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CONCENTRATION CAMPS - Prison camps for civilians in wartime. The first concentration camps were devised by the british during the second boer war in south africa in 1899 for the detention af afrikaner women and children. A system of around 5000 camps were used by Nazi Germany to imprison political and ideological opponents. The most infamous of these being the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau, Maidanek, Sohibor and Treblinka. The total number of people who died in these camps exceeded 6 million, some of the victims were subjected to horrendous medical experiments before being killed. After the war many camp officials were tried for war crimes, and were executed or imprisoned. The most prominent being Adolf Eichmann who was the architect of the extermination system, who was tried and executed by the state of Isreal in 1961.