Histories

Concentration camps did not appear out of nowhere. There is a long history of incarceration that includes workshops, POW camps, asylums, quaran­tine islands, slavery plantations and prisons.

Klaus Mühlhahn writes that the global history of concentration camps shows that they ‘first emerged in the non-Western world within the historical context of colonial rule - which reinforced the assumptions of white super­iority, justified the use of violence against colonized populations, and pro­liferated ideas of ethnic and/or political cleansing'.

The most compelling reason for the redeployment in Europe of these colonial practices was the First World War. During this conflict, not only were POWs taken in numbers previously unseen but so were civilians interned - and subjected to all manner of suffering - in enormous numbers. Some 8-9 million POWs were held during the war, 2.2 million in Russia alone. Nor was this only a European problem, with German POWs being held in Japan, albeit in small numbers. POW camps cannot by definition be considered concentration camps, but the sheer scale of them during the First World War, not to mention the high death rates in them, tells us something about the modern state's ability and willingness to intern huge numbers of people. In the era of total war, this willingness to intern then impacted most forcefully on civilians. As historian of the POW camps Heather Jones notes, in the First World War the ‘prisoner of war camp began the conflict as a means of ensuring that the captured enemy combatant was kept away from rejoining the battlefield fight; in other words, with a purely military function; it ended the war as a sophisticated system of state control and as a laboratory for new ways of managing mass confinement, forced labour and new forms of state-military collaboration.'^[681]

Even more significant for later developments was the internment of civilians during World War I, and not only in Europe.

The war also witnessed refugee movements on a huge scale.

Perhaps more important than the sheer numbers of civilians held in camps is the reason for their being so held. This is the point at which the emerging nation states as well as more established ones, became gripped by fears of ‘fifth columnists', by paranoid fantasies of enemies within, and by a fascination with racial and national homogeneity which rendered civilians with foreign descent suspect in the eyes of patriots and nationalists. The logical extension of this fear was the declaration of a state of emergency, a state which France, for example, remained in from 1914 until 1919.

Nowhere is this claim clearer than in the context of the Armenian geno­cide, during which Anatolian Armenians were deported to the deserts of Syria, with many eye-witnesses describing their destination as concentration camps or even, as in the case of Katma (Ghatma), death camps. Take, for example, Naomie Ouzounian's description, written in 1982:

The ‘camp' where hundreds of thousands had already been thrown together was a narrow strip of the desert, surrounded by bare hills. The hot, humid air was filled with the stench of human refuse and decaying unburied bodies. I couldn't breathe, oh, if only I could take a deep breath! The name of this hell was Ghatma. ‘Dear Lord, I hope there is no Ghatma in the hereafter, and if there is one, forgive my sins and do not condemn me to it', I prayed.1³

Historians of the Armenian genocide agree with this terminology. Hilmar Kaiser goes on to talk of the ‘world of the death camps' as the genocide became more coordinated and ferocious in 1916.^[688] Other historians concur, Ronald Suny claiming that the ‘concentration camps' at Tel-Abiad, Ras al Ayn, Mamureh, Katma and Aleppo ‘were way stations toward extermination.

What is different about twentieth-century camps from colonial and European sites of incarceration that preceded them is thus the context. First of all, we are talking about civilians, people who have not formally been convicted of any crime. As Arendt noted, ‘Criminals do not properly belong in the concentration camps, if only because it is harder to kill the juridical person in a man who is guilty of some crime than in a totally innocent person.'^[690] They are held against their will because of who they are or what the authorities suspect them of believing or what they might do. That ‘liberal' regimes have incarcerated - and continue to incarcerate - people on this basis is an important reminder that concentration camps are not solely the tool of ‘mad' dictators and evil regimes, though we should be clear that the most complete instantiation of camps as ‘laboratories of human behaviour' occurred in the fascist and communist regimes of the twentieth century. Second, it is less the physical appearance of camps that is significant than what they represent, that is to say, the power and the nature of the twentieth-century state, although it is true that with the exception of the Soviet ‘special settlements' - from which there was little chance of escape across hundreds of miles of tundra - they tend to assume a similar pattern, based on conventional prisons, though less accessible to outsiders. Third, the large-scale incarceration of civilians not because they were diseased physi­cally but because they were presumed to be ‘diseased' mentally or racially conforms to what we know of the development of modern states.

Concentration camps appeared in the age of the modern nation state when the drive to establish homogeneous populations - ethnically, nationally or ‘racially' - was common and when the inability to achieve that goal was put down to the existence of ‘alien' population groups. As multinational empires gave way in Europe to homogenising nation states or as new empires such as the Soviet Union attempted to mould society in a new image, the threat of ‘enemies' and ‘wreckers' was in-built as something that had to be combated. Concentration camps were novel forms of incarceration because they were the expression of the modern state when it felt itself to be under threat.

This analysis is most easily confirmed when one turns to the literature on the Nazi and Soviet camps, which we will examine briefly. Here the con­tinuities with the earlier manifestations of concentration camps are clear - but perhaps not as clear as the breaks. Hannah Arendt remarked that the colonial camps provided only ‘apparent historical precedents', although the fact that they provide precedents at all, even in Arendt's formulation, should not be dismissed. There is a huge literature on the Nazi camps, exemplified now by Nikolaus Wachsmann's KL (2015), which follows Saul Friedlander's paradigm of an ‘integrated history'. This combines top-down institutional history with a deep regard for the ways in which the camps' inmates lived through the experience, and shows how the camp system changed over time, from the ‘wild camps' of 1933 to the early camps designed to rid Nazi Germany of political enemies and ‘asocials', and through to the massive expansion of the camps after 1938, peaking at the end of the war with the huge growth in slave labour sub-camps attached to the numerous main camps, and showing how the SS's camps system became embroiled in the history of the Holocaust, the murder of Europe's Jews. There are histories of all the main camps and a growing historiography on the sub-camps, dealing with issues such as gender, survival rates, SS economic policy, human experiments, the camps as ‘schools' for Nazi ideology, and many other topics.

Yet the Third Reich was a world of camps in another respect too. Just as the regime's de facto ‘enemies' were eliminated through the use of concen­tration camps, so the Volksgemeinschaft, or ‘people's community', was to be brought into existence and trained in martial values through the use of a variety of labour camps for different constituencies: Hitler Youth, BDM and teachers, for example. Indeed, according to a law of November 1934, the term Arbeitslager (labour camp) was reserved for organisations which catered for Volksgenossen (racial comrades) and which were devoted to the honour of the German Volk. Camps therefore became a necessary fixture of German life, whether for those excluded from the racial community or for those who were to be drilled into it. The Labour Service camps in particular became must-see sites for foreign dignitaries and tourists alike and were regarded by Nazi commentators as ‘the best means of making this National Socialist call for a Volksgemeinschaft a reality', as Reich labour leader Konstantin Hierl put it.^{[691] [692] [693]} The Janus-faced nature of the Nazi camps meant that few alterations were required to make a concentration camp for the eradication of enemies into a site for the education of the racially valuable members of the Volk - and vice-versa.1⁸ Inclusion and exclusion went hand in hand; the former required the latter.

With respect to the Gulag, the rather under-developed and partisan historiography of the Cold War has given way to a far more sophisticated and nuanced set of works, which see the camps less as the realisation of Stalin's dream of totalitarian control and more as a changing set of institu­tions. In particular, the many different faces of the Gulag - which was by no means a monolithic institution - have been revealed. With lines of continuity from Tsarist and early post-revolutionary carceral practices, the Gulag has been traced by historians from its early days on the Solovetski Islands to the proliferation of prison camps, labour camps and ‘special settlements' across the Soviet Union. Historians have shown how there was no single experience of the Gulag. From the brutal camps of the Far East and Arctic north to the camps of Kazakhstan, the Gulag encompassed a wide variety of institutions: prisons, punishment colonies, corrective labour camps, agricultural colonies, ‘special settlements' and, after the Stalinist period, psychiatric clinics.

The brutal nature of the Gulag's infamous sites of Magadan and Vorkuta is not in doubt. Recent historiography, though, shows that these places changed over time. Perhaps the most notorious of the ‘camps' was Magadan in the Soviet Far East, ‘the capital of the Gulag'. The city of Magadan was the administrative centre of a region of nearly 3 million square kilometres which reached from the Lena River to the Bering Strait, an area larger than western Europe. Magadan's camps existed because of the area's gold reserves. Dal'stroi, Magadan's penal branch, was the largest entity in the labour camp system. Its name, an acronym for the Far Northern Construction Trust, was ‘a calculated euphemism for a ruthless organisation whose wide array of functions made it the omnipotent overlord in the Soviet north-east'. 1⁹ The growth in prisoner numbers in Magadan mirrored the spectacular growth of the Gulag as a whole: from 9,928 in 1932 to 190,503 in September 1940.

A similar process occurred elsewhere. Vorkuta, in the Arctic north-east of Russia, became the site of one the largest camp complexes, holding about 75,000 prisoners in 1950. Coal mining began in Vorkuta in 1931 when a group of thirty-nine prisoners was sent to the uninhabited region for that purpose; it soon grew into a massive camp complex, particularly in 1937-8 as victims of the Great Terror arrived in large numbers and thus as ‘political enemies' replaced ‘colonists'. Although prisoners were sent there to be ‘reformed', their deaths in appalling conditions meant that the reality was far grimmer than the authorities had anticipated. Ukhtpechlag camp was, according to the inspectors' own reports, ‘exceptionally appalling'.^[694] By the end of 1937, Ukhtpechlag held nearly 60,000 prisoners in an area of over 700,000 square kilometres. It was split into four separate camps in May 1938. But the term ‘camp' should not conjure up an image of a small, enclosed institution. One of the four camps, Vorkutlag, occupied a vast space in which the small population was not properly divided (‘zonified') between prisoners and non­prisoners and in which the civilian administration was more or less indis­tinguishable from the camp administration.^[695] Even during the war, when control over the prisoners was tightened, not all sections of Vorkutlag had been enclosed behind barbed wire.

Far more than the Nazi case - despite the efforts of the WVHA, the SS's economic wing - the Soviet camps were tied to the country's economy, proving vital for mining and other basic industries. And historians have shown that inmates were handled with a great degree of variance, ranging from those imprisoned behind barbed wire to the so-called zazonniki (‘un­zoned'), who were able to live and work within a certain territory but were not shackled or permanently guarded. According to one historian, ‘in some parts of the Gulag, such as Vorkuta, it was quite common for prisoners to live outside of the [camp] zone, and the borders between camp and city fre­quently shifted'.^[696] Although recent popular histories of the Gulag tend to follow the Cold War script, describing it as an ‘archipelago' of isolated sites of atrocity, this is to overlook the findings of post-Cold War scholarly research. Certainly there were very isolated camps and being sentenced to a ‘corrective labour camp' was tantamount to a death sentence. But elsewhere, especially in the ‘special settlements' - which were half way between freedom and the concentration camp - the situation was different. Most important, historians now agree that the Gulag provides a microcosmic mirror on Soviet society as a whole, with the camp system's waxing and waning following the pattern of development of the Soviet system in general.

The totalitarian regimes' use of concentration camps marked their high water mark, although this does not necessarily justify Arendt's assertion that ‘these camps are the true central institution of totalitarian organizational power',^[697] since camps have occurred in numerous settings across the world. In the cases of Francoist Spain, fascist Italy, communist China, Cambodia or North Korea, or in the right-wing dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, the spread of camps combined the diffusion of camp ‘technologies' with specific local conditions and national traditions. Even the Nazi and Soviet camps were not particularly bound to one another. Contrary to Ernst Nolte's claim that Hitler's camps were inspired by a Soviet model, the Germans had already looked to the British for the terminology and to South West Africa for the practice, and had also officially named as Konzentrationslager two former POW camps reopened in 1921 to hold ‘unwanted foreigners', that is Ostjuden.^[698] Russian military officials, too, first used the term konsentratsionnyi lager during the Anglo-Boer War and the Bolsheviks quickly revived the term after the 1917 revolution. Perhaps it is in Nationalist China that the evidence for transnational learning is strongest: the Guomindang was advised not only by American officers but by General Alexander von Falkenhausen, a friend of Lothar von Trotha, the man responsible for the concentration camps in German South West Africa.

In Europe, camps became the standard fare of authoritarian regimes. More than half a million Spaniards and other Europeans passed through the more than 180 camps which made up the Francoist concentration camp system. The largest, Miranda de Ebro, opened in November 1936 and remained in existence until 1947. As ofJune 1937, they were administered by the Prisoner Concentration Camps Inspectorate (Inspection de Campos de Concentration), a name which ‘is eerily reminiscent of Eicke's Nazi Inspectorate of 1934'.^[699] Himmler inspected Franco's camps and prisons in 1940; in the same year Spanish officials visited Sachsenhausen.^[700] In Italy a ‘fascist archipelago' comprised islands such as Ventotene and San Nicola and held political prisoners. Later, some fifty-two ‘fascist concentration camps', holding about 10,000 civilians, were set up all over Italy between 1940 and 1943, ‘directly influenced by Mussolini's race laws that he introduced in 1938' - that is, primarily for Jews and Gypsies, but also for foreign citizens.^[701] There are even indications of an attempt to create in 1932 an ‘extermi­nation camp' for Italian political prisoners in the Libyan Sahara, in Gasr Bu Hadi, 478 kilometres south-east of Tripoli. Financial constraints meant it was not built but the idea shows the logic of fascism's radical exclusion taken to its extreme.^[702]

In fascist states, concentration camps were central to the functioning of the regime as such. The use of concentration camps in the context of colonial wars and decolonisation, such as in Kenya, Malaya or Algeria, recapitulated the logic of earlier colonial wars, in separating guerrillas and civilian suppor­ters, and sanctioning exceptional measures that would have been considered unacceptable at home. Several authors refer to the ‘Gulag' in the context of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. More people were detained in Kenya than anywhere else in the British Empire, with a maximum of 71,346 detained in December 1954, the vast majority of them (98 per cent) from Kenya's Kikuyu­speaking central highlands. David Anderson calculates that ‘at least one in four Kikuyu adult males were imprisoned or detained by the British colonial administration at some time between 1952 and 1958'.^[703] Kenya already had a higher number of prisoners than neighbouring British colonies of Uganda and Tanganyika, but when the ‘Emergency' began in 1952 numbers increased rapidly. As part of Operation Anvil in 1954, further camps were built, and the use of forced labour - contrary to international law - was sanctioned by Oliver Lyttleton, secretary of state for the colonies in Churchill's Tory government. Operation Anvil itself was ‘Gestapolike', as loudspeakers were set up in Nairobi and a 25,000-strong security force cordoned off the city to search it sector by sector in order to ‘purge' it, a technique that the British had previously deployed in Tel Aviv.^[704] One historian writes that the Kenyan camps ‘were not wholly different from those in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia' and suggests, more provocatively, that in these camps ‘Britain finally revealed the true nature of its civilizing mission.' The slogan placed at the entrance to Aguthi Camp: ‘He Who Helps Himself Will Also Be Helped.'^[705] Clearly, a transnational model has some purchase here, although we lack explanations which prove that the process was a conscious one and which connect the Kenyan camps to the earlier South African ones. Doing so would mean taking into account the British role in liberating the Nazi camps and how that affected British colonial and military self-perception in the context of decolonisation.

Recent revelations of the torture and brutal rule that characterised the British camps in Kenya has shocked the public. But the scale of the camp system was dwarfed by that established by the French in the context of the Algerian War (1954-62). Algeria was considered a part of metropolitan France, not a colony, and the fight to retain it united almost all shades of French political opinion. During the years of the war, some 2.3 million people were driven out of their villages and ‘resettled' in some 2,000 ‘camps de regroupe- ment' - in other words, a third of the rural population. The inmates depended on the army for their basic necessities, the hygiene conditions were appalling, and one historian notes that they were no more than ‘fenced-in tent camps'.^[706] After 1958, with de Gaulle's return to power, plans to improve conditions and turn the camps into ‘new villages' were announced, but by 1962 only very few had been built. Unsurprisingly, the camps which were supposed to stem support for guerrillas - in Kenya and Algeria, and many other examples from Rhodesia to Vietnam - had the opposite effect. And where resettlement succeeded, as in ‘villagisation' in Malaya, ‘it usually did so not because of any economic benefits it generated for a majority, but through sheer force'.^[707]

By contrast with the lack of interest in British colonial camps, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War has generated a sizable historiography. Indeed, this case is in many ways the most disturbing since, like the internment of ‘His Majesty's Most Loyal Enemy Aliens' - German and Austrian Jews in wartime Britain - here we are dealing with a state interning its own citizens or residents. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans came under suspicion. In the anti-Japanese clamour, this statement from leading anti-Japanese campaigner Lieutenant-Colonel John L. De Witt was typical: ‘I have little confidence that the enemy aliens are law-abiding or loyal in any sense of the word. Some of them yes; many, no, particularly the Japanese. I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native born Japanese - 117,000 - and 42,000 in California alone.'^[708] Ultimately it was President Roosevelt's decision to intern the Japanese, one he took on the basis of his own personal antipathy and because anti-Japanese feeling was generally strong. Daniels puts it down to ‘the general racist character of American society'.^[709] Indeed, the decision to intern the Japanese Americans was made before Pearl Harbor.

The presence of a post office, laundry buildings, a library and schools, and the fact that internees could receive guests, clearly indicate that camps like Tanforan, Minidoka or Manzanar were not Dachau. Nevertheless, some historians are in no doubt as to what to call them:

The most accurate overall descriptive term is concentration camp - that is, a barbed-wire enclosure where people are interned or incarcerated under armed guard. Some readers might object to the use of this term, believing that it more properly applies to the Nazi camps of World War II. Those European camps were more than just places of confinement, however; many were established to provide slave labor for the Nazi regime or to conduct mass executions. I contend that such camps are more properly called Nazi slave camps or Nazi death camps.^[710]

Whatever we call them, the experience of internment was not pleasant and the decision to intern Japanese Americans was hardly a credit to a democratic state. All that really happened was that ‘The myth of military necessity was used as a fig leaf for a particular variant of American racism.'^[711] Indeed, the practice set a precedent for postwar America: at the height of the Cold War the Emergency Detention Act (1950) gave the president the right to set up camps for ‘The detention of persons who there is reasonable grounds to believe will commit or conspire to commit espionage or sabotage' (Sec.101 [14]). Daniels observed in 1971 that ‘Any foreseeable use of these concentra­tion camps will be for ideological rather than racial enemies of the republic.'^[712] Although the act was partially repealed by the 1971 Non-Detention Act, Daniels here presciently foresaw Guantanamo Bay.

The liberal countries' use of camps is dwarfed by the Chinese camp system, however. Internment in the UK or USA represented ‘an authoritarian trend... in our home life', as the author of a contemporary study of the policy wrote, suggesting that the spread of illiberal ideas concerning foreign­ers, citizenship and national belonging was very hard for the democracies to resist when the fascist countries seemed to be in the ascendant.^[713] But in the communist countries, concentration camps were tools of the wholesale reshaping of society and were inseparable from the regimes' economic plans. China's massive laogai system remains understudied. Enough is known, however, for us to agree with the authors of one study that ‘China endured more than its share of concentration camps during the twentieth century. Moreover', they go on, ‘China is the only major world power to have entered the twenty-first century with a thriving concentration camp system, which has been commonly known as “the laogai system” [laodong gaizao zhidu] since May 1951.' Of course, in China one cannot refer to ‘concentration camps', only to ‘remoulding through labour facilities' or ‘re­education through labour facilities'. The term is freely used by emigrants who have published their memoirs abroad, as one might expect; but scholars have also found the term applicable. ‘While considerable variability among the camps is naturally present in a country as large and diverse as China', two scholars write, ‘the living and working conditions in their camps have often evoked the harshness associated with concentration camps, particularly dur­ing spikes in the death rate such as the record-breaking famine of 1959-62.'^[714]

Like in the Soviet Union, the laogai system has also been characterised by the forced settlement of those formally ‘freed' from the camps. When Harry Wu returned to China in 1991 to make a film about the camps for CBS, he met a former prisoner named Zhou. Having served eight years from 1956 to 1964 for ‘counter-revolutionary crimes', Zhou then remained in Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, for a further twenty-seven years. He told Wu that one third of the province's population were resettlement prisoners and their families. ‘Their labour', writes Wu, ‘had been used, he told me, to reclaim wasteland, construct roads, open up mines, and build dams, not just prior to 1979 but throughout the 1980s.'^[715] In other words, far more so than in the Soviet Union, the labour of laogai prisoners was economically beneficial to the CCP; the goods manufactured by the prisoners ‘are sold in domestic as well as foreign markets and have become an indispensable component of the national economy'.^[716] This is hardly surprising when one considers the numbers involved. In 1992, Harry Wu estimated that at least 50 million people had been sentenced to labour reform camps over the previous forty years and that 16-20 million were still confined in them.^[717] Thought reform through labour turned out to be a convenient way of acquiring ‘a dependable source of wealth', as Luo Ruiqing, the public security minister, put it at the Communist General Assembly of 1954.^[718] Unlike in North Korea, the laogai system was formally abolished in 2013 but the structure of the system remains: prison factories, psychiatric prisons, community correction centres and other forms of extrajudicial incarceration still exist, according to cam­paigners. As all of the above examples show (and there are many others that could have been examined), concentration camps not only have a global history; they are one of the best indicators and symptoms of the nature of the world ‘system', if we can use that term.