The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior by Ernest Robert Zimmermann

Author:Ernest Robert Zimmermann [Ernest Robert Zimmermann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781772120295
Publisher: The University of Alberta Press

VIII

A Canadian Conundrum

Deception, Anti-Semitism, Paterson Mission and Partial Solutions

DURING THE PERIOD FROM JULY to September 1940, life in the enclosure at Camp R was unfolding more or less as it was expected to do under the guidance of multiple standing orders, regulations, and the relevant Articles of the Geneva Convention of 1929. During this time, as well, increased contact between prisoners and Commandant Berry and his staff eventually revealed the true nature of the inmates. As early as 10 July, General Panet heard from Camp R that about 200 of the newly delivered prisoners were refugees from Nazi Germany, Jews and true anti-Nazis. Ostensibly they were friends of the Allies in the fight against Nazism and certainly not Nazi POWs or enemies of the Allies. At about the same time, Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs, Dr. O.D. Skelton, who apparently was petitioned directly, received several autobiographical statements from refugee internees in Camp R.[1]

Obviously these prisoners were not what they were supposed to be. Moreover, observing the schoolboys and elderly men, it became increasingly obvious that they were utterly passive militarily and incapable of posing a military risk to anyone’s national security. They were not the crack elite parachutists that had been promised. Observing the situation in Camp R, one could readily conclude that the camp scene illustrated Canada’s conundrum in microcosm: a small group of perhaps 200 unwanted, unexpected, potential Jewish-German-Austrian immigrants had been mistakenly categorized and then deported and dumped in Northwestern Ontario. What was to be done?

The process of enlightenment unfolded in Camp R much as it did in other Canadian civilian internment camps housing the recently unloaded “dangerous enemy aliens” from Britain. The local military camp authorities in Quebec and Ontario rapidly realized that they were guarding not dangerous Nazis and fifth columnists, but mostly Jewish and anti-Nazi refugees from Nazi Germany, schoolboys, students, rabbis, professors, professionals and artists.[2] Soon the realization of the true situation spread from the camps to the central government agencies in Ottawa, and awareness arose that Great Britain had engaged in a great deception of the Dominion of Canada over the true nature and character of these interned “dangerous enemy aliens” and “Nazi leaders” who needed to be deported to Canada. Instead of military security risks, Prime Minister Churchill’s government had dispatched to Canada, according to British records, a bounty of 2,108 German or Austrian Category A, single male internees, including circa 1,700 enemy merchant seamen, an additional 2,290 Category B and C Germans and Austrians, 407 Italian civilian single male internees and 1,948 genuine prisoners of war, making a total of 6,743.[3] Most (85 per cent) of the German and Austrian civilian internees were refugees from Nazi Germany.

Ottawa’s first response to the news from the various internment camps was astonishment: what was received was not what was expected. Subsequent responses have led historians to conjecture whether Ottawa was anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic or just anti-refugee.[4] Such inferences often require fine distinctions. Anti-Jewish attitudes discriminate against Jews on religious or ideological grounds, while

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