Parents were arrested and put into criminal detention, while their children were taken away, classified as unaccompanied alien minors, to be put into child immigrant detention centers.^[248][253]

Even though Trump signed an executive order which ostensibly ended the family separation component of his administration's migrant detentions in June 2018, it continued under alternative justifications into 2019.^[254]

By the end of 2018, the number of children being held had swelled to a high of nearly 15,000,^[255][256] which by August 2019 had been reduced to less than 9,000.^[257] In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps"^[258][259] particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations^[260] and reported deaths in custody,^[261] reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps.^[262]

This family separation policy and the detention facilities again came under scrutiny following a 2021 surge in migrant arrivals.^[263]

Even though some organizations have refused to label these facilities "concentration camps",^[264][265] hundreds of Holocaust and genocide scholars rejected this refusal via an open letter which was addressed to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.^[266][267]

Nazi camps

Nazi concentration camps in Yugoslavia.

Jasenovac monument by Bogdan Bogdanović.

During the Axis occupation of Yugoslavia (1941–1944), as many as 70 Nazi concentration camps were formed in Yugoslavia.^[271] The main victims in these camps were ethnic Serbs, Jews and Roma.^[272] It is estimated that between 1 million and 1.7 million people perished as victims of the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia.^[273]

List of the camps:^[271]

Communist camps

In 1931, 499,969 citizens of Yugoslavia listed their native language as German and they comprised 3.6% of population of the country.^[275] In 1944, an unknown and disputed number of the Danube Swabians left the country,^[276] together with the defeated German army.^[277] As a result of the decisions of the Anti-fascist Council of national liberation of Yugoslavia ("Antifašističko veće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije" – AVNOJ) in Jajce on 21 November 1943 and on 21 November 1944 in Belgrade all legal rights and citizenship were collectively canceled for about 168,000 civilian members of the Danube Swabian minority who remained in Yugoslavia (mostly in the Bačka and Banat regions) after military defeat of the German army. Furthermore, they were fully dispossessed of all property. About 7,000 German-speaking citizens were killed by the local Yugoslav partisans in the autumn of 1944. Most of the other Danube Swabian civilians were interned and driven into numerous labor camps and at least eight additional prison camps were built for those who were unable to work: the old, the sick, and children under the age of 14 and mothers with small children under the age of 2 or 3.^[278]

These camps for the sick, the elderly, children, and those who were unable to work were:

In the Bačka:

• Bački Jarak with 7,000 deaths
• Gakovo with 8,500 deaths
• Kruševlje with 3,000 to 3,500 deaths

Memorial on the edge of the mass grave of Knićanin, the monument was built by members of the "society for German Serbian cooperation".

In the Banat:

• Molin with 3,000 deaths
• Knićanin with 11,000 deaths

In Syrmia:

• "Svilara", silk factory in Sremska Mitrovica with 2,000 deaths

In Slavonia:

• Valpovo with 1,000 to 2,000 deaths
• Krndija with 500 to 1,500 deaths

Over a three-year period, 48,447 of the interned Danube Swabians died in the labor and prison camps from starvation, cold, and disease. Nearly 35,000 of them succeeded in crossing the escape routes from the camps into nearby Hungary and Romania. Beginning in the summer of 1946,^[279] thousands of orphaned children were forcibly taken from the camps and placed in children's homes. Over the next decade, most of them were returned to their families by the International Red Cross ICRC.^[280] Additionally, more than 8,000 women between the ages of 18 and 35 and over 4,000 men between the ages of 16 and 45 were deported from the Bačka and Banat regions of Yugoslavia to forced labor camps in the USSR from the end of 1944 through the beginning of 1945.

The camps were disbanded in 1948 and the Yugoslav government recognized the citizenship of the remaining Danube Swabians.^[281] In 1948, 57,180 Germans lived in Yugoslavia.^[275] In the following decades, most of them emigrated to Germany.^[282]

Works cited