A WHITER SHADE OF PRISONER: How Canada saw the enemy, Revision 5

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]Heat.

[00:00:10]Heat.

[00:00:44]Heat. Heat.

[00:00:47]Heat.

[00:01:04]Heat.

[00:01:18]Fearing an imminent German invasion, the British government had requested that Canada accept 7,000 German prisoners of war in 1940.

[00:01:30]Between 1940 and 1945, over 34,000 captured German soldiers, civilians, and refugees were shipped to Canada and incarcerated in 25 P camps.

[00:01:46]In a panic over Nazi spies and saboturs, Britain rounded up and interned nearly 30,000 Germans and Austrians, mostly Jewish refugees.

[00:01:58]Among them, in 1940, Britain shipped nearly 2300 Jewish men and boys, some as young as 16, to Canada as enemy aliens.

[00:02:10]They had fled Nazi persecution for the security of Britain only to be persecuted again.

[00:02:18]Britain recognized its error within months. Canada took 3 years Despite their treatment, 972 of the Jewish refugees decided to stay in Canada.

[00:02:37]Starting in 1939, Canada also interned male citizens classified as enemy aliens.

[00:02:44]Of the 464,000 persons of German ancestry living in Canada, 850 males, less than 1 of 1% were imprisoned alongside actual German PS.

[00:03:01]Many were Nazi sympathizers suspected of spying and subversion.

[00:03:06]Another 600 internees of Italian ancestry, roughly 1/2 of 1% of the population of 112,000, were also incarcerated in the camps. In 2021, the government of Canada formally apologized.

[00:03:24]Far more Japanese Canadians were interned proportionally than German or Italian Canadians. By the end of 1942, more than 22,000 Japanese Canadian men, women, and children had been forcibly removed from their homes and interned.

[00:03:43]More than 90% of the total Japanese Canadian population.

[00:03:49]The difference was not loyalty, it was race.

[00:03:56]The two largest German P camps, each housing 12,500 prisoners, were located in Medicine Hat and Lethbridge, Alberta. The construction cost of the Medicine Hat camp alone was $2.3 million or approximately $184 per German P.

[00:04:18]In contrast, by August 1942, the BC Security Commission had spent just over $500,000 on the entire operation of removing, transporting, and interning 22,000 Japanese Canadians, approximately $23 per person.

[00:04:40]And then the government sold the homes, businesses, and possessions of Japanese Canadians and used the proceeds to pay for their own incarceration.

[00:04:53]In 1936, the Ki Kuween Ojiway were forcibly evicted from their homes on the shores of Clear Lake to create Riding Mountain National Park. As they hauled their belongings by wagon, park wardens burned their houses and barns to the ground.

[00:05:13]Within 7 years, German PSWs were brought to the same land and housed in $450,000 worth of purpose-built barracks with electricity, running water, and showers.

[00:05:30]In war without mercy, historian John Daer argued that white westerners viewed Germans as their people and distinguished between Hitler and ordinary Germans. The Japanese, on the other hand, were not viewed as people, but as subhuman, condemned by race.

[00:05:52]In February 1945, Pulitzer Prize-winning American War correspondent Ernie Pile wrote from the Pacific, "In Europe, we felt our enemies, horrible and deadly as they were, were still people. But out here, I've already gathered the feeling that the Japanese are looked upon as something inhuman and squirmy, like some people feel about cockroaches or mice."

[00:06:20]A December 1942 headline in the Ottawa Journal rated Canadian soldiers physically below German prisoners. The Red Cross reported that two out of five Canadians had been rejected on physical grounds. A local was in awe of them.

[00:06:40]Every bloody one was a giant. 6'2, 6'4, all fair-haired, blue-eyed, thighs like hams, tanned like Charles Atlas. We have to fight men like that.

[00:06:57]His admiration was shared.

[00:07:00]Journalist Patrick Bouson described the arrival of German soldiers in 1940 France as an erotic shock to the French.

[00:07:09]their admiration for the German body undermining perceptions of the Germans as creatures of terror.

[00:07:17]In Britain, where over 400,000 German PWs were held, the Manchester Guardian observed that the camp wire was more to keep the English out than the Germans in.

[00:07:33]It was an almost universal complaint in the camps that girls made a nuisance of themselves. According to historian Matias Rice, good-looking German PWS in the United States were romanticized and constructed as the epitome of white military masculinity, which led to significant and documented fraternization between American women and Axis PWs.

[00:08:05]Rice also argued that the perception that white Americans treated Nazi prisoners better than their own black soldiers became a powerful weapon in the civil rights struggle.

[00:08:18]In 1941, black soldiers could spill their blood for the United States, but they could not donate it.

[00:08:26]Even Canada was not immune to the Aryan allure. In a letter to the Secretary of National Defense, one of the guards wrote, >> "I have seen them on the street up until 10 or 11 p.m. without escorts, visiting dance halls and beer parlors. Several girls in and around Medicine Hat have become pregnant from prisoners of war.

[00:08:52]Complaints of German PSWs from Camp 40 roaming freely in Buckingham, Quebec, led to a probe into the guarding of prisoners. The Globe and Mail reported that guards had allegedly been drinking beer with German PS and then drove off with four girls.

[00:09:14]At camp 23 in Monteth, Ontario, a condom was confiscated from a P returning from a work detail. And in Lethbridge, an empty cigarette case was found containing a note in German requesting that civilians bring their daughters to PWs for immoral purposes.

[00:09:37]In Espanola, Ontario, five girls aged 15 and 16 were charged under the Defense of Canada regulations for communicating with German PWs.

[00:09:50]One had met her prisoner at a hockey game. Another's father, a guard, had brought her a letter from a prisoner.

[00:09:58]They had been writing for a year. The Crown Attorney warned that the Nazi will stop at nothing. The Ottawa Journal declared that it was a lack system and not five silly girls that were the problem. The judge agreed and gave them all suspended sentences.

[00:10:17]And then there's the case of Corporal Bernard Henen, who delivered letters between his 16-year-old daughter Winky and German prisoners.

[00:10:26]One of them, Fred Lyset, wrote to her, >> "Dearest winks, I feel so completely your friend. Or is it more than that? 3 months of corresponding with you has made me not only admire your style and charm, but also given me a desire to meet you. Already, I am planning to stay in Canada, or at least return as soon as I am naturalized."

[00:10:51]>> Hensen was court marshaled and sentenced to a year in prison. His daughter forced to testify never married.

[00:11:00]Lysette did return to Canada. Years later, when asked about Winky, he said he couldn't remember her, but the letters remembered.

[00:11:10]>> Oh, Revoir, sweetheart. Yours with love, Fred. Kisses.

[00:11:18]>> Even the judiciary fell under the allure of the German PS.

[00:11:23]In October 1943, a German P escaped from Pedawa, broke into a remote cabin, and walked off with a rifle, a knife, clothing, food, and ammunition.

[00:11:37]Magistrate Thomas Gallagghan dismissed every charge. A prisoner of war, he ruled, is not punishable for anything he may reasonably do to escape. The man owed no allegiance to Canada.

[00:11:51]He was simply doing his job.

[00:11:54]Two years later, a German paratrooper hid himself inside a mailbag on a Canadian national train.

[00:12:01]When the heat became unbearable, he cut his way out, then cut open another bag and helped himself to cigarettes, gum, and perfume.

[00:12:11]The Court of Appeal accepted that the perfume served a purpose, concealing, in the judge's words, the extreme odor of perspiration. The cigarettes and gum, however, were purely for comfort.

[00:12:24]Sentenced to 2 months.

[00:12:28]The common dawn of Camp L in Quebec was popular enough to have been given a nickname by the PS.

[00:12:35]Piggy Wiggy wept when the prisoners were transferred.

[00:12:41]>> May your new commander be as fond of you as I am, and may you like him as much as I hope you like me.

[00:12:48]God bless you.

[00:12:56]where the week drift away.

[00:13:03]>> Labor Day weekend 1940.

[00:13:08]>> Four German PS escaped from Camp 20 in Gravenhurst, Ontario. They were quickly recaptured.

[00:13:18]One of them, Joseph Hobbs, a 23-year-old yubot sailor, was caught at a lakeside cottage and taken to the local jail.

[00:13:28]Hundreds of Canadian holidayers crowded outside the barred window of his cell.

[00:13:33]They chatted with him, laughed with him, and asked for his autograph. Hobbes obliged and as he signed dozens of autographs, he boasted that his yubot had sunk 14 British ships.

[00:13:48]Just before he was taken away, Hobbes saluted the crowd. "Goodbye, Joe!" they shouted. Everyone cheered and waved.

[00:13:59]The Kingston wigstandard asked if the crowd realized that while they were idolizing Hobbes, his fellow Nazi yubot sailors were torpedoing a British vessel filled with little children fleeing to Canada.

[00:14:15]More country club than P camp, Camp 20 in Gravenhurst, formerly a sanatorium for the wealthy, provided highranking officers with private or semi-private accommodation.

[00:14:28]The German PS even kept a managerie of pets in a zoo that included a bear, monkeys, rabbits, dogs, fish, birds, and three horses.

[00:14:43]A 1943 letter to the Globe and Mail stated that German PS were eating better than the average Canadian taxpayer and in return we are receiving only contemptuous insults from these self-styled superior people.

[00:15:00]In a profit sharing arrangement with the federal government, German PSWs at Camp 40 in Farnum, Quebec, earned $10,000 harvesting vegetables in 1945.

[00:15:13]The government earned half that amount.

[00:15:18]To make room for the German soldiers, several hundred boys, ages 8 to 14, were expelled from the Bowmanville Boys Training School.

[00:15:30]Citizens protested that swaggering bullies were enjoying the site and privileges of such a fine property whose gymnasium and pool had been donated by Rotary and Kiwanis clubs to rehabilitate underprivileged Canadians of Camp 30 in Bowmanville. A Luftwafa pilot wrote, >> "I am convinced that nowhere in the world did prisoners of war have better housing, better food, better recreation facilities, better educational opportunities, and above all, fairer treatment than in Canada.

[00:16:10]Even German prisoner of war funerals in Canada were afforded much more ceremony, decorum, and indeed respect than Japanese, Canadian prisoner of war funerals.

[00:16:23]German Ps were even blamed for a shortage of tennis balls. A tennis enthusiast could not find one tennis ball in all of Timmans, Ontario. They had all been sold to the German Ps.

[00:16:41]Filmed by the National Film Board of Canada, Ernst Mog, representative for the International Red Cross, narrated a guided tour of a P camp in Canada.

[00:16:54]Speaking in German, he painted an idyllic picture of P life.

[00:17:01]A typical street presents a peaceful scene. At work, accurate and detailed bookkeeping is meticulously maintained.

[00:17:10]While Walter Haggerman is drafting plans behind his drawing board, others are busy in the many gardens providing a welcome addition to the menu or beautifying the huts.

[00:17:23]The Taylor shop is manufacturing pajama bottoms for the infirmary.

[00:17:29]From the specialty workshop are wheelbarrows for stretchers used to transport the sick and the wounded.

[00:17:36]Alois Macakowski and his friend Hans Stark forge metal on the anvil.

[00:17:42]Walter Jacob is tending to his beautiful flower garden while Hinrich Schmid is sunbathing in his hammock.

[00:17:49]And there's always something happening on the sports field. Paul Clean on the parallel bars.

[00:17:57]Some of the PWS are diligently practicing their boxing techniques, working with the jump rope, hitting the speed bag, or training on the heavy bag.

[00:18:07]Sport is always popular, especially when you can relax and grab a bite after the game in such a pleasant beer garden or at the Hanza Cafe. The orchestra is diligently striving to create the necessary atmosphere.

[00:18:24]John Greersonen, the Scottish filmmaker and founder of Canada's National Film Board, also headed the wartime information board during World War II.

[00:18:34]Under his direction, the two agencies became the nation's propaganda apparatus, constructing national identity, fueling patriotism, and manufacturing consent for the war.

[00:18:49]Between 1939 and 1945, they produced over 500 films.

[00:18:56]Greersonen famously stated that art is not a mirror, but a hammer to shape society in the war for men's minds.

[00:19:07]In its news reel of Camp 33 in Pedawa, Ontario, Greersonen's National Film Board humanized actual German prisoners of war. Through the NFB's lens, these men were not the enemy. They were gentlemen sitting in peaceful contentment, reading, writing a letter home to a loved one. Why would anyone lock these men up?

[00:19:36]There was no attempt to humanize the Japanese in the National Film Board's 1942 production, The Mask of Nippon.

[00:19:45]Documentarian Ronald Bloomer wrote that the film carried a message of hate worthy of Yosef Gobles and provided an interesting contrast with the mild and reasonable manner in which similar films treated our Caucasian enemies.

[00:20:05]The soldiers of the rising sun are little men, quick and wiry. Their uniforms are sllovenly. Their faces, even in the heat of battle, are thorny masks, blank, expressionless. They believe that they have embarked upon a holy war, a war of liberation.

[00:20:29]It is senseless to seize an empire where wealth remains in the hands of the inhabitants. We must eliminate every element reluctant to cooperate with Japan. This also they firmly believe.

[00:20:44]And as the United Nations prepare to wipe out for all time the horror now spreading through the continent of Asia, they seek a closer knowledge of their savage enemy. The little men whose double faces and double minds may well render them the most dangerous foe of all.

[00:21:05]The crowd scene, the burying alive of prisoners, the woman and the bayonetted child were in fact staged, taken from a Chinese-made propaganda film and inserted as actual footage along with pre-war segments from the Nank King atrocity.

[00:21:26]Author and academic Gary Evans wrote that the evocative impact of soldiers bayonetting the child remained indelible as audiences would have absorbed the whole as authentic.

[00:21:44]In 1936, Prime Minister McKenzie King wrote in his diary, "I feel I must set out a policy in writing as Hitler has in mine comping our peace."

[00:22:01]In mine, Hitler wrote, >> "For a racially pure people which is conscious of its blood can never be enslaved by the Jew. In this world, he will forever be master over bastards and bastards alone.

[00:22:20]>> After meeting with Hitler in Berlin in 1937, McKenzie King wrote in his diary, "I wished him well in his efforts to help mankind, he truly loves his fellow men and his country and would make any sacrifice for their good."

[00:22:40]In 1938, King wrote, "I cannot abide in Nazism, but Hitler will rank someday with Joan of Arc, among the deliverers of his people."

[00:22:56]On August 6th, 1945, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

[00:23:02]King wrote in his diary, "It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe."

[00:23:17]In 1945, the same year the world saw the first news reels from Avitz, Bellson, and DHA, the National Film Board released a 22minute color documentary about the Japanese Canadian internment. It was made for the Federal Department of Labor, but it had been commissioned and paid for by the British Columbia Security Commission, the same body responsible for the removal, detention, and dispossession of Japanese Canadian families.

[00:23:52]It opens with empty streets in Vancouver, boarded storefronts of Japanese Canadian businesses, a closing out sale sign. The narrator describes this as the conditions Japanese Canadians had lived in before the war.

[00:24:07]They were not. They were what remained after the dispossession.

[00:24:13]After the homes were taken, the businesses sold, the families removed.

[00:24:18]The film presented the wreckage of the policy as the justification for it.

[00:24:24]Then it took the camera to the camps in color.

[00:24:28]unusual for the documentary form in 1945.

[00:24:33]Color was the language of vibrancy of holiday brochures of life. The narrator told viewers that Japanese Canadians were not living in internment camps.

[00:24:44]There was no barbed wire, no soldiers, no bayonets.

[00:24:49]of the camps. Kennedy wrote, "The magnificence of the outdoor setting and the echoes of a romantic past were but candy wrapping, hiding a grim reality.

[00:25:02]Their homes had been sold, their property confiscated, their assets seized.

[00:25:08]Return was forbidden. The rest of the country did not want them. The cage was the policy itself.

[00:25:17]The narrator tells viewers that the children were receiving a proper Canadian education.

[00:25:22]What the film did not say was that the government of British Columbia had refused to provide it. The province refused to fund schools for Japanese Canadian children in the camps. The schools were built and run by the community itself with support from the churches. The teachers, many of them young Nissi women in their late teens, taught in tar paper shacks and church basement, often with few textbooks and supplies and very little pay.

[00:25:53]The film took credit for what the community and the churches had provided without government assistance.

[00:26:01]And in the entire 22minute film, not one Japanese Canadian is named.

[00:26:11]National Film Board producer Dallas Jones had written to his superiors in Ottawa 2 years earlier that the film was needed as insurance against criticism when this is all over. The film he made was not a record of the internment. It was the alibi.

[00:26:31]By the end of 1946, all of the German PWs had been repatriated to Europe. According to the Medicine Hat News, there were no cheering crowds, no brass bands, no waving flags or fond farewells as the men boarded the waiting trains.

[00:26:53]Over 6,000 requested to remain in Canada. More than a thousand returned.

[00:27:02]In 1946, 4,000 Japanese Canadians were repatriated to Japan. More than half were Canadian-born and could not be repatriated to a country they had never seen.