“… catch them all, in any case …”

The documentary film “Churchill’s Forgotten War,” currently available in the Phoenix media library, provides an overview of the internments and deportations in Great Britain during World War II. Among others, Henry Wuga reports in the film. He was interned as a 16-year-old refugee in 1940 and is one of the few surviving witnesses to the actions of Churchill’s war cabinet “against the supposed enemy within their own country.”

Among others, British Liberal MP Eleanor Rathbone is quoted, who vehemently advocated for the unjustly treated refugees in the House of Commons and thus contributed to the reversal of the internment policy: With the mass internments, “including all those who had been recognized by the tribunals as victims of the Nazi regime,” the aim was “to catch those they wanted to catch at all costs,” she criticized Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s policy in Parliament at the time.

Richard Shaw’s 45-minute film “Churchill’s Forgotten War” can be viewed until October 22, 2025, on the Phoenix documentary and event channel as part of the ARD media library. It is not known whether geoblocking prevents use abroad.

A contemporary cartoon comments on the Dunera community’s well-known historian Rachel Pistol: on one side, you see a large crowd of “German & Italian enemies of Nazism & Fascism”; on the other side of the barbed wire fence, a handful of “our own total-minded little Hitlers.” Rachel Pistol comments on the change in British immigration policy following parliamentary and public debates and the subsequent official release of those deported overseas with the relativizing remark: “It was hard to come home.”

In the film, British historian Stefano Paolini critically points out that there is “not a single reference to the internments, the Arandora Star, or the deportations” in British literature on World War II.

His colleague Simon Parkin (“The Island of Extraordinary Captives” about the internees on the Isle of Man) concludes by asking: “How far can a nation go in legitimately defending its values before it begins to abandon them? How can we reconcile our moral obligation to grant refuge and asylum with the need to maintain national security? In a sense, this question has never been answered.” This applies not only to British immigration policy in 1940, but also to the debates in EU countries and the US about how to deal with refugees who believe they will find a safe haven in these countries.