More Internment Questions
The more the question of interned aliens is examined the more numerous are its unsatisfactory features seen to be. Perhaps the most serious of all mistakes is the lack of any differentiation in the internment-camps—and the deportation- ships—between actual refugees, who may be presumed, failing evidence to the contrary, to be convinced anti-Nazis, and other Germans and Austrians (e.g., such as were living, or on a visit, here when war broke out) regarding whom no such presump- tion exists ; and the failure to use the knowledge of experienced refugees of proved reliability—practically all who have not been interned fall into that category—for the detection of any Nazi agents who may be masquerading as refugees. The refugees are better qualified than any non-German to discover such persons, and it is obviously to their interests to impart any suspicions they may harbour. Actually some Germans have been released about whose bona fides there is serious doubt, while hundreds of refugees about whom there is none remain interned. Another matter about which information might very properly be sought in Parliament is the reason for the arrest and imprisonment of a number of Czechs—not Sudeten- Germans—who are actually subjects of an Allied State. The suspicion that anti-semitism in certain Czech circles is respon- sible for a certain indifference to the lot of non-Aryan Czechs may be proved groundless ; but it is sufficiently strong to make an investigation desirable.
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