The Myth of 1940

Angus Calder

  • Collar the lot! How Britain Interned and Expelled its Wartime Refugees by Peter Gillman and Leni Gillman
    Quartet, 334 pp, £8.95, May 1980, ISBN 0 7043 2244 7
  • A Bespattered Page? The Internment of ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Enemy Aliens’ by Ronald Stent
    Deutsch, 282 pp, £7.95, July 1980, ISBN 0 233 97246 3

On 16 May 1940, when the German Army had just overwhelmed Holland, police swooped to arrest 3,000 men born in the Reich but now living in Britain. Some were billeted in the offices of the Tote organisation. Queuing for lunch, one detainee saw an army officer brandishing a revolver at a boy:

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