In the Interest of National SecurityCivilian Internment in Australia during World War II
Klaus Neumann
I cannot enjoie the sun the intense blue sky the song of exotic birds, the
landscape or the sunset with its most mangificent colours. I donot hear
the birds or the grasshoppers with my troubled mind nor the sky or sun
everything appears to me like the landscape behind the veil of barbed wire.
National Archives of Australia
In the Interest of National SecurityCivilian Internment in Australia during World War II
Klaus Neumann
This publication includes material known to be relevant to this subject area but it is not necessarily a complete or definitive listing of all relevant material in the National Archives’ collection.
The National Archives reviews its collection to confirm the value of records for research, evidential and other purposes, or to identify, in consultation with agencies, records for destruction. At the time of publication all the records described in this publication were present in the Archives’ collection. However, it is possible that some of the records may be destroyed if they are reviewed and considered not to be of enduring value.
© Commonwealth of Australia 2006 ISBN: 1 920807 38 1
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior written permission from the National Archives of Australia. Requests and inquiries concerning reproduction and rights should be directed to the Publications Manager, National Archives of Australia, PO Box 7425, Canberra Business Centre ACT 2610, Australia.
Every reasonable endeavour has been made to locate and contact copyright holders. Where this has not proved possible, copyright holders are invited to contact the publisher.
The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Archives of Australia.
Publications Manager: Angela McAdam Editor: Hélène Attrill Cover design: Kylie Smith
Front cover portraits, left to right: (upper) Francesco Fantin, (lower) Imre (Emery) Barcs; Alice Meyer von Forell; Masuko Kathleen Murakami; (upper) Ernest Frolich, (centre) Soeka Soemitro, (lower) Irene Stürzenhofecker; Harley Matthews; (upper) Baldwin (Paul) Goener, (lower) Luigi Camporeale. Background: (detail) Loveday internment camp, Barmera, SA, c1945, and Ernest Frolich’s diary entry for 5 January 1941.
iii
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Abbreviations and acronyms vii
Introduction 1
1. Policy 7
2. ‘The real life was stopped…’ 20Alice Meyer von Forell ........................................................................................................... 21Luigi Camporeale.................................................................................................................... 23Baldwin Goener....................................................................................................................... 26Masuko Murakami ................................................................................................................. 28Imre (‘Emery’) Barcs ............................................................................................................... 30Francesco Fantin ...................................................................................................................... 31Harley Matthews..................................................................................................................... 32Irene Stürzenhofecker ............................................................................................................ 34Ernst Fröhlich (Ernest Frolich) .............................................................................................. 37Soeka Soemitro ........................................................................................................................ 38
3. Behind Barbed Wire 42
4. Release 66Alice Meyer von Forell ........................................................................................................... 66Ernest Frohlich ........................................................................................................................ 68Emery Barcs ............................................................................................................................. 68Harley Matthews..................................................................................................................... 70Soeka Soemitro ........................................................................................................................ 72Luigi Camporeale.................................................................................................................... 74Baldwin Goener....................................................................................................................... 75Masuko Murakami ................................................................................................................. 75Irene Stürzenhofecker ............................................................................................................ 76
5. Legacies 82
Sources 88
Bibliography 93
Appendixes 1. National Archives of Australia....................................................................................... 1042. Unpublished sources held by other institutions ......................................................... 1153. Guides to the National Archives collection .................................................................. 1174. Contacting the National Archives ................................................................................. 120
Index 121
v
In the Interest of National Security is dedicated to the memory of Maria (‘Miriam’) Klaphake (1903–45), who was interned in the Liverpool
and Tatura internment camps from 17 March 1942 to 10 February 1943.
vi
Acknowledgments
In the Interest of National Security was commissioned by the National Archives of Australia. I thank Gabrielle Hyslop for initiating the project, and Angela McAdam, Judith Ion, Alex Bellis and Hélène Attrill for their editorial guidance. The National Archives asked external and in-house reviewers to comment on a draft manuscript; I thank all 13 reviewers for their constructive suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Yuriko Nagata and Kay Saunders for their expert advice. I would also like to thank Roger Averill for commenting on a first draft; his input was invaluable.
In writing this book I drew on research I carried out between 2001 and 2003 about anti-Nazi long-term internees in wartime Australia. I benefited enormously from discussions I then had with former internees and their relatives, and am indebted to all of them for sharing their memories with me.
vii
Abbreviations and acronyms
AMF Australian Military Forces
ARO Aliens Registration Office
AWM Australian War Memorial
CIB Commonwealth Investigation Branch
HMT His Majesty’s Transport
ISGS Intelligence Section General Staff
NAA National Archives of Australia
NLA National Library of Australia
NSDAP Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party)
TNA The National Archives, United Kingdom
SLV State Library of Victoria
UK United Kingdom
1
Introduction
When the world-famous photographer Helmut Newton died in January 2004, Melbourne’s Sunday Age newspaper carried a Reuters obituary:
Born Helmut Neustaedter in 1920 in Berlin to Jewish parents, Newton was apprenticed to society photographer Yva (Else Neulander Simon) in 1936 and fled Germany two years later for Singapore. He settled in Australia, where he served in the army and worked as a fashion photographer before returning to Europe.1
Elsewhere in the same edition, journalist Michael Shmith recalled Newton’s life in Melbourne under the heading ‘A shy and gentle immigrant with an artist’s eye’.2 An obituary in The Times was republished in The Australian, and provided the following biographical information:
With the situation in Germany deteriorating, his family left suddenly in 1938, his parents for South America and Helmut for Australia via Singapore. In Singapore he operated a portrait studio in a department store, but he soon settled in Melbourne and took Australian citizenship.3
Neustaedter had indeed fled Nazi Germany for the Straits Settlements. But he did not proceed to Australia as an immigrant. After the outbreak of World War II, the British authorities interned him and other German nationals in Singapore. In September 1940, Neustaedter and his fellow internees boarded the Queen Mary, which had been converted into a troop carrier. Guarded by soldiers from the Gordon Highlander Regiment, they arrived in Sydney on 27 September 1940.4
Australian newspapers greeted their arrival with headlines such as ‘Nazis arrive for internment in a cheerful mood’.5 In Sydney, the internees were placed in the custody of the Australian Army and put on a train. On their journey to Shepparton in northern Victoria, Australian soldiers carrying rifles with fixed bayonets accompanied them Helmut Neustaedter’s Australian Army
enlistment photograph, 1942. NAA: B884, V377945
National Archives of Australia In the Interest of National Security
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to ensure that nobody escaped. From Shepparton, the internees travelled by bus to an internment camp near the town of Tatura.
Released from internment in 1942, Neustaedter was drafted to work as a fruit-picker in northern Victoria. In April 1942, he enlisted in the Australian Army and served in an employment company.6 After the war, he did indeed settle in Australia. In 1945, he applied to be naturalised.7 A few months later he swore allegiance to the King. In 1946, believing that his name ‘didn’t sound right for the new personage [he] had in mind’ and swearing ‘never to think of [himself] as Neustaedter again’, he changed his name by deed poll to Helmut Newton.8
Why was Newton’s internment not mentioned in the articles that appeared after his death? And, more broadly, why is the internment of more than 15 000 civilians during World War II still a little known episode in Australian history?
This book attempts to answer this question. At the same time, it aims to demonstrate the extent to which unpublished government records can serve as sources about this particular chapter in twentieth-century Australian history. For the lack of public awareness about Australia’s wartime internment camps is not due to the paucity of historical evidence. The National Archives of Australia, in particular, houses thousands of government files documenting the history of internment during World War II. Other Australian archives and libraries hold diaries, memoirs, letters, photographs and other relevant historical sources.
Entrance to Loveday 14 Internment Camp at Barmera, South Australia, c1945. This view is from the western tower, looking east, with A and D compounds on the left and B and C compounds on the right. (Photograph taken by H K Cullen.) Australian War Memorial: 122988
3
The authorities responsible for internees dealt also with prisoners of war. Prisoners of war and internees were often housed in the same camps (even though they were separated within the camps). Some civilian internees were reclassified as prisoners of war during the conflict. Prisoners of war often also refer to their captivity as ‘internment’. But there is a fundamental difference between prisoners of war who are captured during combat and then detained under the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War and civilians imprisoned because they have been convicted of treason or sabotage, or interned because they are suspected of being inclined to becoming traitors or saboteurs. This book is concerned only with the latter group: civilians classified as civilian internees.
In the Interest of National Security is not a comprehensive history of World War II civilian internment. Rather, it tries to draw the attention of a broad audience to this chapter in Australian history, to the relevant secondary literature and, most importantly, to the wealth of Australian Government records that could be used to learn more about it. This book is designed to inform the public about the National Archives’ collection of records about internment during World War II and its cultural and historical significance.
This book gives a brief overview of Australia’s internment policies during World War II, and then tells the story of World War II internment by recounting the internment histories of seven men and three women, whose records are held in the collection of the National Archives. These individuals were chosen to demonstrate the diversity of backgrounds – in terms of nationality, political conviction, faith, class and education – of civilians in the internment camps. Their experiences, however, were not typical – not because their particular histories or personalities rendered them exceptional, but because the diversity of the internees was too great to allow the stories of any 10 to stand in for those of the thousands of others. In one sense, the 10 internees selected for this study are an unusual group because most of them either wrote about their internment experiences or talked about them in interviews recorded by historians.
The youngest
Luigi Camporeale was the youngest of those portrayed in this book. Born in 1919 in southern Italy, he migrated to Australia at the age of 11. He was interned from June 1940 until December 1943 on Rottnest Island, at Harvey and at Parkeston in Western Australia and in the Loveday Internment Camp near Barmera in South Australia.
The oldest
Harley Matthews was the oldest of those featured in this book. He was born in North Sydney in 1889 of Australian-born parents and was interned in the Liverpool Internment Camp near Sydney from March until September 1942.
National Archives of Australia Introduction
National Archives of Australia In the Interest of National Security
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The naturalised British subject
Baldwin (‘Paul’) Goener, born Balduin Göner in 1890 in Germany, had lived in Queensland for most of his life and by the time World War II broke out had been a naturalised British subject for 27 years. He was interned at Gaythorne (Queensland) and Tatura (Victoria) internment camps from September 1941 until October 1944.
The missionary wife
Irene Stürzenhofecker, born in Switzerland in 1908, was married to a German medical doctor who had been working for a Lutheran missionary society in New Guinea. She was interned at her own request in March 1943, remained at the Tatura Internment Camp until November 1947, and was, together with her family, to which three children were added during her time at Tatura, deported to Germany the following year.
The Japanese-Australian
Born in 1914 in Singapore, Masuko Kathleen Murakami was the daughter of an Australian-born Japanese mother. She and her family were interned in Darwin on 8 December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. After a short stay at the impromptu Adelaide River Internment Camp near Darwin, Masuko spent most of her 68 months in internment in the Tatura Internment Camp. There she gave birth to two sons and lost her father, who died of illness at Tatura in 1944.
The dancer
Alice Meyer von Forell, born in Berlin in 1912, was married to a German-Jewish refugee, Hans Meyer. Together they had set up a dance school in Sydney shortly after their arrival in Australia in 1938. She was arrested on 3 September 1939, the day Australia declared war on Germany, and interned in Long Bay Gaol at Malabar in Sydney’s south-west and in an internment camp at Peat’s Bight on the Hawkesbury River north of Sydney. She was released on 8 February 1940, well before any of the other people featured in this book had been interned.
The Hungarian
Imre (‘Emery’) Barcs was a journalist who had been born in Budapest in 1905 and arrived in Australia as a refugee in 1938. Of the ten, he was interned for the shortest time: 57 days, from 9 December 1941 until 4 February 1942, in the Liverpool and Tatura camps.
The political prisoner
Soeka Soemitro,9 born in 1909 in Java, had been interned for more than eight years in Tanah Merah, West New Guinea, by the authorities of the Netherlands East Indies,
5
before he arrived at the Cowra Internment Camp in New South Wales in June 1943. He was released in November 1943.
The ‘Dunera’ Boy
Ernst Friedrich Fröhlich (‘Ernest Frederick Frohlich’), an Austrian Jew, was arrested in England in June 1940 and evacuated to Australia on the infamous HMT Dunera. On 6 September 1940, he entered an internment camp at Hay, New South Wales. In August 1941, he was one of the first Dunera internees to be released.
The murder victim
Francesco (‘Franck’) Fantin, who was born in 1901 in Italy, migrated to Australia in 1924. He was arrested in February 1942, after which he was interned first in the internment camp at Gaythorne and then in the Loveday Internment Camp, where he was murdered on 16 November 1942 by a fellow internee.
These 10 case studies do not provide a strictly representative picture of the population of Australia’s World War II internment camps. Ten individuals of Italian, German, Austrian, Javanese, Japanese, Hungarian and British ancestry are not a representative sample of those interned in Australia, who included not only nationals of countries at war with Australia (such as Germans, Italians, Japanese, Finns and Hungarians), nationals of countries occupied by Germany (such as Norwegians) and Australian-born British nationals and naturalised British subjects of German, Italian or Japanese ancestry, but also members of nations that were neutral or were fighting side-by-side with Australia. But the selection of case studies tries to account for some key features of the internee population:
• the overwhelming majority of internees were men;
• about two-thirds of the internees were either of Italian, German or Austrian background;
• the majority of internees were released well before the end of the war;
• a minority of internees were committed Nazis or fascists, but their overall number was smaller than that of internees who were committed anti-Nazis or anti-fascists and/or had been persecuted by the Nazis on account of their Jewish ancestry;
• most internees passed through several camps, which often provided them with very different experiences; and
National Archives of Australia Introduction
National Archives of Australia In the Interest of National Security
6
• the majority of internees remained in Australia after their release; comparatively few of the local internees were deported after the end of the war.
It is unlikely that the 10 protagonists of this book knew each other. Camporeale and Fantin spent ten days in the same compound at the Loveday Internment Camp and may have met then, but none of the others are likely to have crossed paths either during or after their internment. They had little in common – except the fact that at some time during World War II, they were deprived of their liberty without having committed, or being charged with, a crime.
Notes
1. ‘Photographer Helmut Newton dies in crash’, The Sunday Age, 25 January 2004, p. 14. Reproduced with permission from The Age and Reuters. All English-language sources are quoted as in the original.
2. The Sunday Age, 25 January 2004, p. 5.
3. ‘Notoriety Added to Legend of Lens’, The Australian, 27 January 2004, p. 12.
4. Newton described his emigration and internment in his memoirs, see his Autobiography, published by Nan A Talese, New York, 2002. The history of the Queen Mary internees is discussed in Paul Bartrop, ‘Incompatible with security: enemy alien internees from Singapore in Australia, 1940–45’, Journal of the Australian Jewish Historical Society, vol. 12, 1993, pp. 149–69.
5. Quoted in Pamela Bone, ‘Haven-sent happiness’, The Age, 6 October 1990, p. Extra 3.
6. Helmut Neustaedter’s service records are held by the National Archives of Australia, in NAA: B884, V377945.
7. For Helmut Neustaedter’s naturalisation records, see NAA: A435, 1945/4/5566.
8. Newton, Autobiography, pp. 128–29.
9. I have retained the spelling used in the contemporary written record, although the name would now be spelled ‘Suko Sumitro’.
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ISBN 192-08-0738-1
In the Interest of National SecurityCivilian Internment in Australia during World War II
I cannot enjoie the sun the intense blue sky the song of exotic birds, the
landscape or the sunset with its most mangificent colours. I donot hear
the birds or the grasshoppers with my troubled mind nor the sky or sun
everything appears to me like the landscape behind the veil of barbed wire.
In 1939, the Australian Government passed legislation to enable the internment of civilians who might represent a threat to national security in the event of war.
Klaus Neumann provides a brief overview of Australia’s internment policies during World War II and demonstrates their effects. Using records in the National Archives of Australia, he introduces 10 people of various ethnic origins and political beliefs who were interned during the war and discusses the profound effects internment had on their lives.
In the Interest of National Security is a compelling and fascinating account of a little known chapter in Australian history.
Klaus Neumann is a German-born historian based in Melbourne. His recent work includes the award-winning Refuge Australia: Australia’s Humanitarian Record (UNSW Press, 2004) and Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (University of Michigan Press, 2000). Klaus Neumann was the Archives’ Frederick Watson Fellow in 2001.
