Internment Camps

During the two world wars, many Canadians were placed in internment camps. These people were immigrants from countries then at war with Canada. Although many of them had become citizens, they were perceived by the government of the day as posing a threat to our war effort. 

Today, these people, or their descendants, claim that the government's action was based on prejudiced policies directed at certain minorities. They are demanding apologies and compensation. There seems to be a great deal of ignorance as to what really happened in those dark days of the wars.

In an Immigration Law class I at Seneca College in the 1990s, the professor, a lawyer and an immigrant from Africa, asked the class, “Why is it that only visible minorities were placed in internment camps?”  In reply to what he believed was a rhetorical question, I informed him that more than visible minorities were interned, that many Caucasians, Germans and Italians for example, also lost their freedom for the duration of the war.  I got my worst mark from him in an otherwise “Outstanding” report.

 Let's examine a small piece of a personal record -- my late father's memoirs. My parents, German-speaking Austrians, had come to Canada in the 1920s. Aside from the usual expressions of prejudice and bigotry experienced by foreigners in any country, there were no problems. It was never clear to me if my parents were disliked because they were central Europeans who talked funny, or because they were Catholic, or because during the Great Depression they bought a shiny new Plymouth and two rooming houses in lower-class Toronto. Or was it because they made their own wine, a matter that provoked police investigation? No matter, World War Two was upon us.

 

Investigators from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police visited the working places of foreign-born people (even if they had become Canadian citizens as did my parents). In the case of my father, this was the slaughter house of Canada Parkers in Toronto's west end. They questioned his boss, fellow employees, and possibly others. This incident became one of my mother's favourite jokes. The inspector asked the boss if my father ever talked about politics. "Politics?" the boss replied. "He never talks to anybody about anything." (He later recounted this story to my father.)

The Mounted Police came to our home, fingerprinted my father, and questioned him. As a seven-year old, I was always excited by the mounties. And here they were in our dining room, but not in uniform. “Do you have guns,” I asked hopefully. They replied no. They asked if my father if he belonged to any clubs. "All I could say was that I was a member of the Catholic Church at Dundas and McCaul," my father wrote in his memoirs. They never returned.

[In 2016, a terrible thought came to mind. At the time of the visit hanging somewhere in our home, possibly in the dining room, was a small oil painting of my grandfather’s house in Stadl-Paura, Austria. My parents had received it before postal service to Austria was closed in 1939. On the reverse, several relatives extended greetings. One of them wrote “mit treudeutschen gruss,” translated “with really German greetings.”  It was dated February 1938. Germany annexed Austria the following month. This greeting could have been interpreted as pro-German, making my father an enemy, and having him interned. Stranger things happened in those days of high tension.] 

Besides being a quiet-spoken person, my father, like most immigrants of the time, had come to Canada to escape the political turmoil of Europe, not to spread it. We never witnessed any “systemic” government prejudice, as some would have it, directed at us or other members of our extended family, all of whom were investigated, none of whom was interned. In fact, my Austrian-born Uncle Richard Reininger was given special status because his machine shop was engaged in war work.

On the other hand, a number of acquaintances express pro-Nazi opinions, some rather vehemently. "The government investigated all Germans and Austrians," my father's memoirs continue. "My neighbour across the road on George Street got picked up by the Mounted Police at two a.m. He was a member of an illegal club. He was kept in a camp until the war was over."

This was the Gembe family, with whose son Karl, I often played. My father added the poignant observation, "His wife could not understand why they didn't pick me up." The mother and three children, Hilda, Karl and Elfrieda, survive by renting rooms. Hilda was old enough to work. (I have a vague memory of Karl sporting a swastika on his sleeve, sometime before the war.)

Mr. Gembe was part of about 800 Germans interned during the war. They were sent into the northern bush to carve out the national parks we now enjoy. He spent his spare time building beautiful model sailing ships which he sent home.

The other German family up the street did not fare so well. The husband operated a car repair shop out of a garage. He got shipped away one night. Without his income, the wife and one small girl just moved away. We never learned what happened to them.

These people were quickly segregated from the general population, and placed in internment camps. Unfortunately, this meant great hardship to their families. But their internment was a justified exercise in national security. Not because of who they were, but because of what they did were these people viewed as security risks. That made them a legitimate target of suspicion. If investigation indicated a danger to the war effort, internment rightly followed.

Examination of the official record may well produce examples of rash governmental behaviour. But before any further compensation or apology is considered, there should be an impartial review of the evidence. Let's see what really happened. Judging the facts in the context of the time will, I believe, justify much of what occurred.

War propaganda and afterwards

"The evil that men do lives after them." When Shakespeare put those words in the mouth of one of the assassins of Julius Caesar, he was speaking for all generations. In one way or another, the evil we have been taught lives in each of us. I admit, some of it lives in me, however subconsciously.

In my defence, let me take you back to the dark, desperate days of the Second World War. This impressionable young boy living in downtown Toronto hears nothing but bad news. Every one on the street agrees it's all the fault of the Germans and the Japanese.  Nazi Germany is rapidly taking over much of continental Europe.  They are in Africa. England is about to be invaded.

Following their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese are advancing in China and southeast Asia. Australia is next to fall. We hear that a Japanese ship destroyed a lighthouse on Vancouver Island. Other Japanese invade Alaska. Canadian soldiers, only a few years older than myself, are being killed in places no one on the street had ever heard of, like Hong Kong. My school atlas tells us where it is.

With my central European background, I knew what Germans looked like. And a German family lived across the street. They looked like us. But the Japanese were a different story. I had never seen one in my life. They were from a different world.

Because of the war, a war started by the German and Japanese, food is rationed: meat, butter, sugar, tea, coffee, gasoline, car tires, alcohol. People talk about the black market. I see it as a very dark place where the rich can buy all the food and gasoline they want. The other black I hear about is blackout. When the sirens go off, men wearing white helmets with the letters A.R.P. across the front walk the streets, telling us to turn off all our lights.

We are getting ready to be bombed by the Germans or the Japanese. I wasn't sure which enemy would get here first. I did not like the idea of my home getting destroyed. My 16-year-old friends must register with the government, to get them ready to join the military. 

The tide slowly turns. Street talk is about air raids on the Germans. This pleases me because I feel it's better we bomb them than they bomb us. Because I don't know them. And they started it. The relentless propaganda gets me and all my friends to loathe the Germans and the Japanese.

The Japanese, I am taught to despise absolutely. I am told, and I believe, they could commit every atrocity they are accused of: torture, killing unarmed soldiers, forced labour by prisoners, starvation, execution and sex slaves. 

This anti-Japanese sentiment lingers so strongly in my mind that, one day some forty-five years later, as I enter a downtown department store, I stop cold. I stare wide-eyed at the enlarged Japanese face smiling down at me from the many banners scattered throughout the main floor. I am looking at the face of Alfred Sung, a Canadian fashion designer of Oriental descent. His products are being featured by the store. 

But what fills memory's eye is the smiling face I vividly remember from many anti-Japanese propaganda films, comic books and magazines. It's the face of that pilot machine-gunning innocent civilians fleeing the invading Japanese army. It is the face of that Japanese officer about to torture a prisoner. It is the face my generation was taught to hate.

War propaganda also taught us to hate the face of the blond German soldier, the one whose mouth wears a perpetual sneer, one who even in defeat flaunted a false sense of superiority.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

The good news is two-fold. I like to think that all of my generation knows it was brainwashed. And that life's experience has taught us how to deal with it, and to accept everyone equally. The other good news is that just as young minds can be taught hate, they can be taught love and caring and understanding. Let us pray that is what we, allies and enemies, pass to the next generation.

The Hell of War

Two pieces of related information.

I once knew an elderly woman who, during the Second World War, lived in a small German village. She told me that the locals could distinguish a German aircraft from one of the Allied air forces. They could also tell from the drone of the engines if it carried bombs.

As sometimes happened, Allied planes missed their targets and headed back to England with a full bomb load. As an aircraft would never attempt a landing with bombs aboard, the practice was to dump them in the Channel.

She told me that on one occasion they heard approaching their village a plane returning from a mission over Berlin or Frankfurt, but still carrying bombs. It flew over her village. No harm done. Over the next non-strategic village, it dropped its bombs killing some of the inhabitants.

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In the 1950's, my summer job was with the Air Regulations branch of the Canadian Department of Transport.  I assisted the inspectors, all of whom were veteran pilots.I learned that one of them did not drop the bombs of an aborted mission in the channel. He ordered, "As long as they land somewhere on German soil."

Unhappy Coincidences

In the nineteen-fifties, my summer job was with the federal Department of Transport, Air Regulations. All of the inspectors in the office had been pilots during the Second World War.

One of them told me he never returned from a mission with a load of bombs, the danger of explosion on landing too great. The usual recourse was to drop them in the English Channel. This inspector said he preferred to drop them anywhere on German soil.

Sitting in a coffee shop recently, I got into conversation with an elderly woman. She told be she had spent the war in her home town in northern Germany, a place of no strategic value. The locals got so used to the allied aircraft, they could tell from the sound of the engines if it still carried a load of bombs.

One night, they heard a aircraft returning from an abortive raid on Berlin. The sound of the engines told them it still carried bombs. The bombs were dropped on a nearby town, killing, she said, several thousand people who became part of the 400,000 civilians killed by Allied bombing during that war.

Another such coincidence occurred at a house party in Toronto in 1984. One guest told us that it was on this very night forty years earlier that Canadian bombers destroyed her city. A few minutes later, in another room, I saw a friend I knew flew a bomber during the war. He said he was sad because it was on this very night forty years earlier that his best friend was killed in a bombing mission over Germany.

Bombs From an Earlier Generation

An unexploded bomb dropped by the Allied air force during World War Two has this week been defused in the German city of Koblenz. In 1997, the President of Germany was forced out of his residence due to the discovery of unexploded ordinance under the presidential palace. Soon after that, thousands of residents of Hanover were evacuated while another bomb was defused.

Given that 2,000 tonnes of bombs and munitions are found each year in Germany, there is nothing unusual in this. Some of these air raids consisted of up to 3,000 bombers -- American by day, British and Canadian by night.

Sixty-five years after the last bomb was dropped during the Second World War, danger still lurks. There are areas of France which have yet to be cleared of First World War ordinance.

It's poignant to reflect that some of those bombs were manufactured in Toronto, dropped from aircraft made in Toronto, and flown by young men from Toronto.

Unexploded German bombs continue to be uncovered in England. The Imperial War Museum estimates that of the 19,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on London during the Blitz of 1940-41, 10 per cent did not explode, much of it remains buried somewhere in the city.

People, not then born, live today with a legacy of possible sudden death bequeathed to them by people likely no longer alive.

A legacy of the First World War continues to take lives one century later. During one of the epic battles at Ypres in Belgium, the British alone fired more than four million shells into the German lines. An estimated 30 per cent of those shells were duds or slipped deep into the ground unexploded, causing two or three deaths of local villagers a year. Farmers refuse to plough their fields, for fear a blade must strike a shell. Curiously, this ordinance rises ever so slightly as time goes by..

We have cause to worry at home as well. In April 2014, a 105-millimetre live shell was found on the land of the Enoch Cree First Nation west of Edmonton, Alberta. From 1942 to 1944, part of this land was used by the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan to teach Allied crews navigation and bombing techniques.