When did the first concentration camps appear? History of Soviet concentration camps: from elephant to gulag

Concentration camp

Concentration camp (concentration camp) is a term denoting a specially equipped center for mass forceful imprisonment and detention of the following categories of citizens of various countries:

prisoners of war various wars and conflicts;
political prisoners under some dictatorial and totalitarian regimes of government;
hostages, usually during civil wars or occupations;
other persons deprived of liberty (as a rule, extrajudicially).

The term "concentration camp" appeared during the Boer War, and was applied by the British army to places where Boer prisoners were kept. rural population, which was “concentrated” in camps to prevent assistance to the partisans. The term was originally used primarily in reference to prisoner of war and internment camps, but is now generally associated with extrajudicial repression

This term also has other historical meanings- in 1904-1914, when the flow of people into New World was about 5,000 people per day, “concentration camps” were called in the United States camps for the temporary accommodation of immigrants.

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First camps: Cuba, USA, British South Africa, Namibia

Cuba and USA

Camp Andersonville

According to some evidence, the authorship of the creation of the first concentration camp belongs to the colonial authorities of Spain in Latin America. In particular, American researcher Anne Applebaum claims that the first kind of concentration camps appeared in Cuba back in 1895, during the Spanish war against Cuban partisans. The organization of prison camps is much older.

During the American Civil War, such prisoner of war camps became scenes of torture and ill-treatment, drawing comparisons with later concentration camps. Thus, in a camp called Andersonville (USA), created by the southerners for captured soldiers of the federal army, over 13 thousand captured northerners died from hunger and mistreatment. At least 300 prisoners were shot dead simply for crossing the line. In Andersonville, prisoners were tortured not even to find out any military or other information useful to the camp authorities, but because of sadism. After the war, the camp commandant Heinrich Wirtz was sentenced by the northerners to death by hanging as a war criminal. The official verdict was "neglect of the health and lives of prisoners of war." Conditions in some of the camps set up by the northerners were little better.

Concentration camps from the Boer War

It is generally accepted that the first concentration camps in modern understanding were created by Lord Kitchener for Boer families in South Africa during the Boer War of 1899-1902. The purpose of creating "concentration camps" (this is when the term was coined) was to deprive the Boer guerrilla "commandos" of the possibility of supply and support, concentrating farmers, mainly women and children, in specially designated areas, practically dooming them to extinction, since the supply of the camps was limited delivered extremely poorly. These camps were called "Refugee" (place of salvation). The purpose of creating concentration camps, according to official statements of the British government, was “to ensure the safety of the civilian population of the Boer republics.” In descriptions of the events of that war, the Boer general Christian Devet mentions concentration camps: “women kept carts ready so that if the enemy approached, they would have time to hide and not end up in the so-called concentration camps, just then established by the British behind the fortification line in almost all the villages with strong garrisons assigned to them.” The British sent the men as far as possible from their native lands - to concentration camps in India, Ceylon and others. british colonies. In total, the British drove 200 thousand people into concentration camps, which was approximately half of the white population of the Boer republics. Of these, approximately 26 thousand people, according to the most conservative estimates, died from hunger and disease.

By the spring of 1901, British concentration camps existed throughout almost the entire occupied territory of the Boer republics - in Barberton, Heidelburg, Johannesburg, Klirksdorp, Middelburg, Potchefstroom, Standerton, Vereeniging, Volksrüs, Mafeking, Irene and other places.

In just one year - from January 1901 to January 1902 - about 17 thousand people died in concentration camps from hunger and disease: 2,484 adults and 14,284 children. For example, at the Mafeking camp in the fall of 1901, about 500 people died, and at the Johannesburg camp, almost 70% of children under the age of eight died. It is interesting that the British did not hesitate to publish an official notice of the death of the son of the Boer commander D. Duke, which read: “Prisoner of war D. Duke died in Port Elizabeth at the age of eight years.”

Concentration camps in Namibia under German rule

The Germans first used the method of imprisoning men, women and children of the Herero and Nama tribes in concentration camps in Namibia (South-West Africa) in the fight against Guerrero rebels, which in 1985 was classified as acts of genocide in a UN report.

Camps and the First World War

The prisoners were kept under open air, they were deprived of water and food, hunger forced them to eat grass. It was famine and epidemics, according to eyewitnesses, that caused high mortality, especially among children; According to eyewitnesses and survivors, sometimes only a few hundred remained from tens of thousands of people. By the end of the year, the camps along the Euphrates ceased to exist. By this time, the US consul in Mosul counted only 8 thousand survivors, and the German consul in Damascus counted 30 thousand. The survivors settled in Cilicia in subsequent years and moved to countries in Europe and the Middle East.

Several thousand Rusyns were kept in the Terezin Fortress, where they were used for hard work, and then were transported to Talegrof. The prisoners in the Thalerhof camp were in terrible conditions. So, until the winter of 1915 there were not enough barracks and minimum wages for all sanitary conditions, hangars, sheds and tents were allocated for housing. Prisoners were subjected to bullying and beatings. In the official report of Field Marshal Schleer dated November 9, 1914, it was reported that there were 5,700 Russophiles in Thalerhof at that time. In total, at least 20 thousand Galicians and Bukovinians passed through Talerhof from September 4, 1914 to May 10, 1917. In the first year and a half alone, about 3 thousand prisoners died. In total, according to some estimates, at least 60 thousand Rusyns were killed during the First World War.

Among other things, citizens of the Entente countries who were on Austrian territory at the time of the declaration of war (tourists, students, businessmen, etc.) were subjected to internment in Thalerhof.

Serbs were also imprisoned in concentration camps. So, it was in the Terezin Fortress that Gavrilo Princip was kept. Serbian civilian population was in the concentration camps of Dobozh (46 thousand), Arad, Nezhider, Gyor.

After the defeat of the Red Army near Warsaw and Lvov, Poland found itself big number captured Red Army soldiers. They were concentrated into camps, the most famous of which is Tukhol. Many of the prisoners of war died as a result of starvation and abuse by Polish guards, as well as from disease.

IN Soviet Russia the first concentration camps were created by order of Trotsky at the end of May 1918, when disarmament was planned Czechoslovak corps. July 23, 1918 Petrograd Committee The RCP(b), having made the decision on the Red Terror, decided, in particular, to take hostages and “establish labor (concentration) camps.” On April 15, 1919, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee decree “On forced labor camps” was published, which provided for the creation of at least one camp for 300 people in each provincial city. By the end of 1919 there were already 21 camps; by the end of 1921 - 122 camps. At the same time, in 117 NKVD camps there were 60,457 prisoners doing hard labor, in the Cheka camps there were more than 25,000 - a total of about 100,000. As a rule, people were imprisoned in concentration camps not for a specific “guilt” before new government, but for “bourgeois origin.” In the fall of 1923, there were already 315 camps, of which the most famous - the SLON (Solovetsky Special Purpose Camp) created that year - served as the basis for the system that subsequently emerged labor camps Gulag. Of the white concentration camps, the most famous is the concentration camp on Mudyug Island near Arkhangelsk, which first had the status of a prisoner of war camp (although everyone suspected of Bolshevism was imprisoned there), then an exile prison. With the fall of white power in the Northern Territory, it was liquidated, but on Lenin’s personal orders a new camp was immediately opened in Kholmogory (city).

Finland

After the end of the Civil War, approximately 75 thousand communists were imprisoned in concentration camps. 125 people were killed, approximately 12 thousand prisoners died from hunger, disease and abuse.

During the Second World War Finnish army occupied eastern Karelia (which never belonged to Finland), where concentration camps were established for Soviet citizens Slavic origin. The first camp was founded on October 24 in Petrozavodsk.

Number of prisoners in Finnish concentration camps:

In total, 13 Finnish concentration camps operated on the territory of eastern Karelia, through which 30 thousand people passed. About a third of them died.

Croatia

In August 1941, a system of concentration camps was created on the territory of the Independent Croatian State (see History of Croatia), which actively collaborated with Hitler's Germany, 60 kilometers from Zagreb, near the town of Jasenovac.

To the east of Yasenovets there was camp No. 1 - near the villages of Brochitsy and Krapje, its branch in former prison in Stara Gradiška; camp No. 2 - on the banks of the Sava and Struga, about 3 kilometers northwest of Yasenovets; Camp No. 3 - at the former brick factory of Ozren Bacic, at the mouth of the Loni, three kilometers downstream from Jasenovac.

In the Jasenovac camp system, from 300 to 600 thousand people died from hunger, epidemics, hard work and as a result of direct destruction, almost 20 thousand of them were children.

Most of the victims were Serbs and Jews.

Yugoslavia

Main article: Concentration camp on the island of Rab

(en:Rab concentration camp)

Concentration camps of the Third Reich

The German leadership has created a wide network various types camps for holding prisoners of war (both Soviet and citizens of other states) and forcibly enslaved citizens of occupied countries. In this case, the experience of the internal concentration camps created in Germany after the Nazis came to power was used.

Prisoner of war camps were divided into 5 categories:

assembly points (camps);
transit camps(“Dulag”, German. Dulag);
permanent camps (“Stalag”, German. Stalag);
main work camps;
small work camps.

Collection points

Collection points were created in close proximity to the front line or in the area of the ongoing operation. Here the final disarmament of the prisoners took place, and the first accounting documents were drawn up.

Dulag, Stalag

The next stage in the movement of prisoners was “Dulag” - transit camps, usually located near railway junctions. After the initial sorting, the prisoners were sent to camps, which, as a rule, had a permanent location in the rear, far from military operations. As a rule, all camps differed in numbers; they usually contained a large number of prisoners

Small work camps

Small work camps were subordinate to the main work camps or directly to the permanent Stalags. Differed by name settlement, where they were located, and by the name of the main work camp to which they were assigned. For example, in the village of Wittenheim near Alsace, the camp of Russian prisoners of war that existed in the city was called “Wittenheim Stalag US”. The number of prisoners in small work camps ranged from several dozen to several hundred people.

If you ask an unprepared person who invented concentration camps, most will answer that the inventors of concentration camps were the Nazis during the Second World War, few will say that the communists during the Civil War, and usually no one knows the correct answer.

Meanwhile, the truth about who invented the concentration camps is so shocking that many don’t even believe it, although this is a well-known fact among historians, described in dozens of serious sources.

So, the inventors of concentration camps were English gentlemen during the second Boer War of 1899-1902, and if we get personal, concentration camps were invented by a noble English lord who came from the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy, which ruled even before Norman conquest England (11th century), proudly bearing the title of the first earl of Kitchener County, the gallant General Horatio Herbert Kitchener, from head to toe hung with orders, was chief of staff from the very beginning of the Boer War, and from June 5, 1900 - commander-in-chief British troops in South Africa.

The British could not cope with the Boer partisan detachments by military means, and barely took up the post of commander-in-chief " limited contingent"British troops in South Africa, Kitchener, in order to deprive the Boer partisans and commandos of any support and food supplies from the civilian population, decided this very civilians completely isolate, and at the same time use them as hostages in order to provide psychological pressure on the Boer guerrillas, putting their families at risk.

All Boer women, children, old people and sick men (and all the healthy ones fought in partisan detachments) were concentrated in specially created guarded camps fenced with barbed wire (then the term “concentration camp” appeared).

A distinctive feature of the Anglo-Saxons is their careful concern for their own image, and for disgusting actions they always find very noble and beautiful names and explanations (remember, for example, that the Americans and the British attacked Iraq to save the Iraqi people from the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein and establish democracy in Iraq; no one even mentioned oil).

The same was the case with the concentration camps. As soon as the world community learned about brilliant invention Lord Kitchener, the British immediately decided to ensure a noble image for themselves, and the British government issued an official clarification that the purpose of creating concentration camps was “to ensure the safety of the civilian population of the Boer republics,” and the camps themselves were renamed “Places of Salvation.” From whom the civilian population was saved there remains unknown. Prisoners of concentration camps, that is, sorry, “places of salvation,” began to be called “guests of the British government.”

That is, according to English official version, they didn’t drive the women and children behind the “thorn”, but invited them to visit. But you can’t leave the guests - the kind owner stands with a rifle at the entrance and doesn’t let go - they say, stay with us for a while longer.

By the spring of 1901, British concentration camps existed throughout almost the entire occupied territory of the Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange free state- in Johannesburg, Klerksdorp, Middelburg, Potchefstroom, Barberton, Heidelburg, Standerton, Veriniching, Volksruys, Mafeking, Irene, as well as in the Cape Colony (in Port Elizabeth).

In total, the British drove 200 thousand people into concentration camps, which was approximately half of the white population of the Boer republics. Of these, approximately 26 thousand people, according to the most conservative estimates, died from hunger and disease, of which 50% of children under the age of 16 died, and among children under the age of eight, 70% of the minor “guests of the British government” died.

Sometimes the British had real "Freudian slips" - in some official documents slow-witted clerks who did not understand the lofty matters of official propaganda wrote everything as it is, and the “guests” suddenly began to be called “prisoners of war,” and even small children were registered as “prisoners of war”! For example, in one of the documents from the Boer War it was written that “Prisoner of war D. Duke died in Port Elizabeth at the age of eight” (he was the son of the Boer general James Duke).

Ultimately, the concentration camps did their dirty work, and the Boer partisans, fearing that their wives and children would completely die out from hunger and disease, agreed to peace talks, and the Boer War ended in May 1902 with the surrender of the Boers.

Concentration camps, which today are associated with the death factories of the Third Reich and Soviet Gulag, were actually invented long before World War II.

But first we need to define what is meant by the word “concentration camp”. If this is a place of forced confinement with terrible conditions, then concentration camps have existed for almost the entire history of mankind.

Before the advent of human rights, prisoners of war were never treated on ceremony. However, if we talk about a concentration camp as a place where people are kept precisely for the purpose of slowly reducing their numbers, then humanity only came up with such a thing in late XIX century.

American Civil War

The very first concentration camps were prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. For example, Andersonville, which was built by southerners in Georgia. The conditions there were terrible: the northern prisoners were dying of starvation, and their photographs are difficult to distinguish from those of the Dachau prisoners. Prospered infectious diseases, which at that time did not yet know how to treat.

However, the life of the camp overseers was not very different from the life of prisoners of war. The fact is that by the end of the war, the Confederate States were experiencing a severe food crisis. They had nothing to feed and treat their own soldiers, let alone prisoners of war.

Therefore, the Andersonville guards ate from the same pot as the prisoners and suffered from the same diseases. The prisoners of this camp were victims not of deliberate extermination, but of general critical situation throughout the warring American South.

When the camp was liberated in 1865, photographs of its prisoners had the effect of a bomb exploding. All of America was shocked by the barbaric treatment of prisoners of war. The southerners who lost the war decided to blame the camp commandant, Henry Wirtz. He was quickly given the image of a cruel sadist who abused prisoners of war for his own pleasure. After a fairly quick judicial trial he was executed.

The concentration camps of the northerners, about which much less is known (history is written by the winner), were sometimes even more terrible places. For example, the mortality rate at Camp Douglas in Michigan was 10% (compared to 9% at Andersonville).

Most prisoners lived in tents all year round, and sub-zero winter temperatures are not uncommon in Michigan. The toilets were huge pits, the contents of which leaked into tanks with drinking water. Prisoners were forced to wear bags instead of clothing to limit the possibility of escape.

The system of punishment in this camp was truly sadistic: prisoners were hung by their feet, or placed barefoot in a snowdrift for several hours.

Boer War

England had long tried to enslave the small but proud Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange in South Africa. And the Boers, descendants of the Dutch colonists, offered them worthy resistance. They organized partisan detachments, in which even women and children fought. It all got to the point where the British command came to the need to exterminate these people.

All peaceful Boers - that is, women, children and the incapacitated, who were found by British soldiers, were herded into sectors fenced with barbed wire. Their villages and fields were burned. By the end of 1901, about 120-160 thousand people were kept in such concentration camps - half of all Boers. 26 thousand of them - every fifth - died from hunger and epidemics. 13 thousand of them are children.

The Boer camps varied, some of them with relatively acceptable conditions, while others were terrible places in which it was difficult to survive. Some camps were tents, in which prisoners were crowded, who were given only a blanket among all the utensils. It is interesting that, in order to preserve its image, the British government called these concentration camps “places of salvation” and the captured Boers “guests of the British Empire.”

World War I

All participating countries organized prison camps. They often had unbearable conditions and people died in huge numbers. But this was more a consequence of economy and management errors than of deliberate extermination. But during the First World War there were precedents for real concentration camps aimed at exterminating certain groups population.

During the genocide of the Rusyns, concentration camps appeared for the first time in Europe. Thalerhof concentration camp in Austria, through which about 20,000 prisoners passed from September 4, 1914 to May 10, 1917, a quarter of them were executed or died from disease and starvation.

The camp prisoners were Rusyns - a small people eastern outskirts Austria-Hungary, who sympathized with the Russian people. The Rusyns were seen by the imperial authorities as dangerous collaborators, so it was decided to destroy them. Camp prisoners lived in tents and slept on straw until mid-winter 1914-1915.

Concentration camps also include displacement camps that were created in Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide in 1915-1916. Armenians moved en masse to remote regions of the empire. This was done in order to divide the people. At the same time, instructions were given for a “reduction in numbers”, so the organizers of the movements maintained terrible conditions from which people died. Through the movements in 1915-1916, the total 700,000 Armenians.

These camps were built in the desert areas of modern southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. They were tents made from different pieces of fabric, which stood very close to each other. Food for prisoners was not provided as such, with the exception of rare cases. However, if the prisoner had money, he could buy himself both food and a more reliable tent. The poor were doomed to a miserable existence and, often, to starvation.

The word “concentration camp” is now strongly associated with camp systems Nazi Germany And Soviet Union, but the first concentration camps appeared almost a century earlier, it happened in North America in the 60s XIX century. In the first months of 1864, the southerners created the Andersonville camp, where Yankee prisoners of war were held. The camp became famous big amount victims: over six months of its existence, over 13,000 people died on its territory, that is, almost every fourth prisoner died. Andersonville is often called the first classic concentration camp. But this is not entirely true, a couple of months earlier the northerners had built Rock Island, and although the regime there was milder, it was the first concentration camp... And Fort Williams served as a prison for the Confederates.

In total, both sides adapted more than 150 structures to contain enemy soldiers. These structures were of several types - military forts and fortifications (like Pinckney Castle in the South and Fort Warren in the North); civil prisons; converted for these purposes civil buildings(similar to the Old Capitol building in Washington, built to temporarily house Congress after the Washington Fire during the War of 1812, and served as a hotel before the Civil War); and purpose-built, hastily constructed camps (such as the infamous Andersonville in Georgia). In the South, several tobacco farms remote from communication routes were also given over for these purposes, and in the North, several ships were converted into prisons. The number of people who passed through prisoner of war camps exceeds 55 thousand.

Andersonville.

Andersonville was a 10-hectare area surrounded by a high palisade with dugouts and tents for prisoners. There were two canals running through the camp, one of which served as a sewer, the other as a source of water. Bad economic situation did not allow the southerners to adequately support prisoners of war - there was unusually meager food in the camp, and health care I was almost never a prisoner. Additional source disaster was the attitude of the guards, Henry Wirtz, known as a pathological sadist, was appointed camp commandant. In addition, in the struggle for existence, some prisoners organized gangs and themselves began to terrorize their fellow sufferers.

During the existence of Andersonville, more than 13 thousand captured northerners died from hunger and mistreatment in the camp. Like the later "classic" concentration camps, Andersonville was surrounded by armed sentry towers that created a perimeter under fire, called the "deadline", and at least three hundred prisoners were shot dead for simply crossing the line.

Thus, this word, which received later wide use in another meaning (" deadline getting the job done"), traces its history back to the Andersonville camp.

The usual diet of a prisoner of war consisted of salted beef, the same pork, corn porridge, rice or bean soup. In many northern prisons, hungry inmates hunted rats. Lack of fruits and vegetables often led to scurvy. At the same time, in the South, guards often ate from the same pot as the guards, and suffered from the same diseases.

Constant malnutrition and unsanitary conditions became the causes of outbreaks of diseases such as smallpox, typhoid, dysentery, cholera, and malaria. Wounds left without proper treatment led to blood poisoning, curable only by amputation. And almost all prisoners of war suffered from depression. Unable to bear their current situation, many committed suicide.

After the defeat of the Confederacy, the horrors of Andersonville became known to the press and were widely discussed in the United States, the public demanded a trial of the perpetrators, among whom the names of high-ranking Confederates were named.

However, through the efforts of President Andrew Jackson, charges against high-ranking figures in the South were dropped; only the former commandant of the Wirtz camp was put in the dock. The court sentenced Wirtz, as a war criminal, to death penalty, which soon took place in the Washington prison with a large crowd of people. It is worth noting that in the South of the United States opinions are still voiced that Wirtz has become a “scapegoat”; there are admirers of his memory; a monument and a memorial plaque have been erected in his honor.

The archives of Life magazine and the Library of Congress contain several photographs of Andersonville illustrating those long-ago events.

After searching the Internet, I found a story about how federal authorities offered Wirz a reversal of his death sentence in exchange for testimony against Confederate President Jefferson Davis, which the captain angrily rejected.

He said that the President had nothing to do with what happened in the camp and went to the scaffold in the firm belief that he was a soldier fulfilling his military duty. Captain Virz was the only person, punished for suffering and death in the camp.

Now Andersonville is a quiet place. Not far from the field where the camp once was, there is a huge cemetery with the names of the dead on the gravestones.

A source of pure living water still flows from the ground, but already enclosed in a stone fence. There is a warning sign near the fence: “Do not drink the water, it may be contaminated.”

The photographs were taken in August 1864.

Rock Island

In the summer of 1863, the Yankees themselves began to build a similar camp, and it began to function two months earlier than the Confederates. We are talking about Camp Rock Island. Many people are familiar with this name from the novel “Gone with the Wind,” when Scarlett O’Hara’s lover Ashley was captured and put there.

Rock Island was located on a small island in the middle of the Mississippi River, dividing the states of Iowa and Illinois.

The first prisoners (more than 5,000 people) arrived at the camp on December 3, 1863. Many of them were sick with smallpox, and since there were no quarantine zones or isolation facilities in the camp, the infection spread quickly. By January 1864, 325 people died and another 635 were seriously ill, and a couple more later months number number of patients has tripled. Soon, however, the Yankees built several medical facilities.

The entire prison area was 1,250 feet long and 878 feet wide. The perimeter was surrounded by a wooden fence about 16 feet high. The camp had a total of 84 barracks for prisoners, which were divided into four zones.

By May 12, 1865, 2,164 prisoners remained in the camp, and a total of 12,215 people had passed through it by this time, 1,945 of whom died (according to other sources, at least 2,131 people), 45 escaped and 3,729 were exchanged. The remaining prisoners were released in June, after the surrender of the CSA.

Thus, it turns out that 16% died in Rock Island, and not 25 as in Andersonville, but this does not change anything. The fact remains that the Confederate camp cannot be called the first semblance of a concentration camp.

Now this site is home to the largest American government military arsenal.

For comparison, a total of 194 thousand northerners were captured by the Confederacy, of whom 30 thousand died, and of the 216 thousand southerners captured by the northerners, 26 thousand died

At the same time, the Northerners had their own Andersonville - the Douglas Federal Concentration Camp was located near Chicago, off the shores of Lake Michigan. It was known as the northern camp with a very high mortality rate among all the northern prisons and camps of the Civil War. It contained both captured Confederate military personnel and civilians from occupied territories. The winter of 1864 in Chicago was particularly cold. In just four months, 1,091 prisoners died. From June to December 1864, the mortality rate in the camp was 35%. At the site of the northern Douglas camp, located near Chicago, only one monument was erected: on mass grave, in which more than 6,000 Confederates who died at Douglas are buried. This monument was erected in 1895, 30 years after the war. You understand, no one was punished for this...

Then a semblance of concentration camps appeared in 1895 in Cuba: during the war to preserve their colony, the Spanish authorities had the idea to “concentrate” local population in one place to make it easier to control them. The war in Cuba ended in defeat for Spain, and in 1898 it had to withdraw its troops from the island. The United States immediately jumped into the resulting vacuum, establishing the now American military influence until Castro's revolution in 1959.

The idea of the Spaniards was picked up by Great Britain. By the way, I can make a little reservation about the Spaniards - although they “concentrated” the population, the conditions were quite humane.
The British used this “invention” during the Anglo-Boer Wars - they were the first to create camps in the “classical” sense of this expression.

Well, then the idea spread to the masses...

And it was brought to practical perfection..

Concentration camps, which today are associated with the death factories of the Third Reich and the Soviet Gulag, were in fact invented long before World War II.

American Civil War

The very first concentration camps were prisoner of war camps during the American Civil War. For example, Andersonville, which was built by southerners in Georgia. The conditions there were terrible: the northern prisoners were dying of starvation, and their photographs are difficult to distinguish from those of the Dachau prisoners. Infectious diseases flourished, which at that time did not yet know how to treat.

Therefore, the Andersonville guards ate from the same pot as the prisoners and suffered from the same diseases. The prisoners of this camp were victims not of intentional extermination, but of a general critical situation throughout the warring American South.

Most prisoners lived in tents year-round, and freezing temperatures in the Michigan winter were not uncommon. The toilets were huge pits, the contents of which leaked into drinking water tanks. Prisoners were forced to wear bags instead of clothing to limit the possibility of escape.

The system of punishment in this camp was truly sadistic: prisoners were hung by their feet, or placed barefoot in a snowdrift for several hours.

Boer War

England had long tried to enslave the small but proud Boer republics of Transvaal and Orange in South Africa. And the Boers, descendants of the Dutch colonists, offered them worthy resistance. They organized partisan detachments in which even women and children fought. It all got to the point where the British command came to the need to exterminate these people.

World War I

All participating countries organized prison camps. They often had unbearable conditions and people died in huge numbers. But this was more a consequence of economy and management errors than of deliberate extermination. But during the First World War there were also precedents for real concentration camps aimed at exterminating certain groups of the population.

The prisoners of the camp were Rusyns - a small people of the eastern outskirts of Austria-Hungary who sympathized with the Russian people. The Rusyns were seen by the imperial authorities as dangerous collaborators, so it was decided to destroy them. Camp prisoners lived in tents and slept on straw until mid-winter 1914-1915.

Concentration camps also include displacement camps that were created in the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian genocide in 1915-1916. Armenians moved en masse to remote regions of the empire. This was done in order to divide the people. At the same time, instructions were given for a “reduction in numbers”, so the organizers of the movements maintained terrible conditions from which people died. A total of 700,000 Armenians passed through displacement in 1915-1916.

These camps were built in the desert areas of modern southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. They were tents made from different pieces of fabric, which stood very close to each other. Food for prisoners was not provided as such, except in rare cases. However, if the prisoner had money, he could buy himself both food and a more reliable tent. The poor were doomed to a miserable existence and, often, to starvation.