A Genealogy of the Concentration Camp

Sputnik ran an article today on Finland’s WWII camps:

https://sputnikglobe.com/20260117/throwback-the-horrors-of-finlands-wwii-concentration-camps-for-russians-1123477872.html

Curious about the history of the concentration camp I worked with ChatGPT to study its circumstances and origins: why did camps of this kind appear when they did, why did they resemble one another across regimes, and why are they a distinctly modern phenomenon.

A genealogical approach, rather than a moral or national one, lets us see this more clearly.

I. The Camp Is Not Timeless

It is tempting to imagine that camps are simply an ancient form of cruelty, recurring whenever power becomes brutal. That view is wrong.

Pre-modern societies practiced:

slavery

exile

massacre

imprisonment

forced labor

But they did not practice concentration in the modern sense.

What they lacked was:

large-scale population measurement

bureaucratic classification

racialized civil categories

logistical systems capable of sustaining mass civilian detention

scientific languages that rendered entire populations legible as problems

The concentration camp is therefore not ancient cruelty reborn.
It is a recent administrative invention.

II. Preconditions: What Must Exist Before Camps Become Thinkable

The camp becomes possible only after three discourses converge.

1. Statistical and Administrative Science

By the late 19th century, states had acquired:

censuses

registries

identity papers

population tables

nutritional science

epidemiology

This produces a decisive shift:

populations become objects that can be managed, not merely ruled.

A camp is impossible without the belief that human groups can be:

counted

categorized

rationed

relocated

“maintained” at scale

Without this administrative rationality, camps collapse into massacres or expulsions.
With it, they become institutions.

2. Racial and Civilizational Discourse

Equally crucial is the rise of scientific race thinking.

By the early 20th century, states increasingly spoke of populations as:

ethnically distinct

biologically different

culturally incompatible

civilizationally ranked

This matters because camps are not built for enemies as such, but for:

populations deemed temporarily incompatible with the polity.

In the Finnish case discussed in the article, Russians in East Karelia were:

civilians

non-combatants

but classified as ethnically and politically suspect

This is the key distinction:

not criminals

not prisoners of war

not citizens

The camp emerges precisely to house people who fall between categories.

3. Total War and Civilian Suspicion

Finally, camps require total war.

Total war collapses:

civilian vs military

home front vs battlefield

loyalty vs identity

Once war is framed as existential, populations themselves become threats.

At that point the question becomes:

“What do we do with civilians we cannot trust, integrate, or feed?”

The camp answers that question bureaucratically.

III. Why Camps Suddenly Proliferate in the 20th Century

Seen genealogically, camps appear almost simultaneously across empires and ideologies:

British camps in the Boer War

Spanish reconcentración in Cuba

German camps (colonial, then domestic)

Soviet labor and settlement camps

Finnish camps in East Karelia

American internment of Japanese civilians

This simultaneity is not coincidence.

It reflects the moment when:

science

race discourse

bureaucratic administration

and total war

converge into a single governing rationality.

That is why these camps “mirror” one another even when intentions differ.

IV. Finland as a Case Study, Not an Exception

The Sputnik article wants Finland to appear uniquely culpable.
Finnish nationalist narratives want Finland to appear uniquely restrained.

Genealogy rejects both.

What Finland demonstrates is something more disturbing:

once the camp becomes a normal administrative solution, even reluctant states reach for it.

The Finnish camps were:

not extermination camps

not industrial killing sites

not designed for genocide

And yet:

civilians were segregated

resources were withheld

disease spread

deaths mounted

suffering was normalized as regrettable but necessary

This is not Nazi exceptionalism.
It is modern administrative logic at work.

V. Why Camps Are “Recent” in a Deep Sense

The strongest claim that can be made, and which the article only gestures toward, is this:

Concentration camps could not exist before the modern scientific and racial imagination made them sensible.

They require:

a belief that populations can be engineered

a belief that identity is biologically or culturally fixed

a belief that suffering can be administratively optimized

a belief that death by neglect is morally distinct from killing

These beliefs are not ancient.
They are products of modernity.

VI. The Uncomfortable Conclusion

The genealogy leads to an unsettling realization:

The concentration camp is not the opposite of civilization.
It is one of civilization’s tools.

Once that tool exists, it travels easily:

across borders

across ideologies

across moral self-descriptions

The Finnish case does not indict Finland alone.
It indicts the modern state’s confidence in its own rationality.

And that is why genealogical analysis remains so threatening.

It does not ask:

“Who was evil?”

It asks:

“When did this begin to make sense?”

And once that question is asked, the answer implicates far more than any single country, war, or regime.