Russian Life & People Digest
Question by noman: What’s the difference between a Nazi Concentration Camp and a Russian Gulag?
Answers and Views:
Answer by Cister
Nazi:
A camp where civilians, enemy aliens, political prisoners, and sometimes prisoners of war are detained and confined, typically under harsh conditions.
Gulag:
A forced labor camp or prison, especially for political dissidents.
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1/20/2013: Obama& says
Terence, excellent and insightful response! I would add only that most of the Nazi camps were similarly not designed as death camps, but labor camps. There were relatively few that were operated strictly as extermination centers, and none of the camps in actual German territory were built as death camps.
Aynomous says
your a denier huh? ha.
you will relive history if you dont learn it to begin with.
Johnny Rockets says
Russian Gulags were strictly labor camps, prisoners, and political prisoners were sent to the Gulags and people who spoke out against Stalin, but the conditions were bad and so was the weather so many people died from starvation and disease in the Gulags, the Soviets did not deliberately or systematically murder the inmates of the Gulags
Nazi concentration camps were used to force labor on innocent people, but the main point of the Nazi camps were to systematically murder ALL Jews, Homosexuals, handicaps, Gypsies Catholics and Slavs.
More than half of the people in the concentration camps were women and children and Nazis humiliated them, and tortured them everyday until they killed them. In these concentration camps the nazis would beat the inmates for no reason, torture them for fun and the SS physicians performed horrific experiments thousands of people. The Nazis would cut off many peoples arms and then sew them on other people who got their arms cut off, the nazis tortured people by dehydrating them, starving them, freezing them, poisoning them. The nazis were sick individuals but the Germans let it all happen without caring.
Terence F says
The Nazi concentration camps were designed specifically for two purposes: to "concentrate" the population of undesirables (Jews, minorities, etc.) into isolated locations, and then to methodically kill them in massive numbers.
Russian gulags were certainly deadly to many millions of people, but they were not "designed" specifically as killing factories. The other important difference was that a gulag was intended as both a punishment and a deterrence against disobedience. Nazi camps were not intended as such to "punish" so much as to simply destroy. Nazi leaders did not threaten to send disobedient Germans to concentration camps. But *anyone* who disobeyed the Communist party leaders could be sent to the gulag.
AGLP '08, a fut says
ones russian and ones german, i dont really know the rest
Panama Joe says
About 4,000 miles.
The gulag was designed to work people to death slowly, while places like Aushwicz was designed to kill people as quickly and cheaply as possible.
ga_tx_1992 says
People were sent to concentration camps to die. Soviet gulags were labor camps.