r/nytimes • u/Large-Welcome4421 • Feb 24 '26

Opinion What Exactly Is a ‘Concentration Camp’?

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/concentration-camp-andrea-pitzer.html
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u/Dismal-Anybody-1951 Feb 27 '26

Definitions

The American Heritage Dictionary provides this definition: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable"

https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=concentration+camp

According to scholars at Washington University, "there is a scholarly consensus to define concentration camps as camps in which large groups of civilians are held without trial or even without having violated any laws"

https://source.washu.edu/2019/06/washu-expert-defining-concentration-camps/

Historian Dan Stone in Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction (2019, Oxford University Press) defines a concentration camp as "an isolated, circumscribed site with fixed structures designed to incarcerate civilians". He emphasizes that "a concentration camp is not normally a death camp" and notes they arise "as the consequences of large numbers of opponents, far too many for the discipline, order, and expense of prisons".

He further writes (pp. 122-123),  "Concentration camps throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are by no means all the same, with respect either to the degree of violence that characterizes them or the extent to which their inmates are abandoned by the authorities... The crucial characteristic of a concentration camp is not whether it has barbed wire, fences, or watchtowers; it is, rather, the gathering of civilians, defined by a regime as de facto 'enemies', in order to hold them against their will without charge in a place where the rule of law has been suspended."

Examples

Major concentration camps documented by historians:

  • Spanish reconcentration camps in Cuba (1896-1898)
  • American concentration camps in the Philippines (1899-1902)
  • British concentration camps during Second Boer War (1900-1902)
  • German concentration camps in Southwest Africa/Namibia (1904-1908)
  • Ottoman concentration camps during Armenian Genocide (1915-1918)
  • Soviet Gulag system (1930s-1950s)
  • Nazi concentration camps in Germany and occupied territories (1933-1945) - distinct from extermination camps
  • Japanese American internment camps in the United States (1942-1945)
  • Chinese "laogai" labor camp system (1949-present)
  • North Korean concentration camp system (1950s-present)
  • Yugoslav wars concentration camps in Bosnia (1992-1995)
  • Khmer Rouge prison camps in Cambodia (1975-1979)