concentration camp

[kon-suhn-trey-shuhn kamp]

noun

1. a guarded compound for the mass detention without hearings or the imprisonment without trial of civilians, as refugees, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc.

2. a Nazi prison camp or death camp prior to and during World War II.

concentration camp

noun

1. a guarded prison camp in which nonmilitary prisoners are held, esp one of those in Nazi Germany in which millions were exterminated

concentration camp

1. A place for assembling and confining political prisoners and enemies of a nation. Concentration camps are particularly associated with the rule of the Nazis in Germany, who used them to confine millions of Jews (see also Jews) as a group to be purged from the German nation. Communists, Gypsies, homosexuals, and other persons considered undesirable according to Nazi principles, or who opposed the government, were also placed in concentration camps and eventually executed in large groups. (See Holocaust.)

Word History and Origins

Origin of concentration camp¹

First recorded in 1900–05, applied originally to camps where noncombatants were placed during the Boer War

Example Sentences

He later learned from relatives that all four of his grandparents had been Jewish, and that they had died in Nazi concentration camps.

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Stoppard was not fully aware of his Jewish heritage until the 1990s, when a Czech relative told him all four of his grandparents and three aunts had been killed in Nazi concentration camps.

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My mother, Helen, and her family had been held in the Gurs concentration camp in Vichy-controlled France.

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Her parents remained in what is now the Czech Republic and were sent to a concentration camp where they were later murdered.

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Many of the artefacts scheduled to be auctioned were said to have come from the Buchenwald and Auschwitz concentration camps.

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Related Words

• gas chamber 
• gulag 
• internment camp 
• prison camp