Internment Camps Research Articles

The Materiality of Mental Health at the Morrissey World War I Internment Camp

The Materiality of Mental Health at the Morrissey World War I Internment Camp

Charitable activities of the Young Men’s Christian Association in the camps of interned Ukrainian soldiers in Poland, 1921

The purpose of the paper is: to reveal the content and forms of charitable aid provided by the Young Men’s Christian Association (UMCA) in the camps of interned Ukrainian soldiers of the UPR Army in Poland during a certain chronological period, as well as to determine its overall amount and impact on the everyday life of camp residents and their family members.
 The research novelty is demonstrated by the all-sided coverage of the whole amount of the YMCA’s activities, whose members initiated a humanitarian aid campaign in the internment camps, thanks to which it became possible to organize a full cultural and educational life of the campers, as well as to satisfy the basic needs of children and women most suffering from hard living conditions of camp life.
 Conclusions: The content of the YMCA support campaign in the camps was material assistance to improve nutrition for children, organization of their special care (creation of kindergartens and maintenance of their staff), and purchase of clothing for children and women, assistance to women in childbirth. At the same time, the Association intensively supported the activities of camp cultural, artistic and educational centers, and in particular amateur theaters, choruses and orchestras. The unconditional merit of the YMCA was the development of sports, for which the latter never spared money – equipping gyms, purchasing special equipment for them. At the same time, the YMCA relied on the development of game sports (football, volleyball, basketball, etc.), participation in which enabled to stabilize the emotional state of the military, forced to spend much of time in camp isolation. But the most important aspect was that the YMCA gave a possibility to the internees to acquire new knowledge and specialties, creating additional opportunities for them to integrate into the socio-economic life of their new countries of residence. Thus, thanks to the YMCA, camp schools and courses became able to fulfil their educational mission, and the internees – to overcome difficulties of the first months of staying in camp isolation.

Becoming Italian

Becoming Italian

Review: Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II, by Stephanie D. Hinnershitz

Stephanie Hinnershitz’s groundbreaking account investigates how the prison labor system was imposed on Japanese Americans and permanent resident non-citizens of Japanese ancestry who were confined in War Relocation Authority (WRA) incarceration camps (formerly “internment” camps) during World War II. The actual internment camps (for non-citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry, run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for the Justice Department) are not included in this book.The temporary detention centers (formerly the euphemistic “assembly centers”) that first housed the incarcerees established Work Corps in which prisoners signed up to work in the skilled and unskilled jobs needed to operate the facilities. Wages could not exceed the minimum wage of an American soldier, $21 a month (pp. 42–43). Employing the prisoners meant that costs to operate the detention centers, and later the WRA incarceration camps, were much less than if the workers were Euroamericans hired at prevailing rates. The government established four rationales to explain the purpose and goals of incarceration: Japanese American labor was essential for self-sufficiency, community building, and the “pioneer spirit”; the prisoners needed to prove their loyalty and patriotism; working would build morale; and work was voluntary (pp. 18–19). Some 40 to 60 percent were employed, but unfortunately, and especially for work outside the camps, contracts with the incarcerees were often violated or manipulated, and poor working conditions led to protests, work stoppages, and even strikes. If the incarcerees did not work, they risked being labeled “disloyal or suspect” (p. 60).By 1944, some 33,000 Japanese Americans had signed contracts to work for farmers, especially in the sugar beet fields of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Utah, and elsewhere (pp. 85–86). The opportunity to leave the camps, even for hard work and poor working conditions, was a big motivator in getting people to sign up for this employment. However, many of the imprisoned Japanese Americans truly wished to contribute to the war effort and would have resisted being characterized, even by implication, as exploited dupes of the U.S. government.The Poston, Arizona, incarceration camp, discussed in detail, was built on land belonging to the Colorado River Indian Reservation. There, the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) had lost the funding that hired Native Americans to work on reservation infrastructure projects such as clearing and cultivating land and installing irrigation systems. The OIA thus saw the Japanese Americans as the answer to their labor shortage; Poston was therefore unique in that much of the incarcerees’ labor involved the completion of “infrastructure for another colonized and subjugated people” (p. 161).The book’s notes are excellent and comprehensive, but a longer bibliography would have been more helpful than the single page of “Published Primary Sources” (p. 296). Additionally, more rigorous proofreading could have eliminated some regrettable typographical errors, e.g., “payed” (for paid, p. 177), “Minori Yusui” (for Minoru Yasui, pp. 249, 309), and Sue “Kunitoi” (for Kunitomi, p. 275). Still, these and other imperfections do little to detract from this significant contribution to the literature of Japanese American incarceration.

Evolution of a Subject Heading: The Story Continues

In 2018, the author published a paper that describes the process by which catalogers at Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) institutions create and propose new subject headings for inclusion in the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) controlled vocabulary. In a related vein, this paper describes the process of proposing a revision to an established subject heading via the Subject Authority Cooperative (SACO) Program’s Subject Heading Proposal System. Two separate proposals are presented: one to revise the authority record for the subject heading, Concentration camps [150] by removing the cross reference, Internment camps [450], from that authority record; the other proposal is to establish the cross reference as an authorized subject heading. The reasons for revising subject headings are explored, and a detailed review of the revision process using the SACO Proposal System is presented for the benefit of other catalogers seeking to make changes to subject headings they encounter in their own collections.

Spanish Civil War participants in the internment camps in France: Latvian case (1939–1941)

In early 1939, after retreat from Catalonia, more than 50 Latvians, former participants of the Spanish Civil War, crossed Spanish–French border and ended up in internment camps in France. The aim of the current article is to give an overview and analyse the experience of Latvian men in internment camps. The article focuses on social activities and mutual relations, living conditions and their differences in internment camps in Saint-Cyprien, Argelès-sur-Mer, Gurs, Le Vernet etc., considering the beginning of the Second World War and the establishment of Vichy regime. Furthermore, the attitude of Latvian authorities towards Latvian citizens and possibilities for Latvian men to depart from the internment camps in France have been considered.

Returning the Gaze: A Visual Analysis of Jack Iwata’s Photography in Japanese American Internment Camps

This work explores photography’s potential to return the gaze and challenge powerholders within spaces of control. The authors analyzed 167 photographs from the Japanese American National Museum Jack Iwata Photo Collection to understand disciplinary mechanisms within a carceral landscape and the potential surveillance therein. The authors concluded that these historical photographs can not only supplement historical narratives of internment but also provide insight on methods of actual and potential visibility. At the same time, the authors contend that Iwata’s images are composed in ways that challenge authority.

«Красный сиприенец» – лагерная стенгазета российских эмигрантов

the article tells about the wall newspaper of Russian emigrants "Krasny Cyprienets". Its creators, former members of the White Movement, in order to be able to return home, went to fight in Spain on the side of the republic in the ranks of the inter-brigades. After the defeat, the Re-publicans were imprisoned by the French authorities in internment camps. In them they began to equip their life, including publishing a wall newspaper. Her articles reflected the problems that worried intern-ees - hygiene, sports, studies, the duty of a fighter, international poli-tics.

Alienation and Educational “Third Space”: English Learning and Uyghur Subject Formation in Xinjiang, China

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, this article examines how Uyghurs, a Turkic‐speaking ethnic minority in China, found ways to excel in English language learning despite efforts by the national education system to focus their training in Chinese, the language of the colonizer. It argues that the alienation that resulted from the devaluation of Uyghur knowledge and nonstandard Chinese usage pushed Uyghur students to embody expanded subjectivities in a “third space” of English learning. It concludes with a discussion of how an internment camp system has foreclosed this space of limited autonomy for Uyghur students since 2017.

„Munkatábor, tehát nem büntetőtábor”– Törvényen kívüli állapot a mohácsi láger példáján (1945)

„Labor camp, so no prison camp“ – Extraordinary conditions in Mohács in 1945
 In 1945, in the city of Mohács in southwest Hungary, existed a labor and internment camp for a few months, which has been completely excluded from research of the history of the region until now. At the End of the Second World War, the camp served as a manpower reservoir, but also to punish former political enemies and the ethnic German minority for alleged and actual war crimes.
 This paper presents the circumstances of the formation of the camp and the debates about it between the members of the Mohács National Committee in January 1945. It also analyzes the activity, organization and difficulties that characterized the months of the camp's existence. Another focus of the study is the investigation of the chaotic circumstances and the (lack of) legal framework and regulations that should provide an explanation for why a camp could be established at this early point in time after the war in Mohács. Local archive documents from Mohács and the neighboring villages are used as sources, which offer a deep insight into local history and the chaotic conditions at the immediate end of the war.

On a Path towards Forgiveness: Garden-Practices and Aesthetics of Engagement in Tan Twan Eng’s

Abstract This paper examines the human-nature relationship in the art of Japanese gardening in Tan Twan Eng’s The Garden of Evening Mists (2012). Drawing upon the aesthetics of Japanese gardening and theories of garden art, it argues that the novel advocates the complementarity of nature and human artifice in gardening. Japanese gardening which is related to the Taoist concept of yinyang and the Buddhist notion of impermanence, together with its principle of shakkei (borrowed landscape), suggests a combination of anthropocentric and ecocentric relationships with nature. Moreover, since Japanese aesthetics is interwoven with ways of living, the paper examines how the female protagonist’s apprenticeship to a Japanese gardener in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya gradually alters her mind and opens up ways of coping with her traumatic experience, during the Occupation, in a Japanese internment camp. It argues that gardening art, what art philosopher Arnold Berleant calls the “aesthetics of engagement,” and changing gardenscape induce the protagonist to comprehend impermanence, moral ambiguity and the complementary co-existence of memory and forgetting, all of which enable her to forgive the Japanese transgressors and to make peace with the past.

Multidecadal Trends in Body Size of Puget Sound Chinook Salmon: Analysis of Data from the Tengu Derby, a Culturally Unique Fishery

AbstractIn Pacific salmon Oncorhynchus spp., downward trends in size and abundance have been reported for species and stocks for over 40 years, but the patterns are inconsistent among regions and species. Interpretation of these trends is complicated by many possible contributing factors, including short time series, data comprising a mix of stocks, and varying gear types. Here, we present data on the mass of individual Chinook Salmon Oncorhynchus tshawytscha caught in the winter from 1946 to 2019 in central Puget Sound, Washington, by participants in what may be the longest running Pacific salmon derby in North America, the Tengu Derby. In this annual recreational fishing competition, established by Japanese Americans immediately after release from internment camps at the end of World War II, participants follow strict gear, area, and methods regulations and catch almost exclusively salmonids originating from and remaining in Puget Sound. Records revealed an overall decline in fish mass over the decades, with a high degree of variability throughout the time series. Specifically, resident Chinook Salmon exhibited several shifts, including a decrease in size from a high in the 1950s to a low around 1980, followed by an increase to another high around 1990 and then a decline over the most recent 30 years. These size trends of residents differed from those of Puget Sound Chinook Salmon as a whole. We infer that the resident fish experienced ecological conditions affecting their growth that were distinct from those of fish feeding along the Pacific Ocean in the same periods. These distinct trends in size of Chinook Salmon from common origins indicate that the different migration patterns of fish within stocks must be considered in the analysis and interpretation of body size trends and also in patterns of survival.

“Didn’t Japanese Internment Camps Happen in Japan, Not in America?” An Inquiry Project Challenging Hidden Stories in American History

Using the frameworks of literary understanding and difficult knowledge, this study examines sixth graders’ responses to mixed-genre books about Japanese incarceration camps.

British Quaker Aid to Spanish Republican Exiles in Concentration Camps in the South of France (1939–1940)

When a failed military coup provoked civil war in Spain in July 1936, British Quakers were among the first t respond to the tremendous need for humanitarian aid among the civilian population. They distributed food and clothing, set up canteens and hospitals, provided schooling and workshops, and organized the evacuation of children from war zones. Then, in January 1939, when the Spanish Republic finally succumbed to the might of the rebel forces, the Quakers accompanied thousands of refugees in their flight towards the French border. This became known as ‘la retirada’ (the Retreat). Once in French territory, the refugees were herded into improvised internment camps. These were simply vast open spaces on the beaches encircled by barbed wire, with no shelter, no latrines and barely any food. Quakers were the first to obtain permits to access the camps in order to alleviate the suffering and deprivation found there. They distributed not only the most basic aid such as food and clothing, but also pencils and notebooks, as well as tools and materials of all kinds to work with. Thus, in characteristic fashion, they provided people with the means by which they could help themselves.

5. L’Aumônerie générale des israélites de France, la préservation des rites funéraires et l’entretien des cimetières des Juifs morts dans les camps d’internement français, 1940-1944

The Law of October 4, 1940 regarding “foreign nationals of the Jewish race” authorized the imminent internment of foreign Jews in France. The internment camps were quickly filled up. In February 1941, 40,000 Jews were confined to the internment camps in the Free Zone. Jewish chaplains, who had just been demobilized from the French military, were the first people authorized to enter the camps to assist the prisoners. The first chaplains joined in June 1940, even before the official establishment of the Aumônerie générale des israélites de France (Jewish Chaplaincy). Throughout the war, chaplains assumed numerous and varied roles covering spiritual aid, material assistance, rescue, and resistance. However, the Vichy government only authorized them to act in a religious capacity. The official responsibilities of the Jewish Chaplaincy consisted of providing spiritual support to the prisoners, organizing religious services, and overseeing religious rites within the camps. The difficult sanitary conditions, overcrowded barracks, and spread of disease led to the deaths of 3,000 Jews in the internment camps in France. The elderly population, especially in the Gurs camp, was particularly vulnerable. In this camp alone, 1,000 deaths were recorded. Respect for funeral rites became a concern for the Jewish Chaplaincy throughout the war. Chaplains worked hard to protect this basic right despite the many obstacles standing in their way.As part of a larger study of the efforts of the Jewish Chaplaincy in southern France during World War II, this article focuses specifically on the role of chaplains with respect to the burial rites of Jews who died in French internment camps between 1940-1944. Their efforts went beyond performing funeral rites, as they also worked to establish cemeteries and provide grave markers in accordance with Judaism. Moreover, when the camps closed, the chaplains became concerned about the fate of the abandoned cemeteries and helped maintain these burial sites.By relying on archival documents, especially the abundant correspondence of the chaplains (with each other, with Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, with family members of the deceased, and with the Vichy authorities), this article demonstrates how important burials and the preservation of customs were to the chaplains throughout the war.

4. Enterrés dans Paris occupé. Les tombes des Juifs dans les cimetières parisiens (1941-1944)

While it is not commonly known, Jews were able to participate in the social conventions surrounding funeral traditions during the Occupation. In her diary, Hélène Berr describes the funeral she attended in broad daylight at Montparnasse Cemetery in 1943. This article discusses which burial methods were available to Jewish people during their persecution in Paris. Are their grave sites still visible in the city’s cemeteries? Do those that remain show evidence of the government’s persecution? Do they indicate that the deceased passed away during the Occupation? What do the graves of the Jewish people who died during this time have to tell us?In Paris, regardless of whether they died “naturally,” i.e. from disease or starvation, or in internment camps, Jews could be: 1) laid to rest by their family in a personal tomb, 2) buried for free by the national community in trench graves, 3) interred by the association representing French Jews within the General Union of Jews in France (UGIF). A common characteristic of the remaining grave sites of Jews who died in the Drancy internment camp is the total absence of any mention of the persecution they faced in France during the Occupation. No inscriptions or any other form of evidence describes their tragic fate. Indeed, their tombstones do not mention the Drancy camp or their status as a prisoner at the time of their death.This article also explores one of UGIF’s unique strategies for burying the dead, namely the use of collective vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. This strategy represented a commonality between two distinct types of Jewish populations, namely French Israelites, who made up the majority of UGIF’s leadership, and immigrant Jews, most of whom came from Eastern Europe. Their funeral traditions differed, as did their preferred places of burial in Paris at the time. Members of the first group were buried in Montparnasse and Montmartre, while members of the second group were buried in the Bagneux and Pantin cemeteries. And yet, during the government-led persecution of Jews and the collaborationist regime, these two groups adopted similar funeral rites by requisitioning vaults owned by Jewish mutual aid societies. The purpose of these organizations was to voluntarily unite Jews from Eastern European cities or their descendants. These individuals agreed to offer mutual aid to all members upon their death through the purchase of a collective and permanent tomb where the remains of all contributors and their families could be interred. In the 19th and 20th centuries, these organizations set up an ingenious system in France that made it possible to evade the French regulations that prohibited this type of collective vault. At the time, only family vaults were allowed.By creating its “burial” service using the funds and vaults of this type of organization, called “La Terre Promise,” UGIF also absorbed the assets of all Jewish associations in France, which had been dissolved after its creation in November 1941. From that point on, UGIF had control over the empty spaces in these collective vaults, which it decided to allocate to interned Jews who had died in the Drancy camp and had no pre-existing vaults.A paradox ensued. Jews who died as a result of the anti-Semitic movement in France, but who had not contributed to or joined these kinds of organizations, were nevertheless buried in these vaults, even though they did not have any ties with them. If descendants of the deceased are around today, what do they know? Victims were able to be re-buried by their loved ones in similar vaults after the war. After several years spent renewing the plot the UGIF purchased for his daughter, who died at the age of 4 as an internee in the Drancy camp, a Polish father who had returned from deportation finally had her body exhumed and re-buried in Bagneux in the collective vault of his village’s mutual aid society, before going into permanent exile in the United States himself. However, the direct descendants, who were cousins of the little girl, did not know she had died on French soil, nor that her current grave, an imposing collective monument, is located less than 600 feet from their family vault in the same cemetery.This example shows how the Jewish graves in Parisian cemeteries (because no Jewish cemeteries exist in France today) are the site of a fragmented remembrance that is separate from the persecution Jews suffered in occupied France.

Learn, Teach, Challenge—and Change

Learn, Teach, Challenge—and Change Linda M. Morra (bio) In the fall of 2002, I found myself in Vancouver, in conversation with a Kanien'kehá:ka man named B., who was trying to enlighten me about what it meant to be Indigenous in this country—what it meant for him personally and what the implications have been for his life and his community. "I don't really see what this has to do with me," I retorted. I was grappling with what he was telling me. "My parents arrived in this country well after the problem started. And they were also subject to all manner of racism upon their arrival." He regarded me silently for a moment. He did not judge me. He did not rebuke me. At first, he simply agreed that some immigrants to this country have been treated in the most appalling ways. Then, he told me his own story. He unpacked my assumptions and redirected my misguided logic. The most poignant moment was when he explained how I was yet the beneficiary of a system that oppressed others; as long as I remained quiet about that system and its structures of exploitation, as long as I refused to challenge it, I was cooperative, even complicit in such oppression. I listened. My defences crumbled. When I asked him how I should begin to change, he replied that just listening and having that discussion with him that day was a good place to start. It was. I would learn later that such personal stories and conversations are, in fact, an essential part of Indigenous pedagogies. Little did I realize how much this one interaction would inspire me to change and act in later years, so much so that I would not only advocate for but also eventually develop and teach a course on Indigenous literatures and pedagogies. [End Page 30] ________ Yes, I am impatient with myself now about having been both so defensive and offensive, about having been so obtuse—but I would learn how better to counter such feelings in the classroom, because I myself had experienced them and had to work through them. Before that moment, I had identified myself, first, as the daughter of Italian-Canadian immigrants, and in later years, as a specialist of Canadian literature and a settler scholar. Although I was born in Canada, Italian Canadians are too familiar with their own history of internment camps in this country, with the deep fissures of bias and prejudice that continue to inform mainstream English Canadians, who habitually like to claim that my community has not been so affected. But it has been. And it still is, to some extent. This identity should have made me immediately more sensitive to Indigenous histories of displacement, trauma, and oppression; however, it took me some time. Specifically, I was born to Italian-Canadian parents in the City of Toronto, on the traditional territory of several nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit,1 the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. My understanding, however, of Indigenous literatures did not really begin there, where I lived for the first twenty-three years of my life and completed my first degree in literature at the University of Toronto; and not even while completing my Master of Arts and then my PhD in Canadian literature/Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa, situated on Algonquin Anishinaabe Nation territory. It began rather late in my academic career, during my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, situated on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Musqueam people. Something in me woke up, became conscious and alert, and then began to grow, after I moved there in September 2002 and had that conversation with B. While at the University of Ottawa, I had at least taken a course in Inuit literatures. I studied no less than the likes of People from Our Side by Inuk artist, photographer, and historian Peter Pitseolak, under the instruction of Dr. John Moss who was both prescient and compassionate in developing this course. Several of the writers, however, were also Western (famously, James Houston, whose book The White Dawn we were...

A World Famous, Yet Unknown, Countertenor: Basile Bolotine of Serge Jaroff’s Don Cossack Choir

A World Famous, Yet Unknown, Countertenor: Basile Bolotine of Serge Jaroff's Don Cossack Choir Donna Arnold (bio) PROVENANCE prov·e·nance (prǒv´ ə nəns) n. Place of origin, source. [Lat. Provenire, to originate.] Well before countertenors became prominent in classical music's early music movement of the mid-twentieth century, countless concertgoers in Europe and America had already experienced their artistry. This was because Serge Jaroff's Don Cossack Choir, a world famous a cappella Russian émigré ensemble, showcased singers they called falsettists. We now would call them countertenors. Basile Bolotine (1895–1981) was a beloved falsettist in the choir for many years, and thanks to his recorded legacy, his music is still cherished. Because his name has never been well known, this essay seeks to introduce him by name both to those who have and have not yet experienced his music. The choir had an extraordinary history. It was founded late in 1920 at a wretched internment camp in Turkey. Thousands of Don Cossack soldiers who were expelled from Russia after losing the civil war to the Bolsheviks were detained there. To raise their morale, the camp commander ordered that a choir be formed from the best singers in the regimental choirs. Detainee Serge Jaroff (1896–1985), a graduate of Moscow's prestigious Synodal School of Church Singing, was ordered to establish it.1 All of his potential choristers were amateurs. Against all odds, he selected thirty-six men, arranged repertoire for them from memory, and in a few months transformed them into a brilliant world class ensemble. Despite daunting circumstances, they worked hard to hone their craft after the troops were transported to the island of Lemnos in March of 1921 and freed in Bulgaria later that year. They attracted influential supporters who, cognizant of their precarious hand to mouth existence, exerted strenuous efforts to help them undertake a professional career.2 It began with a groundbreaking concert at Vienna's Hofburg Palace on July 4, 1923. Still dressed in their shabby military attire, they sang so expressively and with such superb technique that the huge audience, which had attended mainly out of curiosity, was ecstatic.3 They became internationally famous overnight, were booked for tours immediately, and would enthrall millions of people in the non-Soviet world for nearly sixty years (Figure 1). [End Page 517] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The choir in Bregenz, Austria, December 1923. Serge Jaroff, who was of very short stature, is sitting in the middle of the front row.4 As founding members occasionally left the choir, Jaroff was able to replace them with outstanding professionals from the Russian émigré community. Basile Bolotine was one of them (Figure 2). He joined the choir in 1930, and was already the featured falsetto soloist in their 1930 recording of Aliabiev's "The Nightingale."6 He would go on to play a vital role in their stellar career, last singing with them around 1970. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Bolotine in his Cossack uniform, 1930s.5 There is very little information about Bolotine's life. He was born in Kiev, Ukraine on January 1, 1895.7 He, too, had fought on the losing side of the Russian Civil War and escaped from Russia in 1919.8 His recorded legacy attests that he was a highly trained singer, but no information has come to light about his musical background except that he was a tenor soloist in another Cossack choir before joining Jaroff's ensemble.9 He married a woman named Ksenia in Yugoslavia in 1921, and their son, Vladimir, was born in 1922. Any exile who had opposed the Bolsheviks was cruelly deprived of Russian citizenship in 1922. Thus, Jaroff's choristers, although based in Berlin for years, were stateless. Providentially, however, their untenable situation would improve dramatically after 1930. In the fall of that year, they began to make annual tours of the United States with phenomenal success (Figure 3). Dismayed by ominous military buildups in Europe, and encouraged by admirers, Jaroff and his singers decided to move their base of operations from Berlin to New York City and seek American...

A Crisis of Identity: Good Aliens, Bad Americans, or Bargaining Chips? U.S. Civilian Exchanges with the Third Reich during World War II

Throughout the Second World War, the United States took part in a series of personnel exchanges with the Third Reich and other belligerent nations. These delicate operations initially focused on diplomatic personnel and other prominent individuals trapped on both sides of the Atlantic when the U.S. entered the war. However, the evolving series of exchanges rapidly expanded to include civilians who had been interned by both sides, including ordinary men, women, and children. American officials were eager to repatriate U.S. citizens who had been caught up in the Reich or occupied countries, while they also proved eager to expel German Americans who had been detained on U.S. soil at the outbreak of war and now languished in internment camps. Many of these individuals and families would consequently end up being sent to the Reich, including in some cases American citizens. This article examines the development and dynamics of the U.S.-German civilian exchange program during the war and immediately after to explore how and why both governments were willing to take part, the domestic political calculations and geopolitical factors that impacted its direction, and the human impact of internment, detention, and repatriation in the midst of a world war.

‘Filthiest Gangs of Thugs’: Anti-Fascism and Anti-Nazism Perceptions in Southern Rhodesia, 1930s to 1940s

ABSTRACT This article examines anti-fascist and anti-Nazi sentiments in Southern Rhodesia from the 1930s to 1940s. Even though the country did not have an anti-fascist and anti-Nazi policy or legislation, the state and the white population held competing anti-fascist and anti-Nazi attitudes regarding how the government should deal with suspected fascist and Nazi propaganda activities in the country and in internment camps. The United Rhodesia Party, Southern Rhodesia Labour Party, Labour Party, Southern Rhodesia Communist Party, and trade unions were all anti-fascist and anti-Nazi. As an openly pro-British self-governing colony, Southern Rhodesia collaborated with other colonial regimes in southern and eastern Africa by exchanging intelligence information on suspected fascist and Nazi activities. However, some sections of the white population in Southern Rhodesia criticised the state for not being committed enough in their efforts to curtail such activities in internment camps, an accusation the government rejected. White settlers defined their anti-fascism in terms of their British identity, the Allied war effort, and democracy. Using newspapers, archives, and Southern Rhodesia parliamentary debates, this article examines the convoluted nature of white identity politics based on contradictory political divides, ethnicity, and white-on-white racism during this era.