There were a few inept plans for sabotage on Canadian soil, and fear of a German invasion persisted for several years, but no serious threats materialized. The internment of Canadians left painful scars and, for Ukrainian Canadians in particular, the lingering suggestion of widespread disloyalty.
In November , after a long, grassroots campaign by the Ukrainian community, Bill C recognized the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during the First World War and called for negotiated settlement between government and members of the Ukrainian-Canadian community.
Since , negotiations have taken place between members of the Ukrainian-Canadian community and the government over issues of redress. Internment had a devastating effect on individuals and families, and left a lasting legacy of fear and hurt within the sizeable German community in Australia after the war.
The collection documents aspects of daily life in the camp and highlights the creative ways in which inmates tried to preserve both culture and sanity under confinement. The collection is significant for the evidence it provides of life in the concentration camps and of the emotional impact on individual internees. Along with holdings in the National Archives and National Library of Australia, and important collections held internationally notably the Paul Dubotzki collection in Germany , it preserves evidence of one of the important, but lesser-known stories of the home front during the First World War.
As the war dragged on and new camps were constructed around the world, an administrative bureaucracy also developed: POW information bureaus were set up; censors processed letters; complaints were received. Under the auspices of the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross and neutral countries worked as go-betweens, forwarding packages and trying to broker prisoner exchanges.
Red Cross officials alone visited more than five hundred camps in thirty-eight countries. As the administration of social quarantine flourished, camp libraries grew to thousands of volumes. Technical courses meeting professional guidelines were approved as trade certifications; prisoners could work toward qualification for Oxford or Cambridge upon release and, in some cases, even university degrees.
But all these activities merely served as dressing on the open wound of endless imprisonment. I n February , Paul Cohen-Portheim neared his third anniversary in prison. Cohen-Portheim could not later recall a single prisoner entirely free of the ailment. For all the businesses closed, livelihoods wrecked, families sundered, and funds spent on camps, mass arrests of enemy aliens in Britain provided no discernible benefit.
Not one German national living in Britain at the start of the war was linked to any wartime act of espionage. Cohen-Portheim was released from prison in February , when he was included in a prisoner exchange brokered by neutral Holland. Returning to Germany later that year, he found food scarce, the economy in ruins, and the country stumbling into civil war.
Given how often circumstances belied his optimism, he proved shockingly fair in his depiction of his time in the camps. In the rubble of a devastated Europe, however, there was little reflection on concentration camps.
A few prisoners had rioted or been shot; camps in Canada and on the Eastern Front had controversially used forced labor; but for the most part the concentration camps could not compare to the unprecedented tragedy of modern warfare that had maimed, gassed, and killed millions.
By , the imprisonment of civilians seemed unexceptionable. The most humane parts of the camps—the Red Cross packages, the classes, the libraries, the orchestral performances—had normalized the idea of wartime internment. The attempt to standardize and humanize internment conditions had also rehabilitated the idea of concentration camps and eroded memories of the brutality of the colonial camps. Indeed, once the public had adjusted to the idea of imprisoning innocent foreigners preemptively, governments learned how to harness anxiety of a foreign danger—with the underlying fear of crime, degeneracy, and disease—and assign it to other target groups, often domestic enemies.
The identification of a pariah class, the registration and rules limiting conduct, followed by mass arrests and civilian detentions; the roll calls and prisoner numbers, the barracks, the watchtowers, the armed guards…civilians everywhere had experienced it all before as a seemingly necessary tragedy in the service of a national cause.
Camps had become part of a formal process of dehumanization. Leon Trotsky would record his own experiences in the Canadian concentration camp and write a memo in after his return to Russia, suggesting similar use of camps for enemies of the Revolution.
Vladimir Lenin quickly embraced the concept, and orders went out to employ camps alongside executions as tools in the mass terror he aimed to instill. If internment during the First World War provided some inspiration for the camps that preceded the Soviet Gulag, anti-Semitic measures in Germany, including the Nuremberg Laws, began in a way that felt even more familiar: the identification of an alien civilian population, followed by registration, restrictions, arrests, and detention in camps.
Yet even as reports of atrocities began to emerge in the s, the world responded to the Nazi camps of the Second World War as if they were the internment camps of the First. In , in the wake of the deportation of Danish Jews to the ghetto-camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, the king of Denmark insisted that Red Cross representatives be allowed to speak with prisoners there.
The Final Solution was underway, but the Nazis needed to keep occupied countries from open revolt, and so permitted a visit. A preparatory frenzy of flower planting and renovation ensued, followed by faked cultural events—all contrived to display the familiar, suggesting that the camps of the Third Reich were no different from camps administered by other nations during the First World War.
They were, of course, profoundly different, but each country in the Second World War transformed the concentration camps of the First into a machine that served its needs. British internment of enemy aliens in repeated the errors of haste and excessive arrests from In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States interned not only Japanese aliens, but nearly seventy thousand of its own citizens with Japanese ancestry.
In occupied France during the Vichy era, French policemen rounded up alien Jews into camps, from which they were sent to Auschwitz. Russia deported hundreds of thousands of Poles eastward, many to Arctic labor camps.
But none of these systems compared to the Nazi death camps that would establish concentration camps as the signature horror of the twentieth century. Cohen-Portheim would not live to see the outbreak of another world war. If the faceless standardization and dehumanization of concentration camps in the Great War had not done him permanent damage, he nonetheless saw himself as the atypical patient who comes out of an epidemic healthier than before.
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