Labour camps in the context of "Penal labour"

Penal labour or prison labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios are sometimes applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.

Large-scale implementations of penal labour include labour camps, prison farms, penal colonies, penal military units, penal transportation, or aboard prison ships.

The Morgenthau Plan was a proposal to weaken Germany following World War II by eliminating its arms industry and civilian industry. This included the removal or destruction of all industrial plants and equipment in the Ruhr and included deporting millions of Germans to various labour camps across Europe to serve as war reparations mainly in the Soviet Union, French Empire, USA and British Empire. It was first proposed by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. in a 1944 memorandum entitled Suggested Post-Surrender Program for Germany.

While the Morgenthau Plan had some influence until 10 July 1947 (adoption of JCS 1779) on Allied planning for the occupation of Germany, it was not adopted. US occupation policies aimed at "industrial disarmament", but contained a number of deliberate loopholes, limiting any action to short-term military measures and preventing large-scale destruction of mines and industrial plants, giving wide-ranging discretion to the military governor and Morgenthau's opponents at the War Department. An investigation by Herbert Hoover concluded the plan was unworkable, and would result in up to 25 million Germans dying from starvation. From 1947, US policies aimed at restoring a "stable and productive Germany" and were soon followed by the Marshall Plan.

A concentration camp is a prison or other facility used for the internment of political prisoners or politically targeted demographics, such as members of national or ethnic minority groups, on the grounds of national security, or for exploitation or punishment.

Prominent examples of historic concentration camps include the British confinement of non-combatants during the Second Boer War, the mass internment of Japanese-Americans by the US during the Second World War, the Nazi concentration camps (which later morphed into extermination camps), and the Soviet labour camps or gulag.