Hell Holes: Torture, starvation and

murder the norm at worlds worst

gulags
By Perry Chiaramonte

Published March 01, 2013

FoxNews.com

Black Beach Prison,Equatorial Guinea, Africa (Courtesy of Foreign Prisoner Support Service)


Main gate of Evin Prison [Behrouz Javid Tehrani/IHRDC] (Behrouz Javid Tehrani/IHRDC)

Hoeryong concentration camp (Camp no.22) (FoxNews.com/Google)



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The imprisonment of American Christian Pastor Saeed Abedini in Iran's infamous Evin prison has sparked an
international outcry and shined a spotlight on one of the world's cruelest gulags.

But Evin is just one of many prisons where conditions exist that would shock medieval jailers, and where the level of
human misery is incalculable. Prisoners brazenly carrying guns and machetes, guards rousting inmates in the night
for mock executions and captives forced to stand in water up to their noses for 24 hours when theyre not being
worked literally to death are common at the world's most draconian dungeons. Most operate in rogue nations, beyond
the influence of human rights organizations or appeals from Western nations. The few who have escaped or been
freed carry the scars from their imprisonment for the rest of their lives.

CAMP 22 and the North Korean gulag system:

Also known as Hoeryong concentration camp, and part of a large system of prison camps throughout the communist
dictatorship, Camp 22 is an 87-square-mile penal colony located in the North Hamgyong province colony where most
of the prisoners are people accused of criticizing the government.

Inmates, most of whom are serving life sentences, face harsh and often lethal conditions. According to the testimony
of a former guard from Camp22, prisoners live in bunk houses with 100 people per room and some 30 percent bear
the markings of torture and beatings -- torn ears, gouged eyes and faces covered with scars.

Prisoners are forced to stand on their toes in tanks filled with water up to their noses for 24 hours, stripped and
hanged upside-down while being beaten or given the infamous "pigeon torture -- where both hands are chained to a
wall at a height of 2 feet, forcing them to crouch for hours at a time.

Tiny rations of watery corn porridge leave inmates on the brink of starvation, and many hunt rats, snakes and frogs
for protein. Some even take the drastic measure of searching through animal dung for undigested seeds to eat.
Beatings are handed out daily for offenses as simple as not bowing down in respect to the guards fast enough.
Prisoners are used as practice targets during martial arts training. Guards routinely rape female inmates.
The conditions are brutal, Phil Robertson, deputy director of the Asian Division of Human Rights Watch, told
FoxNews.com. These people are constantly hungry and constantly scavenging.

At Camp 22 and most other prisons in North Korea, getting locked up means a death sentence.

Its considered a one-way ticket," Robertson said. "They send you there to work you to death.

Kang Cheol Hwan was the rare exception. Imprisoned at Camp 14 for a decade beginning at age 9, his crime was
being the grandson of a man who allegedly criticized the government.

In North Korea, if one person is condemned of betraying the Kim dynasty, then all family members until the third
generation can be sent into prison, Hwan, who is now executive director of the North Korea Strategy Center, told
FoxNews.com through a translator.

Prisoners toiled 15 hours a day in mines, at lumber mills or in manufacturing, according to Hwan.

Prisoners worked every day from 5 a.m and only had two days to rest a year," he said. "They barely had any food to
eat, the food was mostly based on corn and it wasnt sufficient. This is why most people were eating whatever they
could find, including rats. At a young age I realized the benefits of breeding rats.

I was lucky to have learned how to survive and stay strong," he added. "But I had to watch many people die out of
starvation and sickness.

La Sabaneta, Venezuela

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez called it the gateway to the fifth circle of hell. At La Sabaneta prison, some
30,000 inmates live in a facility meant for 15,000. There's just one guard for every 150 prisoners, and gun-toting
gangs led by "pranes" run protection rackets. Poor inmates pay them for everything from a place to sleep to
protection from murder.

At the low-end of the inmate hierarchy, are los anegados, or "the unwanted ones." These prisoners have recently
taken to stitching their mouths shut, taking literally the longstanding La Sabaneta code that says, When one sews his
own lips, no one can kill him. And inmates do get killed, with shocking frequency. In 1994, 130 La Sabaneta inmates
were burned or slashed to death with machetes during a gang fight. The following year, more than 200 inmates died
in other incidents and another 624 were severely injured.

It's a place where you literally have to keep your wits about you, or you could end up dead, Kay Danes, advocate
and founder of the Australian-based Foreign Prisoner Support Service said to FoxNews.com. Violence is prevalent,
even rape a common occurrence. Human dignity means very little and for foreigners, a single day can seem like a life
sentence. It's a place where one mistake may be your last.

Black Beach Prison, Equatorial Guinea:

Located along the coast in the capital city of Malabo, Black Beach Prison is known as one of the most notorious
prisons in Africa and has an infamous reputation for neglecting the basic needs of inmates.

Torture and starvation are the norm at Black Beach, with many victims being denied medical care after being beaten.
Food is so scarce many prisoners have died of starvation. Inmates are kept in their cells and shackled at their feet for
more than 12 hours a day.

A large number of the current prison population are part of a failed coup dtat against President Teodoro Obiang
Nguema in 2004. South African arms dealer and mercenary Nick du Toit, who spent five years in Black Beach, told
Rapport that prisoners were tortured with electric shocks and burning cigarettes. One coup plotter suffered a fatal
heart attack while being tortured, he said. In an article he penned entitled My prison hell, du Toit wrote of how his
handcuffs cut down to the bone and were left to rust in place. He lost more than 80 pounds before he was suddenly
pardoned in 2009.
Tadmor Prison, Syria:

Rising up from the desert sands in eastern Syria, Tadmor Prison occupies a former military base. Known for some of
the most horrific human rights violations in the world, with torture and summary executions occurring every day, the
prison houses dangerous criminals side-by-side with political prisoners.

The most infamous episode in Tadmor's bloody history came on June 27, 1980, when all 500 inmates were shot dead
by the forces of Rifaal Assad, brother of then-President Hafez al-Assad and uncle of current President Bashar al-
Assad. The ultimate penalty, dished out indiscriminately and brutally, was for a failed assassination attempt on Hafez
al-Assad by the Syrian Branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Bara Sarraj, who spent nine years at Tadmor after being arrested in 1984 as a student in Damascus, believes the
death toll was much higher than 500.

Tadmor has no trace of life, Sarraj told Voice of America. There are no books, no radios, nothing. They dont even
have salt to spray over your food. Sometimes there are no needles to sew our clothes. Its indescribable, and the
constant torture, that was unique to that place. At all times, even during the night.

Sarraj, now an immunologist at Northwestern School of Medicine in Chicago, has a chillingly lyrical name for the
prison where he spent nearly a decade: Symphony of Fear.

The prison was shut down in 2001 but was re-opened in June 2011. Guards at Tadmor are given free reign in
handling prisoners and often dole out beatings, torture, hangings, and even chop off body parts of anyone considered
a traitor.

Evin House of Detention, Iran:

Nicknamed Evin University for the large amounts of academic and political prisoners held there, Evin prison is one of
the worlds most brutal detention facilities.

Beatings, torture, mock executions and brutal interrogations are routine for the estimated 15,000 inmates housed in
the low-slung and drab house of horrors on the outskirts of Tehran. Evin was built during the reign of Mohammad
Reza Pahlavi -- known to Americans as the Shah of Iran. Before he was ousted from power in the 1979 revolution,
the prison housed some of the very radicals and sympathizers who would one day rule the Islamic Republic. During
the 10-year reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, thousands of political prisoners were systematically murdered at
Evin.

When you clear the gates, you are immediately blindfolded and brought underground, Marina Nemat, a former
inmate, told FoxNews.com in a previous article about Evin. They take you for interrogation. They take you to a
hallway and sit you down. You are there for a long time. If you move or say anything you are beaten. You must sit
perfectly still, while still blindfolded, and you can wait for hours, days or even weeks.

Nemat, who is a writing instructor at the University of Toronto, added most captors are taken to an interrogation room
where the goal is anything but forcing the truth out of an inmate.

They are not looking for information," said Nemat, now a instructor at University of Toronto and author of "Prisoner of
Tehran," a 2007 book detailing her ordeal and a second memoir entitled, "After Tehran." "What they want is for you to
admit that you affected the national security of Iran.

Former inmates tell of being rousted from their cells in the night, blindfolded and taken before firing squads, only to
get a last minute "reprieve," and be returned to their cages. Closed-circuit televisions show religious propaganda and
recorded confessions from the leaders of opposition groups who had broken under torture, and food is scarce.

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Hell Holes: Torture, starvation and murder
the norm at worlds worst gulags
Perry Chiaramonte
Fox News
March 3, 2013

The imprisonment of American Christian Pastor Saeed Abedini in Irans infamous Evin prison
has sparked an international outcry and shined a spotlight on one of the worlds cruelest gulags.

But Evin is just one of many prisons where conditions exist that would shock medieval jailers,
and where the level of human misery is incalculable. Prisoners brazenly carrying guns and
machetes, guards rousting inmates in the night for mock executions and captives forced to stand
in water up to their noses for 24 hours when theyre not being worked literally to death are
common at the worlds most draconian dungeons. Most operate in rogue nations, beyond the
influence of human rights organizations or appeals from Western nations. The few who have
escaped or been freed carry the scars from their imprisonment for the rest of their lives.

CAMP 22 and the North Korean gulag system:

Also known as Hoeryong concentration camp, and part of a large system of prison camps
throughout the communist dictatorship, Camp 22 is an 87-square-mile penal colony located in
the North Hamgyong province colony where most of the prisoners are people accused of
criticizing the government.

Read full article

This article was posted: Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 9:11 am

Tags: foreign affairs, government corruption

http://www.infowars.com/hell-holes-torture-starvation-and-murder-the-norm-at-worlds-worst-gulags/

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
March 3, 2013

Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim
task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories
that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.
What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe,
spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitlers
reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

Read full article

This article was posted: Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 10:01 am

Tags: eugenics
http://www.infowars.com/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking/

NEWS ANALYSIS

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Collection of Eugenia Hochberg Lanceter

A group of Jewish women at the entrance to the Brody ghetto in Eastern Galicia, 1942. The sign is written in German,
Ukrainian and Polish.
 By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: March 1, 2013

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began
the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and
killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe.

Multimedia

Map

Ghettos for Jews in Eastern Europe

Map

SS Concentration Camps

What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the
Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe,
spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during
Hitlers reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had
heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum
in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought, Hartmut Berghoff,
director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data.
We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, he said, but the numbers
are unbelievable.

The documented camps include not only killing centers but also thousands of forced labor
camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites
euphemistically named care centers, where pregnant women were forced to have
abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced
into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi
killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning
Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site the Warsaw
Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent
only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully
clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections
of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery centered in Germany
and Poland, but reaching in all directions.

The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15
million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as
part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two,
with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a
fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400
contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they
were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives
outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites.

When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his
wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the
most notorious of all the camps.
But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his
memory as deeply as the concentration camp number A188991 tattooed on his left
forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid.

First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded
his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12.

Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a
sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular
work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches
that were used for dumping the bodies of victims. He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed
to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he
and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken
to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at
Flossenbrg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-
8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on
his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. Nobody even knows about
these places, Mr. Greenbaum said. Everything should be documented. Thats very
important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and theyll remember.

The research could have legal implications as well by helping a small number of survivors
document their continuing claims over unpaid insurance policies, looted property, seized
land and other financial matters.

Multimedia

Map
Ghettos for Jews in Eastern Europe

Map

SS Concentration Camps

HOW many claims have been rejected because the victims were in a camp that we didnt
even know about? asked Sam Dubbin, a Florida lawyer who represents a group of survivors
who are seeking to bring claims against European insurance companies.

Dr. Megargee, the lead researcher, said the project was changing the understanding among
Holocaust scholars of how the camps and ghettos evolved.

As early as 1933, at the start of Hitlers reign, the Third Reich established about 110 camps
specifically designed to imprison some 10,000 political opponents and others, the
researchers found. As Germany invaded and began occupying European neighbors, the use
of camps and ghettos was expanded to confine and sometimes kill not only Jews but also
homosexuals, Gypsies, Poles, Russians and many other ethnic groups in Eastern Europe.
The camps and ghettos varied enormously in their mission, organization and size,
depending on the Nazis needs, the researchers have found.

The biggest site identified is the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, which held about 500,000
people at its height. But as few as a dozen prisoners worked at one of the smallest camps,
the Mnchen-Schwabing site in Germany. Small groups of prisoners were sent there from
the Dachau concentration camp under armed guard. They were reportedly whipped and
ordered to do manual labor at the home of a fervent Nazi patron known as Sister Pia,
cleaning her house, tending her garden and even building childrens toys for her.

When the research began in 2000, Dr. Megargee said he expected to find perhaps 7,000
Nazi camps and ghettos, based on postwar estimates. But the numbers kept climbing first
to 11,500, then 20,000, then 30,000, and now 42,500.

The numbers astound: 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration
camps; 1,000 prisoner-of-war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of
other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions,
Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.
In Berlin alone, researchers have documented some 3,000 camps and so-called Jew houses,
while Hamburg held 1,300 sites.

Dr. Dean, a co-researcher, said the findings left no doubt in his mind that many German
citizens, despite the frequent claims of ignorance after the war, must have known about the
widespread existence of the Nazi camps at the time.

You literally could not go anywhere in Germany without running into forced labor camps,
P.O.W. camps, concentration camps, he said. They were everywhere.

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