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Detainment during WWII — 28 Comments

1. I worked in Latin America with a German national who, courtesy of his mining engineer father, had lived almost all his life in Latin America. He did go to university back in Germany. He told me that his uncle had been interned in the US during World War II. His uncle’s reaction to his internment in the US: a very pleasant experience, though I forgot his precise phrasing.

   My German national co-worker learned English on the job- from Texans on the drilling rigs in Latin America. He didn’t speak English with a Texan accent, but with a softer accent, which meant he could pass for a native of the Southern US- Alabama, for example. Conclusion: if you are learning English as a second language, learn it from a Texan, and you will sound as if you were born and raised in Alabama.

   However, a lot of people would give better treatment to someone speaking English with a foreign accent than they would to someone speaking English with an Alabama accent, so it might not be that much of an advantage.

2. if you are learning English as a second language, learn it from a Texan, and you will sound as if you were born and raised in Alabama.

   WEB Griffin, one of my favorite fiction authors (He just died at 87) wrote a series of novels about Argentina. He lived there for a while and , like all his novels, the research is excellent.He has a character who is an Irish cop (born in Argentina) who learned English in a Catholic school from nuns who were from Brooklyn. The cop spoke English with a Brooklyn accent,. I’m sure he must have known someone with that experience,

3. Yes, the British did intern refugee Jews as enemy aliens, until mid-1942, when they were released from internment. They were then allowed to join the British military, at first only the Pioneer (what we call Combat Engineer) Corps. The British also formed Number 3 Troop (aka X Troop), 10 Commando, made up of Jews and other German exiles. Out of 130 men who served (not all at the same time) in X Troop, there were 21 KIA and 22 WIA. A number of Jewish refugees were also recruited into SOE.

4. Mike K — another Griffin fan on this list? Who’d a thunk?. Unfortunately, his son, who has taken over his oeuvre, just isn’t a very good writer.

5. Interning Koppel’s father was a foolish waste of a highly valuable human resource. Knowing he was a Jew should have told the British he was not a security risk. And this was during the darkest days for the UK. Fools.

6. Few people who did not live through it–and that remnant dwindles by the day–are aware of this, but the U.S. had 900 POW camps, stuffed with 425,000 German POWs, scattered around the U.S. during WWII. (There were reportedly also an additional 45,000 Italian POWs in camps in the U.S., and over 5,000 Japanese POWs.)

   These Nazi POWs were treated very well indeed, they were well housed and fed, had good medical care, recreational activities, had canteens and camp stores, were even allowed to carry on Nazi ceremonies with Nazi regalia when, say, one of these POWs died and wanted to be buried in a Nazi ceremony.

   Many of these German POWs were allowed to leave these camps, and worked in farming areas all over the U.S., for which they were given a small wage.

   So well were these Nazi POWS treated that some reportedly traveled back to the U.S. for periodic “reunions,” and, after their release at the end of the war, some number of these German POWs returned here to become U.S. citizens.

   See https://www.historynet.com/german-pows-coming-soon-to-a-town-near-you.htm

   If you can find a used copy, a couple of decades ago, Time Life Books published a very good volume on WWII POWs that had some very interesting commentary and especially pictures.

7. Richard,

   Different Griffin. The novelist is W.E.B. Griffin, and I’m a fan of his (own, not his son’s) “Badge of Honor” books, and some of the others. Agree about the son’s writing. :>(

   Mike’s Griffin is G. Edward Griffin, whom I consider on the “iffy” side. He’s known for, among other things, The Creature from Jekyll Island, about the formation of the Fed. Some think he’s a “conspiracy theorist,” and some take him or at least some of his work, including the Jekyll Island book, seriously. Mises.org is at least somewhat among the latter. Somewhere there (I think it was) I read a review of the book that said it was good work, except that the reviewer didn’t buy that the bankers who convened on J. Island and ended up with the plan for the Fed were “conspiring” to create a money-tree for themselves.

   Further deponent sayeth not.

8. Snow, great article. I had no idea! Thanks. :>)

9. Julie near Chicago

   Different Griffin. The novelist is W.E.B. Griffin, and I’m a fan of his (own, not his son’s) “Badge of Honor” books, and some of the others. Agree about the son’s writing. :>(

   Mike’s Griffin is G. Edward Griffin, whom I consider on the “iffy” side. He’s known for, among other things,

   No, no, no. Mike K is talking about WEB Griffin. His Honor Bound series deals with Argentina. Offhand I can’t place the cop, but there was an ex-Navy radioman, Lt. Schultz, who was born in Brooklyn.

10. I see that Snow on Pine has given documentary proof of my remembrance that the uncle of my German co-worker was treated well in his internment during WW2 in the US.

11. parker:

    Hindsight is 20:10 but remember that the British also interred one of the Mitford sisters and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley, both citizens and supporters of Hitler. It wasn’t just Germans they had to worry about

12. There was a decent film made about interactions with a Nazi POW camp in Wisconsin, called Fort McCoy (2011).

    This is mostly hearsay, but my understanding is that WWI was where many German Americans faced much hostility. I believe my great grandfather would have been in the U.S. a little over 30 years and was probably still speaking largely German. My grandparents changed over to English entirely in the their childhood or adolescence.

    In the early 30’s when the global WWII was in its early stages, there were a great many fans of Nazism in the U.S., including eugenicist Margaret Sanger. (Sanger may have regretted her Nazi associations later in life, but was on board in the early days.)

    I had not heard of any WWII German internment camps. There were a couple German spies caught on U.S. soil in the midst of our involvement in WWII, and they were summarily executed under direct orders from FDR, I think.
    _____

    My wife’s father fled Austria before the Nazis moved in. He was an officer in the U.S. Army until he got busted down to a private for an ahem “enhanced interrogation” of the enemy.

13. The Nazis were evil SOBs, right?

    Speaking of WWII Prisoners of War, here are statistics about U.S. soldiers who were held as POWs you are probably not aware of.

    According to official U.S. government records, the mortality rate for U.S. POWs who died while being interned in Nazi POW camps, under 1%, the mortality rate for U.S. POWS who died while being interned in Japanese POW camps, over 40%.

14. P.S.–Doing some genealogical research, I discovered instances in which some of the people in my German line of ancestors rather abruptly “Americanized” their names, just around the time WWII started.

15. The French also interned German refugees after the outbreak of war.

16. Gringo,

    I surely did mess that up. I know perfectly well who W.E.B. is and who G. Edward is, as I said. But for some reason I got it into one of the holes in my head that Mike was talking about G.Ed.

    I’d swear that today I saw a reference to G.E. somewhere in Neo’s comments. Why settle for making just one mistake when it’s just as easy to make two?

    Please don’t send the guys in the white suits for me. I’m really not danger to myself or others, unless they automatically believe what I say … which would be flattering, but foolish.

    Thanks for the correction. And I apologize to everyone.

17. TommyJay

    This is mostly hearsay, but my understanding is that WWI was where many German Americans faced much hostility. I believe my great grandfather would have been in the U.S. a little over 30 years and was probably still speaking largely German. My grandparents changed over to English entirely in the their childhood or adolescence.

    That would also have been what I heard. My grandfather in the Midwest w the German surname never talked of any problem, nor did his brother- who served in WW1. There were a lot of people of German background in the area, and his family had been native English speakers for generations, so people with German surnames didn’t stick out.

    However, I heard from a resident of my New England hometown that her German background created problems when she was a schoolgirl during WW 1. She told us she quit high school rather than put up with the anti-German guff she had to endure in school.

18. I knew about the German POWs bia this long-ago publication for teens (although I didn’t read it at the time). Romanticized, of course, and now PC-uncompliant.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_My_German_Soldier

    Among those changing their Germanic surnames during first World War was the British royal family, who by descent were the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, and took the name Windsor from the castle.

    As they put it in this article, “But when British citizens were being killed by Germans, a royal family with a foreign name was a problem.”

    https://www.ft.com/content/b80a9dde-f1f0-11e6-95ee-f14e55513608

    The House of Windsor is really the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. One hundred years ago this summer, in July 1917, George V issued a proclamation larded with many a “whereas” and “declare” to announce that henceforth all male descendants of Queen Victoria were to be known by the new surname of “Windsor”. George’s cousin, the German Kaiser, remarked that he was looking forward to watching a performance of “The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg”.

19. om on March 21, 2019 at 8:18 pm at 8:18 pm said:
    parker:

    Hindsight is 20:10 but remember that the British also interred one of the Mitford sisters and her husband Sir Oswald Mosley,both citizens and supporters of Hitler. It wasn’t just Germans they had to worry about
    * * *

    Perhaps they should have kept him there.

    I hadn’t bothered lookin him up before; here are details I found interesting, in
    Wikipedia:

    [His first wife] Cynthia died of peritonitis in 1933, after which Mosley married his mistress Diana Guinness, née Mitford (1910–2003). They married in secret in Germany on 6 October 1936 in the Berlin home of Germany’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was one of the guests.

    Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and tried to establish it on a firm financial footing by various means including an attempt to negotiate, through Diana, with Adolf Hitler for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany. Mosley reportedly struck a deal in 1937 with Francis Beaumont, heir to the Seigneurage of Sark, to set up a privately owned radio station on Sark.[10][11]
    …
    He was determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. The BUF was protectionist, strongly anti-communist, strongly anti-zionist and nationalistic to the point of advocating authoritarianism.[citation needed]
    …
    John Gunther described Mosley in 1940 as “strikingly handsome. He is probably the best orator in England. His personal magnetism is very great”. Among Mosley’s supporters at this time included John Strachey,[24] the novelist Henry Williamson, military theorist J. F. C. Fuller, and the future “Lord Haw Haw”, William Joyce.

    Mosley had found problems with disruption of New Party meetings, and instituted a corps of black-uniformed paramilitary stewards, the Fascist Defence Force, nicknamed blackshirts. The party was frequently involved in violent confrontations, particularly with Communist and Jewish groups and especially in London.[25]
    …
    Mosley continued to organise marches policed by the Blackshirts, and the government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which, amongst other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations and came into effect on 1 January 1937. I
    ..
    After the outbreak of war, Mosley led the campaign for a negotiated peace, but after the invasion of Norway and the commencement of aerial bombardment (see The Blitz) overall public opinion of him turned to hostility. In mid-May 1940, Mosley was nearly wounded by assault.[27]
    …
    Unbeknownst to Mosley, the British Security Service and Special Branch had deeply penetrated the BUF and were also monitoring him through listening devices. Beginning in 1934, they were increasingly worried that Mosley’s noted oratory skills would convince the public to provide financial support to the BUF, enabling it to challenge the political establishment.[28] His agitation was officially tolerated until the events of the Battle of France in May 1940 made him too dangerous. Mosley, who at that time was focused on pleading for the British to accept Hitler’s peace offer of March, was detained on 23 May 1940, less than a fortnight after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.[1] Mosley was interrogated for 16 hours by Lord Birkett[28] but never formally charged with a crime, instead being interned under Defence Regulation 18B. The same fate met the other most active fascists in Britain, resulting in the BUF all but disappearing from the political horizon.[1] His wife, Diana, was also interned …
    …
    After the war, Mosley was contacted by his former supporters and persuaded to return to participation in politics. He formed the Union Movement, which called for a single nation-state to cover the continent of Europe (known as Europe a Nation) and later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe to this end. The Union Movement’s meetings were often physically disrupted, as Mosley’s meetings had been before the war, and largely by the same opponents. This led to Mosley’s decision, in 1951, to leave Britain and live in Ireland.[citation needed] He later moved to Paris. Of his decision to leave, he said, “You don’t clear up a dungheap from underneath it.”[33]

    Shortly after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Mosley briefly returned to Britain to stand in the 1959 general election at Kensington North. Mosley led his campaign stridently on an anti-immigration platform, calling for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants as well as a prohibition upon mixed marriages. Mosley’s final share of the vote was 7.6%.[34]
    …
    In the 2017 film Darkest Hour, Churchill, played by Gary Oldman, discusses with his Outer Cabinet the possibility of Britain becoming a slave state of Nazi Germany under Mosley if the decision is made to pursue peace talks right before his “We Shall Never Surrender” speech. [43]
    …
    [an interesting list of Alternate History books in which Mosley figured]

    Diana was an even more rabid anti-Semite and Hitler supporter than her husband, apparently, but was fantastically beautiful, according to her own Wiki entry.

20. AesopFan,
    P.G. Wodehouse’s character of Sir Roderick Spode is a marvelous parody of Mosley. Which is somewhat ironic, as Wodehouse’s own behavior resulted in his becoming persona non grata in England after the war. The actor (can’t remember his name at the moment) who plays Spode in the TV series, Jeeves and Wooster, does a hilarious job of bringing the character to life. As does everyone in the series. Definitely worth viewing.

21. Great interesting topic. Great links to info. I had a weird feeling about Koppel’s father’s journey and troubles, the sort of small(?) injustice that often makes people make important decisions to change.

    I knew from various WW II Escape books, like Escape from Colditz, that the Germans treated US POWs well, but treated the Russians terribly (and were treated terribly by the USSR). The Japs treated US POWs terribly. (Those who treat others so bad, I’m willing to call them the name I grew up calling them.)

    Demographics a couple of decades ago said there were more Americans with German ancestors, than of any other European country, more than English. Tho less than English+Irish.

    My own German-American grandmother insisted on speaking English, tho my grandfather spoke German. I recall thinking when I was young that “Godisgreat, Godisgood” were two German words which meant “let us thank him, for this food”, in a bilingual grace said before eating. They fully Americanized thru & after WW I.

22. A famous German geneticist Richard Goldschmidt fled Germany in 1936 and was thrown to prison after USA declared war to Germany. He described this in his memoirs published in 1953, when he was a professor of evolutionary biology in Colombia University.

23. Gringo — The cop’s name was Liam Duffy, but he’s in WEB’s final series, “By Order of the President.” Junior has created a post-WWII series, spinning off from “Honor Bound,” but as somebody on another list said, “The kid ain’t got the old man’s chops.”

    AesopFan — I can’t imagine what the childhood of the Mitford sisters was like. Two became fascists, one became a communist, one moved to America, etc.

    Speaking of the royal family, why did the boys use “Wales” as their last name when on active duty? That’s kind of distinctive — I think “Windsor” would be more common and less noticeable. I’ve got to give Harry a lot of credit for deploying to Afghanistan, where he apparently served well until some asswipe of a journalist outed him and they had to pull him out for security reasons.

24. Richard Saunders:

    And then there was the Mitford brother who wouldn’t fight against the Germans in WWII but did fight against the Japanese and was KIA in the Burma campaign late in the war.

25. Molly Brown on March 22, 2019 at 2:22 am at 2:22 am said:
    AesopFan,
    P.G. Wodehouse’s character of Sir Roderick Spode is a marvelous parody of Mosley.
    * * *
    Everything I know about people I learned from Jeeves & Wooster.
    Well, maybe not all-inclusive, but not really kidding.

26. Richard Saunders on March 22, 2019 at 1:02 pm at 1:02 pm said:
    ..
    Speaking of the royal family, why did the boys use “Wales” as their last name when on active duty? That’s kind of distinctive — I think “Windsor” would be more common and less noticeable.
    * * *
    It’s complicated.
    However, I think this article will answer your question.

    In the pre-computer-database era, royalty and upper aristocracy used only their territorial names, not their historical surnames, if they even had one.
    Think of the way Sir Thomas More refers to his friend as “Norfolk”- his title.
    Even Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is a territorial title, not a surname like Jones, although similar to those that develeped from a person or his ancestor’s hometown.

    IIRC, only Queen Elizabeth can use the surname Windsor, and she doesn’t need to.

    https://www.hellomagazine.com/royalty/2019032171126/prince-william-harry-children-reason-different-surnames/

    “Unlike most male siblings* in the UK, Prince William and Prince Harry’s children will not share the same surname, and this interesting fact was a hit with fans, who made this story one of our most read this year. William and Kate’s little ones – Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis – all have the last name ‘Cambridge’, taking after their dad’s title, the Duke of Cambridge. By the same model, it can be assumed that any children Prince Harry and Meghan Markle have will use the surname ‘Sussex’, after their father’s official title, the Duke of Sussex.

    William and Harry grew up with the surname ‘Wales’, using it at school, at university and during their time in the army. William was known as Lieutenant Wales while Harry had the rank of Captain Wales. This is because their father Prince Charles’ title is the Prince of Wales. But following their marriages, William and Harry were granted new titles from their grandmother the Queen, and their children are expected to take these on.”

    * As for siblings, the pre-modern custom of Scandinavia would have named Karl XXX’s children Girl Karlsdatter and Boy Karlsson.

    PS I also felt some irritation at the newshound and his scoop, and both Princes have heretofor lead reasonably admirable lives, under the circumstances**, with a few oopsies for Harry, including one memorably unPC moment involving Halloween costumes, with the usual reactions.

    FWIW, I extend a lot of leeway about poor choices to teens (Harry was barely 20); adult members of Congress, not so much.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1481148/Prince-Harry-faces-outcry-at-Nazi-outfit.html

    **I have read lots of history and biographies; the current royals (and not just England) don’t even come CLOSE to the hanky-panky of the prior generations.

    PPS You really shouldn’t get me started… and don’t ask what I think of Charles Wales.

27. Wales was pretty good place to recruit all those longbowmen I needed.

28. he was instead declared an enemy alien and imprisoned on the Isle of Man for a year and a half.

    There was a video of people capturing that island on video from the coast of… Scotland or Ireland I think it was. That was the sight distance of 120 ish miles. Incredible, given atmospheric density and refraction.

    Of course, the curvature of the Earth globe is 8 inches per mile squared, so 8 x 120 x 120= how far something would be behind a curve of water.

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