Early one Sunday in May 1940, Fabius Gross was arrested at his home in Edinburgh. Gross, a 33-year-old, Austrian-born academic, was tall and lanky and mild of manner. He wore a pair of thin-rimmed, perfectly circular spectacles and a modest, brown suit. Gross walked calmly outside to a waiting police van, a wiry figure between grim-faced officers.
Two days earlier, Winston Churchill had become prime minister of the United Kingdom. After the outbreak of the war in 1939, panic about German spies living in Britain spread across the country. Much of the frenzy was whipped up by the press including, among others, the Daily Mail, which enthusiastically joined the call to arrest German and Austrian refugees. On his second day in office, Churchill ordered the arrest and internment, without trial, of thousands of “enemy aliens”, mostly on the Isle of Man.
