Enemy Aliens Research Articles

Autobiography through Anecdotes in Joe Pieri’s Isle Of The Displaced

Associated with such life writing genres as (auto)biographies and memoirs, anecdotes are described as stories which “illustrate particular ideas, concepts, and views of the way a life is lived, making considerable editorial commentary on the nature of a particular ideological moment and the effect of that moment on individual lives.”(Encyclopedia of Life Writing) Anecdotes thus focus on, and highlight, episodes of a person’s life by transforming them into tales and stories using fictional narrative techniques and suspenseful plot twists.
 Having emigrated from Italy to Scotland at the beginning of the twentieth century and established his fish and chip shop in Glasgow, Joe Pieri was then interned and turned into an “enemy alien” on the day Italy declared war on Britain in 1940. In Isle of the Displaced, his book about this traumatic event, Pieri turns the most marking aspects of his journey to, and life in “Camp S” in Canada into a series of witty and comic anecdotes. This paper focuses on the definitions and history of anecdotal theory in order to analyse Pieri’s fictionalisation strategies and the way these stories function as a psychological dam in times of crisis, in addition to re-inscribing these important events in British and Italian histories. The main contention of this article is that the appeal of fiction increases during life’s most difficult times mainly thanks to the imaginative and tragic-comic powers of literariness.

A Place in the Empire: Gibraltar Camp in Jamaica and the British Imperial Order, 1940–1947

ABSTRACT In July 1940 the British Government erected a camp in Jamaica to house thousands of civilian evacuees from Gibraltar. Only about 1,500 Gibraltarians ended up there – mostly women, children, and elderly. The available space that remained served to intern a few hundred European Jewish refugees, as well as Enemy Aliens and Prisoners of War. About two hundred Jamaicans were employed in the camp, including the Camp Commandant. The little-known Gibraltar Camp created a rather odd encounter between people who occupied different positions within the British imperial global order, and outside of it. My main purpose in this article is to learn about the ways in which people engaged with imperial classifications as they were simultaneously placed and displaced by them. Drawing on official and non-official documents from several archives, and on newspapers, recordings of interviews, and self-published autobiographies, I argue that while the intention of the authorities in sending groups of people to Gibraltar Camp was to ‘put aside’ those who were deemed a disturbance, the constant negotiations about labels indicate that the physical placement of people in a camp did not work to wholly exclude them from the prevailing order of things.

Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II by David A. Taylor

Reviewed by: Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II by David A. Taylor Brian E. Crim (bio) Cork Wars: Intrigue and Industry in World War II By David A. Taylor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 240. David Taylor's absorbing account of how a seemingly innocuous substance like cork became a critical strategic material during World War II hopefully represents a trend in historical scholarship. Cork Wars is a work of "narrative nonfiction," Taylor writes in an author's note, "combining the fact-finding of journalism with literary techniques to create a dramatic story that is also true." Focusing on individuals whose lives revolved around the cork industry, Taylor places ordinary people at the center of extraordinary events, while still producing significant scholarly work in the fields of science and technology, economic history, national security studies, immigration, and environmental history. History is filled with examples of humanity elevating the importance of a resource, exploiting it, altering its natural place in the world, and quickly moving on once it served a purpose. Cork is one such substance, but the most compelling part of Taylor's book is how families of outsiders—immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Spain, and Eastern Europe—demonstrated unbelievable resilience and ingenuity in the face of hostility and deprivation at home and total war abroad. Cork Wars begins with the September 1940 industrial fire at the Crown Cork and Seal factory in Baltimore, a catastrophic event both for Charles McManus, a pioneer in the cork industry so crucial to the local economy, and for preparations for America's impending entry into World War II. With U-boats wreaking havoc on Allied shipping and the FBI hunting Nazi agents up and down the Eastern seaboard, thousands of Italian Americans working in vital industries like cork suddenly fell under suspicion. Like Japanese and German Americans, Italians eventually fell under the purview of the infamous Executive Order 9066, which allowed the government to imprison and seize the property of "enemy aliens" indefinitely. While the cause of the fire was never determined, the event underscored the importance of cork to national security. It also coincided with intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic racing to secure access to the groves populating the Mediterranean basin, specifically the Iberian Peninsula and coastal North Africa. Why was cork so special? Initially used in construction and the beverage industry, cork became an indispensable sealant and insulator used in submarines, airplanes, tanks, and ammunition. Moreover, cork companies like Crown Cork and Seal and Armstrong Cork diversified during the war, helping build vital weapons like the B-26 Marauder. Cork Wars' complex transatlantic story is told through the eyes of three men and their families: Charles McManus Sr. and Jr., Irish immigrant [End Page 567] owners and operators of Crown Cork and Seal; Frank DiCara, a young Italian immigrant who worked for Crown and enlisted in the army when he came of age; and Melchor Marsa, a Catalonian immigrant who managed Crown's Mediterranean interests and was recruited by the newly created Office of Strategic Services to monitor Axis intentions in nominally neutral Spain and Portugal. Fearful the fragile cork trees could fall into the hands of the Axis powers and threaten war industries, the U.S. government invested in McManus Sr.'s "Cork Project," conceived with forester Wood-bridge Metcalf to transform California into a viable environment for cork. The project included enlisting thousands of Americans to lend their property for the experiment, importing and planting millions of acorns, extensive climate zone research, and a coordinated campaign between government and industry to transform the environment for strategic purposes. As the hot war concluded and a cold war took its place, cork remained an arena for competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, although the chemical revolution had the final say. Plastics and other synthetic materials ironically perfected and mass-produced by Nazi Germany diminished cork's relevance as a strategic material by the 1950s. For the McManus, DiCara, and Marsa families, cork featured prominently in their lives and defined their diverse and fascinating wartime experiences. Taylor's interviews with family members, access to personal collections, and impressive detective work in the...

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

“Real war ammunition:” Artists for Victory, the National War Poster Competition, and the Hostile Imagination on the United States World War II Home Front

Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in the Second World War China: Perspectives on the Enemy Aliens Protection Mechanism

This article discusses the Japanese internment of Allied civilians in occupied China during the Second World War (WWII), with a focus on the period leading up to July 1943, by which point most Allied civilians had entered various internment sites throughout occupied China. This article mainly utilises the archives of the Japanese, the Allied governments and international mediators. The study argues that a provisional international mechanism for protecting enemy aliens was formulated shortly after the outbreak of war. It also finds that although Allied civilians did suffer physically and mentally during Japanese internment in occupied China, at least in the beginning, the Allied governments and the Japanese foreign affairs apparatus, based on this provisional international mechanism and the principle of ‘reciprocity’, intended to treat them fairly.

Review: Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz

Review: Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz

Cory Pesaturo: A Musician on a Mission

Cory Pesaturo: A Musician on a Mission

Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire by Ines Newman, Charmian Brinson, and Rachel Dickson

Reviewed by: Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire by Ines Newman, Charmian Brinson, and Rachel Dickson Sarah Painitz Ines Newman, Charmian Brinson, and Rachel Dickson, Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire. London and Chicago: Vallentine Mitchell, 2021. 145 pp. At the center of Internment in Britain in 1940: Life and Art Behind the Wire are the creative works of two Austrians: the diary of Wilhelm Hollitscher and the paintings of Hugo Dachinger, both of which were produced in Camp Huyton, where the men were interned as enemy aliens in the summer of 1940. Their documents are accompanied by three essays: Charmian Brinson provides historical contextualization about the internment of enemy aliens in Britain during the Second World War, Rachel Dickson elucidates the work Dachinger produced in the camp, and Ines Newman, Hollitscher's granddaughter, gives biographical information about her grandfather. What makes this publication a compelling contribution to our understanding of the experience of internment are the specific intersections between Hollitscher and Dachinger as well as the astonishing sequence of coincidences that led to the publication of their work. Not only were Hollitscher and Dachinger at Camp Huyton during the same time, but they met there and became friends. Dachinger painted a portrait of Hollitscher; Hollitscher recorded their interactions and his sittings for the portrait in his diary. Newman, who never met her grandfather, knew about the portrait from the diary and from later letters her grandfather wrote to her mother. After unsuccessful attempts to track down the portrait, Newman saw it on a local TV news program about a Ben Uri Gallery exhibition while she was sitting in her living room recovering from a back injury. Thus, unlikely circumstances led to the publication of this book, which documents the experiences and meetings of two men, who also met under unlikely circumstances. Internment in Britain aids our understanding of the experience of Austrians in British exile in two specific ways. First, it provides a unique insight into the intersection of visual art and the written word. This fruitful combination of painting and text allows each to illuminate the other, and together they bring to light the difficult circumstances of their production. Dachinger's paintings and Hollitscher's diary illustrate a specific moment and place in time. They show that internment meant months of deprivation, fear, and despair, yet, perhaps surprisingly, they also attest to the vivid cultural, educational, and intellectual life in the camp. Even though internment was undoubtedly a traumatic experience, Hollitscher's diary also provides fascinating insights [End Page 126] into daily camp life, such as the internees' system of self-government and the wide array of events they organized, including musical performances, football games, art exhibits, and academic lectures. Hollitscher was not a writer, yet his diary is eminently readable and a number of similarities to another internment diary are especially striking. Like Hollitscher, the Austrian writer Robert Neumann was also interned at Huyton in the summer of 1940, but after only a few days he was transferred to Camp Mooragh on the Isle of Man. Thus, the second way in which Internment in Britain deepens our understanding is in comparison with other documents chronicling life in the camps. Despite the horrific physical conditions, by far the greatest concern expressed in both Neumann's and Hollitscher's diaries was the perpetual lack of knowledge, information, and communication. Hollitscher frequently writes about the slowness and unreliability of the mails, the difficulty of getting news from "outside," and his worries about the safety of his family members, especially his adult son and daughter. In this, he confirms Neumann's experiences. Yet the points about which Neumann and Hollitscher differ are instructive, too. Upon Neumann's release at the end of August 1940, his descriptions of the despair of internment—which he had called "Konzentrationslager" and "Hölle" earlier in his diary—are replaced seamlessly by accounts of the horrors of the air raids and bombings of the London Blitz. Hollitscher, who was released at virtually the same time, describes a warm homecoming surrounded by friends, concluding: "I have benefitted from these last two months which for me have been...

The Yakutsk epos Olonkho in the context of storytelling of the Turko-Mongol peoples of Siberia: main images

The paper considers the main images of the epos through comparative analysis of the Yakut olonkho with the epos of the Turkic-Mongol peoples of Siberia. The author analyzed the main characters, their enemies, and female characters. The main characters, defenders of the Middle World, exhibited the features of an ideal person, exorbitant physical strength, attractive appearance, and high moral qualities. The enemies of the main character are mythological creatures and monsters. S.S. Surazakov classified the enemies of the main heroes in the epos of the Altai peoples into three groups, based on the criterion of the epos stage. He reported that a real image of an alien enemy occurs in the texts of the epos at an early feudal stage in the development of society. The enemies of the kaans-leaders of the Altai tribes are the kaans-military leaders of the conquerors. Later, the epos of the patriarchal-feudal period revealed images of feudal rulers-khans – oppressors of the common people. V. M. Zhirmunsky identified four groups of female characters: heroines, warrior-maidens, sister-assistants, and servant-slaves. According to the researchers of the Yakut epos, there are passive and active female characters.

“The War of the Spirit”: A History of Scientific Ideas or Marginal Emotions?

This review examines a monograph by Polish historian Maciej Górny that examines the phenomenon of the “war of the spirit” in scientific discourse between 1912 and 1923. The “war of the spirit” is broadly understood as a reflection on national character in the context of the actualization of a clear distinction between one’s community and that of the alien enemy, and narrowly as “an irregular cycle of outbreaks of nationalism in science, each inextricably linked to the horror of war, defeat and violence”. The characters of the book are European intellectuals and the psychological, anthropological, and spiritual characteristics of warring nations, and the role of such sciences as geography, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry in the “war of the spirit” is revealed. The Polish researcher points out the complex relationship between intellectual concepts and propaganda settings, believing that the phenomenon of “war of the spirit” is broader than the phenomenon of military-patriotic propaganda. The author of the review, while appreciating the work of his Polish colleague, believes that the study conducted within the methodological framework of intellectual history could have benefited if the methodology of the history of emotions had been used. The review points out that many of the marginalized concepts and stereotypes discussed in the book were typical for all strata of the warring societies, were based on archetypal images, and were fueled by emotions running high during the war. The author calls the “war of spirit” a natural state of a society for development of the main characterological images of “their own” and “alien” in the conditions of military and political conflict. Author points out that the concept of an ideological “war of the spirit” does not fully correspond to its content and considers it more accurate to speak of an emotional “war of patriotism”.

Rethinking Gender, Citizenship, and War: Female Enemy Aliens in Australia during World War I

ABSTRACT Enemy aliens were undesirable migrants in Australia during World War I, right? Yet enemy alien women who sought naturalisation were largely successful. Using the concept of ‘desire’, this article uses quantitative and qualitative material from women’s naturalisation applications to consider why women applied and subsequent state decision-making. The narratives of applicants and administrators reflect wider negotiations over different types of citizenship, where women could challenge their very labelling as enemy aliens, or employ highly gendered notions of vulnerability and respectability. Particular groups were treated favourably, revealing practices which challenge existing historiography about how migration and citizenship laws worked throughout the British empire, especially concerning race and denaturalised women. This is part of a wider need to reassess the relationship between migration law and practice, especially the role of gender and the use of executive privilege. While important to recognise the overlapping push for a ‘global color line’ in creating the system which developed within the British empire, it was less a legal system and more of a constant negotiation between different actors, based on laws that were often imprecise. In this case they gave space for enemy alien women to circumvent the legislative restrictions on their naturalisation, despite the politics of war.

Internment of Enemy Aliens during the World Wars

Abstract The article offers a historical approach to one of the most understudied areas of international humanitarian law by focusing on the successes and shortfalls of the two international armed conflicts with the highest numbers of civilians interned in global history. Through the study of State practice during Word War I and Word War II, the author addresses the causes and justifications that led to massive internment of enemy aliens, the practical determination of the need of those measures, and the role of ethnicity for internment. Lessons drawn from those experiences not only clarify and humanize abstract legal provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions but also warn about harmful deviations from the intended purpose of those norms for future cases.

Bernard Helmut “Ury” Baruch

Bernard Helmut Baruch (“Ury”), who was of Jewish heritage, came to the UK with his family from Germany in 1930. He was dissuaded from studying classics by his parents, who...

Marginal Citizens: Interracial intimacies and the incarceration of Japanese Canadians, 1942–1949

AbstractFollowing Japan’s 1941 attacks on Hawai’i and Hong Kong, Canada relocated, detained, and exiled citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry. Many interracial families, however, were exempted from this racial project called the internment. The form of the exemption was an administrative permit granted to its holder on the basis of their marital or patrilineal proximity to whiteness. This article analyzes these permits relying on archival research and applying a critical race feminist lens to explore how law was constitutive of race at this moment in Canadian history. I argue that the permits recategorized interracial intimacies towards two racial ends: to differentiate the citizen from the “enemy alien”; and to regulate the interracial family according to patriarchal common law principles. This article nuances received narratives of law as an instrument of racial exclusion by documenting the way in which a new inclusive state measure sustained old exclusions.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Who Was He? Internment, Exile and Ambiguity in Norbert Gstrein’s Novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years) (1999)

Winner of the Alfred Döblin Preis in 1999, the novel Die englischen Jahre by the Austrian novelist Norbert Gstrein deals with internment and exile in Britain dur- ing and after the Second World War. It centres on the (fictitious) character of Gabriel Hirschfelder, a writer and refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who is detained, with oth- er ‘enemy aliens,’ in a camp on the Isle of Man. There, Nazi sympathisers are interned together with Jewish and political refugees, and the central chapters in the novel depict the conditions and resulting conflicts in the internment camp. Hirschfelder dies in exile at Southend-on-Sea, having confessed shortly before his death that he killed a fellow inmate. This confession as well as reports of a transport of internees sunk off the coast of Scotland in 1940 incite a young Austrian woman to try to solve the mystery surrounding Hirschfelder and his allegedly lost autobiography The English Years. The paper discusses how Gstrein combines different genres like the historical novel/historiographic metafic- tion and the whodunit as well as using multiple narrative perspectives and refractions to pinpoint questions of shifting identities and allegiances, and of belonging and alienation in the wake of internment and exile.

Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront War in Australia, 1914–1920

During the First World War, the German Australian community, the largest non-Anglo-Celtic group, became the target of a relentless campaign of persecution, internment and deportation that resulted in its dismemberment and the destruction of its socio-cultural infrastructure. Under the country’s belligerent Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, the machinery of government was used to suspend basic civil rights and the rule of law, while Australian civilians were called upon to participate in the “homefront war” against an imagined internal enemy. The government’s aim was to serve the cause of Im- perial Britain and its commercial supremacy, and to secure the future of White Australia as the home of an imaginary, exclusive “British race.”

Close Encounters of an Unprecedented Kind: Police and German Enemy Aliens in Britain during the First World War

AbstractThe First World War introduced new tasks into British policing. One significant addition was the close and systematic surveillance of aliens residing in Britain, a role never before undertaken by the British police and one that would previously have been considered un-English. During the war, various official bodies participated in the regulation of the lives of foreigners, but the police played a crucial part. Foreigners hailing from enemy countries, particularly Germans, bore the brunt of police attention, which can be described as nothing short of discriminatory and oppressive. This article examines the new responsibilities of the British police for controlling German nationals and the public response to the new policing. It also assesses the police's wartime performance and the implications of their conduct for the lives of these Germans, all of which has hitherto been little explored. The police were widely considered, both by large segments of the British public and in many other countries, as the best police force in the world, morally superior to other constabularies, especially in their relatively tolerant attitudes toward the public. Their conduct in a time of national crisis, and particularly the degree of tolerance they exercised in their relations with a hated, indeed outcast minority, offers an illuminating case study.

‘All at Sea’: Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and the Unknown German

On July 10, 1940, amidst fear of Nazi invasion, a prison ship, of sorts, left Liverpool, England, crammed full of over two thousand male ‘Enemy Aliens’ – Germans, Austrians, and some Italians. They were herded together, below deck, with all hatches sealed. Some were prisoners of war, some were passionate Nazis, but most were Jewish refugees. Among them was Walter Benjamin's estranged son, a young man of 22 years, Stefan Rafael Schoenflies Benjamin. Soon after boarding, however, the authorities mistakenly recorded his surname as Benjamini. ‘All at Sea’, John Schad's critical-creative piece, recounts events around ‘the unknown German’ on the vessel, playing richly on, and with, recognition effects around what is (un)familiarly known about Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and various kinds of connection between them and other figures from the period.

KOREMATSU V. UNITED STATES: BETWEEN DISCRIMINATION AND LEGAL SECURITY

“Korematsu v. United States” is one of the most important and precedential cases in the history of United States in terms of introducing new legal practices and approaches, as well as raising people's legal and cultural awareness. This is a case that is similar in content to other controversial and almost discriminatory rulings in recent U.S. jurisprudence, but differs substantially from most of them in its paradigmatic and historical significance. Korematsu v. United States has been viewed in the US history as a model of the opposition between the need to ensure national security and the individual rights of full-fledged citizen of the country. It can be said that today the decision is completely overcome in formally, however there is a big gap between the formal overcoming of the decision and the complete exhaustion of the disputed issue within the legal society (which can only be achieved by implementing new laws and moving to a new stage of legal development). The prelude to all this was the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese Air Force launched an attack against the United States Pacific Fleet, based in the waters of Oahu Island, the capital of Hawaii, at Pearl Harbor. It is safe to say that out of the losses incurred in one particular operation in the history of the United States, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan ended in the most tragic consequences for the United States. On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs Executive Order N9066, initiating a controversial World War II policy with lasting consequences for Japanese Americans. The document ordered the removal of resident enemy aliens from parts of the West vaguely identified as military areas. Japanese Americans were forced to relocate to so called internment camps because they were a vulnerable group for the Japanese Intelligence Agencies, which the authorities claimed posed a potential threat to the national security. Fred Toyasaburo Korematsu was born is Oakland, California on January 30, 1919. He was a Japanese American civil rights activist, who actively resisted the execution of Order N9066 and, unlike his parents, refused to leave his place of residence and move to Internment camp, which later served as a reason for his arrest. It is still disputed whether the decision and the executive order N9066 on the relocation of Americans of Japanese descent were motivated by discrimination or the state acted simply out of a need to ensure National Security. As already mentioned, it all depends on which side we look at the overall picture from.