A labor camp is a simplified detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators.

Labor camps in various countries [edit]

• Albania

See Forced labor camps in Communist Albania

• Allied Forces

The Allies of World War II operated a number of work camps after the war. In the Yalta conference it was agreed that German forced labor was to be utilized as reparations. The majority of the camps were in the Soviet Union, but more than 1,000,000 Germans were forced to work in French coal-mines and British agriculture, as well as 500,000 in U.S.-run Military Labor Service Units in occupied Germany itself.^[1] See Forced labor of Germans after World War II.

• Bulgaria

See Forced labor camps in Communist Bulgaria

• China

The anti-communist Kuomintang operated various camps between 1938 and 1949, including the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp for young activists and students.^[2]

The Communist Party of China has operated many labor camps for some crimes. Many leaders of China were put into labor camps after purges, including Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. May Seventh Cadre Schools are an example of Cultural Revolution-era labor camps. As a matter of fact, hundreds - if not thousands - of labor camps and forced-labor prisons (laogai) still exist in modern-day China,^[3] housing political prisoners and dissidents alongside dangerous criminals.

Chinese state-run media Xinhua reported in early 2013 that the country plans to reform its "controversial re-education through labor system this year."^[4]

• Cuba

Beginning in November 1965, people classified as "against the government" were summoned to work camps referred to as "Military Units to Aid Production" (UMAP).^[5]

• Czechoslovakia

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Communist labour camps in Czechoslovakia

After the communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948, many forced labor camps were created.^{[citation needed]} The inmates included political prisoners, clergy, kulaks, Boy Scouts leaders and many other groups of people that were considered enemies of the state.^{[citation needed]} About half of the prisoners worked in the uranium mines.^[6] These camps lasted until 1961.^{[citation needed]}

Also between 1950 and 1954 many men were considered "politically unreliable" for compulsory military service, and were conscripted to labour battalions (Czech: Pomocné technické prapory (PTP)) instead.^{[citation needed]}

• Italian Libya

During the colonisation of Libya the Italians deported most of the Libyan population in Cyrenaica to concentration camps and used the survivors to build in semi-slave conditions the coastal road and new agricultural projects.^[7]

• Nazi Germany

Registration of Jews by Nazis for forced labor, 1941

During World War II the Nazis operated several categories of Arbeitslager (Labor Camps) for different categories of inmates. The largest number of them held Jewish civilians forcibly abducted in the occupied countries (see Łapanka) to provide labor in the German war industry, repair bombed railroads and bridges or work on farms. By 1944, 19.9% of all workers were foreigners, either civilians or prisoners of war.^[8]

The Nazis employed many slave laborers. They also operated concentration camps, some of which provided free forced labor for industrial and other jobs while others existed purely for the extermination of their inmates. A notable example is the Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex that serviced the production of the V-2 rocket. See List of German concentration camps for more.

The Nazi camps played a key role in the extermination of millions.

• Japan

During the early 20th century, the Empire of Japan used the forced labor of millions of civilians from conquered countries and prisoners of war, especially during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War, on projects such as the Death Railway. Hundreds of thousands of people died as a direct result of the overwork, malnutrition, preventable disease and violence which were commonplace on these projects.

See also: Japanese war crimes

• North Korea

North Korea is known to operate six camps with prison-labor colonies in remote mountain valleys. The total number of prisoners in the Kwan-li-so is 150,000 – 200,000. Once condemned as political criminal in North Korea, a defendant and his family are incarcerated for lifetime in one of the camps without trial and cut off from all outside contact.^[9]

See also: The North Korean prison system

• Communist Romania

See Creation of the camps, Great Brăila Island

• Russia and Soviet Union

See Gulag

Imperial Russia operated a system of remote Siberian forced labor camps as part of its regular judicial system, called katorga.

The Soviet Union took over the already extensive katorga system and expanded it immensely, eventually organizing the Gulag to run the camps. In 1954, a year after Stalin's death, the new Soviet government of Nikita Khrushchev began to release political prisoners and close down the camps. By the end of the 1950s, virtually all "corrective labor camps" were reorganized, mostly into the system of corrective labor colonies. Officially, the Gulag was terminated by the MVD order 20 of January 25, 1960.^[10]

During the period of Stalinism, the Gulag labor camps in the Soviet Union were officially called "Corrective labor camps." The term "labor colony"; more exactly, "Corrective labor colony", (Russian: исправительно-трудовая колония, abbr. ИТК), was also in use, most notably the ones for underaged (16 years or younger) convicts and captured besprizorniki (street children, literally, "children without family care"). After the reformation of the camps into the Gulag, the term "corrective labor colony" essentially encompassed labor camps^{[citation needed]}.

• United States

The United States Army recently declassified a document that "provides guidance on establishing prison camps on [US] Army installations." ^[11]

United States prisons operate like labor camps, according to an article by a professor of journalism from California State University. Operating like the labor camps of communist China, prisons in at least two states, California and Oregon, are doing "exactly what the U.S. has been lambasting China for", the professor's article says. It discusses the similarities in the two countries' prison labor systems. "You might just as well call this slave labor", the article continues, explaining that U.S. prison work is not volunteer work since inmates get time deducted off their sentences for working in the prison: "If prisoners don't work, they serve longer sentences, lose privileges, and risk solitary confinement." The article concludes that there is no "real difference between China's forced labor and that in the U.S. prison system."^[12] The United States prison system is being called "a new form of inhumane exploitation." Current penal labor in the U.S., it adds, "has its roots on slavery.".^[13]

• Vietnam

See Reeducation camp

• Yugoslavia

Socialist Yugoslavia ran the Goli otok prison camp for political opponents from 1946 to 1956.

See also [edit]

• Chain gang
• Civilian Inmate Labor Program
• Extermination through labor
• Memorial (society)

Notes [edit]