Eight decades ago, Andrew Cassel’s father was bundled aboard a prison ship in England and sent to Canada as an “enemy alien”, where he was held behind barbed wire for two years. The elder Cassel was part of a little-known operation that in 1940 targeted about 2,300 Jewish Europeans whom the British feared were spies for Adolf Hitler. Now, Cassel—along with other descendants and some historians—are raising awareness about what he calls “Canada’s dirty little secret”.
The prisoners lived in harsh conditions at nine prisoner-of-war camps in Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick. In some cases, they were locked up together with groups of real Nazi soldiers and German U-boat crews who’d been captured by the Allies during the Second World War. But they weren’t spies—they were doctors, professors, Yeshiva students and bankers who fled to England to escape the Holocaust. The British government soon realized their mistake, but Canada took until 1943 to release all the prisoners. Some experts blame widespread antisemitism in the Canadian government for the undue delay.
[…]
I was right there when one officer said he really doesn’t like his position. He would rather be guarding German prisoners of war who have the decency to stand up for their own country and not like these Jews who betray their country, Germany, or at least pretend that they’re enemies of Germany. They were rabble for them. There […] was a lot of antisemitism.
[…]
Shield was one of 2,300 European Jews who England feared were acting as spies for Hitler, even though they were actually Jewish refugees who had fled from Germany and Austria and Italy to England to escape the war. Far from being spies, they all hated the Nazis.
Some like Schild had been in Dachau or survived Kristallnacht, many had lost their families to the flames of the Holocaust. In the summer of 1940, with the Nazis pushing West and France now fallen, the panicked British government sent four boatloads of these Jewish civilians to Canada. They were crammed on board together with 7,000 real Nazi prisoners of war.
Only three of the prison ships survived the Atlantic crossing.
The Canadian military was told the deportees were dangerous Nazi enemy aliens. They were greeted with fixed bayonets, herded into nine different internment camps in remote areas of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario, where they were held locked behind barbed wire under harsh conditions.
The army deprived them of basic supplies, forced them to work for the war effort. Two of the prisoners died.
And even after Winston Churchill’s government realized they’d made a mistake and formally asked to release the Jewish men and send them back, it took another three years until the last of them were set free. Canada’s wartime leaders notoriously didn’t want to take in Jewish refugees at all. Eventually, about half the prisoners got to stay. The rest were deported.
And while some remained grateful this journey saved them from the Holocaust, the prison experience traumatized others, which is why now some of the internees’ descendants have launched a petition to the House of Commons asking Canada to make amends for what happened even all these 80-odd years later.