My grandparents and father were interned in one of these camps (not sure if in this specific one). I don't know how well known it is, I never saw any discussion about it and only heard about it in family stories.

On the one hand it's understandable that the British were suspicious of German nationals, but I'm not sure how big a threat my toddler father was to The War Effort™.

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Ironically, German POWs detained in England lived in pretty good conditions, and only one ever escaped. In some places, they were allowed out daily on the honor system to work in villages and on farms

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/us/14nazis.html

Then America gave Nazi's a safe haven lbs

My grandfather was interned and then got out of the camps into 'the kings most loyal enemy aliens' which was the pioneer corp.

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Something similar happened to many Romani people after the Nazis were defeated

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/roma-holocaust

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What camp are you talking about? I don’t know of any that mixed POWs with non military internment

I listened to a whole podcast episode years ago about German POWs in the U.S., where they started being shipped when the U.K. started running out of space and resources for them. By most accounts, the POWs thought they had it pretty good. They were given paid work in factories and farms and often made friends with the locals. It seems like they were mostly just happy to be out of the war and well fed. They had camp bands, sports clubs and the like. I think most of them were just poor kids who had been conscripted; the actual Nazi ideologues were held in much more secure prisons.

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You were responding to a comment about POW camps though

That's your bad for assuming redditors have competent reading skills

The Allies were quick to snatch up as many Nazis as they could after the war.

German POWs were treated better by the Americans than the African American soldiers.

>but I'm not sure how big a threat my toddler father was to The War Effort™.

Have you ever seen what an unsupervised toddler can do?

There is a reason why we put them behind bars to this day.

We just got wiser on the barbed wire.

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gay people too

Presumably it was his parent/s that were, not unreasonably, considered a security concern, and keeping him with them was preferable to taking an infant away from their parents.

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So did the Soviets. Operation Paperclip had competition on the Soviet side of the wall.

Of course we probably won't ever see documents about it since they were either destroyed or Russia would implode due to their current reasoning for the Ukraine conflict.

Same thing happened with LGBTQ people who were in the camps: No liberation.

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Theres a war in Albania?

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I can't remember which of Ambrose's books it's in, but an African American Soldier recounts how he was being shipped somewhere (to/from training probably) and stopped to get food. There were German POWs eating in the store but he and his fellow black soldiers were taken around the back and fed out the back door because of the color bar.

In the case of the UK, they rounded up every German and Austrian citizen. No matter if you were just arriving or had been living in the UK for years/decades. People who were organizing opposition to the Nazis from the UK for five years already were interned. Didnt last long for most of them, but still pretty stupid.

It happened to Hungarians like my grandfather too.

Edit: not that anyone ever talked about it (or anything else from this period, for that matter). I learned it from my father shortly before his death, although the phrase he used was "undesirable alien" rather than "enemy alien". He also told me that the only time his parents spoke Hungarian in his presence was when they argued. But he dismissed the idea that there was a link between how they were treated and his parents' determination to bring up their sons to be so thoroughly English; assimilation was just the norm at that time.

These events helped model the modern UNHCR, much of it with British encouragement and input.
Those were febrile times, paranoia was high. It's a times like that we need guidance from more level-headed legislation.

I mean lets be fair, the Soviets pursuit of Denazification was way more stringent and effective than the Wests, lets not try and pretend otherwise. The East German state was basically build from scratch because of their denazification processes.

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>It wasn't 2022.

This not only implies that it wasn't an injustice in 1940 and that nobody was against it at the time, but that in the same context today, the British government wouldn't intern refugees from enemy combatant states.

Think about what you're saying.

You might dis/like this - though it's worth noting there was segregation on the USA bases in the UK and they requested that business impose segregation, though that request was generally met with negative response both from government and locals.

https://youtu.be/SyYSBBE1DFw?t=1518

Did it cover the murder of Corporal Kunze at Camp Tonkawa in Oklahoma? He had been passing information to the US through the camp doctor, and one day the guy he’s been working with wasn’t there, and he still passed a note to a doctor. That doctor didn’t speak much German and asked another POW what it said, and that gave away the game. Later that night, he was beaten to death by multiple men. Those men were then picked up on based on the fact that they had blood on their uniform no one ever spoke about what happened, and they had a trial and were found guilty and sent to Ft. Leavenworth, and then, as soon as the war was over all of them were hung.

I literally have no clue how people like you ever had any kind of discussion. I notice you didn't bring up my omission of the water quality of the Congo in the years 1974-1975 either, silly me for keeping a post about a specific subject and topic and not embracing every part of history in my post.

We are simply talking about Denazification here, not the quality, sustainability or legitimacy of the German States.

It implies that in the early 1900s there wasn't close to as much immigration as there is now and big brutal wars were kinda common. Having 20,000 immigrants or refugees coming from the country attacking you might be a little overwhelming and dangerous. The only thing they could do was to isolate people. There likely wasn't a decision to punish the Germans because they were Jews. It was likely to protect the Allies. Everyone was on board because they might have lost the war otherwise. You or I don't know the complete context of camps, we weren't there. And 'you' have no idea how '1940 you' would react to the camps.

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And many of the high profile nazis were not only spared, but smuggled out, saved and given wealth and great jobs by the US. Google Operation Paperclip

Edit: Shame on you downvoting just because you don't like the history. It's people like you, willfully ignorant, who suppress and ignores history, enabling it to happen again and again. Shame on you, defenders of nazis.

Can't really say the Soviets at that time were much better than the Nazis. Definitely worse for the Germans than the French were.

Also some were shipped to Canada where they were model prisoners and were allowed out to help on farms and they even obtained university degrees via correspondence. A lot emigrated to Canada and I remember once saying that being taken POW was the best thing that ever happened to him in his life.

What was funny though was that the Germans created their own stricter camp rules

I didn't dispute the reasons for internment, so I'll say it again: you also implied that in the same context today, the British government wouldn't intern refugees from enemy combatant states.

To answer your second point, there was absolutely opposition to the camps at the time, from mainstream British newspapers, members of the public, and from the internees. It doesn't matter that I wasn't there; there's more than enough evidence that a number of people were against it at the time.

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Yep, one of the POW’s was a guy named Bert Trautmann, detained in Belgium then transported to Essex, he was the equivalent of a sergeant in the Luftwaffe with the 35th infantry and received an Iron Cross, he later became a professional footballer for Manchester City, he even has a statue in the general area of the stadium.

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> it's worth noting there was segregation on the USA bases in the UK and they requested that business impose segregation

Yeah, that didn't go well in other countries where US forces were either. :)

"American servicemen... objected to Māori soldiers also using the Club, and on 3 April 1943 began stopping Māori soldiers from entering." Battle of Manners Street (Wellington, NZ).

(Edited: typo)

Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bamber_Bridge

I mean if you wanted to make that point just make it man, no reason to beat around it so much. Either way I would simply say the Stasi learning from the Gestapo is no different from the Gestapo learning from the Cheka, who probably learned things from Russian Empire police, who probably learned things from European colonial policing. Secret polices are just a tool of authoritarianism I wouldn't suggest one learning from another is a continuation of persistence of a specific ideology, you could probably trace a lot of the stuff the Gestapo were doing back to revolutionary France.

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Still nothing on that ship full of Jews running away from Germany... that USA turn back from their port, back to Germany

One of my grandma's friends was British and was in Germany when the war broke out. Foreigners from enemy countries were usually rounded up and put into concentration camps (not death camps, that's just the name for them) so they got sent to one for British people. They would write each other through the red cross and there are pictures from the camp. They apparently had plays and carnivals and sports games. Not saying that not having freedom of movement wasnt bad but if I was a civilian prisoner of war it doesn't sound half bad. Near the end it obviously got bad, food and supplies became rationed, but they survived in good health before being repatriated.

I alluded to it but got downvoted by morons who, for some reason, dislike historical facts in a history sub, go figure.

The ship was the SS Drotnighelm iirc, or something like that, and the refugees on it were not the last to be refused entry into the US. The times were very highly charged, and everyone was paranoid, and I guess the decisions seemed sensible at the time, but now looking back with the advantage of the passage of time, we might think that better options should have been found, like the Brits did with the camps.

>What was funny though was that the Germans created their own stricter camp rules

Your probably referring to the fact the Nazis in the camps attempted to maintain loyalty amongst the non-nazi members who rather enjoyed not being on the front lines anymore by harsh extrajudicial discipline.

However, rank is still maintained in POW camps, POWs must follow orders of superior officers and nominally they are under the command of their superior officers who are themselves obligated to follow the lawful commands of the camp commanders. So discipline was largely handled by the prisoners rather than the guards. At the same time enlisted guards had to show superior rank prisoner a certain amount of respect and enlisted prisoners had to show superior rank camp staff the same amount of respect they would their own superior rank officers. Being in a camp wasn't like being in a prison, it was like being in the army but instead of doing combat your being kept busy because you aren't allowed to move freely.

59000 initially, then 80000 more and 10000 orphans. I deeply wish more were saved.

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Sorry.i misunderstood.

Internment camps wouldn't happen today. Not the slightest chance.

And I shouldn't say everyone. There is always a certain portion of the population that are fighting for rights. Tens of thousands of Germans just showed up so let's say the vast majority didn't want Germans wandering around possibly spying.

My great uncle used to muse how the German pows had better treatment than he did as a black man.

Somewhat unrelated but still related so thought I'd point out that roughly half of Holocaust victims were Slavic people

I mean, Britain had its own "colour bar" but that was nothing compared to Jim Crow. (I really only know of it because sports writer Reg Gutteridge mentioned d it in the Randolph Turpin chapter of his book *Masters Of Boxing.*)

The tendency of Americans to interpret issues in other countries in American terms.

Yup. I remember one story where the town by one of these camps had a dance between the townspeople and Nazi prisoners.

Be aware, at this same time, American citizens of Japanese descent were being put in internment camps, and they sure as hell were not having dances.

Unrelated. You're talking about the Nazi death camps, this article is about concentration camps in Britain.

There was definitely racism, though at that point in time, there wasn't any racism enshrined in law (though some laws did come about over a decade later regarding immigration from non-white parts of the commonwealth) however there was no protections from racism. Racism in Britain was very much on a case by case basis and while I don't want to diminish how it was in the early 40s, it was considerably worse come the 50s as a reaction to several large waves off immigration (which were also spread across more cities than previous waves) which also turned racism into a domestic political issue.

Partially, and partially simply expecting that things worked (or should work) the same in those other countries, I should think.

While not wanting to downplay or ignore racial issues outside of the US, by the time the Americans arrived on British shores the UK army was desegregated, and volunteers of all colours from all over the Empire had already been involved in fighting.

The New Zealand army was also desegregated, (and the Māori Battalion had an excellent reputation from service in Crete and North Africa) and while I've little doubt there were a fair number of racists and bigots among the white Kiwis, a colour bar in Wellington was a step too far. And while there were a number of scuffles and brawls, the NZ Government also put considerable effort into reducing tensions, arranging for US servicement to visit Marae and Māori cultural events.

Despicable, just like the Japanese in the US.

“Once zee rockets go up, who cares vhere zhey come down? Zat’s not my department” says Wehner von Braun

My dad lived in Orange county during WWII and the family would be driving along through the orchards, following a pickup truck full of German POWs singing German folk songs en route to working in the orchards.

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I find it ironic that there was a POW camp in the US near Hutchinson Naval Air Base. I was told it held German pilots and air crew. My Dad was stationed there in '39 or '40 before being shipped to Pearl Harbor. Many of the locals were of German ancestry but had nothing to do with the POWs.

Its nicely said in the book Modernism and the Holocaust. Hitler wanted Jews out of Germany so the first thing they tried was to ask surrounding countries and of course nobody wanted them, then they planned sending them all to Madagascar (not joking) and once that failed there was only one option left to satisfy Hitlers goal and the rest is history.

Yes, we all know about it. It was the obvious and rational choice that had to be made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St.Louis#The%22Voyage_of_the_Damned%22

Will look into it. I learnt about segregation in the US armed forces from watching Ken Burns' The War.

you're our enemy but atleast you aren't our N*** friend

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“All of them were hung” hey man, I’m getting a very different mental image than what you intend

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The reason he's got a statue is that he played during the era of no substitutions and so played through a broken neck while winning the FA Cup for City.

Different Axis PoWs were kept in different camps and whilst they all were scheduled to work on farms, they were kept separate and not allowed to mix...

Except, of course, when they did by mistake... Sauce - my dad got a bollocking for simultaneously accepting both German and Italian PoWs for work detail on his farm.

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FWIW, my dad guarded Herman Göring during the Nazi trials in Nuremberg. He had the same complaint.

With the difference that the US government recognizes the treatment of the Japanese in the US, has apologized and is paying reparations. (Well all is not golden, they still rejected Jewish refugees before and during the war).

The same cannot be said about the UK.

I wonder how Canada was on that front.

No. It wasn’t a numbers game. It was a knowledge game.

They were “snatching” up as much technical knowledge as possible. But then again, the German scientists and engineers didn’t need to be snatched…they were actively trying to be “captured” by American and British forces before the Soviets could (literally) snatch them.

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my great grandfather surrendered to British forces and was taken to britan as a POW, in Scotland specifically, and he was allowed to go to a local village, and after the war he worked on the railways, I don't really know that much about him, but he apparently never returned to Germany,

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They actually did have dances at Manzanar. http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/nikkeialbum/items/1630/

And to Australia. There was a TV series made about it called The Dunera Boys.

I’m in aus too. Did you know that during the war Japanese reconnaissance planes flew in land as far as Uluru/Ayers Rock, and it was suppressed from the papers to avoid public panic?

The reason I mentioned it is I can’t help but laugh because the pilots must have thought they were going crazy, there’s just miles and miles of absolutely nothing and even today Japanese people who visit are stunned by the scale of distance out there.

I’m in Adelaide and one morning in the city a Japanese couple in a Toyota Camry wagon stopped next to me and asked ‘ excuse me please which way is it to Ayers Rock?’. I swear on my life this is a true story.

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Yeah I don't think your toddler father was the one they were concerned about. Did you never consider the idea that the German government might ask one or two of its citizens to... Oh, I don't know, lie for espionage purposes?

Japanese troops also landed in WA but turned back before encountering anyone

oh yeah… Are you a fan of Mark felton’s channel?

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My dads family used to run a hotel and he told me a story of a long time resident thats pretty sad.

He was a pole who was pressed into the russian army after they hung his family, then captured and pressed into the german army. He was then captured by the english and sent to a Scottish POW camp who tortured him.

I’ve watched it a little bit, very informative but not a huge fan of his delivery style.

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There was a major breakout from a POW camp near Bridgend, South Wales right as the war was coming to a close.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-51755803

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I’m not familiar with the geography of Australia, how far is Adelaide from Ayers Rock?

I know the old saying is that pictures are hung, people are hanged. Suppose really we need a new version. They can be hung or hanged but they're having a drastically different weekend off being publicly hung.

It's probably not as informative as you think it is. He is a proper historian, but his YouTube channel is just full of 'extraordinary' tales which have been rushed through with little proper research, which is why he can post so many of them. He's also been caught outright plagiarising other people's work and just reading verbatim from a WW2 enthusiast forum.

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Nearly 2000 km. They very probably could have got lost and died. Their vehicle was empty.
I told them not to attempted, and to ask about it at the tourism office.
I told my mother about this and she told me about her friend her in Japan whose child didn’t walk on grass until they were about 10.
She said it’s not standard like that but they would have expected a level of population density like Japan, with fuel stations and good roads all the way there. This was before smart phones as well.
I used to drive to roxby downs from Adelaide, which is much closer and it’s still scary to think of being lost out there and running out of fuel

My wife is from Amarillo and a group of Germans ended up there. There’s a church they built you can still visit. It’s pretty cool. Everything your podcast said her older relatives echoed. These people, mainly men, lived in the Texas panhandle and worked. Pretty wild.

In the US there was a similar camp too:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/nyregion/oswego-jewish-refugees-world-war-two.html

During the 2015 refugee crisis, hundreds of thousands of people were placed in internment camps across Europe, one of the most notable being the 'Calais Jungle' in France. So, one, this establishes that internment camps are still to this day legitimised policy responses to an influx of refugees.

Secondly, Russia has been interning Ukrainian refugees in camps since it invaded the country last February, where they are tortured before being 'filtrated' into Russia. Bosnian refugees were systematically tortured in Serbian refugee camps in the 1990s. In 1974, Paramali Forest camp was set up in Cyprus to take in Greek Cypriot refugees after Turkey invaded the island. So, two, the three most recent examples of European nations interning refugees during times of war show that there's no reason why an internment camp 'wouldn't happen today'.

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Internment and concentration camps are the same thing.

> "for political prisoners and members of national or minority groups who are confined for reasons of state security, exploitation, or punishment, usually by executive decree or military order."

There is a difference between death camps and internment/concentration.

There was a similar case here in Arizona.

America is always and forever bad. The virtues of our forebears must never be highlighted. Only their sins and shortcomings should be pointed out.

>"Hanged, Ami. Your father was not a tapestry."

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My grandfather has stories from the family farm in Idaho where they had German POWs work. It wasn't a terrible system, there wasn't armed guards and barbed wire, just that these farms are the middle of nowhere and the closest decent sized city is over a hundred miles away.

>As incredible as America's own internment of Japanese-Americans. George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu, was actually born in one of those camps.

I would argue it's more incredible since the German Jews had a better reason to not be on their motherland's side in this war.

Really? I thought there was only one other murder of a POW by POWs and that was in Georgia.

so who slipped him the suicide pills?

He didn’t know. Wasn’t his watch. All he did was have a three minute egg timer. Every time the sand ran out, he had to open a little window to observe the general eating his catered meals, reading books from his library or writing letters. As long as he’s not dying, close the little door and flip the egg timer over. Such was the life of an E-2 in the Big Red 1…after the war.

I'd imagine another concern was less what the prisoners would do and more what the public would do, its not much of a secret that there was a lot of misguided animosity

That had to be quite an experience. Despite being a huge monster, I bet he was very charismatic and tried to manipulate the guards for stuff.

> I think most of them were just poor kids who had been conscripted; the actual Nazi ideologues were held in much more secure prisons.

Actual nazi idealogues were rare. Those atrocities were committed by Germans for the sake of Germany. Regular Germans were pretty happy with the nazis until they ran out of countries to rob and the people they'd tried to enslave started to come after them for revenge.

The Army was desegregated but they had a Maori battalion?

I think that had more to do with not wanting foreigners to tell them what to do. It wasn't a matter of domestic policy (in Britain anyway), but the Brits definitely imposed segregation for no other reason than they felt like it.

The UK forcibly limited Jewish immigration (fleeing refugees) to the middle east through immigration policies made with locals in exchange for war resources

Let's also not pretend that the racism of Nazis would have been a problem in most cases in the US of the 40's. (not to mention that Nazi Germany was "inspired" by the US in regards to certain things...)

The same is true for Germans/Germany. While the NSDAP certainly fueled it but core elements of that ideology were common enough within the population, the NSDAP (and Hitler) simply managed to focus all the bad stuff.

The Nazis are sometimes made into these super villains and people are quick to say "x wasn't REALLY a Nazi" but the reality of the time was that it really didn't need much to be in line with Nazi ideology and that didn't require for you to constantly think about industrial scale genocide which is really the thing that sets apart the Nazis/NSDAP from the other reactionary/right wing groups of its time (and even that might have been down to a lack of ability/opportunity and especially scale, not like you can't find at least somewhat similar examples in the time period).

From one historical thing I watched a while ago I think one of the guards of Göring said how he requested a container of hair gel that he previously possessed. The guard didn't think much of it, Göring had been pleasant and so the guard got it for him, unaware of the pills hidden inside.

There was a case in AZ where some POWs tried to escape and float down the salt river, which was dry at the time. They were captured, and at some point one of them was murdered by the rest for being an informant. The perps were executed.

https://www.arizonahighways.com/blog/infamous-murder-phoenix-pow-camp

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I believe there was a radiolab episode on this, not sure if that's the one you're referring to or if you heard it elsewhere but it was quite good coverage of all this.

I think we might be talking about completely different things

Do you have the name of that podcast?

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In the Wehrmacht: "No food today, only Benzedrine! Also you might die. But hey, Gott Mit Uns!"

In prison camp: "Soup's on. Then a day of farm work, then Fusball. Nobody's died yet."

Curious what the exact game plan there was.

> I told my mother about this and she told me about her friend her in Japan whose child didn’t walk on grass until they were about 10.

That's very odd because I'm sure even Tokyo has parks. Not to doubt your mom or anything.

It does. I imagine it’s a slight exaggeration or maybe that family just didn’t visit them. I do recall hearing most people living in the cities spend almost all their time within a very small area, something like a square kilometre. They live that close to where they work etc

I believe it was a scouting mission, but I’m not sure there is much more recorded than that

All fun and games until you run into Australian magic Angela Lansbury. Or drop bears.

> They live that close to where they work etc

Nice, but I'd get fat - I need the exercise of biking to work 😄

That actually does sound like being in the army.

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Wait until you find out what they did in South Africa in 1899.

Can someone follow this post until the upvotes matches the year this happened and grab a screenshot. Someone. Not me

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That guy and the people that upvoted him clearly want our past in the west to be whitewashed. Concentration camp carries a negative connotation due to the Nazis but the internment camps we had are the literal definition of them. Internment is just a euphemism so people don't associate them with the death camps.

It was one of those NPR-ish podcasts. I was thinking This American Life, but someone else said there was a Radiolab episode about it, which I have also been listening to for a long time. Definitely not one of the conversational ones that are more popular now, something produced in a storytelling way.

The Isle of Man mostly. Nice spot, still barbed wire patrolled by soldiers though.

To be honest I'm more concerned with the Lebensraum being created in Gaza for Israeli settlers right now and considering this happened only 70 yrs ago you'd think these suffering victims would be turning over in their graves at what their grand children are doing.

This kind of treatment was quite widespread probably. Atleast in Finland on the farm my grandfather lived on there was a Soviet POW of the Winter War who worked there. He mostly worked physical labour on the farm and also slept and lived there but it turned out he was a very skilled shoemaker. He carved lasts by hand from wood and made boots for pretty much everyone on the farm. When the war was over and he was sent back to Soviet Union my grandfather remembers that he cried and tried to beg the officials to let him stay on the farm and I think everyone on the farm wouldn't have had an issue with that. Alas, he was sent back and that's where his story ends from our point of view.

There are no Israeli settlements in Gaza, you’re thinking of the West Bank. You have no clue what you’re babbling about.

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Wait til they hear about the homosexuals in camps that the British just let them take out of the camps and put in prison.

Good to know. I had no idea.

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I looked after a couple of German guys who were POW's in Perth shire and liked it so much here they didn't leave! They were conscripts and were just glad to survive

Yeah, everyones waxing poetic about treating these "poor kids who had been conscripted" with basically nobody questioning why all of these soldiers, even considering many of them were likely just doing what they had to do, were being welcomed with such open arms by the west and were assimilating so well.

Someone could even question if this went hand in hand with hitler getting some inspiration from the USA's segregation for the holocaust. or with allied powers essentially giving across-the-board pardons to axis scientists.