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).
