Dan Snow's History Hit - Prison Camps in WW2 Britain

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

From the summer of 1940, approximately 30,000 so-called ‘enemy aliens’ were indefinitely sent to internment camps across Britain.Gripped by spy fever and the panic over the fall of France, the British government adopted an aggressive internment policy targeting a broad cross-section of Austrian and German passport holders who were then living in the UK. Many of these people were refugees who had fled the Nazi regime, only to find themselves once again a target of persecution.In this episode, we speak to Simon Parkin, author of Island of Extraordinary Captives, about the experience of the prisoners, the remarkable cultural and educational exchange within the camps as well as the campaign efforts that eventually led to their release.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Down to the Nose History. Today I'm going to find out more about a piece of history that embarrassingly I didn't know much about when I first heard about it on this podcast, where I get most of my education these days. I podcasted a few years ago with David Baddiel, a well-known British broadcaster and comedian and writer. He told me about how from the summer of 1940, sort of like 30,000 foreign nationals at the time known as enemy aliens were indefinitely sent to internment camps across Britain. There was a fear that they might be fifth columnists in the event of a German invasion. That's why I was thrilled the other day when I got sent a book by Simon Parkin, brilliant author. It's called Island of Extraordinary Captives, about the experience of these prisoners,

but also the remarkable cultural educational exchange within these camps, as well as the efforts that eventually got them all released. The British government, so gripped by spy fever and panicking about the fall of France and potentially Britain being the next domino, that anyone with an Austrian or German passport who was then in the UK was sent to the Isle of Man. If you're not familiar with the geography of this North Atlantic archipelago, the Isles, the Isle of Man sits right at the heart of that. It was once a Viking stronghold. It sits in the Irish Sea between Cumbria, Lancashire and Ireland. It is technically not part of the UK, I think I'm right in saying. I think the Queen is not the Queen there. She is

the Lord of Man, which I love. Anyway, so they were sent to the Isle of Man, which is a pretty bleak place. And bear in mind, most of these people with German and Austrian passports in the UK were here because they were refugees. They had fled the Nazi regime that was intent on imprisoning and would later want to kill them. Many of them were Jews. So it was a great chat to Simon Parkin asking all about the internment camps in Britain during World War II, in particular, of course, the Island of Extraordinary Captives, the Isle of Man as well. If you wish to listen to my podcast, David Baddiel, you can do so at History Hit TV. It's our digital history channel. We've got all the podcasts there without any of the ads. We've got hundreds of hours of history documentaries as well, all of them accessible for a very small subscription.

You just follow the link in the description of this podcast, and then you will be taken for a two-week free journey around History Hit TV. And after that, you'll probably want to subscribe because it's so brilliant. I hope you do. But before you do all that, before you go on that exciting journey, here's me talking to Simon Parkin about Britain's World War II internment camps. Simon, thanks very much for coming on the pod. Thanks so much for having me. So talk to me about how many Jewish refugees were arriving here in Britain at the end of the 1930s, before the war had started. In total, there were about 75,000 refugees made it into Britain. So actually far less than most people imagined, even at the time.

There were some polls done by mass observation. mass observation. And most of the sort of interviewees around Britain, when asked how many refugees and asylum seekers do you think we've let in, put the number anywhere between two and four million. So the fact it was only 70,000 was quite telling. It was extremely difficult to bring a person out of Germany and to get them into Britain at that time. So even though there were a number of refugee organisations and the Quakers and Jewish organisations working very hard to secure the right kind of paperwork, there were all manner of obstacles to doing so. So widespread resistance, both on the right and the left, you know, that sort of age old sense that Britain's already full up and there's not enough room for anyone that was going on. But also from trade unions, there was widespread unemployment

in Britain at the time. And so there was this reluctance to let hundreds of thousands of people in who might take those valuable jobs. Wow. We could have a whole episode on that then, dude. That's extraordinary. What happens though when war breaks out? Because technically these people now are members of a country with which Britain is now at war. Yeah, that's right. So the official term at the time for these individuals is enemy aliens. So that's sort of resident foreigners of a nationality with whom Britain's at war at that time. There was initially a general reluctance to intern enemy aliens at the start of the Second World War. This is because Britain had used internment

during the First World War, sent about 30,000 enemy aliens. I'll use that term even though I hate it and resist it in the book, but just for ease, I'll use it here. So during the First World War, Britain sent around 30,000 enemy aliens to the Isle of Man, and it had really been a disaster. Terrible conditions, been awful food. There'd been a riot in a canteen where some of the internees had sort of kicked up a fuss because the food they were being served was full of worms. Their guards, you know, really being inexperienced, closed the doors and then fired their rifles into the room, into the crowd. Six people died. So after the First World War, there's some investigations and the British

government and the various departments vow never to repeat internment again. So when the Second World War starts, we've got 70,000 refugees and many other enemy aliens living in the country. There's a sort of initial reluctance to imprison them or intern them in any way. So the first thing that happens is Britain organises very hastily tribunals all around the country. If you have a German or an Austrian passport, you have to go along to one of these tribunals. You can take a friend with you who can vouch for you. And you're basically interviewed by a senior member of the judiciary whose job is to find out if you're secretly a Nazi. At the end of the tribunal, you're then awarded a classification, either an A, B, or a C. If you're called a Category A, that means they

suspect you of being a Nazi sympathiser and you're carted off to an internment camp because there's no problem putting you behind barbed wire if that's the case. If you're a Category C, that means they don't find you to pose any risk. The only sort of impositions are that you can't own a bicycle, you can't own maps and you have to stay within a certain distance of your home. And then if they're not quite sure, then they give you a Category B. And so for the first few months of the war, most people are allowed to carry on pretty much as they were before, just with this label of Category C. And then in the spring of 1940, that all starts to change. So just quickly though, did people recognise the dissonance of going,

these people are refugees from Nazi Germany and Central Europe, they're therefore unlikely to be mega Nazi sympathisers? Yeah, you'd think so. And in fact, the documents were stamped often with refugee from Nazi oppression. So at a sort of institutional level, there was a distinction made here. And of course, you know, many refugees would make terrible spies because they didn't necessarily speak very good English. Far more likely that fascist sympathizers or agents would come from the invasion of Holland. Stories start coming back from the Nazi invasion of Holland that servants, many of whom were refugees, German and Austrian refugees, had come out of their houses while the paratroopers were being dropped from the air and had assisted the invasionary force. These stories are propagated throughout the British newspapers at that time and also in official reports. And they're sort of very quickly exaggerated and become tall tales, really.

Stories of people jumping out of planes dressed as nuns and all sorts of shenanigans going on that the newspapers lap up, obviously. Very good for selling newspapers. And so there suddenly becomes this shift of actually, hang on, we've got nearly 100,000 enemy aliens that we've allowed into our country. What if some of them are in fact working for the Gestapo in the way that it appears to have happened in Holland? What should we do about it? And that's really when the calls for mass internment start happening very regularly

from really all sides of the press, all manner of op-eds written every day saying, we need to intern the enemy aliens as quickly as possible. So this is mounting pressure, widespread suspicion of the refugees that hadn't been there even like two months earlier. And so Sir John Anderson, the Home Secretary at the time, has really resisted the idea of internment up to this point, but it gets to the point where he can no longer continue politically to resist this. And so throughout May, sort of almost day by day, it starts with the order to arrest any men with German or Austrian passports between the ages of 16 and 60. And then every day, that net expands until at the end of May. It's really anyone who is classed

category A, B or C, it doesn't matter what the judiciary said a few months earlier, the police are coming for you and you're going to be sent to one of the very many camps that have been set up all around Britain, but especially on the Isle of Man where there were 10 of these camps. But these are people, talk about re-traumatising, these are people who may have been in concentration camps in Germany and German-occupied territory before making their way to the UK. Yes, exactly. In fact, some of the individuals in Hutchinson Camp, which is the camp that I've written about in my book, had been not one but in two German concentration camps. This is in the 1930s, so before the sort of real systematic slaughter of Jews was underway, but even so, horrendous conditions. And to be

freed by that, to manage to escape to Britain, which in itself was a huge thing to have achieved, and then to essentially be arrested and imprisoned by your liberators is sort of temporal injustice to be imprisoned by the people who had freed you. And Simon, for all the people listening to this who have not been lucky enough to head to the Isle of Man, just paint a picture. I mean, where are they being sent's situated in the Irish Sea, about equidistant between the Irish coast and Liverpool. And in fact, the internees would travel via ferry from Liverpool often to the Isle of Man. From there, it's a ferry journey that takes a couple of hours, a little bit longer in wartime because they would have to zigzag to ensure they didn't get picked up by any U-boats. It's in the middle of the Gulf Stream, so it has quite a strange climate really. There's sort of palm trees there, but it's also got this sort of rugged landscape that you might associate with the moors in Devon, for example. And in fact, lots of the refugees complain of getting colds and having awful ailments because of the strange climate there.

It's probably most famous for having tailless cats. And in fact, interestingly, during the First World War, a chap called Joseph Pilates was interned on the Isle of Man. And he was sat there in his camp watching one of these cats doing its stretches. And that became the basis for him doing his Pilates movements that after he's released from internment, he then takes around the world. So it's not only sort of these cultural fruits that came up in the Second World War, but also from the First World War as well. You listen to Dan Snow's History, I'm talking about World War II internment camps. More coming up. Hello, I'm James Rogers and over on the History Hit Warfare podcast,

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My favourite expression about the Isle of Man that someone told me in Lancashire once is, from the summit of the Isle of Man, you can see six kingdoms. Man, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, and heaven. Very nice. I mean, I interviewed David Baddiel on this podcast a few years ago,

and he said his, I think it's his grandpa was there. And he said the Isle of Man became the kind of crop-throat capital of Western Europe at the time. Yeah, that's right, because many of the people who had fleed Germany and Austria were sort of high achievers. Not all of them, of course, but there were fated artists, musicians. Academics had been freed. Academics were some of the first people removed from their positions by the Nazis in 1933. And there'd been a very big effort in Britain by the Academic Assistance Council to try and bring as many into Britain as possible and find them positions in British universities. And so huge numbers of some of Britain's best lecturers ended up on the Isle

of Man in these camps. The usual protections of class and status just didn't really apply here. And it didn't matter if you were a baker or a miner, it was very likely that you were going to be rounded up with the Oxbridge professor. And indeed, that happened dozens of times over. So yeah, the Isle of Man becomes sort of a big prison island, really. There are these 10 camps. Hutchinson Camp, the one that I wrote about, had 1,200 men in it. They're sort of in requisition boarding houses. So it's not tents or anything like that, at least on the Isle of Man. And barbed wire is put up around these requisitioned houses. They're sort of boarding houses normally in which you might get 10 holiday makers. There's sort of 30, 35 men in each house, fairly cramped conditions. So of course, you know,

lots of domestic rivalries and troubles. But I think because in many of the camps, but especially in Hutchinson, there's this high density of really incredible people, extraordinary people, who realise they don't know how long they're going to be interned for, they don't know how long the war's going to go on for, who's going to win it, any of these things. So rather than just completely waste their time playing cards or whatever they decide to put on a schedules of lectures almost turn their camp into a university and in fact in hutchinson it was called hutchinson university there was a chap in the camp called bruno arons who was a an architect who had lectured at the bauhaus and he sort of sees some pockets of

people standing up in the square starting to give lectures he's like well this won't do we need to organize this a bit better so he draws up a schedule each day you know you can check it on the board see at what time who is giving a talk on Byzantine music or what bread is best for your health or cancer treatments from doctors who are in the camp as well. So, you know, just a hugely wide and diverse range of subjects. And the camp very quickly becomes this sort of cultural centre. And there's also a high density of artists who managed to convince the camp commandant to give them materials, and they start making art and putting on art exhibitions. It's quite difficult to imagine, but really it was quite an exciting place to be,

even though it was hugely miserable and stressful and depressing as well for the men. That was all going on as well. Well, was it? I mean, was it as bad as the First World War when you say fights broke out, the food was awful, the guards were awful? Had things changed from the First World War? It was certainly better organised, that's true. What was different, I think, is part of the reason so many Germans and Austrians have been arrested. Part of the reason for the mass internment policy was the fact that France had fallen to the Germans. And I suppose it's

difficult for us to imagine now, but in May, June 1940, most people believed that Britain was going to be invaded and that probably would be taken over. There were leaflets being distributed, what to do when the enemy arrives. And if you were a Jewish refugee who had been put in a prison camp on the Isle of Man, you sort of felt like, well, once Britain falls and the Germans get here, the British have already done the Germans' job for them. They've rounded up all the Jews in camps. They're just going to arrive on the island and start doing what they want with us. Some of the people in the camp were in the notorious Nazi black book, so they knew that they would be taken back to Germany to stand in one of these

faux trials or whatever. I mean, even though conditions were better, I think psychologically, it was very difficult. And there was a lot of fear. And in fact, there was a lot of suicide as well. There were in Hutchison camp, a couple of undertakers who went around and put on lessons for the men, what to do if the Isle of Man is invaded. This is how you can sort of kill yourself in the most quick and painless way to avoid being captured. So alongside this extraordinary awakening, cultural awakening and production of brilliant art and learning, there's also this very dark undertone as well, and a sense of grievance as well for many of these people who feel like, I am a victim of the Nazis. Why have you put me here? It's so unfair. Was there any justification at all? Did MI5 find any single one of them? Was it actually a spy in the end?

Well, in fact, prior to the war, MI5 had drawn up a list of people who they were certain were Nazi sympathisers or communists, who they were also equally worried about at that time. They distributed this list to police forces around the country and said, when war breaks out, open this envelope and arrest all the people in it. So about 500 individuals were arrested on the outbreak of war. These were seen as the dead cert category A's. We've got to get them locked up as soon as possible. Then MI5 has this, MI5 incidentally, who was for mass internment right from the beginning. And you can sort of have sympathy for them here. They were understaffed at the time, far too small for really the task that they were given, which was to protect Britain from potential threats within. Didn't have nearly enough people, agents working for them,

and also sort of were reluctant to put these decision-makings in the hands of judges who might not be predisposed to ask the right questions to root out a well-trained spy. So MI5, right from the start, called it a farce and was like we should be interning everyone right from the start once everyone is interned in the start of the summer 1940 they then have this job of sifting through interviewing as many people as they can they managed to get some informants among the internees to sort of feed back to them. Who among you are you suspicious of? There are individuals that are either sort of fair weather Nazis, I suppose you would describe it as. So if Britain lost the war, then they would just quietly say, oh yes, I was

always on the side of you guys. And then people who are a bit more in favour of working against the British. There's one individual in the camp that I write about his story in particular, which is based on sort of new documentation as a result of freedom of information requests at the National Archives, who purports to be an inventor, the inventor of this device called the Teffy phone, which is a recording device, dictaphone, that actually becomes very popular from the 1940s through to the 1960s. He purports to be the inventor of it, ends up in this camp, and is a fairly shady

character who many of the other internees distrust right away. But he's very skilled at ingratiating himself with the camp commandant, who gives him his own building in the camp and allows him to establish a technical school there to train up some of the young people. And this chap, Ludwig Vorschauer, becomes the subject of what is probably the most extensive investigation by MI5 of any internee during the war. The investigation lasts for about three years. You know, I don't want to give too much away, but the lies that he's weaved are sort of exposed by these two particular MI5 agents who are on the case. But suffice to say that the basic theory by the British government, or perhaps the British

tabloid press, that it was a hive of potential Nazi agents was never proven. No, it was certainly not true. It is a morally complex situation because on the one hand, it is sort of justifiable in Britain's position at that particular moment in the war where they're very concerned that they're about to be invaded. And there might be this network, this fifth column, as they were described at the time, residents in Britain poised to help with an invasion. So it's a very difficult, how do you reconcile that fact with civil liberties and I suppose this question of how far can a government go in the rightful defence of its democratic values before it starts to abandon them along the way is a question that every successive government in the world has to

ask itself and doesn't always come up with the cleanest of solutions which this certainly wasn't. When were the camps closed? Well, the petitions for being released start immediately. And in fact, the first internees leave the Isle of Man in early August, so about two months after they're arrested. Some of them on sort of deals that they agree to emigrate immediately to America, which a lot of people did. Then at some point, the British government says, well, another way you can get out is by joining the Pioneers, which was a sort of non-combat unit in the British Army. And about 4,000 internees go through that training and pass, and they're allowed to. Of course, this also makes a mockery of the policy, because if you truly believe that the people who are interned might

be spies, why would you then allow them to serve in the British army but nonetheless about 4,000 get out that way and then there's a number of refugee organizations working out of Bloomsbury House in London who are diligently preparing all the documentation and the cases for each individual in the camp to get them out tireless campaigners who achieve that. And so really, about 12 months after the mass internment begins, a large number have been freed. And then certainly all of the eminent people, people who can prove that they've achieved eminence in their particular profession have managed to get out because they often have people petitioning for them. But then there are also lots of the common man, I suppose you might say, who doesn't have these connections. And it takes them much longer to get out.

Some people remained interned for the entire war. The Hutchinson camp transforms into a prisoner of war camp in about 1943. So by that point, the number of internees on the island has really drastically shrunk from tens of thousands down to less than a thousand. But yes, some people don't get out until the end of the war for whatever reason. less than 1,000. But yes, some people don't get out until the end of the war for whatever reason. Perhaps they had a relative who served on the German army in the First World War and MI5 can't be sure to let them out. So yeah, there are certainly some tragic tales in there as well of people who spent the whole war interned. And there are people who went to Dachau or went to other infamous concentration camps and then ended up spending years in a camp in the UK.

It's a pretty dark chapter. That's right. And some as well, you know, those who joined the pioneers go on to serve with the British Army and then from 1942 are allowed to also serve in fighting units. And a number of internees from Hutchinson Camp serve in the Normandy landings. And even if you were too old to do that, then maybe you had other skills that were useful. So there was an optician who was interned in Hutchinson camp who designed the periscope that

was used to adapt the Sherman tanks to allow them to become amphibious vehicles in the D-Day landings. There was a cartoonist called Joseph Flatter who was employed by the Ministry of Defence to draw satirical cartoons that they could drop in leaflet form over Germany to sort of destroy German troop morale. So many of the internees put aside, I suppose, any resentment that they might have felt in order to join in and help, and they were very eager to do so. And is it possible to talk about how many of them were happy to settle in the UK and how many kind of kept heading west? What was the general feeling? Were they angered by their treatment at the hands of the British state? Yeah, I mean, this is something that is very interesting when you read the documentation, the diaries that are written in the camp and the letters that they

write to their loved ones, which are during the moment while they're in the camp are often very dark and very sad. There's an Oxford professor called Paul Jacobsthal who writes that it's a trauma what he's going through. But then at the end of the Second World War, the feelings are complicated, firstly, by the fact that for many of the internees, they choose to make their life in Britain, and they want to integrate as soon as possible. They change their names from their German spelling to English variations as quickly as possible. They try to get rid of their accents and just assimilate, I suppose, in the way that refugees often do. So they're,

you know, perhaps predisposed not to dwell too much on what happened to them. And then, of course, there's the information that starts to come out after the war about the Nazi treatment of Jews and what happened in the camps. And I suppose the contrast between what happened in Britain, which was a policy that was driven by fear, compared to what happened in Germany, which was a policy driven by hatred, that sort of sets the internment chapter in a different light for many of the men. And in later years, their sort of ideas and notions about what they went through soften. Some of them made lifelong friendships and found work as a result of the relationships they made in the camp.

So it becomes this very nuanced, complex thing, as is often the case. Well, thank you for steering us through it, and well done for writing this wonderful book. It landed on my desk the other day. I said, we've got to get this on the pod. It's an unbelievable story. So thank you, Simon.

What is the book called? It's called The Island of Extraordinary Captives. Brilliant. Going by it, everyone. It's perfect. Simon, thank you very much. What is the book called? It's called The Island of Extraordinary Captives. Brilliant. Go and buy it, everyone. It's perfect. Simon, thank you very much for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of dan snow's history i really appreciate listening to this podcast i love doing these podcasts it's a highlight of my career it's the best thing i've ever done and your support your listening is obviously crucial for that project if you did feel like doing me a favor if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review give a rating obviously a good one ideally then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it we obviously depend on listeners

depend on more and more people finding out about it depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in really appreciate it thank you you