A Case of Murder?
Palace Camp had closed in November 1942 and was never to be reopened as an internment centre. When it wound up, it consisted of about 260 Finns, some of whom were released altogether, while the bulk of them—180 at the first count—were moved up to Mooragh. So 1943 had opened with a total of just under 2,990 men held in all on the island whereas it had been roughly 3,700 a year earlier. And by 1 January 1944 the total had fallen to 2,068. Internment was down mainly to the hard core.
These totals fluctuated week by week, almost day by day but departures predominated. Occasionally the number was augmented by an intake of internees who had been sent to Canada and were now coming back to be released but were held temporarily in the Isle of Man while the paperwork ran its course. It all made arduous desk work for the distant men with the shiny elbows. No war, except possibly the next, can be won without them.
The Finns who had moved on from Palace to Mooragh settled into two factions, the pro-Nazi and the pro-British. Those friendly to Britain were thought to be in the minority, but the two lots were not kept apart, except from the other nationals in the Mooragh camp. The men were nearly all merchant seamen; most were from below decks. They were mainly an ill-educated lot, a very different type of internee from the academics at Hutchinson in the early days. Some had been interned since the previous year, and those who were willing to work for the Allied cause had been steadily released. This meant that the pro-Nazi element which remained behind dominated the Finns more and more. It was not difficult for them to make contact through the wire with the German Nazis in another section of the camp, and the bullying and bluster increased steadily.
By the beginning of April 1943 the Finns at Mooragh numbered 140, about a quarter of the camp’s total population, consisting otherwise mostly of Germans and Italians. At the end of April the number was 141. This did not mean that there was a newcomer. It meant that there had been two newcomers during the month.
For shortly after midday on 20 April one of the Finns was killed.
How he died was not in doubt. He was stabbed in the chest; the knife penetrated his heart and he died almost at once. Why he was murdered, and if the stabbing even constituted murder, is another matter; most of the trial that followed was held in camera as things considered secret at the time had to be considered by the jury. These consisted mostly of details of conditions inside the camp. They were very relevant to the trial, and they would have made startling general reading in April 1943.
Relations, as far as there were any, between Britain and Finland at that stage of the war were delicate; the Finns had declared for the Germans because they hated Russia, not because they had any particular quarrel with the western powers. Many Finns, as had already been proved by the movement of a number of them into the services and war work, were pro-British. There was no sense therefore in holding a trial in open court when a killing might have a political significance; any disclosures might not lengthen the war by five minutes, but the matter called for discretion.
It was not unknown to the people of Ramsey that there was trouble inside the camp, although they knew no details. The noise of quarrelling readied the world outside the wire. Finns of this sort were tough customers. They were often homeless men, semi-literate and semi-vagabond; in peace they divided their time between the forecastle, the bar and the brothel. They drank not for pleasure but for oblivion. They fought. Their standards were different from those of western Europeans. There was no Sibelius among them. They lived roughly and dangerously.
In an internment camp all this was clamped down only for the anger within the men to rise to bursting-point. They would be searched, and there was no question of knife-carrying, thus denying them what they regarded as a symbol of virility and preparedness. But the Finns were a boisterous, hearty lot. They possessed a vast energy, and they had to get rid of it. In their first camp as well as in Mooragh they had rigged up a rough gymnasium for themselves and, according to a Manx doctor who surveyed the scene later, they had even made boxing-gloves of a sort by cutting them out of carpets. Such were the Finns. They could vent their feelings in a clumsy boxing ring. Or they had other ways.
In Mooragh they could spend a little of their camp token money on a beer if they wanted to, a privilege that had been denied them in their last camp. Unknown to the authorities, they had their own means of increasing the alcoholic intake. They were known to boost their booze with an assortment of additives—hair oil, boot-blacking and wood polish among other oddities—and make a highly potent brew. Most dangerous of all, they would pass gas through a harmless ale and emerge with something that could make a man fighting drunk before he passed out. To some extent this sort of thing went on periodically in most of the camps that housed hardliners, but in April that year it was at its worst in the Finnish section at Mooragh.
The week-end before the knifing the noise in the camp increased and plainly sounded the mounting unrest. The Nazi element was in full cry; Hitler’s birthday was anticipated by the looting of the canteen and the theft of all available liquor, which was no doubt tampered with. The result was a widespread hangover in which heads were sore and tempers frayed. Bullying became rampant; Nazi and Fascist songs were loud in the air, and it was said later that men lolled about clutching bottles of drink, many of them drunk and semi-conscious. The braggarts were vociferous, and sections of the camp were dangerous places for the minority. The attacks and beatings-up increased over the week-end. Fist fights became frequent, and there were many brawls.
But a knifing, leaving a man dying in the road, was unique. It had never happened before in any of the camps, while thousands of men had passed in and out of the wire.
Thus it came about that, on 15 June 1943 in the Court of General Gaol in Douglas, a Finn aged thirty-six was charged with the murder of a fellow Finn, aged twenty-six. The incident on which the charge was based had taken place shortly after noon on 20 April.
The trial was to last nearly a week, a long time in a Manx court in those days. The jurors had been warned that they might be in for a long stay, and they arrived at the Court House with toiletries and a change of clothing, carried in attaché cases, the hand-luggage of those times. In all, seventy-two good men and true had been summoned. The chosen twelve were accommodated in Douglas for the duration of the hearing.
Right at the start the Attorney General applied under the Emergency Powers Defence Act for much of the trial to be heard in camera. He said he would have to go fully into matters of a secret nature and he would ask that the Court be cleared.
It was. Vital evidence was given by an internee doctor named Martin Scholtz. His duty was to assist in running the Mooragh Camp hospital. He was the link between the outside Manx doctor who officially looked after the internees and the men themselves. He was to Mooragh what Dr Altmann was to Ballaquane over at Peel, and what Hermann Scholz had been at Hutchinson.
He is believed to have revealed how the camp was sectioned off with wires inside the main perimeter wiring, separating the various nationals into individual units. He explained that he was looking into the adjoining section through the wire separating it from the Germans and saw that the occupants were quiet, walking or sitting in the sun. He said that there had already been three accident cases in the camp that morning. The internees, he said, were normally very quiet people but when excited they would not mind breaking anyone’s leg.
At the time he looked through the dividing wire, he saw the now dead man go down the steps of House 8, carrying a bucket in his right hand. He walked hurriedly, and when he reached the pavement, he waved people aside with his left hand. He walked across the pavement until he was opposite to the entrance of House 9. There he raised the bucket and threw the contents over an internee who was standing near the footpath. The bucket contained dirty water, and it was thrown over the man’s face. The Finn, now the prisoner, seemed surprised at the attack, looked about him for a second or two and mumbled something.
Then the prisoner went for the deceased, drawing his hand from his right-hand trouser pocket. The other men stepped back a pace or two, the bucket still in his right hand. The doctor said that he saw the prisoner jerk out his hand and give his attacker what appeared to be a knock in the region of the stomach. The man lurched back, swinging his hands wildly. He staggered to the entrance of House 8, then he turned round; his face was pale and he fell on his back without attempting to save himself. When he hit the ground, the doctor could see a great blotch of blood staining the front of his shirt and trousers and he lay quite still. He was stabbed and dying.
Doctor Scholtz hurried to the camp hospital and told the orderlies to collect a stretcher. He also contacted the MO, and they both ran to the gate of the Finnish section of the camp. They heard an uproar and saw a man being attacked and the body of the dead man being pushed on a handcart.
The guard opened the gate to let the handcart through, and at the same time the prisoner ran through the gate and was taken into custody by two of the military guard, who took him to the camp hospital. He would have been killed if he had not been taken out.
Evidence was given earlier in the trial by the Ramsey physician who was official MO to Mooragh. He explained how he saw a man being beaten up by a crowd of aliens. He saw another man being lifted from the ground and placed on a handcart. He examined the man and found he was dead.
The prisoner, who was the man who had been beaten, was examined in the camp hospital, and it was found that his nose was broken; he had severe head injuries and was so badly knocked about that he was only partly conscious. The doctor arranged for him to be moved to Noble’s Hospital, where he stayed for some weeks. The doctor said later that he had never seen a man get a worse beating-up than the prisoner had received.
On examining the dead man, the MO found a single wound in the lower part of the chest, about three inches deep, which had penetrated the heart. A post mortem confirmed this evidence. A table knife, with a blade about half the usual length and worn down on both sides, could have caused the wound on the chest wall. Death was caused by one blow only. There was no sign that the dead man had taken drink.
At the end of five days’ hearing the jury returned to court after an absence of seventy-five minutes. The prisoner regarded them almost with indifference and sat motionless until the judge, Deemster Cowley, addressed him.
The verdict was: Not Guilty. The accused was also found not guilty of manslaughter and was discharged and returned to the custody of the internment camp authorities. Two representatives of the Swedish Legation, the Protecting Power for the Finns, were sitting in Court when the verdict was given. They had been on an inspection tour of the camps and had spent some time attending the trial.
The case produced much discussion, particularly on the island. Despite the brevity of the court reports, some details leaked out. In the tiresome catchphrase of those years, there was a war on, and it was felt that war took many shapes. British authority at the time very likely had no desire to see a Finn found guilty of murdering a Finn, with all the consequences of a murder verdict. So ran the gossip. A man was dead; it was better that the matter should be buried, like the victim.
Inevitably, such ideas kindle their own fire. Rumours abounded on the island and took various forms. In the weeks that followed the trial it was even said that important letters had been received from London. This sort of talk was almost certainly nonsense, and there is no record to justify anything of the sort; it could well be that a freer reportage of the trial would have meant less speculation afterwards. Had the public been able to read the spirited defence and the judge’s summing up, there would have been less gossip.
The acquittal was not due to any official desire to cover up a killing that had political enmity behind it; credit for the verdict must surely go to the stubborn and painstaking pleading of the defending Manx advocate, R. Kinley Eason, who was many years later to be elevated to the position of one of the island’s two Deemsters and who at that time practised in Ramsey. Mr Eason sowed doubt and reaped a brilliant result. He was a jaunty but diminutive man, armed with an array of law books from which he liked to quote learned and complex precedents. A case was a case, and this one had to be won. There could be three final views: the prisoner was guilty of murder, guilty of manslaughter or, if the provocation was such as to justify him in thinking his life was in danger, then he was totally not guilty. So argued the defence, and the legal logic was sound.
Between counsel and client there was a massive divide. They had no language in common. But the defence counsel had the law books, with whose points he made much play. He skilfully widened the area of doubt, until in the mind of the jury it faded altogether. The Finn had been in mortal danger. He had remained almost motionless throughout the trial. He listened apparently attentively to a verdict whose words he could not understand. He betrayed not the slightest emotion when the interpreter translated and repeated them. He did then say two words himself, through the official. ‘Thank you.’
Justice had been called for, and justice was done. A man came on trial for his life and was saved by a quite resolute defence, about which little could be said at the time.
And there the matter rested.