IN THE COURSE of the Second World War, around twenty-five thousand German-speaking men — from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia — and perhaps four thousand women, many of them refugees from National Socialism, were held for varying periods of time in British prisons and alien internment camps. The subject of male internment and, in particular, the political, cultural, and educational activity that arose in the men's camps, albeit in difficult circumstances, have been relatively well researched within the field of German exile studies. Comparatively little is known, however, about the efforts of the women to recreate forms of social, political, and cultural organization in captivity as they too found themselves caught up in circumstances beyond their control. In this essay I hope to make good the deficiency by examining documents of the time and also by considering some of the reflections — published and unpublished, written and spoken, and composed in both German and English — of German-speaking women internees who range from well-known cultural and political exiles from Hitler to totally “unknown” women.

It was not the initial intention of the British authorities in 1939 to introduce a policy of mass alien internment as they had in 1914, not least because this time around tens of thousands of the German-speaking population in Britain were racial or political refugees. In fact, only as the military situation deteriorated with the collapse of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France, and the invasion of Britain appeared imminent, was the Home Office pressured into ordering a large-scale internment of aliens in May and June 1940.