By: Elena Kingsbury, FSWC Senior Educator

Strand B.3.5- Canadian government response to the Holocaust, acts of hate and human rights violations. Learning on the impact that global changes in understanding and legislation around human rights since World War II have had on the development of Canada’s responses to acts of hate and human rights violations.

The Internment of Jewish Refugees in Canada during the Second World War  

Many Canadians are aware of our country’s poor record of assistance and support for Jewish refugees just before and during the Holocaust. Historians have noted that Canada's restrictive immigration policies in the 1930s-1940s effectively closed the door on Jewish refugees desperately fleeing Nazi persecution. In their groundbreaking 1983 book, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper revealed that no more than 5,000 Jewish refugees were allowed into Canada from 1933 until the end of the war in 1945. One of the key reasons for this small number was anti-Jewish discrimination. Antisemitism was widespread in Canadian society and Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government considered Jews to be among the “least desirable” immigrants at the time. When we reflect on this period, Canada sadly stands out as one of the least-willing of all Western nations to accept Jewish refugees whose future was threatened by the Nazis.

A less widely known part of the Jewish refugee experience in Canada during this time is that many Jewish refugees who did find their way into Canada during the Holocaust were imprisoned in internment camps upon their arrival. As a result of Canada's wartime policies, nearly 2,300 men were interned as "enemy aliens" in camps across the country between 1940 and 1943, most of whom were Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany.

The origins of this policy are intertwined with the broader Jewish refugee question in Great Britain and other nations in the 1930s. Beginning in 1933 with the Nazi rise to power, tens of thousands of German and Austrian Jews sought refuge in Great Britain and elsewhere in Western Europe. These newcomers were met with considerable suspicion; after the outbreak of the war in September 1939, British courts classified Germans and Austrians in the United Kingdom into three categories: Category A: those considered a threat to the country’s safety, Category B: those presenting little risk, known as “friendly enemy aliens,” and Category C: those presenting no risk to national security. In the spring of 1940, the British government interned tens of thousands of Germans and Austrians. They also requested that Canada and Australia, two former British colonies, welcome some of the “enemy aliens” from categories B and C.

This is how, beginning in 1940, a total of 2,300 Jewish refugees from categories B and C arrived in wartime Canada. Most were Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism, including teenagers who had arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport. Long before their arrival in Canada, these Jewish refugees had been judged to pose little or no national security risk. Despite this, Canadian leadership still considered them a potential threat and interned them in camps across Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick. Shockingly, the Jewish refugees were interned with Nazi prisoners of war, resulting in antisemitic violence and the need to establish separate spaces for Jewish internees.

The internment of Jews continued in Canada, out of sight and out of mind, in places like Farnham, Sherbrooke and Lennoxville, until late 1943. Many, like Eric Koch, an internee at a camp in Sherbrooke who later became a CBC producer, applied to settle in Canada permanently after the war. Many of the internees who made new lives in Canada became very successful in their respective fields, contributing to major innovations in science, medicine and technology in the 20^th century.

Sources:

From refugees to enemy aliens

Resources training: enemy aliens- Canada

Jewish Internees in Canada