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Internment camps were camps that were specifically made to keep citizens with ties to enemy countries imprisoned. This includes immigrants who fled from their countries to find refuge and Canadian citizens with enemy descent. -Clara

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Morrissey Internment Camp, BC, ca. 1916-18.

First World War

Shortly after the First World War was declared, the federal government passed theWar Measures Act on 22 August 1914. It was in effect until 10 January 1920 - the official date of the end of the war with Germany. ( See Treaty of Versailles.) The War Measures Act gave the federal Cabinet sweeping powers to suspend civil liberties and to govern by order-in-council. This meant it could make and impose laws without the approval of Parliament.

On 15 August 1914, the government issued the Proclamation Respecting Immigrants of German or Austro-Hungarian Nationality. It authorized the arrest and detention of Canadians from Germany or Austria-Hungary if there were "reasonable grounds" to believe they were "engaged or attempting to engage in espionage or acts of a hostile nature, or giving or attempting to give information to the enemy, or assisting or attempting to assist the enemy."

According to official records, 8,579 men were held at 24 internment camps and receiving stations across Canada. This included 5,954 men of Austro-Hungarian origin, the majority of whom were Ukrainian. There were also 2,009 Germans, 205 Turks, and 99 Bulgarians. Some dependents of the male internees - 81 women and 156 children in total - were also voluntarily interned. Other internees included homeless people, conscientious objectors, and members of outlawed cultural and political associations.

Women and children prisoners at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp, Abitibi, Quebec, ca. 1914-1920.

In 1915, responsibility for internment operations shifted from the Department of Militia and Defence to the Department of Justice. However, Major General Sir William Otter remained in charge.

Around 80,000 people, mostly Ukrainian Canadians, were obliged to register as "enemy aliens" during the war. They were compelled to report regularly to the police and were subjected to other state-sanctioned censures. These included restrictions of their freedom of speech, as well as their movement and association.

See Ukrainian Internment in Canada.

DID YOU KNOW?
The term enemy alien referred to people from countries, or with roots in countries, that were at war with Canada. During the First World War, this included immigrants from the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and Bulgaria; during theSecond World War, people with Japanese,German and Italian ancestry.

Internees also had their property confiscated. Much of it was not returned at the end of the war. Internees were often made to work on large labour projects, e.g., building a portion of the golf course at Banff National Park. They were used to build roads, clear bush and cut trails. They also worked on logging and mining operations. They were paid less than half the daily wage offered to other labourers.

Conditions were trying. The guards were sometimes brutal. Resentment at what many regarded as their unjust confinement was widespread. This provoked resistance - some passive, such as work slowdowns. Other efforts were more determined. There were escape attempts and even a riot involving some 1,200 internees at Kapuskasing, Ontario, in May 1916. Three hundred armed soldiers were needed to put it down.

In total, 107 internees died in captivity. Six were shot dead while trying to escape. Others succumbed to infectious diseases, work-related injuries and suicide. In many cases, they were buried in unmarked graves or cemeteries far from their communities and loved ones.

Internees being marched off to dinner at the Petawawa internment camp during the First World War.

Redress

Efforts to gain redress (acknowledgement and compensation) for Canada's first national internment operations began in 1978. Internee Nick Sakaliuk provided testimony to historians about his experiences as an internee at Fort Henry in Kingston and then in the Petawawa and Kapuskasing camps. Yet almost a decade passed before a campaign to right this historic injustice began. It was led by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA).

The UCCLA took its cue from another survivor, Montreal-born Mary Manko Haskett. She believed that any redress campaign should be "about memory, not money." Haskett was six years old when she was exiled to the Spirit Lake camp. Her younger sister Nellie died there.

Clearing wood at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp, Abitibi, Quebec, ca. 1914-20.

Haskett believed that contemporary society need not bear direct responsibility for what happened decades earlier. An official apology was never requested. Compensation to individual survivors or their descendants was never sought. The UCCLA instead made concerted efforts to raise public awareness through initiatives such as the installation of historical markers and statues. A trilingual plaque was unveiled by a Spirit Lake camp survivor, Stefa Mielniczuk, at Fort Henry on 4 August 1994.

A $10 million community settlement fund was established in 2008 to further support commemorative and educational projects about Canada's first national internment operations. Symbolically, the settlement was signed in Toronto 's Stanley Barracks, a "receiving station" for internees from 14 December 1914 to 2 October 1916.

Wasyl Hasiuk's certificate of release from the internment camp at Kapuskasing, Ontario, 14 June 1916.

Second World War

The federal government also invoked the War Measures Act during the Second World War - on 25 August 1939. The Act was used to implement the Defence of Canada Regulations. These gave the Minister of Justice the authority to detain anyone acting "in any manner prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the state." As a result, both enemy nationals and Canadian citizens were subject to internment.

The army and the Secretary of State shared administrative responsibility for internment camps. More than 40 camps held around 24,000 people in total. A total of 26 internment camps were in Ontario, Quebec, Alberta and New Brunswick. ( See also Prisoner of War Camps in Canada.)

Most of the German Canadian internees were members of German-sponsored organizations. Some were leaders of the National Unity Party (the Canadian Nazi Party). Hundreds of Germans on Canadian soil were accused of spying and subversion.

The camps also housed captured enemy soldiers. More than 700 German sailors captured in East Asia were sent to Canada. German immigrants who had arrived in Canada after 1922 were also forced to register with the authorities; 16,000 did so. ( See also Prisoner of War Camps in Canada.)

Italians

After Italy entered the war in June 1940, several prominent Italians were interned. Around 600 Italian men suspected of sympathizing with fascism were placed into three camps: Kananaskis, Alberta; Petawawa, Ontario; and Fredericton, New Brunswick. Some 31,000 Italian Canadians were registered as enemy aliens. They were forced to report to local registrars or to RCMP stations once a month.

Jews

In the summer of 1940, more than 3,000 refugees - among them 2,300 German and Austrian Jews aged 16 to 60 - were sent to Canada. They were interned in guarded camps in Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick. The Jews in the group came to be known as the "accidental immigrants." They were initially interned in prisoner of war (POW) camps alongside actual POWs, including Nazi Germans. ( See Canada and the Holocaust.)

Japanese

In March 1941, Ottawa required all Japanese Canadians, whether they were citizens or not, to register with the government. This was done on the recommendation of the Special Committee on Orientals in British Columbia, a federally appointed advisory group. In effect, this declared Japanese Canadians to be enemy aliens.

Immediately after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong on 7 December 1941, the RCMP interned 38 Japanese nationals. Later, an additional 720 Japanese were imprisoned; they were mainly Canadian citizens and members of the Nisei Mass Evacuation Group who resisted separation from their families.

Orders from the BC Security Commission, which appeared 29 April 1942."en.

>DID YOU KNOW?
Various scholars and activists have challenged the notion that Japanese Canadians were interned during the Second World War. Underinternational law, internment refers to the detention of enemy aliens. But most of the Japanese Canadians involved - 65 per cent - were Canadian citizens. Terms suggested instead includeincarceration,expulsion, detention and dispersal.

On 24 February 1942, Cabinet ordered Japanese Canadians to move 100 miles inland from the Pacific Coast. The order led to the expulsion of some 21,000 Japanese Canadians from their homes. Sixty per cent were Canadian born and 77 per cent were Canadian citizens. They were divided by sex, and housed together on cots in a former women's building and in livestock barns on the grounds of the Pacific National Exhibition. ( See Japanese Canadians Held at Hastings Park.)

In 1942 the Canadian government moved to relocate all Japanese in British Columbia, seizing any property that the people could not carry.

The vast majority of Japanese Canadians, more than 12,000 people, were then exiled to the Slocan Valley, in BC's eastern Kootenay region. They were housed in what were euphemistically called "interior housing centres" in largely-abandoned mining towns (e.g., New Denver, Kaslo, Greenwood and Sandon). Their activities were severely restricted. The Canadian government confiscated and later sold their property; it also pressured around 4,000 of them to accept mass deportation after the war ended.

See Internment of Japanese Canadians; Japanese Canadian Internment: Prisoners in their own Country.

Image: Jack Long / National Film Board of Canada/Library and Archives Canada/PA-142853.

Other Internees

Citizens could be interned for belonging to outlawed organizations, such as the Communist Party of Canada. Because of this, some have claimed that internment was used as a weapon against labour leaders. For example, J.A. "Pat" Sullivan, president of the Canadian Seamen's Union, was interned in 1940. He was released in 1941, along with about 130 other communists, after the Communist-ruled Soviet Union joined the Allies. Almost 850 Canadian fascists, such as Adrien Arcand of Montreal, were also interned.

In one of the most high profile cases, Montreal Mayor Camillien Houde was arrested at city hall in 1940. He was interned for four years in Ontario for denouncing government policies that would lead to conscription.

Camillien Houde during civic elections, Montréal, 12 December 1938.

During the First World War, Canada had housed 817 internees from Newfoundland and British Caribbean colonies. During the Second World War, Canadian camps held POWs and merchant seamen captured by the British, as well as some British civilians. At the peak in October 1944, Canada held 34,193 persons for Britain. ( See also Prison Ships in Canada: A Little-Known Story; Prisoner of War Camps in Canada).

Redress

In the decades following the world wars, Canadians who were interned and had their property seized began lobbying for compensation for and recognition of their treatment. The Japanese Canadian redress movement led to an official apology from Prime Minister Brian Mulroney on the floor of the House of Commons in 1988. The terms of the settlement also included a redress (compensation) payment of $21,000 to each surviving individual affected by official policy; a community fund of $12 million; and funding for a Canadian Race Relations Foundation to support human rights projects.

September 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney signs the agreement to compensate the Japanese-Canadians for the expropriation of their property and their internment during World War II.

Repeal of the War Measures Act

In 1988, the War Measures Act was repealed and replaced by the Emergencies Act. This created more limited and specific powers for the government to deal with security emergencies. Under the Emergencies Act, Cabinet orders and regulations must be reviewed and approved by Parliament. This means Cabinet cannot act on its own. The Act outlines how people affected by government actions during emergencies are to be compensated. It also notes that government actions are subject to theCanadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights.

The Emergencies Act also says that "Nothing in this Act shall be construed or applied so as to confer on the Governor in Council the power to make orders or regulations... providing for the detention, imprisonment or internment of Canadian citizens or permanent residents... on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental or physical disability."

See also Japanese Canadian Internment: Prisoners in their own Country; Interned in Canada: An Interview with Pat Adachi; Hide Hyodo Shimizu; Obasan (novel); Joy Kogawa; David Suzuki; Masumi Mitsui; Irene Uchida; Annie Buller.

David Suzuki and two of his sisters in an internment camp in Slocan City in the British Columbia interior, between 1942-1945.

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Morrissey Internment Camp, BC, ca. 1916-18. Shortly after the First World War was declared, the federal government passed theWar Measures Act on 22 August 1914. It was in effect until 10 January 1920 - the official date of the end of the war with Germany. ( See Treaty of Versailles.)

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Mitro Mahoumnuk, having immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1910, was classified as an “enemy alien,” and interned at the alien detention centre in Brandon Manitoba. Once there, he was, along with over nine hundred other men, imprisoned for almost two years and later sent to a work camp in Banff, Alberta after the Brandon internment camp closed in 1916. Mitro’s experiences are known today only because he managed to escape from the Brandon alien detention centre, only to be recaptured over six months later. [1] Due to the destruction of all official government records dealing with internment operations in the 1950s, the names of most of the internees at the Brandon camp remain unknown today.

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The act of being an "enemy alien" resulted in significant discrimination and made your life very difficult with detainment and other restrictions. People that fit the criteria of an enemy alien were those with ties to the enemy, such as Germans. Camps were located in BC, NS, and ON. -Curran

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During the first world war, enemy aliens were put in prison camps across Canada. These camps were harsh as the men were forced to do hard labour with little food and cold, crowded conditions along with very poor treatment by the guards. - Siobhan

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The Flu Hits Internment Camps New Canadians endure life as “enemy aliens” interned in Canada in 1918 Kandace Bogaert During the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Canadian government actively encouraged immigrants from East and Central Europe to come and settle the Canadian Wes…

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Women and children prisoners at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp

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Women and children prisoners at the Spirit Lake Internment Camp

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Clara

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Enemy alien referred to people from countries that were at war with Canada. During the first World War these included immigrants from the German, Austro Hungarian and Bulgaria.  JA

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At this time in Canada, speaking German was looked down upon. There was a lot of anti-German sentiment.

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How were "enemy aliens" treated? Kaden P

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How were "enemy aliens" treated? Kaden P

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The Flu Hits Internment Camps New Canadians endure life as “enemy aliens” interned in Canada in 1918 Kandace Bogaert During the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the Canadian government actively encouraged immigrants from East and Central Europe to come and settle the Canadian Wes…

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The majority of enemy aliens interned were of Ukrainian descent, targeted because Ukraine was then split between Russia (an ally) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an enemy of the British Empire.

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The article associated with this story mentions the story of a painter who in traveling to England in order to paint some cliffs. When the stories of German atrocities in Belgium and France reached England, he became an enemy alien. He was forced to register, and was eventually transported to an internment camp at the isle of man. (Jacob)

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Internment camp were places during World War 1 where many "enemy aliens" were held out of the 8,000 people spread across 24 camps, most of them were Austro-Hungarians along with some Turks, Germans, and Bulgarians. -Wes

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When you were registered as an "enemy alien" you had to regularly report to the police. You also had restrictions of freedom of speech, also movement and association. (H.E)

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Audio brought to you by Curio, a Lapham's Quarterly partner

W hen Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot point-blank in the neck on June 28, 1914, news of his assassination ricocheted from Sarajevo all the way across Europe before nightfall. In the ballroom of a Parisian amusement park that evening, Austrian painter Paul Cohen-Portheim asked a Viennese count what he thought was going to happen next. "Why should anything happen?" replied the count, surprised. Cohen-Portheim was comforted-there was no need to cancel his annual trip to England to paint the cliffs of Devonshire.

On June 28, it was possible to believe that the archduke's death would have few repercussions, but by the end of July that illusion had collapsed. After several pleasant weeks in the English countryside, Cohen-Portheim traveled to London to discover that Serbia and his native Austria were at war. He considered withdrawing funds he had deposited at the local branch of his German bank, but the tellers assured him that a broader conflict was not expected. After a few days with friends in Richmond, an elegant suburb southwest of London, Cohen-Portheim returned to find that his money had effectively vanished.

Desperate for passage home when Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, Cohen-Portheim joined a crowd trying to enter the German consulate on Bedford Square. A diplomat stepped out from the doorway to say that two ships had been chartered but would carry only military reservists-everyone else was out of luck. Cohen-Portheim was stranded in suburban London with only ten pounds on which to live. He would have to survive on the kindness of his British friends.

On August 4, Britain declared war on Germany, and the next day Parliament passed the Aliens Restriction Act, transforming every foreigner born in Germany or Austria-Hungary into an "enemy alien." Cohen-Portheim was required to register immediately at his local police station.

An Old Man With a Penetrating Gaze, from the series Asakusa Portraits, by Hiroh Kikai, 2001. Gelatin silver print. © Hiroh Kikai, courtesy of the artist and Yancey Richardson Gallery.

As required by the new law, Cohen-Portheim visited a station near Richmond, only to be sent to another station, where officials should have given him a registration card listing the details of his newly restricted life: an enemy alien was not permitted to send letters to his family; he could not travel without permission more than five miles from the station at which he had registered; he could not own a camera, a car, an airplane, a motorcycle, or a carrier pigeon; he was forbidden military maps, clandestine signaling devices, guns, and ammunition. Cohen-Portheim, however, did not receive the new regulations, which he only learned after unintentionally violating any number of them.

For years, British newspapers had sounded the alarm about nefarious Germans, and in the eyes of many, registration of enemy aliens did not settle the issue. "Does signing his name take the malice out of a man?" cried the Daily Mail. As early as 1909, papers had reported (entirely imaginary) Zeppelin sightings on the British coast and warned of the threat posed by an expanding German navy. Newspaper magnate Lord Northcliffe, owner of both the Daily Mail and the Times, further stoked the fear of invasion, warning that German waiters and barbers lurked at the heart of a hidden spy network.

During the first month of the war, reports of German atrocities in Belgium and France exploded into headlines-prisoners of war lined up before firing squads, children bayoneted, widespread civilian executions at Liège. But while some members of Parliament expressed outrage that not enough aliens had been rounded up at home, government ministers encouraged restraint. "To arrest all aliens wholesale, irrespective of their guilt or innocence," declared Lord Chancellor Viscount Haldane, "was a policy as inhuman as it was inefficacious."

But on May 7, 1915, a German submarine torpedoed the British ocean liner Lusitania, killing more than a thousand civilians. Anti-German riots erupted across the British Empire, from Johannesburg to Melbourne, striking at least three dozen neighborhoods in London alone. Looters ransacked German pubs and bakeries, stomping freshly baked bread and causing shortages the next day; children carted away stolen goods in wheelbarrows; windows were broken, dishes handed over to onlookers, pianos and harmoniums burned. In Liverpool, police took German enemy aliens into protective custody. The riots gave the government the chance to declare that mass internment was in the interest of enemy aliens themselves.

Less than a week after the Lusitania 's destruction, the government announced that all male enemy aliens of military age would be rounded up and sent to a camp on the Isle of Man. On the evening of May 24, 1915, a detective visited Cohen-Portheim and told the painter to turn himself in at the Richmond police station at ten a.m. the next day, saying, "Pack as if you were going for a holiday." Cohen-Portheim filled two trunks in the hopes he would be gone a few days at most. In the morning, his last real friend in London accompanied him as far as the courtyard of the police station. From there he went by taxi to a camp in London's East End, where a thousand German and Austrian men of fighting age squatted together in an open hall under a bombed-out glass roof. Given a metal disc with his prisoner number, Cohen-Portheim was relieved to learn he would only have to survive one night there.

At six a.m., armed guards marched the new prisoners through the streets of London to the train station. Crowds lined their path, spitting, throwing things, and shouting about Huns and baby killers. Cohen-Portheim was well aware of his pariah status. "Everybody felt something extraordinary was expected from him," he wrote in Time Stood Still, his memoir of the almost three years he would spend as a prisoner in British internment camps. "But no one-except [British] soldiers-quite knew what to do in order to show his devoted patriotism." At the train station, the prisoners' nightmare suddenly reversed. They boarded a comfortable train to the coast, with a good meal and friendly civilian waiters. On arrival, soldiers took over again, ordering them onto a steamer, where they were locked standing-room-only into the hold while they sailed across the Irish Sea to Knockaloe Camp on the Isle of Man, which would eventually hold more than 23,000 enemy aliens.

Approaching Knockaloe in darkness, Cohen-Portheim saw a bright chain of arc lights on a hill, illuminating barbed-wire fences that stretched as high as eighteen feet. Thousands of inmates crowded inside the wire, initiating new arrivals by imitating their British tormenters: Huns! Baby killers! Cohen-Portheim's feet sank into muddy clay. He surrendered his prisoner number and began to wait for the end of the war.

Jurist William Blackstone first defined the term alien enemy in his celebrated Commentaries on the Law of England in 1766. Summing up centuries of British common law, he wrote, "When I mention these rights of an alien, I must be understood of alien friends only, or such whose countries are in peace with ours; for alien enemies have no rights, no privileges...during the time of war." The United States in 1798, anticipating war with France, created the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts, including its own Alien Enemies Act, which authorized the apprehension, arrest, or removal of males over the age of fourteen native to a country at war with the United States. (While nearly all of the Alien and Sedition Acts expired a few years later, the Alien Enemies Act remains on the books today.)

Before the First World War began in 1914, civilian internment had been used as a tactic during a handful of colonial wars in Africa, the Pacific, and Cuba. As administered by Britain, Germany, Spain, and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, colonial internment camps held the seeds of nearly everything the camps would become in the next hundred years, from sites of detention to factories of outright genocide.

Spain established the first camps in colonial Cuba in 1896. Rural populations were forced into urban camps to cut off guerrillas from local aid. Their crops burned and homes lost, families slowly starved to death on the outskirts of Havana and other cities. In the Philippines, five years later, the United States military briefly set up its own camps during a brutal campaign against independence fighters, executing civilians and waterboarding suspects during interrogations, actions considered so brutal that officers faced court-martial for their conduct. Between 1900 and 1902, the British would build more than a hundred camps to intern Afrikaner families and black Africans during the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa. As in Cuba, widespread mortality resulted more from poor planning rather than deliberate abuse, but this mismanagement caused tens of thousands of deaths. In 1904, Germany would incorporate concentration camps into a strategy of deliberate genocide against rebellious Herero and Nama tribes in its territory of South West Africa (today Namibia), driving them into the desert, hunting down survivors, chaining them together, and delivering them to labor camps with staggering mortality rates.

The death toll from colonial concentration camps ran to more than 150,000. Word of those fatalities, amplified by aggressive newspaper coverage and early human rights campaigners, turned the camps into a source of national shame for the imperial powers that had adopted them. In December 1904, Germany rescinded its extermination policy in South West Africa, and the Reichstag soon cut funding to the territory. In England during the Boer War, members of Parliament denounced the British military treatment of civilians, asking if the rules of civilized warfare agreed on in The Hague in 1899, the year the Boer War began, were being followed.

In the Anglo-Boer War, the British government argued the Hague Conventions did not apply: the Boer republics were not signatories. Nor did the Hague Conventions wield any meaningful force in relation to the treatment of prisoners in other colonial camps. Eventually ratified by more than forty nations, including Britain, Germany, Spain, and the United States, the conventions were binding only between signatories who later went to war with each other. The colonial camps were technically law-abiding. Colonial subjects and powers were not at war, only an indigenous people against their governors; the prisoners were natives, not enemy aliens.

Vaslav Nijinsky performing the "Siamese Dance" from the ballet Les Orientales, Paris, 1911. © Private Collection, Archives Charmet, Bridgeman Images. Photograph by Eugène Druet.

In the first days of the Great War, Britain intended only to detain suspect enemy aliens as prisoners of war. Pressured by Parliament to arrest all enemy aliens, British Home Secretary Reginald McKenna resisted, saying he would proceed under the Hague Conventions, in which the military was responsible for designating enemy aliens for arrest. Internment, he noted, was reserved only for enemy aliens who were military personnel or seen as dangerous to the nation. After the Lusitania 's sinking, however, the political resistance vanished, all military-age enemy aliens were rounded up, and civilians were transformed into prisoners of war.

As declarations of war multiplied across the globe between signatories of the Hague Conventions, a complex bureaucracy of detention began removing groups of civilians en masse from society. The Hague Conventions authorized internment of prisoners in a "town, fortress, camp, or other place," but stated that they could "only be confined as an indispensable measure of safety." At the heart of wartime internment conditions was the requirement that prisoners of war "be treated as regards board, lodging, and clothing on the same footing as the troops of the government which has captured them."

To understand the effects of mass internment during the First World War, the experience described by Paul Cohen-Portheim should be multiplied hundreds of thousands of times around the globe. In November 1914, Germany moved to arrest all British, French, and Russian men between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five, and by war's end held more than 111,000 enemy aliens. During the same period, France interned 60,000 German and Austro-Hungarian civilians; Bulgaria rounded up more than 14,000 Serbian and Croatian noncombatants; and Romania held 6,000 civilians, mostly Germans and Austro-Hungarians.

By the war's end, concentration camps in Britain had housed more than 32,000 enemy aliens. In Russia, foreigners from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey were exiled to villages in the far reaches of the tsar's empire, with roughly 300,000 enemy aliens deported or interned before the Bolshevik Revolution led to a separate peace early in 1918. After joining the conflict in April 1917, the United States would intern just over 2,000 enemy aliens, nearly all of them Germans, with a twenty-two-year-old J. Edgar Hoover at the helm of enemy alien registration.

In an era of widespread conscription, any male of fighting age was a potential soldier. Generals worried that able-bodied foreigners deported to their home countries on one day might show up on the battlefield the next, further discouraging any desire to make distinctions between civilians and combatants. Internees knew that compared to life in the trenches, a concentration camp offered relative safety, but internment had its own price. Even where they had spent decades as part of a community, foreigners' businesses were ransacked or shuttered, or their assets seized by governments. Internees were not soldiers, but instead a new kind of low-grade hostage. Not expected to fight or die, they only endured.

In all, records from the First World War document more than half a million civilian internees. Death, however, trumped detainment. During the war, Britain alone lost more than 700,000 soldiers in combat, and fatalities across the globe, civilian and military, have been estimated at over sixteen million. In the wake of this vast carnage, it is perhaps no wonder that the internment of a few hundred thousand enemy aliens has largely been forgotten. Yet the First World War was a watershed moment in the treatment of civilians during wartime. In the summer of 1914, concentration camps were a defunct, disgraced concept. By the end of the war, they stretched across six continents. In only four years, mass detention of innocent civilians had been legitimized in every corner of the earth.

T he morning after his arrival at Knockaloe Internment Camp in May 1915, Cohen-Portheim listened to the camp commandant's assurances that prisoners would be treated with kindness and consideration-his heart rose briefly-but if they tried to escape, the commandant continued, they could also be shot. Cohen-Portheim did not know it, but despite the rough aspects of the camp, it had been designed to preclude the kind of suffering internees had faced during the Boer War.

In the summer, prisoners could lie on a grassy hill and stare at the sky. In a camp with no adults over fifty or under eighteen, and no women at all, there were no obligations for internees beyond morning and evening roll call. Cohen-Portheim was prepared to make the best of circumstances for the week or two he thought might reasonably pass before his release.

As prisoners settled in, their belongings arrived, but one of Cohen-Portheim's trunks had disappeared. The one he received was filled with the holiday gear he had optimistically packed: bathing attire, white flannel suits, and evening wear, but not a thing of any practical use. He began to wear his white suit regularly, to the amusement of fellow internees. He used his remaining money to acquire two nails to hang his clothes on and two boards for a headrest.

Cohen-Portheim's lot improved further when he found he could receive not just letters from his family, but small sums of money as well. Class division reared its head when those with funds were allowed to request transfer to a "gentlemen's camp" at Wakefield in West Yorkshire. Hearing of better conditions there, Cohen-Portheim signed on, only to find the same cramped quarters, the same boredom, and the same omnipresent barbed wire.

Newspapers criticized exemptions for influential foreigners, but internment affected all classes and occupations around the world. In 1915, as James Joyce began writing Ulysses, his brother Stanislaus-and nearly Joyce himself-was imprisoned in Austria as a subversive. Leon Trotsky was intercepted as he sailed from New York City on his way to Russia to greet the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. He was interned for several weeks as a political prisoner in a camp in Nova Scotia, despite the fact that Russia and Canada were not at war.

As the war dragged on and new camps were constructed around the world, an administrative bureaucracy also developed: POW information bureaus were set up; censors processed letters; complaints were received. Under the auspices of the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross and neutral countries worked as go-betweens, forwarding packages and trying to broker prisoner exchanges. Red Cross officials alone visited more than five hundred camps in thirty-eight countries. As the administration of social quarantine flourished, camp libraries grew to thousands of volumes. Technical courses meeting professional guidelines were approved as trade certifications; prisoners could work toward qualification for Oxford or Cambridge upon release and, in some cases, even university degrees. But all these activities merely served as dressing on the open wound of endless imprisonment.

In February 1918, Paul Cohen-Portheim neared his third anniversary in prison. A year later, the diagnosis of "barbed-wire disease" would be offered by Swiss doctor and Red Cross observer Adolf Lukas Vischer to describe the effects of ongoing internment on civilians and combatants alike. "Try to imagine," Cohen-Portheim wrote, "though it is impossible really to understand without having experienced it-what it means, never to be alone and never to know quiet, not for a minute, and to continue thus for years, and you will begin to wonder that there was no general outbreak of insanity." Despite the absence of overt abuse in most camps, the combination of monotony, unknown release dates, lack of privacy, sexual deprivation, and prisoners' helplessness to alter conditions combined to foster profound mental illness. Cohen-Portheim could not later recall a single prisoner entirely free of the ailment.

Early in the war, politicians had tried to carve distinctions between the "friendly alien" and the "enemy alien." But the entire project of determining and assigning loyalties to people en masse was useless. For all the businesses closed, livelihoods wrecked, families sundered, and funds spent on camps, mass arrests of enemy aliens in Britain provided no discernible benefit. Heading into the Great War, Germany's spy network was ineffectual, with Britain quickly rounding up known agents in the first days of the conflict. Not one German national living in Britain at the start of the war was linked to any wartime act of espionage.

The Reception of the Diplomatique and His Suite, at the Court of Pekin, by James Gillray, 1792. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Cohen-Portheim was released from prison in February 1918, when he was included in a prisoner exchange brokered by neutral Holland. Returning to Germany later that year, he found food scarce, the economy in ruins, and the country stumbling into civil war. Given how often circumstances belied his optimism, he proved shockingly fair in his depiction of his time in the camps. Time Stood Still was published in 1931, and the New York Times would later describe his memoir of internment as a civilian All Quiet on the Western Front.

In the rubble of a devastated Europe, however, there was little reflection on concentration camps. A few prisoners had rioted or been shot; camps in Canada and on the Eastern Front had controversially used forced labor; but for the most part the concentration camps could not compare to the unprecedented tragedy of modern warfare that had maimed, gassed, and killed millions. By 1918, the imprisonment of civilians seemed unexceptionable. The most humane parts of the camps-the Red Cross packages, the classes, the libraries, the orchestral performances-had normalized the idea of wartime internment.

The attempt to standardize and humanize internment conditions had also rehabilitated the idea of concentration camps and eroded memories of the brutality of the colonial camps. Indeed, once the public had adjusted to the idea of imprisoning innocent foreigners preemptively, governments learned how to harness anxiety of a foreign danger-with the underlying fear of crime, degeneracy, and disease-and assign it to other target groups, often domestic enemies. The identification of a pariah class, the registration and rules limiting conduct, followed by mass arrests and civilian detentions; the roll calls and prisoner numbers, the barracks, the watchtowers, the armed guards...civilians everywhere had experienced it all before as a seemingly necessary tragedy in the service of a national cause. Camps had become part of a formal process of dehumanization.

Leon Trotsky would record his own experiences in the Canadian concentration camp and write a memo in 1918 after his return to Russia, suggesting similar use of camps for enemies of the Revolution. Vladimir Lenin quickly embraced the concept, and orders went out to employ camps alongside executions as tools in the mass terror he aimed to instill. The system would find its champion under Stalin, whose Gulag rose in part on the back of Trotsky's few unremarkable weeks in an internment camp in Nova Scotia.

If internment during the First World War provided some inspiration for the camps that preceded the Soviet Gulag, anti-Semitic measures in Germany, including the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, began in a way that felt even more familiar: the identification of an alien civilian population, followed by registration, restrictions, arrests, and detention in camps.

Yet even as reports of atrocities began to emerge in the 1930s, the world responded to the Nazi camps of the Second World War as if they were the internment camps of the First. In 1943, in the wake of the deportation of Danish Jews to the ghetto-camp at Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, the king of Denmark insisted that Red Cross representatives be allowed to speak with prisoners there. The Final Solution was underway, but the Nazis needed to keep occupied countries from open revolt, and so permitted a visit. A preparatory frenzy of flower planting and renovation ensued, followed by faked cultural events-all contrived to display the familiar, suggesting that the camps of the Third Reich were no different from camps administered by other nations during the First World War.

Qajar, by Shadi Ghadiran, 1998. Chromogenic print. © Shadi Ghadiran, courtesy the artist and Robert Klein Gallery, Boston.

They were, of course, profoundly different, but each country in the Second World War transformed the concentration camps of the First into a machine that served its needs. British internment of enemy aliens in 1940 repeated the errors of haste and excessive arrests from 1915. In the wake of Pearl Harbor, the United States interned not only Japanese aliens, but nearly seventy thousand of its own citizens with Japanese ancestry. In occupied France during the Vichy era, French policemen rounded up alien Jews into camps, from which they were sent to Auschwitz. Russia deported hundreds of thousands of Poles eastward, many to Arctic labor camps. But none of these systems compared to the Nazi death camps that would establish concentration camps as the signature horror of the twentieth century.

Cohen-Portheim would not live to see the outbreak of another world war. He died in 1932, a year after the publication of his memoir and a year before Hitler's rise to power. Of his years boarded among strangers with little hope for release, he wrote, "I cannot honestly say that it has harmed me." But evaluating the moral nature of the camps, he was less accommodating. If the faceless standardization and dehumanization of concentration camps in the Great War had not done him permanent damage, he nonetheless saw himself as the atypical patient who comes out of an epidemic healthier than before. His own good fortune, he wrote, "must not prevent me from considering a disease a disease nor induce my readers to think that I call good what in itself is evil."

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Audio brought to you by Curio, a Lapham's Quarterly partner W hen Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot point-blank in the neck on June 28, 1914, news of his assassination ricocheted from Sarajevo all the way across Europe before nightfall.

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Stanley Barracks on the CNE Grounds became a receiving station for "enemy aliens"

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Why they didn't like enemy aliens -Briana L

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Why they didn't like enemy aliens -Briana L

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https://www.history.com/news/italian-american-internment-persecution-wwii

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What happened to the enemy aliens Logan K

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What happened to the enemy aliens Logan K

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Under the authority of the WMA, Canada interned 8,579 enemy aliens in 24 receiving stations and internment camps from 1914-1920. Otter classified 3,138 as prisoners of war, while the others were civilians.

https://www.warmuseum.ca/firstworldwar/history/life-at-home-during-the-war/enemy-aliens/the-internment-of-ukrainian-canadians/

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Canada’s contribution to the First World War led to growing autonomy and international recognition, but at great cost.

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The term “enemy alien” referred to the citizens of states legally at war with Canada who resided in Canada during the war. Under the authority of the WMA, Canada interned 8,579 enemy aliens in 24 receiving stations and internment camps from 1914-1920.