internment

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internment of civilian nationals belonging to the opposing side was undertaken with varying degrees of severity by all the belligerent powers, though in Brazil some Japanese communities remained unmolested and even managed to improve their lot. Internment was also usually the fate of the armed forces personnel of combatant nations who, through the hazards of war, accidentally found themselves in a neutral country, and the Germans interned a number of prominent politicians of occupied countries, some of them in concentration camps.

The Geneva Conventions did not cover non-combatant enemy aliens. However, at the start of the war the International Red Cross Committee obtained from belligerent countries an agreement that interned civilians, including merchant seamen, should have the same protection as prisoners-of-war. It was therefore sometimes better for civilians to be interned as their camps were inspected, and they received mail, food parcels, and other forms of relief, while those who merely suffered restrictions of their freedom did not have these advantages. In Italy, for example, enemy aliens were banished to small mountain villages where sufficient food and warm clothing were hard to obtain. Not for nothing were they known as isolati.

In Germany and the UK only those thought to constitute a danger were immediately interned when war was declared in September 1939, the remainder being allowed to return to their own countries. However, in France male refugees from Germany and what had been Austria were interned immediately and when the Germans launched their May 1940 offensive (see FALL GELB) fear of fifth columnists led to a wave of arrests, some quite unjust, in Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, resulting in the dispatch of trainloads of civilians to internment camps near the Pyrenees. After the fall of France, when these countries had been overrun by the Germans, male civilians of Allied countries were confined to internment camps, or Ilags (Interniertenlager), in France and Germany, but most women remained free. However, in the Channel Islands German policy was much harsher, and in 1942–3 2,350 men, women, and children who had not been born there were sent to internment camps in Germany.

When war broke out special tribunals in the UK classified all enemy aliens into three categories. Those in ‘A’ (569) were interned as a possible security risk, those in ‘B’ (6,782) were subject to certain restrictions, while those in ‘C’ (66,000) remained without restrictions, 55,457 of this last category being recognized as refugees from Nazi oppression. But in May 1940 rumours about fifth columnists altered the perception the British had of aliens in their midst. The home secretary, John Anderson (1882–1958), urged on by the press and the military, had every male alien between 16 and 70 removed from designated ‘protected areas’ around most of the coastline, and all German and Austrian nationals living there were interned. Internment of all ‘B’ category male Germans and former Austrians, aged 16–60, followed and after France fell nearly all ‘C’ category males were also interned.

Many internees in the UK were confined to camps on race courses, or in partially completed housing estates, or were sent to the Isle of Man. But some were shipped abroad and when one ship, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed 661 people died. When the surviving internees reached Canada genuine refugees initially had to live with Nazi supporters. Internees were also shipped to Australia in the Dunera, and these suffered humiliating conditions and treatment, many having their possessions stolen or thrown overboard by their British guards.

This mass internment and deportation caused an outcry in parliament and from August 1940 internees began to be released. By February 1941 more than 10,000 had been freed and by the following summer only 5,000 remained in the camps. Many of those released subsequently served with the British armed forces.

Within the first few days of Japan and the USA entering the war in December 1941 some 3,846 Germans, Italians, and Japanese had been arrested in the USA as ‘dangerous enemy aliens’—though the criteria used by the FBI (see USA, 6) to label them thus remain unknown to this day—and Japanese-Americans were later forced to move from the West Coast and were interned inland as were Japanese-Canadians. In the Philippines Japanese civilians were not well treated—five were killed by their Filipino guards after an air raid—which resulted in American civilians receiving similar treatment when they were interned in the Philippines after Japanese occupation of the islands. But until the treatment of interned Japanese-Americans became known the 12,500 US citizens in Japanese-occupied countries were often ignored. Very few lost their liberty entirely, and in Shanghai Americans still retained their legal rights, but by March 1943 all citizens of Allied countries had been interned.

The number of British and Dutch civilians trapped by the Japanese invasion of European colonies far outnumbered American internees and Japanese treatment of them was immediately harsh. There were 30,000 Dutch internees in Java alone; 3,250 British in Hong Kong's Stanley peninsula camp, and another 4,500 in Singapore, including about 300 children; while those civilians, about 1,500 or so, who fled from Singapore by boat were eventually interned on Sumatra. As with so many prisoners-of-war in the Far East, many did not survive their ordeal.See also women at war.

Bibliography

Collar, H. , Captive in Shanghai (Oxford, 1990).
Gilman, L. and and P. , ‘Collar the Lot!’ (London, 1980).
Pearl, C. , The Dunera Scandal (Sydney, 1983).

internment. In the 18th and 19th centuries detention without trial had been provided for by the suspension in times of emergency of habeas corpus. Following the rising of 1916, 1,841 persons were interned according to regulations made under the Defence of the Realm Acts. The same regulations were used to intern about 100 Sinn Féin and Irish Volunteer activists between May 1918 and March 1919. A fresh wave of arrests, initiated by the army in January 1920, led to the internment of over 250 ‘rebel leaders’. Following ‘Bloody Sunday’ (21 Nov. 1920), the army (now acting under Restoration of Order in Ireland Act regulations) made more widespread use of internment, detaining a total of 4,454 persons between January and July 1921.

During and after the Civil War the Free State government, acting first under martial law powers then under the Public Safety Acts of 1923 and 1924, made extensive use of internment, the numbers detained peaking at 11,480 on 1 July 1923. Internment was next used, under the Offences against the State and Emergency Powers Acts, to detain over 500 republican activists (as opposed to over 600 imprisoned for offences under the former act) during the Second World War. More were interned during the IRA border campaign of 1957–62.

In Northern Ireland internment under the Special Powers Act was used to detain 728 men, almost all nationalists, between May 1922 and December 1924. Around 320 were detained during the Second World War, and an average of 150 during 1957–9. Interment was reintroduced, in response to the renewed Northern Ireland conflict, in 1971. The initial wave of arrests, on 9 August, was based on inaccurate identifications of key activists and was accompanied by methods of ‘interrogation in depth’ later categorized in a government inquiry as ‘brutality’, and by the European Court of Human Rights as ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’. The operation provoked widespread nationalist alienation while wholly failing to curb republican violence. 2,060 republicans and 109 loyalists were detained in the period up to December 1975, when internment was suspended, the enabling legislation lapsing in 1980.

internment in international law, detention of the nationals or property of an enemy or a belligerent. A belligerent will intern enemy merchant ships or take them as prize , and a neutral should intern both belligerent ships that fail to leave its ports within a specified time and belligerent troops that enter its territory. The practice of detaining persons considered dangerous during a war is often called internment, even though they may not be enemy nationals. In World War II the United States detained persons of Japanese ancestry and German or Italian citizenship in relocation centers . The Geneva Convention of 1949 on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War provides for the unrestricted departure of enemy aliens from the territory of a belligerent at the outbreak of conflict, and the humane treatment of those aliens who choose to remain.