Concentration Camps in the Pacific

As the Nazis did in Europe, the Japanese Imperial Army had concentration camps in the Pacific. The Asian camps were nearly as horrific as the European ones, and the conditions were inhumane, nonetheless.

This is just a side note, but I did notice, while researching, none of the Pacific camps were referred to as camps in occupied countries. For example, the Tjideng camp was stated as being in the Dutch East Indies, not the occupied Dutch East Indies.

For this piece, I am focusing on those camps in the Dutch East Indies (presently named Indonesia).

Throughout East Asia, the Japanese set up concentration camps, also called Jap Camps. The Japanese in the Dutch East Indies detained approximately 42,000 soldiers and 100,000 civilians. Families were separated; the men were placed in different camps from the women and children. Malnutrition, disease, and abuse caused tens of thousands of casualties. More than ten per cent of the Allied citizens (mainly British, American, and Dutch) in Japanese captivity—died.

During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies from March 1942 to August 1945, Dutch soldiers were interned as prisoners of war in camps at Batavia, Bandoeng, and Tjimahi. The military prisoners of war can be divided into two categories: those who remained in captivity in Java, Sumatra, and Madura, and those who were deported as forced labourers to Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), and Japan. Internment can be further divided into two other categories: civilians and military.

For the Japanese, your status in society did not matter. Among the victims were a great number of Dutch nobility.

The internment by the Japanese of European citizens in the Dutch East Indies was not the same everywhere. In the Outer Regions, quite soon after the occupation began, the entire European civilian population was interned in camps, the men separated from their wives and children.

In Java, the internment issue was more complicated because of the large number of Europeans living there. There, the confinement in camps proceeded in stages. First, in March and April 1942, Dutch civil servants and people from the business community – insofar as they were not necessary for the maintenance of public life – were interned.

In April 1942, all Dutch citizens on Java who were older than 17 years had to register. During registration, a distinction was made between full-blooded Dutch people, the so-called totoks, and Dutch people of mixed descent, the Indo-Europeans or Indos. Almost all of the totoks were eventually interned. The majority of the Indo-Europeans on Java remained free, although many Indonesians also ended up in a camp sooner or later.

Initially, there were large and many small camps scattered all over the archipelago; later the civilian internees were increasingly concentrated in a few very large camps. Urban districts, prisons, barracks, schools, monasteries, and even hospitals were set up as internment camps. Here began a period of internment that would last for many for almost three years or more, during which living conditions deteriorated. Nearly 13,000 people died during the internment.

Tjideng was a camp for women and children during the Second World War, in Batavia (today known as Jakarta, Indonesia).

Batavia came under Japanese control in 1942, and part of the city, called Camp Tjideng, was used for the internment of European (often Dutch) women and children.

Initially, Tjideng was under civilian authority, and the conditions were bearable.

But when the military took over, privileges (such as being allowed to cook for themselves and the opportunity for religious services) were quickly withdrawn. Food preparation was centralised and the quality and quantity of food rapidly declined. Hunger and disease struck, and because no medicines were available, the number of fatalities increased.

The area of Camp Tjideng was over time made smaller and smaller, while it was obliged to accommodate more and more prisoners. Initially, there were about 2,000 prisoners and at the end of the war, there were approximately 10,500, while the territory had been reduced to a quarter of its original size. Every bit of space was used for sleeping, including the unused kitchens and waterless bathrooms.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s mother, Hermance, was in Camp Tjideng in Batavia, with her mother and sisters. She remembers having to bow deeply towards Japan at Tenko, “with our little fingers on the side seams of our skirt. If we did not do it properly we were beaten.”

Another punishment, head shaving, was so common that the women would simply wrap a scarf around their bloodied scalp and carry on.

From April 1944, the camp was under the command of Captain Kenichi Sone, who was responsible for many atrocities. After the war, Sone was arrested and sentenced to death on 2 September 1946. The sentence was carried out by a Dutch firing squad in December of that year, after a request for pardon to the Dutch lieutenant governor-general, Hubertus van Mook, was rejected.

There were camps all over the Pacific region.

sources

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM

https://www.tracesofwar.nl/articles/7153/Omgekomen-leden-van-de-Nederlandse-adel-in-Nederlands-Indi%C3%AB-1942-1949.htm#

https://www.tracesofwar.nl/news/12190/Vele-leden-van-de-Nederlandse-adel-kwamen-om-in-Nederlands-Indi%C3%AB-in-de-Tweede-Wereldoorlog.htm

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29665232

https://www.indischekamparchieven.nl/nl/bezetting-en-bersiap/over-de-kampen#:~:text=Kampen%20%2D%20Indischekamparchieven&text=Gedurende%20de%20Japanse%20bezetting%20van,en%20kinderen%20%E2%80%93%20ge%C3%AFnterneerd%20in%20kampen.

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George Takei and Executive Order 9066.

I am not saying I agree with Executive Order 9066, in fact I strongly disagree with it. It was a breach of basic human rights.However it is also very easy for people nowadays to judge about things retrospectively and for people who never found themselves in the unprecedented times like WWII.

Executive Order 9066 was a US presidential executive order signed and issued during World War II by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942,less then 2 months after the Pearl Harbor attacks which dragged the US into WWII.

The order authorized the Secretary of War to prescribe certain areas as military zones, clearing the way for the incarceration of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans in U.S. internment camps.

Over the years the US has received a lot of negative commentary about these camps, but they were not the only countries to have internment camps for citizens perceived to be as potential enemies. Canada, Great Britain  also had these type of camps and some had worse living conditions then the American camps.

George Takei, from  Star Trek fame , spent his formative years detained with his family in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.

In 1942 aged 5 he and his family spent 3 months in a converted Horse race track called Santa Anita Park.

After 3 months the Takei family was transferred to the Rohwer War Relocation Center for internment in Rohwer, Arkansas.The family was later sent  to the Tule Lake War Relocation Center in California.

George and his family remained interned until the end of the war.

Life was very hard in the internment camps but they were a far cry from the European concentration camps, therefore comparing them would be completely inaccurate.. People in the internment camps had no threat of death.

In total about 120,000 Japanese Americans ended up in the internment camps as per Executive Order 9066.

Takei had a number  relatives living in Japan during World War II. Among them were an aunt and infant cousin who lived in Hiroshima and who were both killed by the atomic bomb attack.

At the end of World War II, Takei and his family returned to Los Angeles.

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Source

Variety

IMDb

The Verge

CNN

Owlcation

 

WWII Internment camps in Britain

“Collar the lot,” is what Churchill said about the citizens of enemy nations living in the UK, it didn’t matter if they were friend or foe,.

During the Second World War (1939 – 1945) a number of internment camps for civilians from enemy countries were established on the Isle of Man. These were based at Peveril Camp, Peel (on the west coast of the island) and Mooragh Camp, Ramsey (on the NE coast of the island). Some civilians lived in the pre-war guest houses at Douglas and other Manx towns. Prisoner of War camps were established at Base Camp, Douglas and one nearby at Onchan.

During the war, thousands of people were held in internment camps on the Isle of Man.

Some were political detainees or suspected spies, but many were innocent refugees who had nowhere else to go.

Throughout the UK citizens from Germany,Italy and Austria,including Jews who had escaped these countries from Nazi perscuion, were rounded up and transferred to the Isle of Man.

 

At the outbreak of World War Two there were around 80,000 people in Britain who were considered potential “enemy aliens”.

It was feared there might be people acting as spies, or people willing to assist Britain’s enemies in the event of an invasion.The UK government asked the Isle of Man to accommodate people at camps in Douglas, Ramsey and Peel.

Political prisoners were detained in high security camps, but most internees – including many Jewish refugees – were free to go shopping, swim in the sea and attend classes.

One of the internees was Rabbi Werner van der Zyl. a rabbi in Berlin and in London.He was a founder and President of Leo Baeck College, London; President of the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain (now known as the Movement for Reform Judaism); and Life Vice President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.Van der Zyl came to Britain in 1939. During World War II the British Government interned him at Kitchener Camp in Sandwich, Kent and then at Mooragh Internment Camp  on the Isle of Manas an “enemy alien”. He was released from internment in 1943.

Fred Uhlman was born in Stuttgart, Germany, into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. He studied at the Universities of Freiburg, Munich and Tübingen from where, in 1923, he graduated with a degree in Law followed by a Doctorate in Canon and Civil Law.

On 4 November 1936, he married Diana Croft, daughter of Henry Page Croft (later Lord Croft), against her parents’ strongest wishes, and they remained close and happy for nearly fifty years.

They set up home on Downshire Hill, in London’s Hampstead and it became a favourite cultural and artistic meeting place for the large group of refugees and exiles who, like Uhlman, had been forced to flee their homeland. He founded the Free German League of Culture, whose members included Oskar Kokoschka and Stefan Zweig, though he parted company with it when he felt it coming under communist domination.

Nine months after the outbreak of the Second World War, Uhlman, with thousands of other enemy aliens, was, in June 1940, interned by the British Government, in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man.  He was released six months later and reunited with his wife and with his daughter, born while he was interned.

 

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Sources

BBC

The Telegraph

Forgotten History-Japanese Canadian internment.

Like their southern neighbors, the USA, the Canadians also put their fellow Canadians,albeit from Japanese descend, in intern camps. However it appears that history has forgotten this chapter. Unlike their Southern neighbors the Canadians kept restrictions  for their Japanese-Canadian citizens in place  for several years after the war.

I am not saying that I don’t understand the reasons why this was done, because I do. But that doesn’t mean that I condone it especially many of the Japanese were born in Canada and  some of the interned Japanese Canadians were combat veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, including several men who had been decorated for bravery on the Western Front. Despite the first iterations of veterans affairs associations established during World War II, fear and racism drove policy and trumped veterans’ rights, meaning that virtually no Japanese-Canadian veterans were exempt from being removed from the BC coast

Not until 1949, four years after Japan had surrendered, were the majority of Nikkei allowed to return to British Columbia. By then most had chosen to begin life anew elsewhere in Canada. Their property had long before been confiscated and sold at a fraction of its worth.

When the Pacific War began, discrimination against Japanese Canadians increased. Following the  Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and Malaya and the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese Canadians were categorized as enemy aliens under the War Measures Act, which began to remove their personal rights. Starting on December 8, 1941, 1,200 Japanese-Canadian-owned fishing vessels were impounded as a “defence” measure.

Beginning in early 1942, the Canadian government detained and dispossessed the vast majority of people of Japanese descent living in British Columbia. They were interned for the rest of the Second World War, during which time their homes and businesses were sold by the government in order to pay for their detention.

The order in 1942, to leave the “restricted area” and move 100 miles (160km) inland from the west coast was made under the authority of the War Measures Act and affected over 21,000 Japanese Canadians. Most were first held in the livestock barns in Hastings Park (Vancouver’s Pacific National Exhibition grounds) and then moved to hastily built camps in the BC interior. At first, many men were separated from their families and sent to road camps in Ontario and on the BC/Alberta border. Small towns in the BC interior such as Greenwood, Sandon, New Denver and Slocan became internment quarters mainly for women, children and the aged. To stay together, some families agreed to work on sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba where there were labour shortages. Those who resisted and challenged the orders of the Canadian government were rounded up by the RCMP and incarcerated in a barbed-wire prisoner-of-war camp in Angler, Ontario.

On 24 February 1942, the federal Cabinet of Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King issued Order-in-Council P.C. 1486 to remove and detain “any and all persons” from any “protective area” in the country. While those powers were broad enough to detain any person, they were specifically used to target Japanese Canadians along the West Coast. The following week, the British Columbia Security Commission, the organization that carried out Japanese internment, was established. On 16 March, the first Japanese Canadians were transported from areas 160 km inland from the Pacific coast — deemed a “protected area” — and brought to Hastings Park. More than 8,000 detainees moved through Hastings Parks, where women and children were housed in the Livestock Building. All property that could not be carried was taken into government custody.

Special trains then carried the Japanese detainees to Slocan, New Denver, Kaslo, Greenwood and Sandon — ghost towns in the BC interior. Others were offered the option of working on sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba ,where they would be able to keep their families intact. Though the camps were not surrounded with barbed wire fences, as they were in the United States, conditions were overcrowded and poor, with no electricity or running water.

Those who resisted their internment were sent to prisoner of war camps in Petawawa, Ontario, or to Camp 101 on the northern shore of Lake Superior.

In a further betrayal, an order-in-council signed 19 January 1943 liquidated all Japanese property that had been under the government’s “protective custody.” Homes, farms, businesses and personal property were sold, and the proceeds used to pay down the social assistance received by detained Japanese Canadians.

Anti-Japanese racism was not confined to British Columbia, but was spread across Canada. Though acutely in need of labour, Albertans did not want Japanese Canadians in their midst. Alberta sugar beet farmers crowded Japanese labourers into tiny shacks, un-insulated granaries and chicken coops, and paid them a pittance for their hard labour.

Japanese-Canadian women and children faced a specific set of challenges that greatly affected their way of life and broke down the social and cultural norms that had developed. Whole families were taken from their homes and separated from each other. Husbands and wives were almost always separated when sent to camps and, less commonly, some mothers were separated from their children as well. Japanese-Canadian families typically had a patriarchal structure, meaning the husband was the centre of the family. Since husbands were often separated from their families, wives were left to reconfigure the structure of the family and the long established divisions of labour that were so common in the Japanese-Canadian household

In 1946, nearly 4,000 former internees sailed to a bombed-out Japan. About 2,000 were aging first-generation immigrants — 1,300 were children under 16 years of age. The last controls on Japanese Canadians were not lifted until 1949, when they were granted the right to vote. Finally, Canadian society began to open to the Japanese.

On April 1, 1949, four years after the war was over, all the restrictions were lifted and Japanese Canadians were given full citizenship rights, including  the right to return to the west coast. But there was no home to return to. The Japanese Canadian community in British Columbia was virtually destroyed.

 

 

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Inside Manzanar concentration camp.

Manzanar is most widely known as the site of one of ten American concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from December 1942 to 1945. Located at the foot of the Sierra Nevada in California’s Owens Valley between the towns of Lone Pine to the south and Independence to the north, it is approximately 230 miles (370 km) north of Los Angeles. Manzanar (which means “apple orchard” in Spanish) was identified by the United States National Park Service as the best-preserved of the former camp sites, and is now the Manzanar National Historic Site, which preserves and interprets the legacy of Japanese American incarceration in the United States.

Although it was called an internment camp or relocation, technically it was a concentration camp. Albeit not comparable to the camps built by the European Fascist regimes.

The attack on Pearl Harbor fueled mass paranoia in the United States, paranoia that led to the development of domestic concentration camps not long before the U.S. would take part in liberating similar camps abroad.

Over the course of just a few years, the U.S. federal government forced 120,000 people of Japanese descent into these camps in an attempt to quarantine and surveil them — and it took decades before these victims saw any form of redress.

In early 1942, President Roosevelt signed an executive order that legalized the creation and use of these camps.

Executive Order 9066

Evacuation orders were subsequently distributed to people along the West Coast, often giving Japanese-American families less than a week to gather their things, leave their homes, and be forcibly relocated. With no information on where they were going or how long they would be away, people were forced to sell or abandon their homes and businesses.

Preschoolers  children on the way to their barrack homes from morning class.

Barracks under construction at Poston. Barrack construction and materials were the same at all ten camps, including Manzanar. Poston, Arizona May 5, 1942

Typical interior scene in a Manzanar barrack apartment. Note the cloth partition separating one apartment from another, lending a small amount of privacy. June 30, 1942

Bunk space at Manzanar.

A camp mess hall.

Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus. Identification tags are used to aid in keeping the family unit intact during all phases of evacuation. Mochida operated a nursery and five greenhouses on a two-acre site in Eden Township. He raised snapdragons and sweet peas. They may have been deported to another camp, but what is striking her is that they were tagged.

Replica of an historic watch tower at the Manzanar National Historic Site, built in 2005. Eight watchtowers, equipped with searchlights and machine guns pointed inward at the incarcerees, were positioned around the perimeter of the camp. April 27, 2007

Of course in retrospect it is easy for anyone to judge. I am not saying that the US government did the right thing, because they didn’t , but if I had been put in that situation would I have reacted differently? I just don’t know.