During WWII, Alberta had several internment camps. Due apparently to government ignorance or uncaring, they, like others across the country, mixed fascists, anti-fascists and non-political persons of foreign origin somewhat indiscriminately.
In a piece entitled Election Handbills of a Spanish Civil War Veteran by Kaarina Mikalson (an attachment to the Wikipedia article "William Kardash" article), Mikalson noted:
"According to the Columbus Centre, Kananaskis Internment Camp #130 was built in 1939 as a work camp for “enemy aliens.” Prisoners included German merchant marines, German Canadians, Italian Canadians, and Canadians belonging to the Communist Party. The War Measures Act allowed the Canadian Government to classify 31,000 Italian Canadians as enemy aliens, and 600 of these citizens were interned for the majority of the war (Pier 21). Forty-eight Italian Canadians were interned at Camp Kananaskis, but in 1941 they were all released or moved to Petawawa Internment Camp #33 in northern Ontario. German Prisoners of War took their place at Camp Kananaskis."
William Kardash was elected in 1941 as one of Winnipeg's ten MLAs (elected through proportional representation). He campaigned for the release of the interned members of the Communist Party. With the Soviet Union coming into the war in 1941, the attitude of the Communist party to the war, and the Canadian government's attitude to the Soviet Union, shifted 180 degrees.
(Note that both had shifted -- Canada had pretty much given Hitler free hand in Spain and had discouraged its citizens from fighting to defend the democratically elected government of Spain in 1937, while Communists were active in the Mackenzie-Papineau battalions of foreign volunteers fighting against the fascist rebels led by General Franco. Then in 1939 both had shifted their positions. The Government, being newly anti-German (if still not truly anti-fascist) had declared war on Germany. The Communist, echoing the sentiment of Soviet Union to avoid conflict with Germany, went soft on the war. Then in 1941, with the Soviet Union invaded and in the war, the Communist Party was all-out for war, and the Canadian Liberal government then was happy to be seen in the company of Communists. The Party's ties with ethnic communities gave it influence when the war effort (formerly dominated by xenophobic True-Blue-Conservative British-Canadian stuffed shirt types) needed spies and organizers to drop into Occupied Europe.
The "Canada and the Spanish Civil War" website has reproductions of three pieces of Kardash's 1941 election campaign literature:
"Elect a True Champion of People's Democracy.. Restore Democratic Rights..Tax profits, not wages.. For workers' representation, not sell-out and coalition" (four-page pamphlet),
"Who is Kardash?" (four-page pamphlet); and
"Mothers and Wives of Winnipeg" (3-page pamphlet).
I talked to a man who was once a guard at one of the camps in the Rockies. He said there was very little security, the rugged mountains guarding the inmates. Once two Germans escaped, heading towards the West Coast. One was never seen again. Two or three days after the escape, one of the escapees walked out of the woods and back into camp, scratched-up, exhausted and half-starved. After that no one else ever tried to escape.
The Hollywood film "49th Parallel" detailed the flight of a marooned squad of German submariners fleeing out of Canada. One way out was to the U.S., which was neutral until it joined the conflict more than two years after Canada. Another was catch a ship on the West Coast. They began to kill and steal their way across Canada. The crew tried to find refuge among Hutterites in Manitoba, whom they thought to be sympathetic due to common German background, but then found that they were refugees of Hitler's regime. One of the crew expressed desire to settle on the Hutterite colony and was shot by the crew-leader.
Wonderful Canadian tie-ins
Canada's famous Massey family featured in the production of the film.
The family had made its fortune in the manufacture of Massey-Ferguson tractors. The overseas sale of these tractors alone earned something like a quarter of all of Canada's export trade in some of those early years. They were so ubiquitous even in Europe that when Canadians soldiers took Vimy Ridge they found a Massey-Ferguson (or Massey-Harris) tractor at one of the destroyed farms there.
The Massey Hall in Toronto is/was a famous performance auditorium.
In "49th Parallel," Raymond Massey played a gallant Canadian bloke who fights the crew-leader in the end. This is said to be the only time that Massey, later a Hollywood icon, played a Canadian on screen. He was famous for his starring role in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois" (1940). He also played Lincoln in the film "How the West was Won."
Massey was probably the first of the many Canadian actors who have played U.S. presidents. Here are others -
Brendan Fraser as Lincoln in Bedazzled,
Walter Massey (another of the Massey clan) as William Howard Taft in The Greatest Game Ever Played;
Thomas Peacocke as Herbert Hoover in The Angel of Pennsylvania Avenue. Thomas Peacocke was a Uof A prof in Edmonton, father of TV producer/director TW Peacocke (graduate of Strathcona Composite High in Edmonton) who himself was once husband of the Canadian treasure Saskatchewan-born actress Kari Matchett.; and
Bruce Greenwood as JFK in Thirteen Days.
Raymond Massey's brother Vincent Massey, later a Governor General, read the prologue to the film 49th Parallel.
Other luminaries involved in the 49th Parallel were Laurence Olivier, later a famous British Shakespearian actor, who here plays a French-Canadian trapper, and Leslie Howard, of "Gone With the Wind" fame.
Leslie Howard, who only three years earlier had played the man that Scarlett O'Hara was almost fatally in love with, in "49th Parallel" played an eccentric writer wandering in the Rockies who befriends the murderous submarine crew and then is assaulted by them. In a performance meant to ignite the fighting passions of U.S. film-goers he walks into the German's fire, showing that he is not scared of him. (A similar turning point in power relations occurs in the film "1900" starring Donald Sutherland (once husband of Tommy Douglas's daughter Shirley Douglas) as a local fascist functionary. The villagers eventually (about 4 hours into the film's length) show they prefer to oppose Sutherland even at the cost of dying rather than live under his deranged rule.)
By the time the "49th Parallel" came out, Japan had attacked Hawaii and Germany had declared war on the U.S. so the film was too late to have its desired effect of getting the U.S. into the war.
Howard made two more films before himself being killed by Nazis in early 1943 while a passenger on a regularly scheduled flight from neutral Portugal to Britain. The plane was shot down. It is said that possibly when boarding he and his agent were mis-identified by spies as Churchill and his bodyguard. Howard apparently looked like Churchill's bodyguard and Howard's agent looked like Churchill. But to think that Churchill would take a regular flight during wartime beggars imagination.
Or did the German fighters know who Howard was and decided to kill him to stop him doing his bit for the anti-fascist movement?
Or was it just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? A Luftwaffe pilot revealed after the war that he had just shot down anything that crossed his path - whether neutral or enemy.
Boos and hisses go to Turner of Turner's Classics TV channel who when speaking about the film almost seemed to excuse the shooting down of Howard's plane implying that because of it Churchill's plane got through. Turner made no criticism for the German fighter pilot shooting down a plane carrying 17 innocents. Churchill's plane was nowhere nearby, having taken a safer, longer round-about route, so should have had nothing to do with the fate of Howard's plane.
Canadian-born "Ironside" actor Raymond Burr later claimed that his wife, Annette Sutherland, had died on that same flight. He could have been confusing it with another commercial flight shot down about the same time. He later said he travelled to Spain and Portugal to get information but never learned anything about the tragedy. It is likely authorities in Spain or Portugal would not know anything. The attack would have happened out at sea, with no witnesses. Burr told his biographers that he had a son by Annette, but oddly apparently there is no record of the marriage nor of the son.
Getting back to Canada's internment camps --
The mixing of hard-core fascists with others in camps under Canadian supervision twice led to disaster.
After Holland's liberation by Canadian soldiers, POWs were put into a holding camp. A German conscientious objector or deserter was put in with hard-core German soldiers. The latter held a trial, found him guilty of cowardice and got permission to borrow guns to form a firing squad and shot him dead. A scandal ensued, with international law experts saying that Canada had the responsibility to prevent harm of this sort to an inmate of its POW camps. The Canadian camp commander said in his defence that the killing meant one less German. He had been hoping as soon as possible to go to fight in the Pacific and was planning on a future in the army after the war but the scandal ended that. He later took up farming in central Alberta. The scandal used to be dug up every decade or so in the Edmonton Journal. A play based on the event was performed in one of the early Fringe festivals.
Somewhat similarly, in 1944 German Prisoners of War interned at Lethbridge killed other internees and were hanged themselves.
David Carter wrote a book on this, "Behind Barbed Wire."
(David Carter was the speaker of the Alberta Legislature who prevented French from being spoken in the Legislature when NDP MLA Leo Piquette tried to use the other of Canada's official languages in that chamber in 1986/7. This produced the Affair Piquette, a real constitutional argy -bargy in which Piquette and other Francophone pursued their constitutional right to speak their own language in the Legislature - and won!
Conservative Nancy Betkowski (later MacBeth), being a Francophile herself, having studied French literature in university, appeared distraught at her government's anti-French stance and later joined the Liberal party. The MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona at the time, Gordon Wright, was competent in the French language.
And Carter himself used French to have Piquette resume his seat on that fateful day by telling him "asseyez-vous." Piquette's obedience to this official usage of French added a touch of irony to the situation.
Carter was re-elected to his seat in 1989. Piquette was not so lucky.
Although Carter later defended his decision to prevent Piquette from speaking in French in the legislature because at the time "it was illegal," apparently the issue became a personal feud. In Carter's book Our Fragile Democracy: In Defence of Parliament, he calls Piquette “the less than honourable member.” Piquette, it is said, held equally uncomplimentary views of Carter.
Leo Piquette is the father of Colin Piquette, NDP MLA from 2015 to 2019.
(In WWI, Canada was in the war long before the U.S. Canada tried in intern its most dangerous German immigrants.
Joachim Ribbentrop was one of these. Living in Ottawa, he made a living importing German wine and champagne. After the war's outbreak, he fled to U.S., still neutral at the time, and from there found legal passage to Germany. Upon arrival in Germany he joined up and fought through WWI. Later ascending to a powerful position in the Nazi movement, he was named Minister of Foreign Affairs in Hitler's government.
Trotsky
A literary reference to Canadian wartime escapees is the 1981 book The 6th of December by Jim Lotz. In it, Trotsky, who was a temporary internee in an internment camp near Halifax in April 1917, helped set the stage for the Dec. 6, 1917 Halifax explosion. German POWs, inspired by Trostky to escape, are the cause of the catastrophe.
A Nova Scotia website states this:
"April 17, 1915 The arrival of the first group of First World War prisoners at the Amherst prisoner of war internment camp (POW) from Halifax aboard armed trains. The camp was the largest POW camp in Canada during the Great War, holding a maximum of 854 prisoners, many of whom were German sailors. Besides Amherst, there were also internment camps at Melville Island on the Northwest Arm of Halifax, and at the Citadel Hill fortress (Fort George). There were 24 camps across the country. The Amherst camp closed on Sept. 27, 1919.
One notable prisoner at the camp was Russian leader Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) who arrived there in early April of 1917. He was released at the end of April and sent to Russia where he and Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) began the October Revolution that same year.
Author and playwright Silver Donald Cameron wrote a play about Trotsky's confinement as a POW in Amherst called The Prophet at Tantramar (1988)."
Thanks for reading.
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