Today, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II is a well-known part of history. But the hard reality nobody seems to talk about is that this wasn’t some unique, isolated event. Governments were rounding up citizens from enemy countries and locking them inside camps on every corner of the world.

This wasn’t something that just happened to Japanese people in the United States and Jews in Germany. Nearly every country that fought in the war locked up innocent civilians purely because of their ancestry. And some of the stories that don’t get told are even more horrifying than the ones you’ve heard.

10 Canadian Internment Camps Were Worse Than The American Ones

While Japanese Americans were being rounded up and forced into internment camps in the US, the exact same thing was happening north of the border. The 23,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in Canada were dragged off and locked up in camps that, in many ways, were even worse than the ones in the United States.^[1]

They were stripped of every possession they owned and told that their property would be held “in trust” until the end of the war. That, though, was an empty promise. Less than six months after they were locked away, all the property the government had taken from them was auctioned off without their consent.

Many of the camps were converted barns and chicken coops that had been crudely insulated with tar paper. The prisoners weren’t given beds—instead, they were forced to sleep on straw-filled sacks that were often infested with fleas.

The winter of 1942–1943 was one of the coldest ever recorded in British Columbia. Temperatures regularly dropped down below –40 degrees Celsius (–40°F). The internees had to shovel dirt and pack it against their thin walls just to keep from freezing to death.

The United States started allowing their interned Japanese civilians to return to their homes in 1944, but the Canadians didn’t. They kept their Japanese prisoners locked up until April 1949 before finally sending them home.

Even then, not everyone made it back. The government strongly encouraged their Japanese civilians they’d locked up to move to Japan and never come back. 4,000 of the interned Japanese were deported before a single one was set free.

9 The US Also Interned Italian, German, Taiwanese, And Korean Civilians

The Japanese weren’t the only people sent to internment camps in the United States. Under the order that sent the Japanese into the camps, Taiwanese and Korean civilians were considered Japanese.

11,500 German Americans and 2,700 Italian Americans (other sources claim between 1,900 and 10,000) were locked up for being immigrants from an enemy state, as well.^[2] Compared to Japanese Americans, this was a fairly small portion of their population, but the ways they were chosen were often absurd. Joe DiMaggio’s father, for example, was very nearly sent off to the camps even though he’d lived in the US for more than 40 years, purely because he hadn’t yet applied for US citizenship.

Hundreds of thousands more were put under strict restrictions. Over 600,000 Italian Americans who were spared from the camps were still put under a mandatory curfew, forbidding them to step outside of their homes between 8:00 PM and 6:00 AM.

It all could have been a lot worse, though. A 1944 opinion poll showed that a good chunk of Americans supported turning the internment into an outright holocaust. A frightening 13 percent of the respondents said they were in favor of “killing off” every Japanese person in America—children included.

8 Jewish Refugees In Britain Were Interned And Deported

When Germany took Norway in 1940, paranoia started to consume Great Britain. Every person of German or Italian descent was labeled an “enemy alien” and locked up.

Most of those people were Jewish. Of the 80,000 enemy aliens in Britain, 55,000 were refugees who had fled to Britain to escape persecution by the Nazis.^[3] Those refugees were almost exclusively Jews—people who had barely escaped death in concentration camps, only to be locked in a different set of camps by the people who’d promised to protect them.

Families were torn apart. The prisoners, for the first year of captivity, were separated into male and female camps, pulling husbands and wives apart and refusing to let them be together.

An additional 7,000 were kicked out of the country altogether and sent off to camps in Canada and Australia. Not all of them survived the journey. One ship, en route to Canada, was attacked as a German vessel and destroyed. 714 people died.

7 Finland Starved 4,000 Prisoners To Death

In Finland, it was Russian civilians who were locked up in camps. When the Finnish army moved into East Karelia, they rounded up 24,000 Russian civilians who lived on the land and threw them into camps surrounded by barbed wire. The prisoners were barely fed, and before the war was over, 4,000 had died.^[4]

The families weren’t rounded up because they were any kind of threat; or, at the very least, that certainly wasn’t the main reason. They were meant to be bartering chips—Finland’s goal was to trade their civilian captives for prisoners of war. Others—the Jewish captives—could be used to win good faith with the Nazis. More than ten percent of the Jews in the camps were sent off to the Gestapo.

Death, though, soon consumed the camps. Malnourishment was the greatest killer. Starving bodies fell throughout the camps, with the worst deaths hitting in the middle of 1942. Over just a few months, 3,500 Russian prisoners starved to death.

6 The Japanese Starved And Murdered Interned Civilians

The Japanese government locked up even more civilians than the Americans did. Throughout the war, they interned more than 130,000 enemy aliens living in the colonies that they’d invaded.

These people weren’t soldiers—they were civilians living in Southeast Asian countries who just happened to be in the wrong place when the Japanese armies rolled in. In many places, though, the treatment was almost as bad as it was in the prisoner-of-war camps where they locked up enemy soldiers.

In the most of the camps, the people were fed so little that they nearly starved to death, and violent force was used on anyone who stepped out of line. One internee said that beatings from Japanese guards were as “regular as the striking of the clock.”

The worst camps, according to the survivors, were the ones with the fewest people. When there weren’t many witnesses around, Japanese guards would get brutal. The survivors of a camp in Nauru that only held seven prisoners said that, after an Allied bombing run, the guards beheaded two of the civilians in the camp just as a way to let off steam.^[5]

5 Seven Prisoners In A Japanese Internment Camp Were Publicly Tortured And Executed

The largest Japanese-run internment camp was in Hong Kong. It was called the Stanley Internment Camp, and it held 2,800 civilian prisoners inside.

Most of the people locked inside were British civilians who’d refused to flee Hong Kong when the Japanese armies rolled in. They were given nothing to eat but the scrapings of leftover food. A family of five would get little more than a bowl of rice and a bowl of stew to eat, and even that, according to an inmate, “frequently contained dust, mud, rat and cockroach excreta, cigarette ends and . . . dead rats.”^[6]

121 of the internees didn’t make it out alive. The most horrifying story of all, though, happened to seven men who tried to stage an escape. They got their hands on a radio set and used it to contact the outside world—and when they were caught, the payback was horrible.

The seven men were publicly tortured while the other inmates were forced to watch. When they couldn’t stand any more pain, the men were either shot or beheaded as a warning to the others never to try to escape.

4 Jewish Refugees Were Robbed And Beaten On The Way To Camps In Australia

Australia interned its Japanese, German, and Italian residents, as well. In total, they sent 7,000 of their own people into internment camps—but they took on another 8,000 from other countries, who were sent to be locked up inside their walls.

The most horrifying story to come from their camps is that of the Dunera : a British ship that was used to send thousands of Jewish refugees to the prison camps in Australia. It was a vessel designed to fit only 1,600 people, but 2,500 were crammed on board.^[7]

2,000 of those prisoners were Jewish refugees, some of whom had already seen the inside of the Nazi death camps and had fled to Britain hoping for salvation. Instead, they were locked up side by side with 451 genuine prisoners of war from Italy and Germany, putting them right next to the SS officers who had slaughtered their families.

The prisoners had to sleep in piles on the floor and were only allowed 30 minutes of fresh air a day. For the entire journey, they were so tightly compacted that it was a struggle not to step on other people’s bodies. Showers were out the question, and the air was so filthy that prisoners would take turns pressing their faces against an open hatch in the wall.

The whole trip took 57 days, and when it was done, they were thrown into prisons. When they got out of the boat, though, they found out that everything they’d brought with them was gone. The guards had gone through their luggage, taking everything that was worth money for themselves. The rest—like medicine and prayer books—were thrown into the sea.

3 Peru Deported Japanese Residents To American Internment Camps

2,200 of the Japanese prisoners in American internment camps had never lived in the United States before. They were from Peru: civilian prisoners rounded up, deported, and sent off to foreign camps, purely because their parents were Japanese.^[8]

The prisoners were sent at the request of the US government. US authorities wanted more civilian prisoners they could use as bargaining chips in negotiations with Japan. So, they got Peru to send them as many Japanese Peruvian civilians as they could.

Peru was only too eager to oblige. The anti-Japanese sentiment there was vicious—in May 1940, a massive riot that broke out in the country ended with 600 Japanese-owned houses, schools, and businesses being burned to the ground.

800 of the civilians deported to the US wound up being sent to Japan in exchange for American prisoners of war. They were often separated from their families and forced to live in a place that, regardless of their ancestry, was a completely foreign country to them.

Hardly any of them made it back home. When the war ended, Peru refused to allow the Japanese citizens they’d deported to step back into the country. Another 1,000 were shipped off to Japan after the war, while the luckiest few who were sent away were forced to make the United States their new homes.

2 Native Alaskans Were Interned And Died At Horrifying Rates

Not everyone in the internment camps was from an enemy country. 881 Native Americans living in Alaska were locked up for three and a half years, even though they were as American as anyone could possibly be.^[9]

The government didn’t suspect them of treason. Instead, they locked them up in the camps for what they said was their own safety. Alaska, they believed, was about to become a war zone, and so they moved them into camps—most of which were still right in the path of war.

They didn’t protect anybody, though. The conditions were so horrible in these camps that the Native Alaskans died at a horrifying rate. Their camps were dilapidated, abandoned buildings; one was a converted gold mine, while another was an old cannery. Disease was rampant, with nearly every person in the camps infected.

By the end of the three and a half years that the Alaskans spent in these camps, one in ten prisoners had died. Most went out in slow, painful deaths, starving, freezing, or plagued by disease.

1 Norway Labeled Its Own Citizens As ‘German Whores’ And Locked Them Up

When the war came to an end, some countries started focusing their wrath on their own citizens. In Norway, in 1945, 5,000 women were branded tyskertoes, meaning “German whores,” and locked up without trial inside internment camps.^[10]

Some of these women had taken German lovers while the Nazis occupied Norway, but many more hadn’t done anything of the sort. Women who had done any type of work for the Germans whatsoever were locked up, even if they’d just worked as cleaners or seamstresses.

The government justified it as a way of protecting them—which wasn’t a totally unfair claim. Mobs would often drag these women out into the streets and shave off their hair, with newspapers and rallies cheering them on.

That didn’t just happen in Norway. In France, women would be stripped, beaten, and paraded down the streets if anyone thought they’d supported the Germans in any way. More often than not, their heads would be shaved, and they’d have swastikas painted on their faces.

The men, though, got off almost completely scot-free. In Norway, there were 28 men who had married German women during the war. They suffered no consequences at all—but every woman who had taken a German husband during World War II was deported from the country, deprived of her citizenship, and branded a traitor for life.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, the sociopolitical doctrine of communism claimed its first state. Despite a massive military intervention in 1918 which featured soldiers and sailors from the British Empire, the United States, France, Serbia, and Belgium,^[1] and despite the Japanese occupation of Siberia and Sakhalin Island that lasted until 1925, the communist government in Moscow managed to survive.

Following World War II, communism spread beyond Russia’s borders to Eastern and Central Europe, Latin America, and East Asia. Although not all communist states were alike, each were totalitarian dictatorships, and almost all of them had in place “reeducation” systems that subjected political prisoners, criminals, and everyday citizens to horrific physical and mental abuse. Some of these penal systems, such as the Soviet Union’s gulags, are well-known in West. Others have been all but forgotten, and in some communist states today, camp horrors still exist.

10 S-21

In 1960, Saloth Sar and Nuon Chea, two ethnic Khmers from Cambodia, formed a small cadre of Mao-inspired communists. Officially called the Communist Party of Kampuchea, this group is better known by its French name, Khmer Rouge (“Red Khmers”). Its leader, Saloth Sar, would later rename himself Pol Pot.

From 1960 until 1975, the Khmer Rouge led a guerrilla campaign against the Kingdom of Cambodia, the latter of which had backing from the United States and France. The “Red Khmers” had support from Ho Chi Minh’s communists in Vietnam, but these two groups would later have a serious falling out that would lead to a full-scale Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1979.

Much of this of this falling out was due to the sheer brutality of the Khmer Rouge’s regime. Beginning in 1975, as part of the “Year Zero” policy, two million urban dwellers in Phnom Penh and other cities were forced to toil as agricultural laborers in the countryside. All of this was done in order to turn Cambodia into a rural, egalitarian society. Therefore, the Khmer Rouge banned money, markets, schooling, private property, religion, and other aspects of traditional Khmer culture. In order to force compliance, the Khmer Rouge established reeducation camps throughout the country. The most infamous of these camps was S-21.

Following Vietnam’s invasion, prison guards at S-21, which was located in Phnom Penh, fled the scene. Left behind were thousands of photographs and letters from prisoners. In total, it is believed that some 30,000 prisoners were held at S-21, 12,000 of whom were killed.

Duch, real name Kaing Guek Eav, would later tell an international court all about the type of torture methods used at S-21. These methods included beatings with sticks, electric shock, suffocation via plastic bags, and a crude form of waterboarding that used a towel and water. Electrical wires were also used to whip inmates, while female inmates were singled out for rape and sexual assault.^[2] Some former Khmer Rouge members have admitted that although the point of torture was to extract confessions, most of the time, it was done for personal enjoyment.

In total, between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot’s regime murdered between 1.5 and 2 million Cambodians. Pot himself died in 1998 at the age of 72.

9 Vietnam’s Reeducation Camps

Despite removing the awful and genocidal Khmer Rouge from Cambodia, the communists of Vietnam should not be labeled as great humanitarians. Indeed, following North Vietnam’s successful takeover of South Vietnam in 1975, the communists established brutal reeducation camps throughout the country.

It has been estimated that between one and 2.5 million people entered the camps in 1975 alone under the new government’s promise of a quick “reeducation” in communist dogma. The camps themselves were divided into five different levels. The level one camps were study camps that indoctrinated inmates with Marxist-Leninist thought. These inmates were allowed to go home every night. Level two camps had the same purpose, but inmates could not return home for three to six months. Approximately 700,000 people were forced to attend both level one and level two camps.

The level three camps, or socialist reform camps, contained about 50,000 inmates. Level four and five camps, like the level three camps, were designed to force inmates to work long, hard days under primitive conditions. In these camps were those deemed less susceptible to socialist ideology, including intellectuals, Roman Catholics, teachers, legislators, and judges. Even as late as 1987, some 15,000 of these inmates were still incarcerated.^[3]

It is believed that as many as 165,000 Vietnamese people died in these camps between 1975 and 1990. The number might be much higher, however. Also, given that the first reeducation camps were started in North Vietnam in 1961, it is possible that over one million Vietnamese people died in communist-run camps in both North and South Vietnam.

8 The Xinjiang Camps

The Xinjiang region of far-western China has been a hotbed of violence for centuries. In 1775, the Qing Empire, an ethnic Manchu dynasty that ruled all of China from Beijing, began the liquidation of the Dzungar people, or ethnic Mongols who lived in Xinjiang, following a rebellion against Qing rule. In total, between 480,000 and 500,000 Dzungars, or 80 percent of their population, were killed by Qing soldiers and their allies. The remaining 20 percent were forced into slavery.

It is another minority people, the Muslim Uyghurs, who are currently facing a government crackdown in Xinjiang. As we speak, roughly one million people are held in internment camps in China. A large portion of these inmates are Uyghurs. It is claimed that ten percent of the entire Uyghur population in China is currently being detained in one of the many reeducation camps in Xinjiang.^[4]

The purpose of these camps is to “reeducate” Uyghurs and to get rid of their ethnic and religious identity. Uyghur inmates are forced to speak Mandarin and reportedly must say, “I’m not a Muslim,” on a daily basis. These same punishments are forced on other minority groups, including Hui Muslims, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmen, and even non-Muslim minorities.

In 2018, Uyghur activists told Radio Free Asia, a US-funded radio station designed to counter communist propaganda in East Asia, that the reeducation camps in Xinjiang are filthy work camps where inmates are forced to praise Xi Jinping daily, sing communist songs, and publicly confess to such “crimes” as attending a mosque or traveling outside of China. One former inmate, an ethnic Kazakh named Kayrat Samarkand, told the American media that he experienced grueling interrogation sessions that lasted for multiple days. Samarkand also stated that he was tortured one day by being forced to wear a metal suit that weighed over 23 kilograms (50 lb).

The Chinese government officially legitimizes this practice by highlighting Islamist terrorism inside of China itself and high Uyghur participation in the Syrian Civil War and in Afghanistan on behalf on groups affiliated with ISIS and Al-Qaeda. (Both accusations are true.)

7 ‘Farewell To The World’

Very few outside of the Ethiopian diaspora have ever heard of the Derg. The Derg, which was officially known as the Provisional Military Government of Socialist Ethiopia, came to power in 1974. It would hold on to power until 1987. In that time, several humanitarian crises rocked the country, including a massive famine, an economic collapse, and military defeats against the armies of Eritrea and the Tigray people. The worst of it all occurred between 1984 and 1986, when two years of drought caused a famine that affected 5.8 million people. This famine was then followed by locust and grasshopper plagues in 1986. Overall, the famines and plagues killed 1.2 million people.

Besides these “natural” disasters (which were really the result of government villagization and oppression), the Derg was responsible for a massive campaign of terrorism known collectively as the Red Terror. The Red Terror, which was announced after the Derg took power in Addis Ababa, saw military troops and communist militiamen invade homes and villages in search of “counterrevolutionaries.” As many as 50,000 people were killed during the Red Terror.^[5]

Many of the Red Terror’s victims wound up as inmates at the Alem Bekagn (“Farwell to the World”) prison in Addis Ababa. Already made infamous during the Yekatit 12 massacre, where Ethiopian intellectuals were murdered by Italian fascists, Alem Bekagn saw torture and mass executions under the Derg. In 1990, Argentine forensic experts uncovered several mass graves at Alem Bekagn. One of the worst atrocities at the prison, the Massacre of Sixty, saw Derg officials execute 60 former members of Emperor Haile Selassie’s government. Others executed at the prison included Ethiopian teenagers, suspected anti-communists, and intellectuals. The African Union believes that 10,000 were executed at the prison, while thousands more died due to overcrowding and disease.

6 Lenin’s Gulags

Many Soviet apologists will claim that Vladimir Lenin, the first communist ruler of Bolshevik Russia, was not a genocidal maniac a la Stalin. However, this is false and overlooks how Lenin’s regime expanded the old Tsarist system of Siberian prison camps and turned them into the “gulag archipelago.”

By 1920, there were some 84 work and prison camps in Russia, all of which were designed to “rehabilitate” enemies of the Soviet system. By 1923, the camp system had expanded to over 300. At that point, the total inmate population in Russia stood at a staggering 70,000. As early as 1918, in a letter penned by Leon Trotsky, the Soviet state sought to use the gulags as a way to modernize Russia on the backs of slave labor. In the letter, Trotsky stated that inmates, whom Trotsky calls “vermin,” must experience “thousands of forms and means of practical reckoning by the communes themselves.”^[6] In practice, this translated to inmates being worked to death in order to build railroads and factories.

Lenin’s dreaded secret police, the Cheka, also ran their own camps. In 1920, 100,000 Russian citizens were convicted in Cheka courts and sentenced to work camps. The Cheka camps of 1920 were only built to house 40,000 to 60,000 inmates. At these camps and all over camps during Lenin’s regime, unsanitary conditions led to thousands of deaths due to disease, while starvation, overwork, and executions claimed all other lives. Lenin’s gulags were also thoroughly corrupt, with career criminals given freedom in the camps to prey upon their fellow inmates.

5 The Belene Labor Camp

The Belene Labor Camp is often called a “concentration” camp by Western sources. The use of this word, which is most closely associated with the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust, should tell you all you need to know about how awful this Bulgarian prison really was.

Operated off and on from 1949 until 1989, the camp on Belene Island housed thousands of male and female political prisoners. Housed alongside political prisoners were hardened criminals, whom the communist guards encouraged to “terrorize” the political offenders. During the 1950s, hundreds of inmates died from malnutrition and exhaustion because they were forced to cut down trees, harvest vegetables, and do other kinds of manual labor with very little food or water. Those convicted of breaking camp rules were often used for target practice by the guards or sent adrift at sea in order to freeze to death.

The camp was formally closed in 1959, following the anti-Stalinist purges directed by the Soviet Union. However, during the 1970s and 1980s, Bulgarian Muslims and ethnic Turks who opposed the assimilation campaigns run by the communist government were detained on Belene Island and held in squalid conditions for months to years.^[7] Such religious persecution was not unique, as earlier during the 1950s, Christian pastors were frequently sent to the camp as “spies.” One of those inmates, Haralan Popov, wrote a book outlining all the ways in which camp guards and wardens tried to convert religious inmates to atheism. Those who resisted were often tortured for days on end.

4 Castro’s Concentration Camps

The term “concentration camp” was born on the verdant island of Cuba in the late 19th century. Originally, the term denoted Spanish-run camps that housed supporters of Cuban independence. The United States later used these camps as justification for the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Decades later, Fidel Castro’s communist state reintroduced concentration camps to the Cuban people. Under the unassuming name of Military Units to Help Production (UMAP), Castro’s government began forcing all those suspected of “counterrevolutionary” activity and attitudes to these camps in November 1965. At the UMAP camps, humiliation, torture, and rape were common. So, too, was suicide, as many inmates killed themselves rather than die by starvation or disease.^[8]

The purpose of these camps was to “reeducate” Cubans to the wonders of socialism. Religious Christians, rock and roll fans, men with long hair, and those deemed too ideologically close to the United States and the West were forced to perform hard labor. Another group singled out for incarceration were homosexuals, whom the Cuban government recognized as a “scum” not worthy of the same rights as heterosexuals.

Like the better-known concentration and extermination camps of Nazi Germany, the UMAP camps often featured slogans such as “Work Will Make Men Out of You.”

3 Laogai

Laogai can be roughly translated as “reform through labor.” These camps were modeled after the Soviet gulags under Joseph Stalin and first opened their doors following Mao’s ascension to absolute power in 1949. Although they have been renamed, hundreds of laogai camps are still in operation today throughout China.

One survivor of the laogai system, Harry Wu, has said that during the height of Mao’s power, some 40 million Chinese people were interned at these labor camps. Wu, who now lives in the United States and runs the Laogai Museum after spending 19 years in a laogai, claims that these reeducation camps forced inmates to work for hours on end under dangerous conditions. Food and water were rarely given to the inmates, thus forcing them to steal from each other. Inmates at these camps were also used for the harvesting of organs, a process that is still going on inside China right now.^[9]

According to Wu, one of the more gruesome torture methods used by these labor camps is the tiger chair, which is a bench where prisoners have their hands tied behind their backs, their mouths gagged, and their legs bound tightly with rope. Bricks are then placed underneath the legs, thus elevating them. Prisoners tied to the tiger bench are shouted at by guards and are forced to hold these uncomfortable positions for hours and sometimes days.

Such inhumanity should not be shocking. After all, the architect of these camps, Mao Zedong, oversaw the Great Chinese Famine (1958–1961), which may have killed 30 million people out of a population of 650 million. The famine was caused by the Great Leap Forward, which was an attempt rapidly modernize China into an industrial society. This mass starvation was followed by the Cultural Revolution, which saw radicalized college students (“Red Guards”) publicly denouncing their teachers and family members as “counterrevolutionaries.” Through show trials and struggle sessions, in which the accused were forced to confess to a litany of anti-communist crimes, counterrevolutionaries were sentenced to labor camps or were executed. The total number of deaths during the period (1966–1976) is not known, but most estimates say that somewhere between 1.5 and 7.7 million people died.

2 Stalin’s Gulags

No communist leader is more infamous than Joseph Stalin. During his lifetime, Stalin was credited with turning the mostly agrarian Russia into an industrial powerhouse. However, Stalin did so by killing millions of his own people through overwork, starvation, and execution. During the Great Purge, when all those suspected of disloyalty to Stalin and his forced labor system were imprisoned and executed, 20 million people were killed by state authorities. Collectivization, whereby peasants were forced to produce food in order to meet unrealistic government quotas, killed millions more. For instance, in Kazakhstan between 1930 and 1933, collectivization led to a famine that killed 1.5 million people. The Holodomor, a forced famine designed to punish independent peasants in Ukraine, claimed about three million lives between 1932 and 1933, with an estimated 28,000 Ukrainians dying of starvation daily.

Stalin’s government expanded Lenin’s gulag system in order to house those deemed antagonistic to collectivization. Gangsters and serious criminals were also housed in these camps, and guards encouraged them to brutalize the political prisoners. Those inmates without connections (i.e. in good with the guards) typically worked 14-hour days. Jobs included cutting down and hauling lumber, digging ditches for hydraulic dams, and mining for ore and coal. Prisoners were kept on starvation diets, with many dying from malnourishment, dehydration, exhaustion, and lung diseases stemming from the inhalation of ore and coal dust.

Survivors of Stalin’s gulags, including writers Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, wrote books about the inhumane and barbaric conditions of the gulags, where murder and robbery were commonplace among starving inmates. A more graphic depiction of gulag life can be found among the sketches of former camp guard Danzig Baldaev. For decades, Daldaev worked as a gulag guard, and during that time, he sketched pictures of what he saw. These stark images include depictions of forced feeding, gangsters urinating on beaten and bloody inmates, decapitations, the insertion of soldering irons into vaginas and anuses, and the institution of female and child sex slavery within the camps.^[10]

1 The Pitesti Experiment

What happened in Romania between 1949 and 1951 was so horrific that it turned the stomachs of hardened Soviet officials. Known collectively as the Pitesti experiment, these reeducation experiments were conducted inside the Pitesti Prison. The ultimate monsters in charge of these experiments were Ana Pauker and Eugen Turcanu. On the surface, these two could not have been more different. Pauker came from an Orthodox Jewish family and was a lifelong leftist, with former membership in both the Social Democratic Party of Romania and the Socialist Party of Romania. Turcanu was an ex-con and a former member of the anti-Semitic Iron Guard.

Together, Pauker and Turcanu used Pitesti Prison as a laboratory to build new communists out of the ashes of old Romania. Their subjects included former members of Ion Antonescu’s regime, members of the Iron Guard, landowners, diplomats, Orthodox and Catholic priests, intellectuals, Jews accused of being “Zionist,” and other members of the bourgeois. These inmates were dubbed “enemies of the people,” and all manner of torture was meted out to them by Turcanu, Pauker, and their minions.

Examples of torture included: forcing prisoners who did not renounce their Christian faith to take a “communion” consisting of fecal matter, forcing prisoners who did not confess to anti-communist activities to put their hands in chamber pots full of urine, forcing inmates to spit into the mouths of suspected spies, and forcing prisoners to mock Christ’s nativity on Christmas day. Survivors claim that Turancu was especially creative with priests and devout Christians. Every morning, these inmates would be “baptized” with urine and fecal matter. Their heads would be held inside the putrid buckets almost to the point of drowning.^[11]

The point of the experiments was to force people to confess to the fact that they deserved all of this punishment because of their past anti-communist activities. The experiments also sought to destroy any individualism within the inmates. In order to accomplish both, physical torture was coupled with long periods of solitary confinement. Torture, which was almost always carried out by other inmates (most of whom were students sent to the prison because they had belonged to non-communist political parties), included forcing prisoners to eat with their knees on the floor and their hands tied behind their backs. Often, the food they were forced to eat was each other’s excrement. On Easter morning in 1950, prisoners were forced to kiss a phallus-shaped piece of insect-repellent paper, while on most other days, they were encouraged to commit suicide. This latter activity was usually stopped by guards, who simply wanted to prolong an inmate’s torture. One prisoner, Turcanu’s former friend Bogdanovici, died after other inmates jumped up and down on his stomach and chest for days, thus crushing his internal organs.

The experiments came to an end when Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, successfully lobbied Stalin to purge the Romanian Communist Party of Pauker and her supporters. Specifically, Pauker was accused of being a “Zionist” and of having “nationalist” attitudes toward Jewish immigration to Israel.

As for Turcanu, he and his handpicked guards stood trial for their crimes in 1954. On December 17, 1954, Turcanu was executed by firing squad. After Turcanu’s death, the Romanian Communist Party tried to say Turcanu and Pauker were responsible for all the crimes at Pitesti, but most scholars today believe that the party encouraged the experiments.