Labor Camp: Behind Enemy Lines, Survival in the Forgotten Prison

By Fouad Sabry

What is 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 (ILO), adopted internationally on 27 June 1957, abolished camps of forced labor.

How you will benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Labor camp

Chapter 2: Gulag

Chapter 3: Laogai

Chapter 4: Penal colony

Chapter 5: Internment

Chapter 6: Katorga

Chapter 7: Hoeryong concentration camp

Chapter 8: Penal labour

Chapter 9: Jaworzno concentration camp

Chapter 10: Extermination through labour

(II) Answering the public top questions about labor camp.

Who this book is for

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of Labor Camp.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jun 3, 2024

Book preview

Chapter 1: Labor camp

A labor camp (or labour camp; see spelling variations) or work camp is a correctional facility in which inmates are required to perform forced labor as a form of punishment. There are many similarities between slave camps and prisons (especially prison farms). The conditions of labor camps vary greatly according on the operators. Adopted worldwide on June 27, 1957, Convention No. 105 of the United Nations International Labour Organization (ILO) prohibited forced labor camps.

In the 20th century, a new type of labor camps emerged for the confinement of millions of individuals who were not criminals per se, but rather political opponents (actual or imagined) and other so-called undesirables under communist and fascist governments. Some of these camps were labeled reeducation centers for political compulsion, although the vast majority acted as economic and agricultural pillars for the state's benefit, especially during wartime.

Early-modern nations were able to exploit dissidents and people with questionable political or religious ideologies by combining incarceration and useful labor in the operation of their galleys. This was the sentence imposed upon numerous Christian captives in the Ottoman Empire and Calvinists (Huguenots) in pre-Revolutionary France.

After World War II, the Allies controlled a number of labor camps. At the 1945 Yalta Conference, it was decided that German forced labor would serve as reparations. More than one million Germans were forced to work in French coal-mines and British farmland, in addition to 500,000 in US-run Military Labor Service Units in occupied Germany. See German forced labor after World War II.

According to the New Statesman, between 1962 and 2011, the Burmese military administration maintained around 91 labor camps for political prisoners.

Between 1938 and 1949, the anti-communist Kuomintang ran numerous camps, notably the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp for young activists and students.

Since at least 1949, when it assumed control, the Chinese Communist Party has run numerous work camps for various offences. Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi were among the Chinese leaders sent to labor camps as a result of purges. May Seventh Cadre Schools are an example of work camps during the Cultural Revolution.

Xinjiang internment camps

People categorized as against the government were ordered to Military Units to Aid Production camps beginning in November 1965. (UMAP).

In 1948, following the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, numerous forced labor camps were established. Inmates included political prisoners, clergy, kulaks, Boy Scout leaders, and a number of other groups deemed to be state enemies. Approximately fifty percent of the inmates worked in uranium mines. These camps existed through 1961.

In addition, between 1950 and 1954, some males were deemed politically untrustworthy for military duty, and were conscripted to labour battalions (Czech: Pomocné technické prapory (PTP)) instead.

During the colonization of Libya, the Italians deported the majority of the Libyans in Cyrenaica to concentration camps and exploited the survivors to construct the coastal road and new agricultural projects under semi-slave conditions.

During World War II, the Nazis ran numerous types of Arbeitslager (Labor Camps) for various categories of prisoners.

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 trains and bridges damaged by bombing or work on farms.

By 1944, 19.9 percent of the employees were foreign nationals, either civilians or war captives.

The Nazis used numerous slave laborers. In addition, they operated concentration camps, some of which provided free forced labor for industrial and other jobs, while others were only for the purpose of extermination. The Mittelbau-Dora labor camp complex, which supported the development of the V-2 rocket, is a famous example. List of German detention camps for further details.

The Nazi concentration camps played a crucial part in the murder of millions.

During the early 20th century, the Empire of Japan utilized the forced labor of millions of civilians from conquered countries and prisoners of war on projects such as the Death Railway, particularly during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War. Hundreds of thousands of people died directly as a result of the commonplace overwork, hunger, preventable disease, and brutality on these projects.

In secluded mountain valleys, North Korea is believed to construct six camps with prisoner work colonies. The total number of Kwan-li-so captives ranges between 150,000 and 200,000. Once convicted as a political criminal in North Korea, the defendant and his family are imprisoned without trial and cut off from the outside world in one of the camps for life.

Additionally, see: North Korean jail system

The katorga system of distant Siberian forced labor camps was part of Imperial Russia's regular legal system.

The Soviet Union assumed control of the existing huge katorga system and vastly expanded it, eventually establishing the Gulag to operate the camps. A year after Stalin's death, in 1954, the new Soviet government under by Nikita Khrushchev began releasing political detainees and closing the camps. By the end of the 1950s, almost all corrective work camps had been reformed, predominantly into a system of corrective labor colonies. The Gulag was officially abolished by MVD order 20 on