Prisons, Prisoners & Camps

According to international law, chaplains are considered to be protected personnel who are not subject to internment as POW’s. They are to be released as soon as possible by their captors and returned to their own forces. Many chaplains, however, have elected to stay with their captive flocks and have provided essential solace to POW’s facing th...

Detaining powers face many challenges when handling prisoners of war and civilian internees, not the least of which is the need to provide accommodation or living quarters for captives. In some conflicts, belligerents are able to make advance preparations, but more often, arrangements must be made much more hastily. As a result, prisoners have u...

The prisoner of war camp at Andersonville, Georgia, was operational for only 15 months, but it was by far the largest and most notorious such facility operated by the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Over 41,000 Union captives were interned there, and almost one third of that number died while confined within its walls.

As the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau set the tone for all subsequent facilities of this type. The rationale for the establishment of the camp followed the suspension of the German democratic constitution on 28 February 1933, with the ensuing "protective custody" measures against all critics of the Nazi regime.

Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany operated from 1937 to 1945, during which tens of thousands of inmates were put to death by the SS-Schutzstaffel, including several thousand Soviet POWs and several Allied intelligence officers.

During World War II, the German army established work detachments, or Arbeitskommandos, to detain prisoners of war who were put to work in factories, farms, mines, and other industries. Under the terms of the 1929 Geneva Convention (Articles 27 to 34), countries at war were permitted to utilize the labor of prisoners of war so long as that labor...

Dulag Luft, the German prison camp through which tens of thousands of Allied airmen captured in western Europe passed, was the most efficient interrogation center of World War II. Dulag Luft (the word is a corruption of the German “Durchsgangslager Luftwaffe”, or air force transit camp) was near the town of Oberursel, about 10 miles (16 km) nort...

Auschwitz (in German) or Oświęcim (in Polish) was the largest and most notorious German concentration camp during World War II. It was one of the so called combined camps (concentration and extermination camp) like the Majdanek concentration camp. Originally built as a military barracks, Auschwitz I received its first prisoners in June 1940 with...

Officially designated Stalag 8B, Lamsdorf was one of the largest and most disliked German POW camps of World War II. In a bleak part of Upper Silesia near the site of a POW camp built in 1915 to hold British and Russian prisoners, Lamsdorf was opened in the summer of 1940 to accommodate over 5,000 British army POWs captured during the Battle of ...