Enemy Alien

[trumpet music] Let no one say that Britain is unprepared in the grave hour that is at hand.

Barbed wire and other defenses appear in the streets of London to guard important centers, to defeat Fifth Columnists, and any other enemies working among the civil population, and it's the same stories of these new defenses from all over the country.

[gentle music] In the lead-up to the war, in Great Britain there was this intensifying moral panic about traitors in our midst.

MI5 is taking the situation seriously, the government is taking it seriously, and people are wanting to dob in strangers, dob in their neighbors, and accuse them of being either Nazis or communists.

It was given a label of the Fifth Column, and that Fifth Columnists were people who were traitors.

That's Kathryn Biber, the legal historian from UTS we heard from in episode one.

She and her team have been researching the lives of lawyers who left Europe to escape the rise of fascism from the early 1930s.

Many of those people, most of them Jewish, had gone to England.

[gentle music] Much more tragic is the continued story of refugees arriving in Britain.

Just try to imagine what they are feeling.

For days and nights, they have been fleeing, almost continuously harassed by Nazi bombs and machine gun bullets.

Now, for the moment, they know they are safe behind the Allied armies, but even here they realize that for the time being, the tide of Nazi brutality sweeps forward.

When the war is declared in September of 1939, there are 70,000 German nationals living in Great Britain.

[static] This is London.

You will now hear a statement by the prime minister.

This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.

And all of the aliens in Britain who are of German nationality immediately become enemy aliens.

[static] Sir John Anderson's first task in Parliament as the new home secretary and minister for home defense was to announce that all Germans and Austrians in this country will be examined immediately.

Examiners will sit in London and the provinces to decide who shall be interned or otherwise restricted.

He said that all aliens who might be hostile to this country must be rendered harmless, and all enemy aliens over 16 and British-born women who became German or Austrian by marriage must now report to the police.

Shortly afterwards, a tribunal system is established to classify these enemy aliens, and they create three categories: A, B, and C.

Category A are people who are actual national security risks.

Category B is people who are allowed to be at liberty, but they're restricted and subject to surveillance.

And category C are the so-called friendly aliens.