What Is a Concentration Camp?

Zygmunt Bauman has offered one of the more memorable assessments of concentration camps, with his pithy claim that just as the eighteenth century was the age of reason and the nineteenth the age of progress, so the twentieth century will be remembered as the ‘century of camps'.

The camps were distillations of an essence diluted elsewhere, condensations of totalitarian domination and its corollary, the superfluity of man, in a pure form difficult or impossible to achieve elsewhere. The camps were patterns and blueprints for the totalitarian society, that modern dream of total order, domination, and mastery run wild, cleansed of the last vestiges of that wayward and unpredictable human freedom, spontaneity and unpredictabil­ity that held it back. The camps were testing grounds for societies run as concentration camps.^[675]

There is a striking mismatch between this sort of philosophical attempt to account for the meaning of concentration camps and historical studies which examine the development, running, staffing and victims' experience of camps as they appeared in particular settings. This chapter will consider the historiography of concentration camps, showing how histories of individual camp systems - and individual camps - mean we now have a detailed understanding of how camps arose, developed and, in many cases, closed, although the scholarship is much better developed in some cases than others. This body of literature now allows historians to ask whether concentration camps should be considered from a transnational perspective, the ‘global portability of the concentration camp' as Klaus Mühlhahn puts it.^[676] Did regimes learn from one another's practices? Were ideas about incarceration passed on by particular ‘experts' or by the press and concerned commentators? Were the specific practices engaged at concen­tration camps, such as the use of barbed wire, torture, ritual humiliation or forced labour, shared ideas or did they emerge spontaneously across the globe? The answers shed light on camps as one of the twentieth century's most notable inventions.

The question ‘what is a concentration camp?' is not as easy to answer as it might at first appear. On the one hand, it may seem straightforward to say that a concentration camp is an enclosed site used to hold against their will and without due legal process a group of civilians deemed ‘unwanted' by a regime. On the other hand, and thanks mainly to the association of concentration camps with the Third Reich, we tend to think of concentration camps as places where the law has been abandoned, ‘spaces of exception' where the inmates are set against each other and where they are at the mercy of the guards' whims. The imagery of barbed wire, guard towers, machine gun emplacements and ironic slogans over the entrance gates completes the picture. That is all well and good, until we consider some questions which complicate the story. What if we take seriously the notion that camps in South Africa were set up by the British primarily with the aim of preventing a rural population, whose land had been destroyed by the British Army's scorched-earth policy, from supporting Boer guerrillas and not as ‘punish­ment' camps? What if we consider the cases of people interned against their will because of racial and political paranoia, such as citizens of many European countries during World War I, Japanese Americans or German- Jewish ‘enemy aliens' during World War II, Jewish Displaced Persons at the end of World War II, either in Germany and Austria or, even more proble­matically, in the camps set up by the British in Cyprus where Jews who had made the ‘illegal' crossing to Palestine were held until the establishment of Israel? What happens to our understanding of camps when we discover that in the Soviet Gulag there were prisoners who were granted the right to live ‘outside the zone' (so-called zazonniki) who could move about unguarded? How should we deal with ‘liberal' countries' use of camps - in which brutal torture and mistreatment were rife - in the context of decolonisation in Malaya, Kenya or Algeria? None of the people in these camps want to be there, but can we say that they are in each case a ‘surplus' population abandoned to their fate, deprived of the law? The case of Guantanamo Bay is especially disconcerting here.