Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

lanzkron OP t1_ivbadfq wrote

My grandparents and father were interned in one of these camps (not sure if in this specific one). I don't know how well known it is, I never saw any discussion about it and only heard about it in family stories.

On the one hand it's understandable that the British were suspicious of German nationals, but I'm not sure how big a threat my toddler father was to The War Effort™.

46

GMN123 t1_ivc6ngd wrote

Presumably it was his parent/s that were, not unreasonably, considered a security concern, and keeping him with them was preferable to taking an infant away from their parents.

94

Reddit-runner t1_ivbyznq wrote

>but I'm not sure how big a threat my toddler father was to The War Effort™.

Have you ever seen what an unsupervised toddler can do?

There is a reason why we put them behind bars to this day.

We just got wiser on the barbed wire.

45

BackwardPalindrome t1_iveb9xz wrote

Yeah I don't think your toddler father was the one they were concerned about. Did you never consider the idea that the German government might ask one or two of its citizens to... Oh, I don't know, lie for espionage purposes?

29

SeleucusNikator1 t1_ivjx7qt wrote

> Did you never consider the idea that the German government might ask one or two of its citizens to... Oh, I don't know, lie for espionage purposes?

Tbh the Nazis were so abysmally incompetent at espionage that they genuinely might not have thought of that trick harhar.

1

metropitan t1_ivevim2 wrote

I'd imagine another concern was less what the prisoners would do and more what the public would do, its not much of a secret that there was a lot of misguided animosity

3