Labor camp


A labor camp or work camp is a detention facility where inmates are forced to engage in penal labor as a form of punishment. Labor camps have many common aspects with slavery and with prisons. Conditions at labor camps vary widely depending on the operators. Convention no. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization, adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor.
In the 20th century, a new category of labor camps developed for the imprisonment of millions of people who were not criminals per se, but political opponents and various so-called undesirables under communist and fascist regimes, both totalitarian. Some of those camps were dubbed "reeducation facilities" for political coercion, but most others served as backbones of industry and agriculture for the benefit of the state, especially in times of war.

Precursors

Early-modern states could exploit condemned dissidents and those of suspect political or religious ideology by combining prison and useful work in manning their galleys.
This became the sentence of many Christian captives in the Ottoman Empire
and of Calvinists in pre-Revolutionary France.

Labor camps in the 20th century

s are lined up by German soldiers to do forced labour, September 1939, Nazi-occupied Poland
s by Nazis for forced labor, 1941
in the early 20th century