They were first started by the British military during the [Boer War]?. British forces rounded up the Boer? women and children as well as black people living on Boer land, and sent them to camps scattered around South Africa. This is where the term "concentration camp" was first used. Although these were not extermination camps, the poor nutrition and bad hygiene of the camps resulted in high mortality rates. The situation was only relieved when [Emily Hobhouse]? brought the conditions in the camps to the attention of the British public.
The term [Internment Camp]? is often used as an equivalent in other historical contexts, such as the imprisonment by the United States of [Japanese American]? citizens during World War II. However American internment camps did not involve forced labor or extermination, merely confinement.
During the First World war, thousands of Ukranians were put into concentration camps as "enemy aliens" to perform forced labor in steel mills, forestry, etc. This is partly because Ukraine was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, partly because capitalists wanted to turn a profit on slave labor, partly because Canadians were racist, etc.
Concentration camps rose to notoriety during their use in World War II by Nazi Germany. The Nazi regime nominally maintained both kinds of concentration camps -- work camps and extermination camps. The distinction between the two, in practice, was very small. Prisoners in Nazi work camps could expect to be worked to death in short order, while prisoners in extermination camps usually died sooner in gas chambers or in other ways. Guards were known to engage in target practice, using their prisoners as targets.
The first Nazi camps were within Germany, and were primarily work camps. The worst excesses, including the murder of Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovahs Witnesses, Polish intellectuals, Soviet Prisoners of War and others, were to come later in the war. (See Holocaust, genocide.) It is estimated that around six million people were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
Cambodia under the Pol Pot regime.
In the Soviet Union, concentration camps were called gulags? and/or their white collar equivalent the sharashka?. These were used as forced labor camps, and were often filled with political prisoners. The gulag system was exposed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his work [The Gulag Archipelago]?. The sharashka, prisons filled with engineers and scientists as slaves for the state, are treated in his book [The First Circle]?. An estimated 40 million people died in the Soviet concentration camps.
Concentration camps in modern China are called Laogai, which means "reform through labor". Hundreds of these camps have been identified throughout China. The communist-era camps began at least in the 60s and were filled with anyone who had said anything critical of the government, or often just random people grabbed from their homes to fill quotas. The entire society was organized into small groups in which loyalty to the government was enforced, so that anyone with dissident viewpoints was easily identifiable for enslavement. These camps were/are modern slave labor camps, organized like factories. The products are often sold in foreign countries with the profits going to the Chinese government. Products include everything from green tea to industrial engines to coal dug from mines.
An insiders view from the 1950s to the 1990s is detailed in the books of Harry Wu, including Troublemaker and The Laogai. He spent almost all of his adult life as a prisoner in these camps for criticizing the government while he was a young student in college. He almost died several times, but eventually escaped to the US.
See Holocaust, Indian Removal
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