A Collection of Characters
After what seemed to him a long, long wait, Dr Hermann Scholz was at last removed from Huyton Camp in Lancashire and was transferred to Onchan in the Isle of Man. He arrived there in the early spring of 1941 but did not stay many months, for Onchan was run down and closed at the end of July. It stayed closed until September, when it reopened with Italian internees; its original Germans had mainly been released, and those that were still interned were transferred to Hutchinson, Scholz among them.
Once settled in Hutchinson, the young doctor continued his work as assistant to the Manx doctor who had daily responsibility for the medical side of the camp. Once again he was able to say that he was not helping the British war effort.
In Hutchinson he was one of the leading figures in some trouble that involved the integrity of an officer. He said later that it was he who laid the original allegations to authority, and he did it in a manner that avoided the official censorship. He contrived to write direct to Dr Huber, one of the Swiss delegation that acted as the protecting power for the Germans, and he alleged ill treatment and misbehaviour by the guard troops. A court of inquiry was ordered, and Scholz was one of the witnesses who had claimed that there were breaches of the Convention. Incidents revealed and arising from the inquiry led to the removal of the officer, who was found not guilty of the charges.
It was not long before Dr Scholz was also transferred. He was moved over to Metropole. To authority he must have been a complicated and most unusual internee, a man who did not fit easily into any of the categories. He was wholly German, very articulate and very anti-Nazi. Yet he was not Jewish and he was no political activist. He favoured Germany and made no effort to disguise the fact. He labelled himself, by his own statements, as a Class A internee. He was not a man to expect or to receive release. He was there for the duration. And as the man who had initiated the investigation at Hutchinson, he had marked his own card. It is easy enough to imagine what the NCOs in the office thought of him. He was a ‘rum one’, a character. There were many such.
At about this time the authorities were planning the development of the married camp at Port St Mary; the streamlining of the main men’s camps in Douglas was proceeding steadily. From a total of roughly 7,000 male internees at the end of 1940, the figure had dropped to 5,300 by April 1941 and fallen again to less than 4,700 by the start of May, when it was significant that Peveril, the Peel camp, was empty. The intention was to fill it again, with a different breed of inmate.
The pattern of the releases was always the same. The previous evening a man whose discharge had come through from London was told by the camp commander that he was to be let out. First thing next morning he would report to the guardroom, where he could collect his belongings and his papers, which would include a travel voucher through to his destination. Then, punctually at seven fifteen, or seven at some camps, the gate would open. The morning air would seem better outside.
There would be a police check at the harbour, and a ticket to Liverpool or Fleetwood to be handed out. Once aboard the steamer, the ex-internee would be a private citizen once more, bound only by the restrictions besetting all aliens in wartime. He could not proceed beyond his port of arrival in the United Kingdom without first reporting to the police; documents would need to be checked and stamped before the next stage of the journey could begin. To most, it was a long way home.
The day for which a man had yearned for so many months would largely be spent waiting around: waiting for a boat to pull out, waiting for an official, queueing for a bite of food bought with the pocket money given him by welfare funds for the journey; waiting for a train, which would almost certainly be late; queueing for a bus; waiting for a first view of a never-forgotten street. Waiting, just waiting.
At the end of his journey, whether it was home or merely an accommodation address, there was little time before he had to register with the local police. It was indeed all a matter of form. It could hardly be otherwise.
Thousands of men had been collected, thousands released within the year. Not all went back to the life from which they had been taken: some had volunteered for the Army; some had gone to Canada or Australia, and nearly 500 Italians had been lost in the sinking of the Arandora Star. A few secured release to emigrate, risking a hazardous sea journey to get to some country where no sirens sounded. But all such groups were small; the substantial majority of the freed men went back to their old surroundings.
One of the most significant statistics that remain is dated 1 March 1941. It is headed ‘Return of Kosher Internees’ and gives their total in the Manx camps as 395 men at that date. The phrase is possibly ambiguous; the word kosher could be used to mean an internee who opted for kosher food, and there would doubtless be Jews who did not. However, the figure is important in the way it suggests that the number of Jews left in the camps put them decidedly in the minority. This meant that all the original Category C internees had gone, and a high percentage of the Bs had also been released, for the bulk of them had been Jews. They were no longer the largest group behind the wire.
With the releases, much of the character and many of the characters had gone from the camps, for these men had created something of a colourful life for themselves in the suspended animation of internment. The Olympic athlete who had worn the British singlet at the Berlin games and then worn it defiantly in Hutchinson Camp had gone back; he had been a victim of mixed ancestry. The warrant officer, a veteran from the First World War, who had stood every morning with bemedalled chest in his makeshift uniform outside the guardoom at his camp, saluting and claiming his right to release, had also gone. He had brought his medals into internment with him and had proudly worn them on his way out again. There were others like him, men interned in the officers’ rig of the British merchant navy, who had spent their working lives under the red ensign; often they were British, they thought British, they spoke only English; their parents had merely forgotten to take out British papers years and years ago when they arrived as refugees at the end of the last century. There had been a number of such cases collected in the crisis days of the previous summer. Such men had now vanished back to normality.
The old and the sick had been released fairly quickly; the men who had been born or lived principally in Britain, speaking only English, were going; the C Class had gone and the B was being re-examined; the men with a war contribution—as owners or factory-workers, scientists or research people—were quickly out. Authority had listed eighteen different categories for release; steadily it could be widened. Until it came to their turn, the men left behind could only hope.
The younger men who played in the inter-camp football league—the games were often played at Onchan, with its field inside the outer wire—had mostly gone, and the enthusiasts who had played their improvised boule on the green at Hutchinson had also departed. It is doubtful if they ever replaced the brass bedstead knobs that they had originally used for the balls. Almost everything that was usable in the houses had been used in those early days; linoleum from the floor, chair legs, curtains, even a floorboard—all could be used for painting cut-outs, for wood carving, for a sail to a toy boat and so on. Interned victims of war had behaved like this since the days of the Napoleonic troops languishing in Dartmoor.
One of the first of the colourful eccentrics to be awarded his liberty had been an elderly gentleman at Palace Camp, an elocution expert who was supposed to have given lessons in public speaking to the King, a fact that had not saved him from internment when the stampede started in the great crisis. He was a health food faddist and must have seemed an oddity to some of his pupils in Buckingham Palace, where he was said to have taught singing and elocution for several years. He saw in the dandelion the embodiment of all the gastronomic virtues, and during his spell behind the wire he was allowed out for long daily walks, accompanied by a guard, picking bunches of his favourite leaves. According to the London Daily Mail, the lover of dandelions was Signor ‘Gaetno’ (Gaetano) Loria. He is thought to have appeared under a different name when he came up before one of the early tribunals on the island, when he repeated his claim to a connection with Buckingham Palace. When enquiries were made, it appeared that authority had never heard of him. He was one of the first of the Walter Mitty brigade with whom internment camps were littered. However, one of the first Italians to be taken in, he was one of the first out.
An internee who aroused much interest was Dr Gerhard Bersu, a German professor of archaeology. A man of international standing, he had done his first notable work back in 1911, excavating Roman pottery kilns in Bavaria. In the 1920s he was director of an important German archaeological centre. In 1935 he was dismissed by Hitler. Three years later he was in Wiltshire, near Salisbury, excavating an Iron Age farmstead. Soon after the beginning of the war, he and his wife were interned as enemy aliens. Then, when the married camp was started in Port St Mary, they were transferred there and lived in internment throughout the war. The Professor’s short, chubby figure did not suggest that he could climb lithely in and out of ‘digs’, but he was a man of high distinction, and word came from London that he need not waste his time while interned. Permissions were sought, funds were provided by learned societies, Chief Inspector Cuthbert gave his blessing, and so from 1941 onwards a series of what were regarded as outstanding excavations were organized and carried out under Bersu’s direction by volunteer parties from the camps, watched by armed guards. The bizarre circumstances did not worry the academics; the wife, Maria Bersu, was responsible for the initial survey of the sites, Gerhard Bersu directed the dig. They were a remarkable couple, seemingly immersed in their work and totally happy, unaware, it seemed, that Europe was at war. Never once did they apply for release. The result was the excavation of two Celtic roundhouses and a Viking fort. The timelessness of wartime internment made it possible to give each project an exceptionally long and detailed investigation, and the archaeologist was happy, providing only that he could get his regular supply of snuff.
Professor Bersu died in 1964, and the full details of his work in the Isle of Man were not published until eleven years after that. His was nothing if not a highly specialized internment. His fascination with holes in the ground, his expert knowledge of their contents, and his wife’s urge to catalogue and map every inch of them, must have made them an odd pair to the troops who at first guarded them.
To anyone involved with the camps, the Bersus embodied the permanent things of peace. The rumours around the island belonged to the grimmer reality of war. Even as the Bersus started their first preliminary work, it was noticed among Manx officials how the Peveril Camp population out at Peel was steadily decreasing. The inmates were transferring, mainly to Mooragh in Ramsey. Curiosity and speculation were answered by Herbert Morrison, Home Secretary, in the House of Commons. Special legislation, he explained, was necessary before British subjects or non-enemy aliens could be sent out of the United Kingdom; the Isle of Man was not a part of the UK, but it was plain that, in the event of an invasion, some people would be smaller security risks if they were on an island. Up to a thousand people were involved.
All persons of enemy nationality were classed as enemy aliens who could be liable to internment under the Royal Prerogative in a State of War. This covered the rank and file of the internees held in the Isle of Man, in Canada and Australia and in transit camps on the British mainland. Aliens unfriendly to the country’s cause, but whose country was not at war with Britain, could be detained under Article 12.5a of the Aliens Order. This was the category that found itself going to Peel and in some cases to prisons in Britain. British subjects considered a potential danger could be detained under Article 18B of the Defence Regulations. A number of these men were members of the British Union of Fascists who would also soon be going to the Isle of Man. So, explained Morrison, the Isle of Man Detention Bill was on its way.