British Concentration Camps by Simon Webb

Author:Simon Webb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain
ISBN: 9781473846302
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

That there was something pretty unsavoury going on in Scotland during the Second World War and for some time after it, seems certain. Just what it was that was happening is less clear. The Polish army were definitely running camps there; camps which General Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government in exile, referred to as ‘concentration camps’. There were also penal institutions where prisoners were mistreated and even killed. Whether these places too were concentration camps or just ordinary, military detention barracks is impossible at this late stage to establish. The Polish army, directed by their government in London, were very keen to claim that anybody whom they wished to lock up was, or had been, a soldier in their army and therefore a person over whom they had legal jurisdiction under the terms of the Allied Services Act.

It is perhaps worth mentioning that if the Polish government in exile was desperately keen to prevent Poles from returning to their own country to work in support of the new, Moscow-backed administration there, then the communists were only too ready to blacken the name of the official government in exile. This was done by using such epithets as ‘fascist’ and also by referring to the use of ‘concentration camps’. That some of these claims were purely propaganda cannot be doubted. Even so, it is exceedingly odd that every single person whose name we now know who was detained in these places was Jewish. Even allowing for the fact that the Soviet Union was milking the situation for any advantage to their own position; it seems inescapably true that the Polish government in exile seemed very ready to lock up Jews in their special camps.

Ultimately, the only safe verdict to deliver on some of the more extreme stories emerging from those times is the old Scottish one of ‘Not Proven’. Enormous suspicion attaches itself to the actions of the Polish army in Britain when it came to the detention of their fellow countrymen, but it is not possible to say with any degree of certainty that all the sites at which we have looked were really concentration camps, in the sense that we have been using the expression. We will perhaps have to wait for more evidence to emerge, before we can say for sure what was going on at such places as Inverkeithing and Shinafoot.

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