When World Word II began, Australia’s then Prime Minister Robert Menzies said that it would be “absurd to intern refugees and anti-fascists when they were on the Allies’ side”.
Yet, writes La Trobe University historian, David Henderson, in his case-study history, Nazis in our Midst, this is exactly what happened in Australia during the war.
Despite Menzies’ statement, German Jews and anti-Nazis were detained along with Nazis in Australia’s five internment camps. Most of the 1500 German-Australian internees were the innocent victims of racial prejudice or espionage hysteria simply because they were German.
Military intelligence justified blanket internment because they saw refugees as “excellent cover for agents” or as susceptible to blackmail by Hitler’s Nazi regime threatening their relatives in Germany. The Australian press was vigorously pro-internment — “this is no time for squeamishness in dealing with foreigners in our midst”, honked the Hobart Mercury, for example.
Both the Menzies and Labor governments used broad internment powers to respond to a public sentiment that had reanimated latent World War I Germanophobia with paranoia about Nazi “fifth columnists”. In this toxic atmosphere, the wildest denunciations about disloyalty were treated by the security agencies as good coin.
Read the full article by Phil Shannon at the Green Left Weekly.