The Dunera Scandal: Deported by Mistake by Cyril Pearl

Book Description

Secondhand. Very good to near fine condition. Very minor wear to book corners and edges. Dust jacket has light wear. Interior and binding are still excellent.

On 10 July 1940, a ship left at the Pierhead in Liverpool, loaded with an extraordinary cargo. The ship HMT Dunera and her cargo consisted of 2542 German and Austrian internees, most refugees and bitter enemies of Narzism.

The refugees, all men, came from various English camps, where they had been interned as friendly enemy aliens. They had been told they would be shipped to the United States or Canada, where they would have more freedom of movement and that their wives and children would soon join them.

But in fact, they were destined for austere internment camps in Australia and were soon to find that the ship that was to carry them to freedom was, in effect, a floating internment camp. Stripped of personal possessions, crammed below decks in appalling conditions, the internees were subjected to brutal and humiliating treatment throughout the voyage.

On arrival in Australia, the refugees, some of whom had lived in England since childhood, some of who had suffered cruelty at the hands of Nazis, were treated as criminals and subversives and held in barbed-wire protected camps for years, despite British government attempts, rather late in the day, to have many of them released. (back cover)