Japan conquered Southeast Asia in a series of victorious campaigns over a few months beginning in December 1941. By March 1942, many civilians, especially Westerners from the European colonies in the region, were behind enemy lines and were later interned by the Japanese. There has long been confusion about the terminology used about the Nazi camp system. For example, the term concentration camps is often but inaccurately used to describe various detention and killing sites built by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. As a result, the term “concentration camp” is sometimes confused with the concept of “extermination camp,” and historians debate whether the term “concentration camp” or the term “internment camp” should be used to describe other examples of civilian internment. [4] In such a “concentration camp,” a government may “concentrate” a group of undesirable people in any way in a place where they can be observed – for example, in times of insurrection, potential supporters of insurgents could be placed in such a facility where they cannot provide them with supplies or information. Concentration camps select certain sections of a population based on their race, culture, politics, or religion. Normally, these population groups are not in the majority, but are considered the cause of the social, economic and other problems of the majority. The function of concentration camps is to separate the perceived problem, this “scapegoat” population, from the majority population. Even the call for a division of the population characterizes the interned population and stigmatizes it. There were twenty-four internment camps and associated workplaces. [5] Many of these internees were used for forced labor. Another 80,000 were registered as “enemy aliens” and required to report regularly to the police.

In May 2008, after long efforts by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a reparation settlement was reached and the Canadian Fund for the International Recognition of the First World War was established. [6] Not all camps created by the Nazi regime were under the control of concentration camps or, after 1942, the SS Economic and Administrative Department. The killing centers, also called extermination camps, with the great exception of Auschwitz II (Birkenau) did not fall under the system of National Socialist concentration camps. Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Chelmno were never officially designated as concentration camps by the SS, although they were under SS control. Internees may be held in prisons or in institutions known as internment camps, also known as concentration camps. The term concentration camp comes from the Spanish-Cuban Ten Years` War, when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps to facilitate the fight against guerrilla forces. In the decades that followed, the British also used concentration camps during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine-American War. There were allegations that products from Chinese labor camps were sold overseas, with profits going to the PRC government. [11] These products include everything from green tea to industrial engines to coal extracted from mines.

Generally defined, a concentration camp is a place of detention of civilians, which a regime perceives as a kind of security risk. What distinguishes it from a prison (in the modern sense) is that imprisonment in a concentration camp is independent of a judicial conviction or even a charge and is not subject to judicial review. The U.S.-led coalition of troops fighting the Vietnam War attempted various counterinsurgency strategies, most based on the idea that population control was the most important step in crushing an insurgency. To this end, the U.S. military worked with the South Vietnamese government to create the Hamlet Strategic Program. The concept of operations was to build thousands of fortified camps, protected by fixed facilities and a small self-defense force, which would also be used to monitor residents and track their movements. Any South Vietnamese citizen loyal to the government should live in one of the hamlets, as the areas outside the fortifications are considered a free-fire zone occupied by the guerrillas. More than 3,000 such hamlets were built, and they created an unprecedented level of control over the population for the government, which tended to govern with a very heavy hand. Although they have never been called “concentration camps”,” strategic hamlets meet the same definition that has emerged during the current debate, as they have served to consolidate a large population into a small area for the convenience of law enforcement and military authorities.

Although the first example of civilian internment may date back to the 1830s,[10] the English term concentration camp was first used to refer to the reconcentration camps (Spanish: reconcentrados) established by the Spanish army in Cuba during the Ten Years` War (1868-1878). [11] [12] The label was attached to warehouses established by the United States during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). [13] And the expanded use of the concentration camp label continued when, during the Second Boer War (1899-1902), the British established camps in South Africa for Boer internment during the same period. [11] [14] During World War II, about 8,000 people were interned in the United Kingdom, many of them in camps at Knockaloe, near Peel, and a smaller one near Douglas, on the Isle of Man. These included foreign enemies of the Axis powers, mainly Germany and Italy. [16] Initially, refugees who had fled Germany were also included, as were alleged British Nazi sympathizers such as the British leader of the Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley. The British government gathered 74,000 German, Austrian and Italian foreigners. Within six months, however, the 112 aliens` courts had summoned and examined 64,000 foreigners individually, and the vast majority of them were released after it was determined that they were “friendly foreigners” (mostly Jews); Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold as well as members of the Amadeus Quartet are examples. British nationals have been detained under Defence Regulation 18B.

After all, only 2,000 of the rest were interned. Originally, they were shipped overseas, but this was stopped when a German submarine sank the SS Arandora Star in July 1940 with the loss of 800 internees, although this was not the first loss that had occurred. The last internees were released in late 1945, although many were released in 1942. In Britain, internees were housed in camps and prisons. Some camps had tents rather than buildings with internees sleeping on the ground. Men and women were separated and the greatest contact with the outside world was denied. A number of prominent Britons, including the writer H.G. Wells, campaigned against the internment of refugees. In the Soviet Union, in 1922, there were 23 concentration camps for the imprisonment of people accused of political and criminal acts. Many corrective labor camps were established in northern Russia and Siberia, especially during the first five-year plan in 1928-32, when millions of wealthy farmers were displaced from their farms as part of the collectivization program. The Stalinist purges of 1936-38 brought millions more people to the camps – supposedly essentially institutions of slavery. After the end of World War II in Europe, millions of German citizens were temporarily accommodated in “displaced persons camps”.

These camps offered the most basic conditions of survival, although they did function as massive waiting bays for military-age men. The terminology of the camps stemmed from the inability to maintain the requirements of the 1929 Geneva Convention due to the enormous logistical burden of feeding and maintaining the enormous number. Gradually, Allied military officials began to free camp residents to return home on their own as soon as it was certain that resistance to the Allied occupation had ceased.