Heinrich Fraenkel had an unlikely problem. A German citizen interned on the Isle of Man in 1940, the Hollywood screenwriter and New Statesman chess setter needed to smuggle out the manuscript of his new book Help Us Germans Defeat the Nazis!, a manifesto for confronting Hitler’s regime. While the commandant of Hutchinson camp, one of ten such camps on the island, had been supportive – providing a private room, typewriter and a stack of ink carbons, as well as excusing him from roll-calls and curfews – Fraenkel feared his book would stall on the censor’s desk if it travelled via official channels. If it did, he wrote at the time, it would be “out of date before it ever reached the printer”.
Hutchinson camp was then home to more than a thousand Germans and Austrians, mostly Jews who had, like Fraenkel, escaped Europe and found refuge in Britain. But when war broke out, fearing that the Nazis had planted spies, their saviours turned against them. In the summer of 1940, the police arrested close to 30,000 people, some of whom had travelled to Britain on the Kindertransport. Innocent asylum seekers were labelled “enemy aliens”. One refugee recorded that, as he disembarked the ferry from Liverpool on to the Isle of Man, he heard a British officer say, in a puzzled voice: “I never knew so many Jews were Nazis.” For those who had survived Dachau and Buchenwald, it was a befuddling injustice.
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