ABSTRACT
The White Terror demanded more lives and caused more pain and suffering than the Red Terror not only because it lasted longer: more people were tortured or killed in prisons and internment camps after August 1919 than during the Communist experiment. The internment camp in Europe was a typical creation of wartime emergency and post-war chaos. In Germany, for example, the first modern concentration camps were set up by the Social Democratic government in the early 1920s; in 1923, after the declaration of a state of emergency, the moderate left-wing government interned thousands of Communists. Giorgio Agamben and Enzo Traverso see a direct link between the prisoner-of-war camps (POW) and internment camps during the Great War and the Nazi labor and death camps during the Second World War. Hajmasker, the most infamous of all internment camps, had been the largest POW camp, housing mainly Italian soldiers, during the Great War.
