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30-514: Leopold was born in Langenlois , in the rural Waldviertel region of Lower Austria , and attended Volksschule there until 1904. After one year of study at a specialized fruit and viticulture school, he worked on his father's small farm. Leopold then decided on a military career, joining the 49th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian Army on 7 October 1910. Following the outbreak of

60-764: A convinced activist in the party after hearing Adolf Hitler speak at Krems in 1920. Leopold quickly rose through the Party ranks, from Ortsgruppenleiter in Krems in 1924 to Kreisleiter of the Waldviertel district in 1925 and, by September 1926, he formally joined the Nazi Party (membership number 50,416) and was made leader of the Sturmabteilung in Lower Austria, as well as Deputy Gauleiter of that region. As an early member of

90-627: A result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable." Although the first example of civilian internment may date as far back as the 1830s, the English term concentration camp was first used in order to refer to the reconcentration camps (Spanish: reconcentrados ) which were set up by the Spanish military in Cuba during the Ten Years' War (1868–1878). The label

120-467: A result, the term "concentration camp" is sometimes conflated with the concept of an " extermination camp " and historians debate whether the term "concentration camp" or the term "internment camp" should be used to describe other examples of civilian internment. The "concentration camp" label continues to see expanded use for cases post- World War II , for instance in relation to British camps in Kenya during

150-697: A terrorist attack by Nazis, and the Austrian government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß responded by outlawing the Nazi Party in Austria. Leopold subsequently was removed from his positions in the Landtag and the Landesrat , and he also was discharged from the Austrian Army on 31 August 1933. The only Gauleiter who refused to flee Austria, he was arrested on 16 September and held for investigation until 1 February 1934 when he

180-684: Is a town at the Kamp river in the Kamptal , district of Krems-Land in the Austrian state of Lower Austria . Famous for its wine production, it is also home to the Loisium, a centre celebrating and advertising the local wine and built by the American deconstructionist architect Steven Holl . This Lower Austria location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Internment Internment

210-656: Is also occasionally used to describe a neutral country 's practice of detaining belligerent armed forces and equipment on its territory during times of war, under the Hague Convention of 1907 . Interned persons may be held in prisons or in facilities known as internment camps , some of which are known as concentration camps . The term concentration camp originates from the Spanish–Cuban Ten Years' War when Spanish forces detained Cuban civilians in camps in order to more easily combat guerrilla forces. Over

240-439: Is killing, are also imprecisely referred to as concentration camps . The Universal Declaration of Human Rights restricts the use of internment, with Article 9 stating, "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest , detention or exile ." The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as

270-466: Is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges or intent to file charges . The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects". Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment , it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime. Use of these terms is subject to debate and political sensitivities. The word internment

300-498: The Reichstag as a deputy from Austria. On 23 May, he was appointed as a Party Reichsinspekteur in Munich on the staff of Deputy Führer Hess and promoted to the rank of SA- Gruppenführer . This was followed on 1 June by his being named an honorary Führer of Vienna's SA- Gruppe Donau . On 30 January 1939, he was awarded the Nazi Party's Blood Order decoration. On the outbreak of

330-573: The First World War , he served as a platoon leader with the rank of Stabsfeldwebel , and saw action on the eastern front until 1 August 1915, when he was captured by forces of the Imperial Russian Army . He was sent to Siberia as a prisoner of war where he remained until February 1918 when he escaped, returning to Austria. Leopold became an instructor of new recruits in Vienna and, after

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360-722: The Mau Mau rebellion (1952–1960), and camps set up in Chile during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). According to the United States Department of Defense as many as 3 million Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups are being held in China 's re-education camps which are located in the Xinjiang region and which American news reports often label as concentration camps . The camps were established in

390-621: The Second World War , Leopold volunteered for service in the German Army . With the rank of Oberstleutnant , he commanded of a reserve battalion of Austrian troops in the Battle of France and in the invasion of the Soviet Union . He died on 24 July 1941 at the eastern front as a result of an accident with a Romanian soldier's grenade. He had been Reich Minister Alfred Rosenberg 's choice for

420-502: The Soviet Gulag system of concentration camps (1918–1991) and the Nazi concentration camps (1933–1945). The Soviet system was the first applied by a government on its own citizens. The Gulag consisted in over 30,000 camps for most of its existence (1918–1991) and detained some 18 million from 1929 until 1953, which is only a third of its 73-year lifespan. The Nazi concentration camp system

450-458: The Nazi Party in Germany, despite his earlier support for an independent Austria. However, he never attained the level of leadership that he had wielded in Austria. He was considered for the role of Gauleiter of Reichsgau Lower Danube , although this role went to Hugo Jury instead. On 21 February 1938, Leopold was granted the title of Honorary Gauleiter . At the 10 April election, he was elected to

480-425: The Nazi Party. Leopold hoped through this to become part of a coalition government and to eventually form an independent Nazi government in Austria. He then sought to work more closely with other nationalist groups in order to come closer to his ideal of a Nazi Austria and, in this endeavour, won the backing of cabinet ministers Edmund Glaise-Horstenau and Odo Neustädter-Stürmer  [ de ] . Despite this,

510-685: The Party, he would later be awarded the Golden Party Badge . On 29 August 1927, he was personally appointed by Hitler to the post of Gauleiter of Lower Austria. From 21 May 1932 to 23 June 1933, he was a member of the Lower Austrian Landtag and leader of the Nazi faction in that body, as well as a member of the Landesrat (state council). Leopold belonged to the pro-independence faction within Austrian Nazism and insisted that Adolf Hitler

540-482: The coup plot were seized. Hitler finally dismissed Leopold as Landesleiter on 21 February 1938, on the pretext that he wanted Austrian Nazis to follow legality. Hitler, who had been due to hold talks with Schuschnigg, was especially annoyed that Leopold had launched a bombing campaign in the run-up to the meeting, and so acted quickly to remove him. Following the Anschluss , Leopold was able to continue his career within

570-721: The end of the war, he remained in military service with the Volkswehr . Following the reorganisation of the military after the establishment of the republic, he was retained in the newly renamed Bundesheer and attended the military school at Enns . Commissioned as a Leutnant in March 1919, he was assigned to the 6th Infantry Regiment in July 1920, based in Krems an der Donau . He became its training officer in August 1923, where he remained until 1925. By 1927, he

600-686: The following decades the British during the Second Boer War and the Americans during the Philippine–American War also used concentration camps. The terms concentration camp and internment camp are used to refer to a variety of systems that greatly differ in their severity, mortality rate, and architecture; their defining characteristic is that inmates are held outside the rule of law . Extermination camps or death camps, whose primary purpose

630-528: The negotiations and his pro-independence stance meant that Hitler did not trust Leopold, who he felt might use the SA to try to seize power on his own, perhaps by force. Therefore, he sent Wilhelm Keppler to keep a watch on him in July 1937. However, Keppler was told by Leopold that he took orders from no one. Heinrich Himmler made him leader of the Austrian Schutzstaffel in 1937, but he soon grew tired of

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660-663: The post of Generalkommissar for Crimea , but the job ultimately went to fellow-Austrian Alfred Frauenfeld . In October 1945, Leopold's widow, Sidonie née Saxeneder (16 August 1894 – 19 July 1980) was tried by the Vienna People's Court for her Nazi Party membership. She had been a member since 1927, and had been awarded the Golden Party Badge. On 8 October 1945, Sidonie was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison and had her assets confiscated. Langenlois Langenlois ( German pronunciation: [ˈlaŋənlɔʏs] )

690-591: The quarrelsome Leopold, who also had clashes with Hermann Göring , Rudolf Hess , Franz von Papen and his co-leader of the Austrian Nazis Hermann Neubacher . While leading the Nazis in Vienna during 1938, Leopold boasted to British Union of Fascists representative Robert Gordon-Canning that he was about to lead an uprising with Hitler's aid. However, the conversation was picked up by Schuschnigg who had Leopold's office raided, where documents relating to

720-555: The talks with Schuschnigg came to nothing and Leopold's desires to see the Nazis recognised and to establish a coalition known as the Deutschsozialer Volksbund were left unfulfilled. Indeed, Leopold came out of the negotiations badly, as not only were his plans to reconstitute the Nazi Party as part of the Fatherland's Front made public, but he also failed to secure an offer of a cabinet post as he had hoped. His failures in

750-624: Was a "domestic matter" over which Germany would exert no direct or indirect influence. In return, Austria agreed to an amnesty of imprisoned Nazis, and Leopold obtained his freedom on 23 July. Although officially still the party leader, Leopold found that during his time in prison much of the power within the party passed to Friedrich Rainer and Odilo Globocnik who, on Hitler's express instructions, were seeking to build alliances with more conservative leaders such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart and even Schuschnigg. Later in 1936, Leopold began negotiating with Schuschnigg in an attempt to regain legal status for

780-587: Was applied yet again to camps set up by the United States during the Philippine–American War (1899–1902). And expanded usage of the concentration camp label continued, when the British set up camps during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa for interning Boers during the same time period. During the 20th century, the arbitrary internment of civilians by the state reached its most extreme forms in

810-523: Was extensive, with as many as 15,000 camps and at least 715,000 simultaneous internees. The total number of casualties in these camps is difficult to determine, but the deliberate policy of extermination through labor in many of the camps was designed to ensure that the inmates would die of starvation, untreated disease and summary executions within set periods of time. Moreover, Nazi Germany established six extermination camps , specifically designed to kill millions of people, primarily by gassing . As

840-468: Was only a spiritual leader rather than the future Austrian leader. Leopold's faction within Austrian Nazism was underground in nature and frequently launched terrorist attacks. His position as an extremist who supported independence meant that he clashed with the pro- Greater Germany wing of Theodor Habicht and the constitutional pro-independence wing under Anton Reinthaller . On 19 June 1933, 32 auxiliary policemen in Krems were wounded by hand grenades in

870-712: Was promoted to Oberleutnant and assigned as an artillery officer in a mountain howitzer battery. Advanced to the rank of Hauptmann in January 1931, he became the commander of the 1st Feldjäger Battalion on 1 July 1931. Leopold's initial involvement in politics came in December 1918 when he joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria . However, by March 1919 he had switched sides to join Walter Riehl 's Deutsche Nationalsozialistische Arbeiterpartei and he became

900-728: Was released for lack of evidence. Rearrested on 5 May of the same year, he was interned in Wöllersdorf concentration camp until July. Leopold was appointed the Landesleiter of the banned Austrian Nazi Party on 29 January 1935 and the leader of all SA troops in Austria in June. However, he was again interned in Wöllersdorf later that month for distribution of propaganda pamphlets. Over a year later, on 11 July 1936, Hitler concluded an agreement with Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg , recognising Austria's sovereignty and agreeing that Austrian National Socialism

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