When war broke out in 1939, the British government was faced with a giant and immediate problem: what to do with the 73,000 Germans and Austrians living in Britain who had become “enemy aliens” overnight. The answer was mass internment, a policy authorised by Churchill days after he took office as prime minister in May 1940. Police around the country were dispatched to arrest male nationals of axis powers – which would soon include Italy – aged between 16 and 60 and cart them off to prison. Some of these internees would be sent on perilous voyages to Canada and Australia, but the majority were taken to camps on the Isle of Man. One of these, Hutchinson camp, is the subject of Simon Parkin’s excellent new book.
The policy of detaining civilians en masse without trial represents a dark chapter in Britain’s war. It grew out of the fear, stoked by the press, that “fifth columnists” had been sent to infiltrate the country and undermine British defences against the coming German invasion. Churchill realised as early as August that the threat was exaggerated, but by this time the arrests had been made, and many of the internees, who included women and children, would not be released for years. The most shameful aspect of internment was that it predominantly picked up Jewish refugees who had fled to Britain to escape the terror visited on them by Hitler’s stormtroopers.
