Concentration camp

in Nazi Germany during World War II]]

A **concentration camp** (or **internment camp**) is a place where a government forces people to live without trial.  Usually, those people belong to groups the government does not like. The term means to confine (keep in a secure manner) "enemy citizens in wartime or terrorism suspects".

Some governments put people in concentration camps because they belong to a certain religion, race, or ethnic group.

Usually, people are sent to concentration camps without having had a trial or being found guilty of a crime.

Sometimes, governments send people to concentration camps to do forced labor or to be killed.  For example,  concentration camps were run by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during World War II.  The Nazis used concentration camps to kill millions of people in The Holocaust and force many others to work as slaves.  However, many other countries have used concentration camps during wars or times of trouble.

## Camps in the 1800s 
### Native American "reservations" 
 used to imprison the Cherokee before the Trail of Tears]]
The first modern concentration camps in the United States were created in 1838.  Around this time, the United States was getting bigger.  However, Native Americans lived in the lands that the United States wanted to take over.

In 1830, the United States Congress and President Andrew Jackson had passed a law called the Indian Removal Act.  This law said that all Native Americans had to leave the United States and move to "Indian Territory," west of the Mississippi River.  353 Cherokee people died in the camps from dysentery and other diseases.  Finally, the Cherokee were forced to travel to the area that is now Oklahoma.  (At the time, Oklahoma was not in the United States.)  The government also forced other Native American tribes to leave their lands and move west.  The United States government reacted by forcing Native Americans to leave their lands again and move into concentration camps.  The government called these camps "Indian reservations."  (They were called "" because some land had been put aside, or "," for the Native Americans.)  However, Native Americans were not allowed to leave their reservations.  On some reservations, many people, especially children, died from hunger and sickness.

The deadliest prisoner of war camp during the Civil War was Andersonville prison.

By the end of the Civil War, about 30,000 Union soldiers, and about 26,000 Confederate soldiers, had died in prisoner of war camps.

The people fighting for Cuban independence were guerrilla fighters.  They did not wear military uniforms and could hide themselves in groups of civilians.  They could also camp and hunt, without needing help from anybody to survive.  At the time, they were fighting the Boer people in the Second Boer War in South Africa. At first, the British were not able to beat the Boers.  They reacted by putting the Boer fighters' family members into concentration camps.  They did this so these family members could not give food or help to the Boer fighters.  However, after the Soviet Union was formed in the 1922, the Soviet government started sending many more people to labor camps.  By 1936, there were 5,000,000 inmates in these camps.

These camps are called *zone* in Russian.  They are also commonly called "gulags". GULAG is an acronym for the Russian words "Main Camp Administration" (ru: **Г**лавное **у**правление **лаг**ерей и мест заключения; **G**lavnoe **u**pravlenye **lag**erey i mest zaklyucheniya).  This was the government  that was in charge of the prison camps while Josef Stalin led the Soviet Union.  These three groups were Jews, Roma people, and people with disabilities.  Hitler wanted his Nazis to kill every Jew, Roma, and disabled person in Europe.

Hitler also wanted to get rid of other groups he did not like, including people who he thought might challenge or fight the Nazi government.  These people included socialists, communists, people of certain religions, and members of resistance movements (groups who tried to fight the Nazis any way they could).  Just in the Auschwitz camps, at least 1.1 million people died (about 1,000,000 Jews and about 75,000 non-Jewish people, like Poles).  Towards the end of World War II, the Nazis killed up to 20,000 people a day in the camps' gas chambers.

### Independent State of Croatia 
With Nazi Germany's support, the Ustaše government of the new Independent State of Croatia (ISC) created concentration camps and extermination camps.  Mainly, the camps were for Serbs.  The ISC hated Serbs and thought of them as the ISC's biggest enemy.  However, the Ustaše also helped the Nazis with the "Final Solution" by killing many Jews in these camps.

On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.  In February 1942, the United States government ordered that nobody with Japanese ancestry could live on the West Coast.  The government, led by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, thought that Japanese-American people might be spies for Japan, or might try to hurt the United States.  More than three out of every five of these people were born in the United States, and were United States citizens.  About half of the people sent to the camps were children.

After Canada declared war on Japan, it also forced people with Japanese ancestry into internment camps.

In the 1980s, the United States government admitted that Japanese-Americans were not a danger to the country during World War II.  In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a law that apologized for the internment camps.  The law said "there was no ... reason for the internment ... [and] the internment was caused by racial prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of [government] leadership[.]"

### Italy 
During World War II, Italy's fascist government (led by Benito Mussolini) was Nazi Germany's ally.  Italy had taken over Yugoslavia, Greece, and the southeast part of France.  The Nazis told Italy to put Jews from these areas in concentration camps and then send them to the Nazis' death camps.  However, Italy refused.  The Italian military and police would not help kill or deport Jews.

However, in 1943, after Mussolini had lost power, Nazi Germany took over northern and central Italy.  They also put Mussolini back in power.  The Nazis created concentration camps to hold Italian Jews and other prisoners until they could be sent to death camps. or 709 including some death camps.

### Soviet Union 
When Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union invaded Poland at the start of World War II, the Red Army deported at least 1.5 million Poles at gunpoint.  They were forced to get into cattle wagons (train cars), which took them to Siberia.  Whole families were deported to concentration camps, including children and the elderly.
* Chile, led by Augusto Pinochet, created 17 concentration camps.  They used these camps to torture prisoners.
* Cuba, led by Fidel Castro, used concentration camps from 1965 to 1968.  These were forced labor camps for people who Castro thought were bad for Cuba.  Castro's government thought they could "re-educate" these people (change their thinking and behavior) by making them work.  People who were sent to the camps included homosexuals, people without homes or jobs, Jehovah's Witnesses, other religious missionaries, and people who disagreed with the communist government.

### Soviet Union
The Soviet Union kept using forced labour camps after World War II.  In fact, the people they sent to the gulags after the war included Soviet soldiers and civilians who had been taken prisoner by the Nazis, or used as slave workers in Nazi Germany.

### Yugoslav Wars
In the 1990s there were several concentration camps during the Yugoslav Wars.

## Camps in the 2000s 
### United States 
Since January 2002, the United States has run the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.  Some people have called Guantánamo a concentration camp or a gulag.  These people have included Fidel Castro, the leader of Amnesty International, and 

### Australia 
The **Pacific Solution** is the name given to the Australian government policy of transporting asylum seekers to detention centres on island nations in the Pacific Ocean, rather than allowing them to land on the Australian mainland.

### Gaza 
Often said to be "the world's largest prison", the Gaza Strip has been occupied since 2007 by Israel and Egypt, preventing free movement of its citizens and often launching artillery at citizens. 

## Photo gallery

File:Wounded Knee aftermath3.jpg|View of the destroyed Lakota Pine Ridge Indian Reservation
File:Woundedknee1891.jpg|Mass grave for Lakota killed at Pine Ridge in the Wounded Knee Massacre
File:Andersonville pow tents photo.jpg|Photo of Andersonville Prison in 1864
Image:Revised photo of bunks at Fort Pulaski, Savannah, GA IMG 4667.JPG|Prisoner beds at Fort Pulaski, where Confederate POWs were starved on purpose
File:LizzieVanZyl.jpg|A child in a British concentration camp during the Second Boer War
File:Boercamp1.jpg|Boer women and children in a camp during the Second Boer War (1900-1902)
File:Auschwitz Resistance 280 cropped.jpg|Prisoners' bodies are burned after they are killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz concentration camp
Image:Ustaše militia execute prisoners near the Jasenovac concentration camp.jpg|Ustaše soldiers kill prisoners near Jasenovac concentration camp
File:Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Residents of Japanese ancestry, at the H . . . - NARA - 539235.jpg|Heart Mountain internment camp for Japanese-Americans in 1943
File:The fence at the old GULag in Perm-36.JPG|Fence at a gulag called Perm-36, opened in 1943
File:Centro Popular de la Memoria Rosario.jpg|A former torture center in Argentina (now a memorial)

## References