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Tag Archives: WWII

The HMT Dunera scandal

By Dr George Venturini

The HMT Dunera scandal

In the spring of 1940 England was in the grip of a great panic over the possibility of an invasion by Nazi Germany. Enemy troops were just across the English Channel – less than fifty kilometres away.

In England, German, Italian and most European foreigners were feared as potential spies and agents provocateurs, who would join with the enemy if and when the Nazis invaded.

Consequently, the British government ordered all such adult subjects to be rounded up and interned. And that included even German Jewish refugees who had recently escaped from Nazi Germany and who were implacable enemies of the Nazis.

The majority were sent to the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown dependency in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Ireland, where they could do little harm, but heavy suspicion fell on those men of military age, from 18 to 65, who were regarded as highly dangerous.

Those were to be sent all the way to Australia.

Those deported to Australia had to be kept under surveillance for the journey, and the British navy was able to supply a suitable troopship, the HMT (Hired Military Transport) Dunera. It was a secure military vessel and had originally been designed and equipped for 1,600 troops, but now was to be filled with 2,542 refugees aged between 16 and 60, besides the crew and the army warders. As a result, everyone was cramped and hugely uncomfortable.

Seventy per cent of the internees were Jewish refugees who had managed to escape from the Nazis and had arrived in England long before the outbreak of the war. The Dunera began loading on 10 July 1940. With 7 officers and over 300 others, a total of 2800 men were to be crammed on to a vessel built to hold 1600. The ship’s crew – 309 poorly trained soldiers – brutally searched and looted the internees’ luggage, some of which quite large, while the ship’s commanders, Lieutenant-Colonel William Scott and First Lieutenant John O’Neill, either stood by indifferently or actively participated. (C. Pearl, The Dunera scandal, Angus & Robertson, Sydney 1983)

The ship left Liverpool at midnight. Callously indifferent to the fate of the men, the British government allowed the Dunera only one destroyer escort. Less than 24 hours out of Liverpool, German submarine U-56 attacked; a but because the waves were heavy, the ship went up just as the torpedo passed underneath.

The 57 days of the voyage were a nightmare of inhuman conditions and brutal mistreatment. The lower decks of the ship were jammed, and men had to sleep on mess tables or on the floor. For weeks hatches were kept down. Neither daylight nor natural air ever reached the decks; the upper parts of the ship, where one would have been in the fresh air, were absolutely out of bounds, being barred by barbed wire and sentries with bayonets. Only ten toilets were available which meant long queues and ‘toilet police’ who would call up people as vacancies arose. Men slept on floors and benches, and if one wanted to go to the toilet at night he had to walk on bodies. Robbed of their luggage, the refugees had but the clothes on their backs; most of them had lost the basics: toothbrush, toothpaste, comb or soap. Later, the guards gave one piece of soap to every 20 men to share for 2 weeks but this was hardly enough to keep clean. If an internee became ill there was a half-hour waiting to see the doctor. Inoculations were non-existent. Food consisted of smoked fish, sausages, potatoes and a spoonful of melon and lemon jam a day; the bread was usually maggoty and the butter rancid.

The crew treated the refugees with extreme cruelty. The internees remained uninformed of their true destination until their own knowledge of geography and navigation by the stars – and arrival in a western coastal port of Africa – made further secrecy impossible. The crew searched the men daily, threatening them with loaded rifles fixed with bayonets. If guards found any vital medications, such as insulin, they threw them overboard. They also threw false teeth away, confiscated razors and shaving utensils and threatened men who hid their razors or were clean-shaven with detention in the bunker. Any valuables, hidden food, or Jewish religious vestments, phylacteries and prayer books were confiscated and either kept or thrown overboard. Beatings were daily.

Two internees died during the two-month voyage: Hans Pfeffen was sick when he boarded the Dunera at Liverpool and died in the ship’s hospital; Jacob Weiss suicided. Weiss had hoped to save his family from the Nazis in Europe and after 12 months of work and ultimately attaining immigration documents for himself and his family, he was arrested, interned and forced aboard the Dunera. When the guards on the ship found his immigration papers, they tore them up in front of him. Distraught, Weiss jumped overboard and drowned.

Prior to arrival in Australia, the crew ordered the internees to shave off their beards, providing the 2,542 men with 8 razors to do the task. The ship reached the Port of Fremantle in Western Australia on 27 August and Port Melbourne on 3 September. At Melbourne, two groups disembarked: the 251 German and Austrian ‘A’ Category internees whom the British government regarded as dangerous or potentially dangerous due to their political affiliations, along with 94 Germans and 200 Italians whose political affiliations were seen as “doubtful” since they were members of the Fascist Party in England. These men were interned at a camp at Tatura, Victoria.

Around 10 o’clock on the morning of 6 September 1940, fifty-seven days out of Liverpool, the Dunera entered Sydney Harbour. The remainder of the internees were sent to camps, at Hay and, later, at Orange in New South Wales.

The atmosphere was tense: on one hand, the press sniffed a sensational story – in its coverage, the Daily Telegraph reported that “among the internees were parachutists, other prisoners of war, and hundreds who had been carrying out subversive work in England.” On the other hand, the first Australian to board the ship, medical army officer Alan Frost, was appalled by the conditions that greeted him. His report led to the court martial of the officer-in-charge, Lt. Colonel William Scott. For the weary internees, “some in heavy overcoats, hats, others with summer wear having lost everything else, some orthodox Jews in their traditional black garb and hats.” they did not much look like spies as they left the ship. (S. G. Rosenberg, ‘HMT Dunera, the scandal and the salvation’, The Jerusalem Post, 12 December 2015).

The scandal was compounded by an initial tragedy: many of the internees had been living freely in Britain prior to September 1939, some having arrived there as children thanks to the Kindertransport organised by the Movement for the Care of Children from Germany after the Kristallnacht in November 1938. With the outbreak of war, they were under suspicion as potential fifth columnists who might secretly assist a German invasion. Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared had them declared as enemy aliens and swiftly had them shipped off to Canada and Australia.

Between the youngest aged sixteen and the oldest aged sixty-six, were future students or workers at Australian universities after their release from detention, and many became significant academic figures, including physicist Hans Buchdahl, economist Fred Gruen, philosopher Peter Herbst, political scientist Henry Mayer, fine arts scholar Franz Philipp, and mathematician turned oceanographer Rainer Radok – to mention just a few. Treated like dirt by their imprisoners, most of them went on to stellar careers as scientists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, public servants and artists.

So it is not entirely surprising to find that Tatura had its own university – Collegium Taturense – which delivered an average of 113 lectures a week attended by nearly 700 students. Concerts, theatre performances and sports matches were another feature of life in the camps, as the internees did their best not only to fill time and combat boredom, but also to retain a sense of dignity and purpose in the face of an indefinite wait for freedom. As the editors of the first edition of the Hay camp newsletter, the Boomerang, put it in February 1941: “Please remember that your mind is not interned, nor is it confined to this camp.”

The injustice of the Dunera internees’ treatment was recognised by Churchill, who came to regret the decision to order the indiscriminate detention of those who had sought Britain’s protection. He apologised and instigated a court martial which documented the abuses the boys endured at sea. The Dunera’s senior officer was severely reprimanded and a regimental sergeant-major was discharged and goaled for theft. A fund of £35,000 was used to compensate the Dunera internees for their lost and stolen property.

Their treatment in Australia began to change too. By mid 1942 at least 1,300 had been set free, hundreds of them returning to England as soon as they could. Fewer than half of the internees remained in Australia; the rest returned to Britain, emigrated to the United States, helped found the state of Israel or ended up in a variety of other counties. A few dozen returned to divided Germany. (P. Mares, ‘Remembering the Dunera’, insidestory.org.au, 13 July 2018, being a review of K. Inglis, S. Spark and J. Winter with C. Bunyan, Dunera Lives: A Visual History, publishing.monash.edu/books, July 2018).

Continued Wednesday – Beyond the ‘Palace Letters’ (part 1)

Previous instalment – The Kimberley Plan

Dr. Venturino Giorgio Venturini devoted some seventy years to study, practice, teach, write and administer law at different places in four continents. He may be reached at George.venturini@bigpond.com.au.

 

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The Évian Conference

By Dr George Venturini

The Évian Conference

In 1930, with the Great Depression severely affecting Australia’s workforce, the Scullin Government (1929 – 1932) tightened up entry requirements for ‘aliens’, demanding that only those immigrants who had £500 landing money, or who were dependent relatives of aliens already living in Australia, would be permitted to enter the country.

Following the election of Adolf Hitler in Germany, a group of concerned Jewish spokesmen, led by Rabbis F. L. Cohen and Israel Brodie, travelled to Canberra and personally lobbied the Minister for the Interior to admit a limited number of skilled German-Jewish refugees. But it was to no avail. Two years later, and following Hitler’s promulgation of the notorious Nuremberg Laws (German: Nürnberger Gesetze) which were purposely anti-semitic and racial laws, and had been enacted by a submitted Reichstag on 15 September 1935, prominent Sydney leader Sir Samuel Cohen presided over the formation of the German Jewish Relief Fund, which tried to emulate similar initiatives in Britain by raising funds to assist young German Jews to escape to Palestine or other ‘safe havens’.

Simultaneously, Cohen, Brodie and Brigadier Harold Cohen, among others, continued to press Government members for an easing of immigration restrictions. The successor Lyons Government (1932-1939) compromised by reducing landing money to £50 for those migrants guaranteed by family or friends. It also encouraged the formation of the Australian Jewish Welfare Society, A.J.W.S. to coordinate migration processes. Australia House in London reportedly received 120 inquiries a day from would-be immigrants in March 1938, while the A.J.W.S. received 1200 pleas for assistance in the week following the German invasion of Austria, the so-called Anschluss Österreichs, on 12 March 1938.

The A.J.W.S. was sensitive to Government and public sentiment and concerned that its actions could have been affected by the presumption that any marked increase in migrant numbers would merely jeopardise existing, and already tenuous, concessions. As a result it could accept only a fraction of the 70,000 applications for help it had received.

In July 1938 Australia followed Britain’s lead by agreeing to send representatives to Évian-les-Bains, France where a world summit was to seek solutions to the refugee problem. Named officially the ‘Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees’, the conference – originally the initiative of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and held on 6 to 15 July – brought together delegates from 32 nations.

The results of the conference were disappointing; it was clear from the outset that none of the participating countries was willing to modify its existing migration restrictions.

The Australian delegation was headed by Lieut. Col. T. W. White, Federal Minister for Trade and Customs. He bluntly informed the participants that Australia was committed to its policy of British migration, and declared that ‘as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one by encouraging any scheme of large-scale foreign migration.’

Clearly White had not heard of the ‘Day of Mourning’, a protest held by Indigenous People on 26 January 1938, the 150th anniversary of British invasion of Australia. It was declared to be a protest of 150 years of the seizure of the land and of criminal treatment of the original population. It purposefully coincided with the Australia Day celebrations held by the non-Indigenous population on the same day. The protest became a tradition, and annual ‘Days of Mourning’ have been held ever since.

White was voicing a widespread national sentiment. According to a public survey conducted at this time, only 17 per cent of the Australian population was in favour of large-scale immigration of Jews. There was intense disquiet about the reluctance of Jews ‘to integrate’ – whatever that may ever mean – or the possibility that refugees would ‘swamp’ some professions or take away jobs from ‘Australians’. Already rigid quotas had been imposed on the number of refugee practitioners able to enter the medical profession in Australia.

At the Évian conference, the United States itself – represented not by Roosevelt or even an elected official but by a friend of the President called Myron C. Taylor – refused to increase the annual admission quota of 27,370 from Germany and Austria even before the meeting began. Edward Turnour, 6th Earl Winterton, Lord Winterton, the leader of the British delegation, clearly outlined his country’s position: “The United Kingdom is not a country of immigration.”

By 1938 more than half a million refugees would be on the move across Europe, fleeing the Nazis, who had rendered first 900,000 German Jews stateless under the Nuremberg Laws, then 200,000 Austrian Jews following the invasion in 1938.

After Kristallnacht (literally “Crystal night”) or ‘The night of broken glass’, between 9 and 10 November 1938, which was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany – then including Austria and Sudetenland – and in slow response to increasingly urgent calls to increase its refugee intake, the Australian Government announced that it would accept 15,000 refugees – 12,000 of them Jews – over the subsequent three years.

This apparent ‘liberalisation’ of policy was, in fact, nothing of the kind. Australia was effectively already accepting 5,100 refugees per annum – before December 1938 – and the new quota actually reduced the proposed intake. The trick was intended to advertise the Government as compassionate, liberal and ‘humanitarian’; in reality, the new policy cynically used the opportunity to curtail whatever trend there had previously been towards a growth in refugee admissions. As it was, a mere fraction of the first annual quota had reached Australia before the second world war broke out. In fact, only some 7,000 Jews settled in Australia between 1933 and 1939. (IRIN | ‘Look back and learn: The Evian Conference, 1938’; see also: Evian Conference – ThoughtCo; The Evian Conference | The Holocaust Encyclopedia).

Once war against Germany by Britain and its allies had been declared in September 1939, immigration effectively ceased, although a small number of refugees did manage to reach Australia through the Orient in the early years of conflict. As former citizens of enemy states, quite a number of them were promptly – albeit temporarily – interned as ‘enemy aliens’.

Continued Wednesday – The Kimberley Plan

Previous instalment – Adjunct imperialist clowns (part 2)

Dr. Venturino Giorgio Venturini devoted some seventy years to study, practice, teach, write and administer law at different places in four continents. He may be reached at George.venturini@bigpond.com.au.

 

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