There were three categories of Enemy Alien – A, B and C.
Category A meant immediate internment.
Category B placed restrictions on movements and required regular reporting to the police.
Category C (friendly enemy alien) meant no restrictions except notification of address.
In October 1939 I went before such a tribunal and was classified as being Category ‘C’. I continued running the two companies for Sykes but the job in Florida was now out of reach, as I could no longer leave England.
A friend of mine from Munich, Wolfgang Schlittgen, was far less lucky than I, and his story is so weird that it must be told. I had known Wolfgang in Munich for years. His appearance indicated that he was Jewish, but he was pure Aryan. One day, in 1935, he and a friend had taken their girlfriends to lunch in a restaurant near Munich. There was a table with SA men – storm-troopers – who kept glancing in their direction. When the group left the restaurant the SA men had beaten the hell out of Wolfgang, in order to, ‘teach him, the bloody Jew, to lay off running around with German girls’.
Wolfgang decided something had to be done. He had heard of a Nazi organization which could be joined and would issue a membership card, to be shown if such an incident threatened to re-occur. Wolfgang, having obtained his ‘Ariernachweis’ (documentation establishing his pure-bloodedness) joined what turned out to be the motoring section of the SS. He got his membership card and forgot about the whole thing. Then he began to get instructions to report for drill, which he ignored. An officer called and told him he had better show up – he ignored that too. The officer came back. There would be a special parade the following Sunday. Herr Schlittgen was to be there, in SS uniform, or there would be disciplinary action. There might even be concentration camp detention. Wolfgang borrowed a uniform and got drunk. Then he staggered on parade and ruined the whole thing. When he was marched before an officer and severely reprimanded, he invited the officer to ‘kiss his arse’.
When he sobered up he very wisely left the country and went to England. There he made a lot of friends and dined out on his story which was considered to be extremely funny by everybody who heard it. We all knew that Wolfgang had been a bit of a fool but was certainly anti-Nazi. When he appeared before his tribunal with his friends however he was asked: ‘Were you ever a member of a Nazi organisation?’ ‘I was, on paper’ admitted Wolfgang, and went on to tell his story. ‘Too bad’ said the tribunal chairman, ‘to us you were an SS man, Category A’ and Wolfgang went straight ‘inside’.
He went to Liverpool and embarked on the Andorra Star that was sunk by a German torpedo. He drifted in the water for seven hours and was then shipped off to Australia and an internment camp. There he stayed, felling trees and building roads for almost six years. He came back in late 1945, feeling, understandably, lost and bitter. Subsequently, to round off the tale, HM Government bestowed British Citizenship upon him.
17. ARREST AND INTERNMENT
BESIDES LIVING VARIOUSLY AT MY LONDON APARTMENT and on my boat on the Thames I also rented a large property, known as ‘The House on the Creek’ in Maidenhead where Pat and I often stayed until Maidenhead was declared a ‘protected area in which enemy aliens, even friendly ones, were not allowed to reside’. I had been keeping my boat nearby, so I loaded my two radio sets and my bicycle onto the boat whilst a friend, Jimmy Harwood, drove my car to the White Hart Hotel at Sonning on Thames, a few miles up-river and out of the ‘protected area.’
Our timing was quite perfect. I tied up my boat and Jimmy arrived a few minutes before opening time. ‘Two pink gins’ we said.
‘This is the six-o’clock news.’ crackled a voice on the radio over the bar. ‘With immediate effect enemy aliens are prohibited from owning or using motorcars, boats, bicycles and radio sets.’
‘Ch… ch… cheers’ said Jimmy ‘I suppose you’ll be allowed to keep your shoes on.’
To do justice to the Chief Constable of Berkshire, it must be said that I applied for and was granted an exemption from that order.
Five weeks later however, on the glorious, beautiful morning of 26 June 1940, I emerged from my bath whistling and ready to travel to London for lunch with a particularly nice and attractive young woman when I found two large gentlemen waiting for me in my room.
‘Good morning sir,’ said one. ‘I suppose you know what we’re here for?’ I confessed I had no idea. ‘We’ve come to detain you,’ he said cheerfully.
I sat down. Then I asked a lot of questions. ‘Yes,’ I was told, ‘every enemy alien in England was to be detained.’ Did they think I would be detained for long? – ‘Definitely not, only for a few days.’ Could I telephone? ‘No, unfortunately.’ Could I take luggage? ‘Certainly. But it would be silly to take too much, since I would soon be back.’ I told them about my lunch date. They promised to let her know and trotted off to the telephone.
I packed as much as I could get into a fairly large suitcase and was taken in a police car to ‘a secret location’ – which turned out to be Wokingham Police Station – where I was put behind locked doors.
A police constable entered to enquire if I had had breakfast? I hadn’t. He took some money and returned a few minutes later with a tray on which I found tea, toast, butter, marmalade and a boiled egg under an egg warmer in the shape of a chicken’s head. I could not help but laugh – that egg warmer seemed to be a ludicrous touch under the circumstances.
During the hour I spent alone in that room, I took stock. I had preserved my freedom by fleeing from Germany but had lost out to the British. I had got rid of my German nationality and would remain stateless for the duration of the war, whist my naturalisation application remained suspended.
I stared at the locked door of my private suite – the way through it into the British Army looked quite impossible. The ground had, very effectively, been pulled from under my feet. I felt scared, mistreated, victimised and extremely angry. However, I also resolved that I would emerge undamaged and triumphant, in fact the victor, over all these injustices and those who created them.
Both the principle and the methods used to intern those of us who had fled from Nazi terror – whom the British had conveniently labelled ‘enemy aliens’ – became the subject of much criticism in England, and elsewhere. That criticism could be heard in Parliament and read about in the Press and it will always remain one of the less glorious chapters in the history of a nation that is generally so very humane; but which can, at times, also be extremely cruel.
It was foolish for anyone to expect plans to be ready for the internment of 40,000 of Hitler’s arch enemies in a country which was altogether unprepared for war and did not have enough anti-aircraft guns to hold off enemy planes. It was also quite unreasonable to think that this was the way to control enemy aliens and make a Fifth Column[1] in England impossible, and to then demand the immediate internment of those aliens in order to be certain.
Those in authority should have realised much sooner than they did that the aliens were themselves enemies of the same regime the British were fighting and included amongst their number racial and political refugees many of whom had already suffered in Hitler’s prisons and concentration camps. It should also have been obvious that, properly employed, we could make a considerable contribution to the war effort of a country desperately short of manpower.
1
A fifth column is a clandestine group of people whose objectives are to undermine a larger group from within.