Internment

With the declarations of war in September 1939, thousands of formal German citizens on the British and French Caribbean islands - including numerous Austrian refugees - became enemy aliens. In the following months, the governments in London and Paris began considering interning these enemy aliens. The Blitzkrieg of 1940 made mass internment and evacuation a reality. As a result, thousands of enemy foreigners and evacuees ended up in internment and transit camps on various islands in the Caribbean region. After Cuba entered World War II in agreement with the United States in December 1941, the Cuban government also began interning enemy aliens in camps. Some of the internees remained in camps until 1948. The research deals with the history and archeology of the internment camps in the British colonies of Jamaica and Trinidad, in the French colonies of Martinique and Guyane, in the Dutch colonies of Curaçao, Bonaire and Suriname as well as the camps in Cuba. On the one hand, we focus our research on the politics behind the internment measures and the construction of camps and, on the other hand, life in the camps, taking into account the various categories of internees as well as local residents, refugees, evacuees, temporary workers, men, women and children . Transatlantic and inter-American perspectives allow us to not only see the perpetrators and victims, but also to look at those people in the colonial societies where internment camps were set up.