Walter Igersheimer, Ian Darragh. Blatant Injustice: The Story Of A Jewish Refugee From Nazi Germany Imprisoned In Britain And Canada During World War II (Footprints Series). Montréal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005. xxix + 231 pp. $44.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7735-2841-3.

Reviewed by Patricia Kollander (Department of History, Florida Atlantic University)
Published on H-German (July, 2006)

A Victim's Odyssey

It is difficult to imagine a book more aptly titled than this one. Walter Igersheimer, a German Jew, left Nazi Germany for England in 1933, only to end up in an internment camp in Canada during World War II for a period of fourteen months. During his year-long imprisonment, Igersheimer wrote a memoir of his odyssey from Germany to Canada. Thanks to the efforts of his father, a prominent ophthalmologist practicing in Boston after his own escape from Nazi Germany, Igersheimer eventually was released from internment and made his way to the United States. Because he wanted to put his travails behind him, he kept the memoir under wraps for nearly sixty years, until his friend, Ian Darragh, persuaded him to have it published.

Igersheimer was fifteen years old when he arrived in England in 1933. When the war broke out in 1939, he was a medical student who wished eventually to join the Royal Army Medical Corps as a physician. But he was not yet eligible to apply for British citizenship, and because he still held a German passport, he was classified as a "Refugee from Nazi Oppression." One might think that this classification would have protected him from discrimination, but just the opposite was true. The war generated such an anti-German scare that the British press and many politicians called for the incarceration of all male German and Austrian citizens living in Britain--regardless of whether they were refugees of Hitler or not. Igersheimer--by this time a second-year medical student involved in war work--was imprisoned in June 1940. His indignation at what happened to him and hundreds of others like him is clear when he writes, "instead of letting us enlist and giving us citizenship ... the British government decided to imprison us and ship us out of England. Many of us felt betrayed by the very country we wanted to belong to and fight for" (p. xxix). Igersheimer and some eight hundred others were shipped to Canada aboard a prison ship with German prisoners of war. After arrival in Canada, they were sent to Camp L outside of Quebec City. To their indignation, the refugees discovered they were to be interned together with the German POWs. To make matters worse, their accommodations were worse than those provided for the German POWs. Igersheimer wrote: "German prisoners of war already occupy the best huts and have been given fresh sheets for their beds, while about two hundred of them have full use of one kitchen ... [but] we are not given any bedsheets, and have only one kitchen to feed eight hundred men" (p. 51). Though food was adequate, the internees' boredom, along with their frustration at the injustice of their internment, made their incarceration difficult, to say the least. They whiled away the hours by writing letters to authorities asking for their release and by forming a camp university where internees taught each other everything from agriculture to physics. They also managed to rise above being bitter about their plight by producing artwork to raise money for air-raid victims and other war charities. But frustration at their situation could not be eliminated. Igersheimer wrote: "It is awful to sit here in Quebec not being able to help in any way to fight Hitler. We file an endless stream of petitions and applications for release with no result. Doctors, mechanics, scientists, engineers ... we are all straining to help but are stranded here--forgotten" (p. 86).

This book is gripping and clearly written. It is also unusual because Igersheimer wrote about his experiences as they were taking place, rather than from the distance of several decades, as is more commonly the case with World War II memoirs. The reader can sense the indignation, frustration and helplessness that young Igersheimer felt as his internment dragged on month after month. The book is also a story about waste; these talented refugees could have done much to help defeat Hitler, but were not allowed to do so because of the short-sighted vision of the British and Canadian governments.

In his forward to the memoir, Darragh writes, "Blatant Injustice is a cautionary lesson about how basic human and legal rights are ignored in the time of war, and how innocent people often have little recourse against the machinery of their governments and bureaucracies" (p. xxiii). Igersheimer's story has special resonance today as governments investigate aliens who may or may not pose a terrorist threat. This book clearly shows that innocent people can become victims of injustice when fear of the enemy, real or imagined, is taken much too far.

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Citation: Patricia Kollander. Review of Igersheimer, Walter; Darragh, Ian, Blatant Injustice: The Story Of A Jewish Refugee From Nazi Germany Imprisoned In Britain And Canada During World War II (Footprints Series). H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11999

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