There weren't just POW camps, labour camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps
in the Second World War. Some camps were set up as preventative measures, or so they say. Basically,
a country would intern civilians who they believed might pose a threat to national security. Often
these were civilians whose heritage corresponded with a nation's wartime enemies. In the US,
for instance, they interned civilians of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. While the definitions
are a little vague and confusing, we're going to refer to said camps as "internment camps."
The term "concentration camp" is also applicable, but people generally associate concentration camps
with brutality and a high mortality rate, if not outright genocide. In this video, we're going
to cover a number of the internment camps of the Second World War, which were all over the world.
In the United States, as many as 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, around 11,500 people of
German ancestry, and just over 1880 people of Italian ancestry were sent to internment camps
throughout the war. These included residents and citizens born overseas and in the US. American
Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt had quite a rigid opinion on the matter of the Japanese,
stating, "I don't want any of them here. They are a dangerous element. There is no way to determine
their loyalty. We must worry about the Japanese all the time until he is wiped off the map."
Manzanar camp in Inyo County, California, housed a little over 11,000 Japanese Americans from March
1942 to November 1945. The internees lived in tar-paper barracks with very little privacy
and very little protection from the elements. They were constantly covered in dust and had to
line up for meals and to use communal toilets and showers. They were enclosed in a perimeter
of barbed wire and watchtowers. The children attended a school in the camp, however, and
the adults could take up poorly paid camp jobs, such as producing camouflage nets and rubber.
Some even raised livestock and cultivated fruit and vegetables.
There was also a golf course. Of course, the quality of life varied from camp to camp.
The situation in Canada wasn't much different. More than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were relocated
and interned during the war, accounting for around 90% of the country's Japanese population. While
the Canadian government had some 31,000 Italian Canadians in their sights as potential enemy
aliens with fascist connections, only between 600 and 700 were actually sent to internment
camps. The largest concentration of Italian Canadians were interned at Camp Petawawa army
base in Ontario, where there were also some German civilians. The camp was composed of 12 barracks,
each housing around 60 internees. Watchtowers and two barbed wire fences enclosed the camp, and like
Manzanar, it functioned as a sort of community, with people working various camp jobs. Still, it
wasn't easy for the internees and their families. In an interview, Italian Canadian Chester Capponi
said that the government took his father away for two and a half years without telling his family
why, or when he would be released. His father was also in poor health throughout his internment,
and could only communicate with the outside world via censored letters.
India was still under the British Raj during the Second World War, and Germans, Italians,
Austrian, and people of other nationalities who had become British citizens or were otherwise
travelling through India were interned in the country at a number of camps. One of
these was the Dehra Dun Central Internment Camp, where the internees were divided into sections,
separating pro-Nazi Germans, anti-Nazi Germans, communist Germans, and Italians from each other.
Austrian mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, the bloke who wrote Seven Years in Tibet, actually escaped
from the camp alongside a German by the name of Rolf Magener, who described it like this:
"The British had a camp for internees outside the town, where the jungle met the inhabited world,
on a site which had once been a tea plantation and had partly gone back to jungle. There were
rows upon rows of reed thatched huts, with such low eaves that a murky gloom surrounded them."
Imperial Japan maintained hundreds of internment camps throughout the war,
many on the Japanese Home Islands, but many in the territories they occupied, too.
A lot of them were mixed camps, housing POWs and civilians; some were occupied by civilians alone.
Batu Lintang camp in Sarawak on the island of Borneo was one of the former. As you might have
come to expect of World War II-era Japan, the camp was brutal. Malaysian author Ooi Keat Gin summed
it up well: "The trying conditions ... tested to the limits of the human struggle for survival.
Food shortages, diseases and sickness, death, forced labor, harsh treatment, and deplorable
living quarters were daily occurrences ..." Generally, the civilian internees were treated
slightly better than the POWs. Some chose to cultivate the land and tend to various jobs,
including gathering wood, latrine duties, and cooking. Some internees were forced to do labour,
working in timber yards and constructing roads and runways. Many of the civilians were Dutch and
British, including Catholic priests and Catholic nuns. When the Australian 9th Division liberated
the camp in September 1945, they freed 396 male civilians and 237 women and children. The Japanese
operated a so-called "Civilian Assembly Center" in Weifang, China, too. This was Weixian Internment
Camp, used to intern over 2,200 American, Canadian, British, Australian, Dutch, Belgian,
and Italian civilians living in China, including 300 children. American theologian Langdon Gilkey
was an internee at Weixian; in his words, "We suffered no extreme hardships of limb, stomach,
or spirit. We were secure and comfortable enough to ... create a small civilization, but our life
was sufficiently close to the margin of survival to reveal the vast difficulties of that task."
Similarly, the Germans interned Allied civilians in Internierungslagers or Ilags in Germany
and some of the countries they occupied. At Ilag V Liebenau, a castle in Württemberg, Germany,
the Germans exterminated 700 mental hospital patients to make way for 300 British citizens
who'd been living in Poland. In the French city of Besançon there was the Ilag Frontstalag 142.
As many as 5,000 people, mostly British women and children, were interned here between 1940
and 1941. Hundreds succumbed to sicknesses, such as food poisoning and frostbite, throughout this
time, after which many were released and some were transferred to Frontstalag 121 in Vosges,
France. It was much more hospitable at 121 than at 142. The internees had access to a theatre
and several tennis courts, for example. There were some North-American internees there, too.
Australia maintained several dozen POW and internment camps throughout the war,
interning around 7,000 Australians of Japanese, German, and Italian descent. This amounted to
over 20% of Australia's Italian population and 98% of all the Japanese people in Australia,
with a total of 1,140 Japanese interned. Australia also took on around 8,000 internees shipped over
by its allies. On the 10th of July 1940, 2,542 "enemy aliens" left England aboard the passenger
ship HMT Dunera. 2036 of these people were anti-Nazi German and Italian civilians,
and most of them were Jews. After a less than comfortable voyage, the internees
arrived in Australia early in September 1940, and the majority of them were transported to
an internment camp in Hay, New South Wales, on the 6th. Over the course of their internment,
they established what was in essence a township, replete with its own currency. In December 1941,
many of them were reclassified as "friendly aliens" and released.
Around 1,000 of the so-called "Dunera Boys" volunteered to fight in the Australian Army,
and after the war, around 800 of them chose to build lives in Australia. Among them were
scientists, engineers, economists, and artists who brought significant value to Australian culture.
But we're interested to know what you think. Did you know so many civilians ended up in
internment camps during the Second World War? Can you think of any other nations which set
up internment camps? And lastly, can you think of any specific camps we didn't cover or any
great internment camp stories? Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.