One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps by Andrea Pitzer

Author:Andrea Pitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: War, History, Holocaust, Military, Politics, Political Science, Genocide, War Crimes, Non-Fiction
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2017-09-18T23:00:00+00:00

5. Arendt’s experience was repeated again and again, not just in France, but around the globe. Despite the British government’s assessment that internment of civilians in the First World War had been a mistake, the mistake was apparently too tempting and politically convenient not to duplicate.

As German forces rolled through Western Europe with ease, British leaders lived in fear of amphibious invasion. It was not an outlandish concern for England during the summer of 1940, but the government’s hysterical response followed the same route taken after the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915. If anything, the government’s response was worse in the Second World War, because Britain had, in theory, learned from its prior experience. The nation had surveyed the internment program in place during the First World War and decided that a better policy would be to assign a board to assess the risk posed by each enemy alien instead of committing to mass internment.

Under that policy, German and Austrian aliens in the United Kingdom had been required to register at the beginning of the war, after which they were segregated into three classes. Category A included 569 known Nazi sympathizers and those who had been assessed as espionage risks. This group faced immediate internment. Category B held approximately 6,700 aliens whose status was not clear. This group was monitored and was refused permission to own cameras and other items. Assigned to Category C were more than 66,000 enemy aliens judged to be no threat at all. More than 50,000 of Category C aliens were specifically understood to be Jewish refugees in flight from the Nazis.20

The policy of selective internment was followed for the first nine months of the war despite rising calls for mass detention. Critics of this more cautious policy believed that Norway had fallen due to a fifth column of spies and that the same strategy could topple Western Europe and Britain. Even normally level-headed journalists folded spy fever into their copy, offering observations that “now it is difficult to separate the genuine refugee from Nazi persecution from the Nazi agent posing as such.”21

When Germany invaded France in May 1940, the measures protecting refugees were abandoned. Neville Chamberlain resigned, and Winston Churchill became prime minister. Two days later, British security forces arrested some 3,000 German and Austrian enemy aliens, regardless of their categorization.22 In short order, the total number of German and Austrian detainees had doubled. The following month, when war with Italy became official, Winston Churchill told officers to “Collar the lot!” adding 4,000 Italians to the interned population.23 The hastily improvised arrangements led to prisoners arriving before facilities were completed, as well as misunderstandings about the identities of the internees. The sight of Orthodox Jews in their distinctive clothing on their way to a camp near Liverpool led an adjutant to observe, “I never knew so many Jews were Nazis.”24

The Isle of Man, home to tens of thousands of internees during the First World War, opened its gates again. This time, however, British authorities decided that the island was not sufficient for detention purposes.

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