“A man who wants constant watching”: Karl Hens (1872-1948) and the politics of wartime internment in South Africa, 1914–1918

ABSTRACT

The internment of ‘enemy subjects’ in many countries in response to the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 reflected global security concerns. South Africa, then a newly constituted Dominion of the British Empire, followed London’s lead and interned some 2,500 German and Austro-Hungarian nationals. Based on the examination of official and private records, this article analyses the story of a German, migrant couple: Karl and Marie Hens. It explores their life in South Africa hustling to make a living and then, after August 1914, first to escape and then survive war-time internment. It reveals the difficult relationships between them and their communities and between the internees themselves and the relief agencies; from the impact of severe personal restriction and growing impoverishment to the politics of release in 1919. Yet, as Marie no doubt realised, the wives and children – not interned, and left at the mercy of their ‘British’ neighbours – suffered the most.

KEYWORDS:

• World war
• internment
• enemy aliens
• East London
• meat preservation
• U-boats

Introduction

The Second World War came to South Africa’s South East Coast in late September 1939. On 1 October, Lt Col H. Hamman, the Officer Commanding Eastern Province Command, reported that at 0745 on that morning a German submarine had been sighted about 2.5 miles out to sea in the vicinity of Cove Rock – about 7 miles southwest of the Buffalo River. According to the observer – Du Preez, a local fisherman familiar with the coast – the U-boat was travelling at speed in the direction of Algoa Bay and had been visible for ten to fifteen minutes. The matter was reported to Captain Baillie, the local commandant of police, who – accompanied by Major Myers (GSO) and Lt Cdr Watson (SNO) – interviewed Du Preez and his son independently. The three men were satisfied that the fishermen had seen a U-boat. Watson asked that an air reconnaissance be made from East London and Port Elizabeth. Hamman agreed; a Hart was ordered up from East London and a Ju86 from Port Elizabeth. The aircraft from each centre reconnoitred as far as Port Alfred. Neither spotted a U-boat.¹

The previous day, on 30 September, Baillie had received a report that Carl Hens² – a family butcher and ‘known Nazi supporter’ resident in East London – was in touch with a ships chandler named Hopf, who was allegedly planning to refuel U-boats in the vicinity of the Gonubie River.³ Baillie received this report from the Officer in Charge of the Railway Police, who had received it from his headquarters in Johannesburg. No local information on the matter was available, and Hopf was unknown in East London.⁴ Similar security concerns had arisen in the Eastern Cape during the First World War and the authorities investigated further.⁵

‘Spy Fever’ gripped portions of the South African public from before the outbreak of war – as it had done before 1914.⁶ As an intelligence officer in the Cape Area noted, this always ‘afflicted the more susceptible members of any community’. People, convinced they had seen something untoward, called in to the Cape Area Headquarters conveying mostly ‘their suspicions of everyday happenings of no real significance’.⁷ Popular films – such as The Confessions of a Nazi Spy, released earlier in 1939 – encouraged the monitoring of neighbours: of their comings and goings, and of their mail. Illegal, private transmitting plants along the coast were reported; the government had cancelled all transmitter licences and a watch had been placed to listen for transmissions. However, a shortage of shortwave, direction-finding equipment made it almost impossible to fix the precise locations of illegal devices.⁸ Human intelligence seemingly again proved its worth, although the Cape southeast coast would remain an area of concern regarding local loyalties and alleged visits from German U-boats.⁹

Perhaps a local ‘do-gooder’ had reported strange activity to the police in East London or the Railway Police had noticed the activity near the Gonubie River mouth. We do not know, but the ensuing investigation led to a report concerning ‘one Hens of East London and a refuelling base’. The Railway Police in East London, the South African Police in Pretoria, and the military authorities in both places reacted immediately. On 7 October 1939, the Deputy Director of Intelligence informed Colonel Stanford that ‘the matter required certain action to be taken’.¹⁰ The submarine-refuelling incident led to greater coordination of the intelligence function and increased cooperation between the services locally and nationally. The Police discovered coded messages and hiding German nationals.¹¹ The arrests included Hens, who disappears from the public record for the remainder of the war. The police investigation no doubt uncovered the story of an interesting man; interned in 1914, Hens was again interned in 1939.

Worldwide, scholars, adopting the ‘global turn’ in First World War studies, have examined topics far removed from the frontlines of the battlespaces in the war theatres. New interest in civilians on the home fronts led to studies on the ‘brutalisation’ of politics and changing population policies, on surveillance and the compromise of individual liberty, on the war-time incarceration of military and civilian prisoners, on economic and other forms of exploitation, and on poverty, especially among marginalised groups.¹² Pre-1914 anti-spy preventative actions included the monitoring of individuals considered dangerous to the State, the preparation of lists of known suspects, and, after the outbreak of war, the arrest and imprisonment of ‘enemy aliens’ and suspected spies on the Security Service lists. In Britain, the number of internees reached a peak of thirty-two thousand in October 1915.¹³ Reginald McKenna, Home Secretary in the Asquith government, had concluded reluctantly that ‘anti-alien feeling ran so high that male enemy aliens might well be safer if interned’.¹⁴ As Annette Becker notes, ‘although civilian deportations, concentration camps, barbed wire and watch-towers were part of the landscape of the Great War, in a world preoccupied by the fallen heroes lost on the battlefields, these other victims of war were ignored’.¹⁵ This war zone – ‘an atypical front’ perhaps but a battlespace nonetheless – was characterised by its own violence, marked as it was by deportation, incarceration, and sometimes forced labour.¹⁶

The historiography of internment remains scant in South Africa where world war studies still largely focus on the clash of arms on the battlefronts. The literature on the South African homefront emphasises the anti-German feeling but deportation and internment, where mentioned, is done so almost only in passing. Tilman Dedering’s useful examination of internment in wartime South Africa, and Graham Duminy and Dieter Reusch’s study on the leisure-time activities in the Fort Napier internment camp, are valuable exceptions.¹⁷ As Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi have noted, there is ‘no comprehensive and little interpretive treatment’.¹⁸ The literature focuses on the anti-German feeling on the wider homefront; internment is mentioned almost only in passing. There are also few journal articles.¹⁹ While Manz and Panayi treat the question of internment within the British Empire during the First World War in magisterial fashion, there is no similar treatment for the Second World War – not for South Africa. In a larger study, Patrick Furlong investigated the connections between Germany and South Africa, and specifically the German-speaking community in South Africa²⁰; while Christoph Marx dealt very briefly with the internment of ‘enemy aliens’ during the Second World War.²¹ Micro-history certainly offers its own dividends.²² As Manz and Panayi argue, case histories of individual men and women – of which there are few for South Africa – prise open oft-hidden themes and provide opportunity for some historiographical observations.

During the First World War, South Africa interned immigrants, and the children of immigrants, from Germany and Austria-Hungary. Their lot was largely in the hands of a few men: Lieutenant-Colonel Hon. Hugh Wyndham, the Chief Intelligence Officer from September 1914; and most significantly, Lieutenant-Colonel H.W. Hamilton-Fowle, the Provost Marshal of the Union, who later became the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, the Custodian of Enemy Trading, and the controller of the Pietermaritzburg internment camp – the ‘home’ of internees for four years. Some four thousand German males had lived in South Africa in 1914. Approximately 2,500 of them were interned.²³ This article uses one of them as a lens through which to examine the internment experience during the First World War in South Africa. It explores the pre-war life of the Hens couple before analysing their attempts to escape and then survive internment against the background of the ‘spy’ scare, the growing securitisation of the state, and calls for the internment of all German and Austro-Hungarian nationals. For South Africa, the material lies dispersed in the official records of National Archives and Records Service of South Africa, and the Department of Defence Archives in Pretoria, and several demi-official and private collections – including the personal papers of Hugh Wyndham and uniquely Karl Hens himself – as well as the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva.

Hens and his meat preservation process

Karl Friedrich Hens was born in Iserlohn, Westphalia, on 4 February 1872. He left Germany in 1888 and four years later moved to South Africa, where he first emerges in official documentation – in 1898, at the age of twenty-five – for contravening the liquor act in the Transvaal Republic. Found with four bottles of whisky, he was convicted on 6 January 1898 and sentenced to a fine of £150 or six months’ hard labour. Unable to raise the money, he was jailed, but escaped five days later from a work party. On 13 January, the State Attorney issued a warrant for his re-arrest. In it Hens is described as: ‘German, well-set with strong build (“frisch gebouwd”), 5 foot 4½ inches in height, light colour hair, light blue eyes, with light moustache and a tattoo mark on the left arm’.²⁴ Arrested once more, the magistrate at Boksburg convicted Hens on 4 February 1898 and sentenced him to six months imprisonment with hard labour. But, on 18 February, Hens escaped again and fled to the relative safety of Portuguese Mozambique.²⁵ However, his troubles were far from over. Writing from Lourenço Marques on 24 February, he petitioned the Transvaal government for permission to return to Boksburg. While in prison, one of his friends, a certain Billigheimer, had taken possession of his belongings and had alienated them illegally. As a result, Hens found himself in Lourenço Marques in ‘de grootste armoed’ (the greatest poverty). Quite naively, he begged for clemency but the Transvaal government denied his request.²⁶ Hens would remain in Mozambique until he could return to the Transvaal after the fall of Pretoria²⁷ before making his way to German South West Africa where he emerges during the German-Nama-Herero wars (1904–1907). He was supplying the German armed forces with fresh meat.²⁸ These years, as he would later explain to the security authorities, had been spent in Kimberley. However, his attempt to re-establish a timeline – and hide his presence in GSWA, and his service with the German forces there – probably did his case for parole in 1914 irreparable harm. But these years were formative; Hens had established himself in the butchering business and, seemingly, the conditions in South West Africa had led to the development of a new process for meat preservation, which he patented and would attempt to use for monetary and political advantage.

With the war in German South-West at an end, Hens re-emerges in Johannesburg. He was now running a butchery at 53 Balmoral Chambers, in Commissioner Street. He spent a good part of 1908 and 1909 touring territories in southern Africa and demonstrating his meat process and gaining local acknowledge, which he recorded and used for publicity. He now attempted to sell rights to use his patented process for meat preservation to the governments in British South Africa and Portuguese East Africa. After initial interest, these failed to find success. The Chief Veterinary Officer in Pretoria told his counterpart in Lourenço Marques that the meat he inspected was ‘quite putrid’ and according to the Government Chemist, who had analysed a sample, had not been preserved with anything other than common salt, which, as everyone knew, improved its keeping qualities.²⁹ The private sector showed greater interest and rights for this patent and another – one for a portable dipping tank – were sold to Imperial Cold Storage and the Rand Cold Storage and Supply Company.³⁰

But opportunities now seemed to be closing down. The Union of South Africa came into being on 31 May 1910 and the central government allowed fewer opportunities to hustle officials, especially after Hens confronted officials in the Department of Agriculture regarding an outbreak of East Coast Fever. According to Christie, the principal veterinary surgeon in the department, Hens was nothing more ‘the disappointed owner of a meat preserving patent, which he has been pressuring the Government to take up for the past two years’ and – attributing the Government’s refusal to do so to the Department of Agriculture – had embarked upon a vendetta.³¹ Concurrently, a private firm Anghern & Piel, was using Hens’s patents freely; Hens sued, but the case was struck off of the roll of the Witwatersrand Local Division of the Supreme Court of South Africa when Hens failed to appear.³² By August 1913, Hens had moved his business to 28 Kimberley Road, East London and had written to General Louis Botha, then prime minister of the Union, regarding the consolidation of his patents over the four provinces of South Africa.³³ Hens was in Germany during the first half of 1914 and returned that June.³⁴ Things would soon change dramatically with the outbreak of war.

The German community and wartime internment

Great patriotic scenes took place in South Africa’s larger towns and cities when the war erupted in Europe in early August 1914. Race goers sang ‘God Save the King’ at the end of the race schedule at Turffontein and ‘Rule Britannia’, which was bellowed ‘three times running’, followed this.³⁵ Similar scenes took place elsewhere. Union Jacks were flown from the clubs, motor cars and houses; and the newspapers – heavily anti-German and stirred by a populist imperialism – were full of news from the war fronts in Europe.³⁶ For many South Africans – across all societal divides – the war’s first, direct impact came on the closest, domestic front. Foreign nationality was an inherent disadvantage for domestic servants and small-town shopkeepers during times of international crisis – and many German immigrants to South Africa in the preceding decade occupied such vulnerable roles. Of the Germans living in East London, there was a hotelier, a small businessman, a musician, and of course a self-employed butcher in the person of Hens. Maud Wyndham, wife of South Africa’s shadow defence minister and chief intelligence officer, noted rather smugly when they ‘lost’ their German cook how ‘big things & little things all hang together’.³⁷

Although many believed the war would be short and sharp, steps to control ‘enemy aliens’ – similar to those taken in the United Kingdom – were adopted in South Africa. Here too, ‘notions of cultural difference, which were often enmeshed with anxieties about economic competition, as well as an emotional need for scapegoating, coagulated into scaremongering imaginaries of “the enemy within”.’³⁸ “Enemy subjects” fell under the province of a newly appointed Commissioner for Enemy Subjects (CES), while British subjects of enemy origin were the responsibility of the Provost Marshal (PM); these archival collections are richly veined yet poorly mined. Treated as potential sources of German espionage, ‘Enemy subjects’ – or, worse still, ‘enemy aliens’ – were rounded up from early August 1914 and interned at the Milner Showgrounds in Johannesburg, at Roberts Heights to the southwest of Pretoria, and at Fort Napier outside Pietermaritzburg. Fort Napier – home for the most ‘serious cases’ – would later hold 2,500 internees deported from across the Union and from the conquered territory of German South-West Africa.³⁹ Their lot was largely in the hands of one man: Lieutenant-Colonel H.W. Hamilton-Fowle, the Provost Marshal of the Union, who later became the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, the Custodian of Enemy Trading, and the controller of the Pietermaritzburg internment camp. Government Notice No. 40, as amended by Government Notice No. 91 of 1915, provided for the internment of German subjects as well as British subjects of German descent considered dangerous and warranting internment.⁴⁰ In principle, enemy aliens remained interned until they could prove that they should be released.

Hens was in a difficult position: one worsened by his own actions immediately after the outbreak of war. From August 1914, German subjects applied for permission to remain in South Africa to trade and enjoy treatment as an ‘alien friend’. At first, the government allowed this, subject to the conditions laid down in the proclamation appearing in the Government Gazette on 6 August 1914. If, however, they were German reservists – that is, between the ages of 17 and 45 – they had to report to their local magistrates as prisoners of war.⁴¹ Hens was 42 at the time and technically a prisoner of war; he claimed instead to be a naturalised British subject, but could produce no papers. The position of the Department of Defence was clear: ‘Unless he can give date and district it is difficult to trace naturalization. Intern if he cannot give date or produce papers’.⁴² His position soon worsened once more.

Hens was on a list of five enemy subjects in East London dated 2 September 1914. They had been identified for internment. As Table 1 shows, some of these men had British or South African wives, children born in South Africa, and belonged to the Anglican Church. Several had lived in one place for a long time. They could show some level of acculturation. All denied having reported to the German Consul and swore they were not reservists of the German Army. For Hens, things were different: his wife, Marie, was from Hamburg; they had no children; and Hens had trekked about Southern Africa before settling in East London in 1911.⁴³ Matters worsened again when the South African Police searched Hens’s house on 20 August 1914.

Table 1. Five German residents of East London identified for internment on September 2, 1914 with the essence of their declarations. Hens’s time in GSWA is conveniently omitted.^144.

Serial	German Subject
1	Hens, Carl: Aged 43, 18 St Andrews Rd., East London. States he was born in Germany. Has been in South Africa last 22 years, i.e., Delagoa Bay 2 yrs. Transvaal 3 yrs. Delagoa Bay 2 yrs. Transvaal 6 yrs. Kimberley 3 yrs. Cape Town 2 yrs. Natal 1 yr. East London 3 yrs. Never served in German Army, never reported to German Consul.
2	Perlitz, Oswald: aged 26 yrs. 20 St Paul’s Rd., East London. States he has been in East London last 5 months, previously in London for 10 yrs. Left Germany where he was born when he was 15 yrs old. Never served in Army and never reported to Consul. Married English woman and has one child. Wife and child now in London.
3	Bartosch, Johannes: aged 43 yrs. Lilyfontein District, East London. States he was born in Germany. Arrived in East London when 6 years old – with parents. Never reported to Consul. Has British wife and six children. Mother lives in East London. Father died in E. London. Cannot read or write.
4	Becker, Charles Julius: aged 40 yrs. 8 St John’s Rd., E. London. States he was born in Germany. Been in Cape Province since 1895. Left Germany when 17 yrs old. Served in Boer War for British for two years and obtained medal for service. Married British woman. Belongs to English church. Never reported to German Consul.
5	Huss, John Alfred: Schoolmaster, Bluewater School, District East London. States he has been in S.A for 12 years and that he is not registered with the German authorities as willing to serve in the German Army.

Detective Anderson, who accompanied the search party, found a German reservist called Albert Grimme concealed on the premises. Hens was questioned. Grimme, a cousin, had returned with him from Germany in June; they had hoped that Grimme, whom they explained was in poor health, would benefit from the South African air. However, when a board of military doctors examined him they found him to be in robust health and Grimme was sent to Johannesburg for immediate internment. His Prisoner-of-War History Sheet, filled out on 15 September 1914, confirms that he was 32 years of age; that he had been born in Hannover, Germany; and that he had been captured in East London, at 18 St Andrews Road – the house of Carl Hens. Grimme was first interned at Roberts Heights and then from 25 October at Fort Napier; he had had nine pounds in gold on him at the time of his capture, for which he was issued a receipt.⁴⁴ Like Hens, Grimme – a merchant by profession, who had never served in the German Army – was automatically part of the Landsturm.⁴⁵ He would only be repatriated to Germany on 30 June 1919.

Hens was now firmly under the spotlight.⁴⁶ He, the Police found, had not only visited Germany recently, and had harboured a German reservist, but had been frequently in the company of other Germans and had been a member of the German Club before the war. He was, the report stated, ‘by no means a desirable man to be allowed to remain at large as he wants constant watching’.⁴⁷ The Defence Authorities issued his internment instruction. Hens’s initial, primary concern was to prove his naturalisation as a British subject. Naturalised aliens were ‘generally presumed prima facie to be loyal’.⁴⁸ He alleged that he had been naturalised four years previously. He had enlisted the services of a Johannesburg lawyer, a Mr Cohen, whom he had paid the fee of £1.1.0. Hens took the oath before Dr Krause and his naturalisation was allegedly gazetted on 28 February 1911. Hens left the matter there. But things suddenly changed in August 1914 with the outbreak of the war. He now needed documentary proof: something Cohen had not sent him in 1911. At the end of August, he again enlisted Cohen’s service, although outraged that Cohen that not forwarded the documents of naturalisation – ‘You are blaming me for not calling for the documents!’ He sent another fee of £1.1.0 and asked that Cohen forward copies to him.⁴⁹ But finding the documentation would prove insuperable.

All Hens could do was to attempt to forestall the inevitable. Planning for the South African invasion of German South-West was underway but, by the end of August, the military authorities were already experiencing problems regarding the supply of rations to the troops bound for Port Nolloth.⁵⁰ The Department of Defence signed contracts with local firms to supply fresh meat to the advanced camps of the expeditionary force and to drive livestock with the invading columns.⁵¹ Not only did the contractors prove inept, but all foodstuffs perished the moment they left the refrigerating units aboard the ships Galway and Gaika.⁵² A means to preserve meat without the use of refrigeration had to be found. Then a letter from Hens – promising a continuous supply of fresh meat for the forward troops – arrived at Defence Headquarters.

Hens offered his patent to the defence minister, Jan Smuts, for the sum of £1,000: as well as his personal services to slaughter and treat the meat. He offered to work behind the South African troops and promised that as soon as the cattle had been killed, the meat would be sent forward without going bad. For his services and the services of two assistants, he asked for £40 per month. This was an attractive offer: in addition to his activities in South West Africa, Hens claimed to have slaughtered over 18, 000 head of cattle over the previous five years – in the Transvaal, Natal, Rhodesia and the Cape Colony – and all had been treated with his process. However, his request for £1,000 for the use of his patent made the men at DHQ bristle. The Quartermaster General requested a security check and the reply from the Magistrate at East London came quickly: ‘Karl Hans [sic.] is a prisoner of war on parole. I do not consider him to be of good standing’.⁵³

In the meantime, the invasion of German South West Africa had stalled at the Orange River following the repulse of an invading South African column at Sandfontein.⁵⁴ New contracts were signed with firms that would follow and supply the main body of troops – and where possible detachments of 200 men – into South West Africa; but the price of meat went up to eight pence per pound.⁵⁵ No better terms for the supply of fresh meat had been made to Defence Headquarters, although the Quartermaster General added that: ‘Several offers of an indefinite character have been submitted but … I have not held out any hope of acceptance’.⁵⁶ He may have been referring to Hens, who – in a letter to Louis Botha on 15 October – was now becoming impatient: ‘I am entirely waiting for this’. The official reply, which came from the Quartermaster General, was curt: ‘the Defence Department is not prepared to take advantage of your offer’.⁵⁷ Hens depended on this work. It would bring income and, more importantly perhaps, help him avoid internment.

Many English-speakers embraced the anti-German agitation and local ‘vigilance committees’ – appearing in the main cities and towns – and pushed the authorities to take firmer steps and intern all Germans. The agitation in East London came to a head on 2 September 1914, when, in the German-speaking hamlet of Potsdam, the local schoolmaster hosted a concert at the Lutheran Church. The Police, prompted by outraged, local, English-speaking farmers, investigated and found that the concert – arranged some time before the outbreak of hostilities in Europe – had been held to raise funds for the local church.⁵⁸ People disavowed their neighbours, while an intelligence officer drew up an extended list of the prominent, German, businesspeople in the district. Some had been born in South Africa. Some had served in the German army during the Franco-Prussian War, but were then naturalised. Others were ‘unnaturalised enemy subjects’ – a category that drew immediate concern. One local informant stressed that:

A large section of the East London public strongly resent these Germans being allowed to be in their midst and if action can be taken to have, at any rate the unnaturalised ones, interned, it would be appreciated by the British section of the community.⁵⁹

Much depended on the local magistrates, who exercised some latitude regarding the local approach to internment. In some towns, the instructions were interpreted rigidly – especially if these were coastal towns. In King William’s Town the magistrate accepted the recommendations of the Police. Matters were different in East London, where conditions were like those that had existed in Port Elizabeth until 12 October. A divisional inspector arrived from the South African Police (SAP) headquarters in Grahamstown. A list of 25 enemy subjects, all of whom were in East London, but did not include those already interned, was compiled. Of the 25 there were 13 who he considered ‘should be interned immediately’.⁶⁰ The District Commandant of the SAP in Grahamstown agreed: ‘all male Germans and Austrians without distinction should be interned [but] if the Commissioner cannot concur in this, then the enclosed list of thirteen names is submitted for his approval’.⁶¹ Hens was number seven on this list of 13.

But Hens did not know this then. On 17 October, when at the Resident Magistrate’s Office, he told Sgt D.M. Bland ‘that he was about to be engaged by the Union Government as a slaughterman and that he was just getting fixed up’.⁶² In the next few days he would learn that the Union Government was not prepared to appoint him and that he was on a new list of enemy subjects marked for immediate internment. Under official scrutiny, Hens was in a bad position: he had been born in Germany, was technically a reservist in the German Army, and he had apparently taken no steps to naturalise. He lived at 18 St Andrews Road, Southernwood, East London, but had been in the town for only two years. He was 43 years of age, married to another German, and without children; reported to be frequently in the company of other Germans; and a member of the local German Club. Grimme’s arrest at Hens’s house on 20 August had certainly not helped. The South African Police felt Hens should not remain at large as he ‘wants constant watching’. The Defence Authorities ordered his internment. The Commissioner for Enemy Subjects concurred, and Hens was detained on 28 October 1914.⁶³

On 7 January 1915, Inspector T.C. Whelehan, the commandant of police in East London, confirmed that the instructions regarding the internment and treatment of enemy subjects had been fully complied with in his district. Fifty-nine, male ‘enemy subjects’ – ‘reasonably considered’ to be of a danger to the safety of the State – were interned. Another 53 men had not been interned; they were only permitted to remain at large subject to certain restrictions, including the obligation to report to the police periodically.⁶⁴ A considerable number of residents in the East London district had arrived in South Africa as children as part of the Cape Government’s German immigration scheme run in the 1850s and 1860s. They farmed in the district and remained at large – despite the protestations of some British neighbours. However, although some had never been naturalised, they would only be regarded as enemy subjects and interned if ‘they misbehaved or that there were any grounds whatever for believing that they were in any way disloyal’.⁶⁵ Hens had stood differently in the eyes of the law. For the Hens couple, these were all ‘big things’.

By March 1917, under the Trading with the Enemy Act (No.39 of 1916), of the thirty-five ‘enemy businesses’ operating in South Africa, ten had been wound up, eight were in voluntary liquidation, five were under the control of the Custodian for Enemy Property, and the remainder were still under consideration. Medium enterprises owned by German nationals in South Africa saw a similar pattern; of the sixty-seven enterprises, two were in liquidation, three were controlled, and in eight cases their interested was vested in the Custodian. However, the small, owner-operated businesses run by 649 ‘enemy subjects’ – shopkeepers, butchers, tradesmen, although of ‘minor financial importance’ – seem to have suffered most. Of their number, 335 or 51.6% were interned and their businesses, at the forefront of the targeted anger of the ‘British’ population, especially following the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May 1915, were forced to close. Carl Hens, whose name appears in the annexure to the report, had been one of them.⁶⁶ His butchery at 28 Kimberley Road in East London closed.

Prisoner-of-war relief agencies

In terms of The Hague Convention of 1907, London set up a bureau to maintain information on the prisoners of war. This was later mirrored by Germany and the other belligerent states.⁶⁷ The Prisoners of War Information Bureau, based at 49 Wellington Street in London, was a branch of the War Office and administered POWs on behalf of the British Government. This Bureau drew up the first lists that were exchanged from the end of September 1914, and in October, their work was expanded to include the ‘Lists of Dead and of Identity Discs found by the British Forces on the field of battle’ as well as ‘weekly returns of the condition of sick and wounded prisoners’.⁶⁸ Included, as far as possible, was the surname, Christian names, age, rank, regiment, and home address or birthplace of each prisoner, as well as a remarks column. These were forwarded to Berlin and Vienna, where queries about individual German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners could first be addressed there, before the London Bureau was approached in cases where the foreign government did not have the information. The Bureau also transmitted to POWs, interned by the British government, letters and parcels forwarded through the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Geneva.⁶⁹

Secondly, alongside the diplomatic channels, were the arrangements made to exchange lists of prisoners of war between the national Red Cross societies, using the ICRC, in Geneva, as the post office. The lists were prepared in duplicate, with a copy going to Geneva for onward transmission to the national society on the other side.⁷⁰ In this way, as Sir William Lawrence, the secretary of the London Board, noted, the Swiss, and the ICRC in particular, played a vital part in alleviating ‘the anxiety of relatives of missing combatants’.⁷¹ These arrangements went into effect in September 1914, and were immediately extended to include names lists of those detained as prisoners of war before the outbreak of hostilities.⁷²

But what was happening with regard to the prisoners and internees in British Africa? Some matters fell into place through trial and error; sometimes policy made in Europe extended to the dominions and colonies. From late November 1914, the London Bureau furnished information on the POWs and internees in all British colonies and territories. From its next instalment, the ‘Lists of Prisoners’ – as received from the dominions and colonies – were included in each weekly list sent to Berlin and Geneva. List No.VIII included prisoners interned at Gibraltar and Malta. However, we do not know when the names of the German internees in South Africa were added. There were also strong national variations. For example, the German Central Committee of the Red Cross in Berlin only communicated information regarding prisoners and internees to the relatives when they were asked: ‘Notification of the relatives takes place insofar as there are inquiries’.⁷³ As a result, to relieve familial anxiety, the ICRC took on the work of informing the family of each prisoner.⁷⁴ The London Bureau compiled the lists on a weekly basis. They did so with great care – trusting in reciprocity. These they forwarded to Berlin and Geneva.⁷⁵ In this way, Hens’s name arrived on the lists in Geneva and Berlin.

Fort Napier: internee no. 2394, camp III. a.2, pietermaritzburg

South Africa shared in the considerable German diaspora in the British Empire in the decades and centuries before the outbreak of the war. The German male population of South Africa in 1914 was approximately 4,000. Of these 2,500 were interned and some 500 were too old or infirm to lock up. Then there were 500, including many missionaries, whom Hercules Pakenham – the MI5 officer sent to South Africa in 1917 – felt ought to have been interned. That left about 500 whom the authorities considered ‘harmless’. Fowle was not satisfied with this state of affairs. Although facing vehement opposition – in and out of Parliament from the Dutch community, with whom the Germans were largely intermarried – he continued with the internments. As Pakenham noted in 1917, Fowle quietly ‘gets a few at intervals’.⁷⁶ In May 1915, the Acting Secretary for the Interior had informed all magistrates in the Union that only the serious cases were to be sent to the internment camp in Pietermaritzburg; the rest would wait for the time being.⁷⁷

Matthew Stibbe and Oliver Wilkinson, in their studies of British prisoners in German hands, argue that the civilian internment camps – designed as army camps – functioned along military lines and according to military values. However, unlike military prisoners, whose captivity was regulated by the Geneva and Hague conventions, the interment of civilians was poorly controlled beyond an appeal to civilised standards.⁷⁸ Hens arrived at Fort Napier, a former British garrison post dating from 1843, shortly after his arrest on 28 October. Fort Napier comprised four camps each having as many as eighteen barracks of wood-and-iron construction on brick foundations with a veranda, twenty-six WCs, twelve open showers, and two bathrooms. A kitchen equipped with a limited range of utensils served as a common area.⁷⁹ In terms of the Hague Convention, the detaining power was responsible for the proper feeding of its prisoners. Hunger, at times near starvation, was a frequent complaint in First World War prisoner-of-war camps. For example, a commission convened during November 1915 to investigate the treatment received by South African prisoners from their German captors in German South West Africa, found that the German authorities had contravened article 7 of the Hague Convention. They were thought to be unprepared for the reception of POWs – certainly in any numbers – and this caused much disorganisation in the reception depots and internment camps in the territory where the men suffered for the want of food, clothing, and shelter.⁸⁰ But this does not seem to have been a regular complaint made by the internees at Fort Napier. However, the encampment, with its spartan furniture and bedding and a military-style hospital, resembled a military camp and, Becker argues, their detention was ‘administrative and/or military, and certainly not legal, since the prisoners had not been put on trial and convicted’.⁸¹ They entered another world and suffered the loss of liberty, separation from their families, the dislocation of their lives socially and economically, crowded living in the camps, and uncertainty regarding the duration of their incarceration. Many would suffer from ‘barbed-wire disease’ a neurosis described by Swiss surgeon Adolf Vischer as following long-term incarceration that manifests in confusion, disorientation, and sometime amnesia.⁸² Vischer described how prisoners of war and internees – having been deprived of their liberty because of their nationality, concentrated in sometimes appalling circumstances, and with no idea of how long they would be imprisoned – developed ‘a collective mentality more or less stereotyped’.⁸³

Internees responded to captivity in different if predictable ways. Some resisted through refusals, or the visual and acoustic appropriation of the space through the naming of hutments and the singing of patriotic songs. For the brave there may have been acts of sabotage, group action in the form of revolt, or individual attempts to escape.⁸⁴ For Hens escape meant a legal avenue. He immediately reopened the matter of his putative naturalisation. He wrote to Cohen on 27 November 1914; the reply was dated 9 December. Cohen had apparently written to Hens on 3 October, a letter Hens did not receive, in which Cohen explained ‘the decision given by the Government in your matter’.⁸⁵ Cohen had seen the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects on 8 December regarding the release of some of his clients: he mentioned Hens’s name too. He was told that new documents were being issued: ‘each prisoner [would] have to find sureties for a certain sum for his good conduct when released’.⁸⁶ Cohen planned to get copies of the bond, so that he could advise his clients. He planned to go down to Pietermaritzburg personally to discuss the matter with each one of them. He asked Hens to let him know if Hens wished to see him when he was there; he would have to obtain a permit to see each of the prisoners. In March 1915, the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, following a petition from Marie Hens, could still find ‘no trace’ of her husband’s naturalisation.⁸⁷ The 1911 application may have been a 1914 fiction; or Solicitor Cohen, having taken the fee, failed to file the papers after Hens had taken the oath. Either way, as Dedering has argued, while some internees objected to their being classified as ‘German’ – arguing that their ‘cultural and family connections with Germany had faded or had always been insignificant’ – some, perhaps many, of them were no doubt opportunistic.⁸⁸

In the meantime, on 9 January 1915, Hens applied for his release on parole on the grounds of having to support his family. Marie lodged the application in East London – with four ‘British residents of standing’ vouching for him. He gave his trade as a wholesale butcher and declared that he had had no military training. He had been in South Africa for 22 of his 44 years.⁸⁹ Marie addressed a letter to the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects on the same day. She sketched her husband’s history: of his arrival in South Africa and of his naturalisation in 1911, when – in the presence of Dr Krause, and ‘standing on the Flag’ – he had taken the oath of naturalisation as a British subject. They had then concluded that ‘the papers would be sent to him in due course either direct or through his Solicitor, but he also believed that they were not absolutely to him to prove his citizenship of this country, thinking the fact the Gazette notice was all sufficient for the purpose’. She explained their bitter disappointment when notice arrived that Hens was to present himself as a prisoner of war for internment at Pietermaritzburg, after he had vainly endeavoured to get his papers of naturalisation from Mr Cohen, and ‘after writing to Dr Krause and also General Botha, with whom he has been well acquainted, having in the past slaughtered some thousands of head of cattle for the Government of the Transvaal in infected areas’. Her husband’s departure, at such short notice, meant that ‘all business matters were left without being attended to, there being only time to get away’. Marie could not collect the outstanding monies owed to him – some of his clients may have seen internment as an escape from their liabilities. Shewas as a result without money or means of support, and had ‘no one else to fall back upon’. Marie ended the letter saying that her husband was unjustly interned and still considered himself a properly naturalised British subject. Appealing for his release, she closed: ‘I pray you to investigate these facts, and feel certain you will – should you do this – grant my prayer for his release, and return him to me here’.⁹⁰ This too, did not succeed.

They would try repeatedly. Pakenham felt that there was a natural affiliation for Germans on the part of many Afrikaners – centred on emotion, ancestry, and intermarriage. Many Afrikaans-speakers, Dedering argues, ‘perceived the attacks on German residents as an assault by English-speakers on the Afrikaner community’.⁹¹ Hens may have sensed this. Perhaps to bypass ‘British’ officialdom, he wrote to Dr F. Bok, the prime minister’s private secretary, on 8 March 1915; he did so as Internee No. 2394, Camp III. A.2, Pietermaritzburg. Hens again professed his loyalty – ‘I have never done anything against the interests of the Union, our country’ – and emphasised his usefulness as a butcher and his willingness to work in any part of South Africa.⁹² Marie wrote to Sir Andries Stockenstrom on 31 March 1915, enclosing Cohen’s receipt for fees paid him as well as the original letters from Cohen to Hens written at the time of the alleged naturalisation: ‘The enclosures are indirect proof of my husband’s naturalisation in addition to which there is the direct proof in the shape of the notice in the Government Gazette’.⁹³ But Hens was considered sufficiently dangerous to be kept behind the wire. He would remain at Fort Napier until his release on 6 August 1919.⁹⁴

Hens’s other primary concern was to keep his business affairs going as best he could, while interned. Financial support for Marie was paramount. After being turned down by the South African government, he turned to other possible buyers for his meat preservation patent. At the beginning of December, the Press Censor intercepted a letter signed by ‘Hans’, which he forwarded to the Criminal Investigation Department, in Johannesburg, for investigation. The letter was about some plans that would cost £50 to obtain. The letter was apparently re-posted so that the Intelligence Section could follow the matter.⁹⁵ But Hens appears to have slipped the net and, three months later, the Provost Marshall in Cape Town tried to trace the letter without success.⁹⁶ We do not know to whom Hens was attempting to sell the patent. Although we may guess that this was being done covertly and, to the official mind in 1915, possibly to an enemy of the state. Had the Intelligence authorities known the circumstances – that the £50 fee related to a questionable meat preservation process – they might have been less interested.

With time, the physical barriers associated with internment reinforced the disjuncture between the internee’s ‘home’ and ‘captive’ worlds.⁹⁷ Hens had shown the signs typical of other internees. At first, he worked hard – the natural antidote to his immediate trials – and focused on ‘outside’ objectives such as proving his naturalisation and securing his finances. But, as these slipped from his grasp, he withdrew and entered ‘the grey and dreary shadowland [Vischer described] where the music is muffled and flat’.⁹⁸ After six months, Vischer found that prisoners developed the symptoms of ‘barbed-wire disease’: increased irritability, irascibility, argumentative, obstinate, lack of judgement, quarrelling, pathological fatigue. In Hens’s case, they seem to appear from December 1915, when he had been behind the wire for 12 months. Marie’s physical condition was deteriorating too.

Popular attitudes hardened during the succeeding war years. This took various forms, from social ostracisation to physical harm. According to J.E.P. Levyns, ‘people like ourselves, who were German in nothing but name, were assaulted or had their property destroyed’. In January 1916, Levyns’s father changed the family name from Kuhlmann to Levyns – something ‘he had been contemplating since the Lusitania riots of the year before’.⁹⁹ Writing in May 1915, Smuts lamented that: ‘wild mobs are (as I write) surging through the streets around me to destroy property of German subjects as a reply to the sinking of the Lusitania. But effective measures have been taken to cope with this rioting. It has however been very bad these last few days in various parts of South Africa. Public indignation has been at white heat over this torpedoing of the Lusitania’.¹⁰⁰ Incensed by the anti-German riots, Botha declared to Trew, the commander of his bodyguard: ‘I hate mob law, it is always cruel, cowardly and unjust. What have the unfortunate German citizens in the Union to do with the policy of the German Government on the High Seas. If the Cowards want to show their disgust at the sinking of this steamer let them enlist and go to France’.¹⁰¹ Stibbe correctly reached the conclusion that women are the ‘forgotten victims of internment’.¹⁰² As the Hens case shows, even though women and children resident in South Africa were exempt from internment, they suffered ostracisation in their communities and often-severe, economic disempowerment.

The Hens’s and their cousin, Grimme, were now in serious financial trouble. There was little sympathy from the authorities. On 8 December 1915, Grimme, then in the camp hospital, applied to the commandant of the internment camps for permission ‘to receive a visit from my cousin No. 2394 Karl Hens, No. III Camp’. He wanted to speak to him ‘on a matter concerning money’.¹⁰³ The request was refused. A month later, on 26 January 1916, Marie Hens fired off two letters: one to the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects; another to Jan Smuts, the defence minister.¹⁰⁴ Her tone had changed. She referred to Hens’s putative naturalisation and the documentation; but now added a humanitarian appeal. Her husband’s internment and her own straightened circumstances were affecting her health. She was troubled with ‘Fainting fits’. She had seen a doctor, and had taken the medicine he had prescribed, but her condition worsened:

I am feeling worse every day, anything might happen to me with my heart. I pray you therefore to release my husband, I am all alone, the people where I am staying do not take any Interest in me. I hope you dear Sir, will have pity on me and grant my prayer.¹⁰⁵

On 4 October 1916, Marie wrote to the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects again; she was now staying at Binswood House in St. Paul’s Road, East London. This seems to have been a commune. New realities were setting firmly in. She addressed the letter in impersonal fashion and blandly headed it: ‘Re Prisoner of War K. Hens’. This was a hard statement of the true facts. Again, she pleaded for her husband’s release; he was ‘since three months sick with Asthma and Rheuma [sic.] at the Camp Hospital, the Doctor says, he should have change of air’. She begged for his release on parole to King William’s Town. She was ill herself; her doctor told her, she said, ‘the Internment of my husband has brought my nerves in a terrible Statement [sic.]’ – ‘I am praying from my heart, release please my husband’.¹⁰⁶ Hens’s condition was deteriorating. In October 1916, the medical officer at Fort Napier recommended his release on parole for one month ‘in order to try and get rid of the disease (Acute Bronchitis) which may become chronic’.¹⁰⁷ As Dedering argues, ‘the authorities acted in a lenient manner when applications for parole were submitted by elderly, sickly or reputable prisoners who had resided in South Africa for long periods and had lost ties with Germany’.¹⁰⁸ As we have seen, Hens fell short of the official requirements in several respects.

His health must have improved – he was re-interned; but their finances were in ruins. Hens wrote to the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects asking that his wife receive the allowance of 1/- per diem as before: ‘as my financial affairs are all dead money at present and as the assistance asked for is urgently needed’.¹⁰⁹ Marie Hens affirmed that her husband had ‘no assets whatever’ that could be realised and that she had had to borrow money on everything she possessed – ‘so as to be able to live’.¹¹⁰ Whelehan, instructed to investigate, reported on 26 March 1917. The Hens couple had no immovable property and – shown in Table 2 – very few movable assets of any value. Mrs Hens had tried to dispose of some of this property, but there were no buyers. Whelehan thought it difficult to estimate what they might realise on sale, but doubted they would fetch enough for the medium-term hire of a furnished room – ‘as some of the wives of other interned enemy subjects do’. Hens’s patents also realised no money at this time. Marie had loaned thirty pounds from a family friend – with no way of repaying this. ‘She gets butter and eggs free from a farmer friend’, Whelehan reported.¹¹¹ The Commissioner for Enemy Subjects granted Marie a relief allowance at the usual rate: from a date determined by the East London magistrate.¹¹²

Table 2. Schedule of goods Mrs Marie Hens possessed as of March 26, 1917.

Item	Estimated value	Remarks
One horse	£20.0.0	The horse was on a farm, the owner of which had the use of the animal in return for its keep.
A large tickey-in-the-slot organ, which stands in the Orient Beach Tea Rooms at East London	£100.0.0	Mrs Hens received no return from the organ in the Beach Tea Room. The Proprietor requested her to take it away, but she said she had no place to put it.
Bedroom Suite (good quality)	£30.0.0
Suite of furniture	£7.0.0
Brass Bedstead	£7.0.0	No possibility of raising money on public auction.
Two Cooling Fans	£5.0.0
Various other articles of furniture	£8.0.0
Total	£177.0.0

Boredom was a constant. Internees battled to fill empty hours with meaningful pursuits. There were various visitors including the senior magistrates in Durban and Pietermaritzburg,¹¹³ the German prisoners’ relief committee, which was established in Johannesburg to assist destitute family members, and the routine inspections of the camps by the American and Swedish consuls – the protecting powers representing the interests of the German and Austro-Hungarian internees. Most importantly, visitations were possible from wives and children if they lived in the Pietermaritzburg area – Marie did not. News in the form of newspapers and letters from home were critical in combating ‘barbed-wire disease’. Inmates searched every line for any glimmer of military news that might give hope of a coming armistice. Their thoughts concentrated on an end to the war and the possibility of impending release. Steps were taken to ensure contact between the prisoners and internees, and their families. The letters had to be short and, as far as possible, written in English.¹¹⁴ Any letters sent from Germany were routed – through the London Bureau – to South Africa and then on to Fort Napier.¹¹⁵ Post is an important pillar in troop and public morale; it is even more so for internees and prisoners of war.

Karl and Marie corresponded with their relatives in Germany. We know from a letter Hens wrote to his brother, in December 1916, that he worked in Camp 3 at Fort Napier as a ‘Kitchen and Meat Inspector’ and that he was unwell: ‘am not very healthy’.¹¹⁶ The position appears to have been dire. Writing in September 1916, Hens said that, to date, they had not received ‘a single article from the Red Cross’ and that the naturalised Germans who ran the Aid Society were ‘not worth shooting’. He continued: ‘Our women and children are in the greatest need of everything and suffer from hunger, the result is that many men in Camp here are half mad from sorrow, they commit suicide by hanging themselves or cutting their throats’. As a community, he claimed, they had seen nothing of the sixty thousand marks received from Germany and, in East London, there were at least sixteen women and twenty children – his own wife, included – who were ‘simply destitute’. Marie Hens was willing to distribute articles amongst the poor women and children (they had no children). They needed ‘blouses, underwear, skirts, and clothing in general, and if any money could be sent through the Standard Bank’. She would keep the necessary accounts and receipts.¹¹⁷ This would have given Marie meaningful community work under the difficult circumstances forced by the war.

But Hens – his claim that nothing had been done for them, and his threat albeit written in anger to shoot the local members of the Aid Society – had angered the humanitarian agencies created for the relief of internees and their families. He had sullied their work as ‘the personal link between sufferer and sympathiser’.¹¹⁸ At the end of March 1917, a series of letters – from the Hilfsausschuss für die Deutschen in Britisch Südafrika to the Deutscher Hilfs-Verein und Allgemeiner Unterstutzungs-Verein at Johannesburg and Cape Town – were intercepted by the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects and forwarded to the Chief Censor.¹¹⁹ Ludwig Hens had written to the German Aid Society: ‘complaining about the treatment of his interned brother and in general the women and children in East London, who in spite of the generous contributions of the Aid Society receive no aid and are left destitute’. They demanded that the matter be ‘fully investigated and explained’.¹²⁰ Karl received a terse reprimand from the German Aid Society for Germans in British South Africa. They wrote him from Berlin on 22 June 1917¹²¹:

We received your letter of the 23^rd March. The Revd. Wagener from Cape Town had informed us already that we should not believe any of your accusations and since then we have received a report from our Camp representatives that your indictments are totally unfounded and are pure and simple slanders.We regret it very much that the gentlemen and ladies who help to promote our interests and also the Camp representatives are so horribly slandered by you.We hereby inform you that for the future you won’t send letters to us, and assure you that they won’t be taken any notice of, and forthwith be put in the wastepaper basket.

Forwarded by the Chief Censor to the Provost Marshal and then to the Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, Hens probably received it at Fort Napier during the course of October 1917.¹²²

In the meantime, Marie Hens was again concerned about her husband’s deteriorating health. The government allowed POWs to work on the government’s experimental farms; she asked in September 1917 that Karl be considered for this ‘concession’ where he could use his ‘perfect knowledge of handling animals, slaughtering, preserving and bacon curing’.¹²³ But the selection of POWs for this work was already made and Hens was placed on a list should more POWs be released for farm employment.¹²⁴ Desperate, Hens wrote to the Minister for Agriculture in January 1918 but nothing seemingly came.¹²⁵ He was admitted to the camp hospital and, discharged at the end of January, was given two months of recuperative leave. He returned to the camp by 20 March 1918.¹²⁶ Two months later, Marie received some relief; her allowance of £2.8.0 per month was increased to 12 shillings per week, which was the maximum amount paid to the wives of interned enemy subjects.¹²⁷ She remained in East London until her husband’s release.

Release and return to East London

The internment of Germans and other ‘enemy aliens’ – and the feeling and friction it had brought between the Afrikaner and British sections in the country – had caused the government much disquiet. Talk of post-war deportation intensified this. An Enemies Repatriation and Denaturalisation Bill identified three classes for possible deportation: those that desired repatriation; those of German nationality who were not normally domiciled in South Africa; and those thought to be a danger to the State. Public opinion was set firmly against anything that would hint of persecution or involve the deportation of those who had lived peaceably in South Africa before the war. The circumstances changed dramatically while the Bill was still being dismantled in committee stage. Of the 1,200 people flagged for possible deportation, more than a thousand left voluntarily. There being no longer justification for it, the measure was dropped to the applause of Afrikaner nationalists who believed its purpose had been to weaken the Afrikaner nation.¹²⁸

Of the 2,116 men still interned in April 1919, approximately half were repatriated to Germany during May, while most of the remaining internees – Hens included – were gradually released.¹²⁹ They travelled on ordinary trains in small parties of 20 to 30 per day to avoid attention. Warned to return quietly, and remain quiet, they were advised – in their own interest – to ‘efface’ themselves as far as possible, at least for the immediate future.¹³⁰ The property and businesses of interned subjects had been severely affected. German Clubs in the towns and cities had been closed and the property sold. During the 1916 session, Parliament passed the Trading with the Enemy Bill. ‘Obnoxious’ firms were wound up, while genuine South African businesses with German owners were placed under supervision. The measures were controversial – embittering with the Afrikaner right and the ultra-British elements and their mouthpiece the Natal Witness. Yet, despite the difficulties and complications, Burton, then the responsible minister, was satisfied that the legislation served its purpose ‘without causing undue hardship to innocent people’.¹³¹ Two large German firms – Malcomess of Cape Town, and Orenstein Arthur Koppel of Johannesburg – had been wound up.¹³² Hundreds of smaller businesses – grocers, butchers, hotels, and guesthouses – had closed when the owners and staffs were interned. All had to return to some normality. But the experience of internment did not end with release. It left a legacy that was both physical and psychological.¹³³

Hens – among the first – was released with effect from 6 August 1919. The return to society was inevitably difficult and equally traumatic. Newman, who studied the mental attitudes of repatriated prisoners of war, argued that POWs were ill-equipped for the readjustment:

He is temporarily without the sheet-anchor of his daily routine, he has laid aside his habits of recreational relaxation, and he has lost the art of working for his living. With these handicaps he must readjust himself to his return to normal life. Should domestic trouble and unemployment further burden him he may succumb to his adversities and relinquish the struggle.¹³⁴

But, arrested sometimes publicly, and often facing the jeering of erstwhile neighbours and friends, internees and their families are especially deprived and dispossessed. Hens had experienced a traumatic transition from his role as a family butcher, specialising probably in German-style meats, to one of ostracisation in the East London community and of physical confinement. Marie, forced to remain in one of the most ‘British’ of South Africa’s towns, suffered steady disempowerment, the loss of their last assets, and the breaking of her health.

The Hens couple decided to stay in South Africa and set about getting their affairs in order. Rebuilding after more than four years at Fort Napier proved predictably difficult. Karl’s return to East London meant that Marie’s relief allowance would discontinue.¹³⁵ He approached the Relief Society for a loan of £10; he received £5. But, his other financial queries – what became of the refund on the Canteen Rent at Fort Napier, and what money was left in the camp cash box – were beyond their remit.¹³⁶ He applied for naturalisation in May 1920. He was presumably naturalised after this; the Custodian of Enemy Property confirmed that Hens had been interned and that ‘his conduct during internment was satisfactory’.¹³⁷ Things seemingly did not improve. Marie died in 1924; perhaps the mental anguish of her husband’s incarceration and her own poverty and dispossession had been too much. Perhaps her fear of heart failure had been true. Karl remarried in 1930: again to a German – Helena Kurz.¹³⁸ They lived in East London. But, unable to recover from the losses sustained during the war, Hens battled to recover financially. During the 1930s, he sold off portions of his meat patents to Duncan Brown of Kaffrarian Estates in East London.

Writing in March 1939, the head of MI5, Major General Sir Vernon Kell, identified several categories of Germans nationals applying for British nationality. Most applications he felt were ‘based upon a long residence … resulting in the formation of such personal and financial ties here that the applicant regarded himself more as a citizen of the British Empire than of Germany’. Such men, Kell felt, made good British subjects. He identified two further categories: applications ‘of convenience’ – by German nationals holding ‘views contrary to the existing regime in Germany’ and had become fugitives; and German nationals ‘of Aryan origin and without “roots” in this country’. Such immigrants, he argued, sought British nationality ‘merely as a matter of commercial convenience, but in some instances we have been able to trace N.S.D.A.P. activities in the motives of such applicants’.¹³⁹ From an official viewpoint, Hens might have fallen into the last of these three categories; a view apparently confirmed when he was again arrested in October 1939. ‘Loyalties’, as Dedering has shown, ‘may also shift back and forth again across a number of fault lines’.¹⁴⁰

Conclusion

South Africa differed significantly from the other parts of the British Empire in terms of their treatment of interned ‘enemy aliens’. Bill Nasson suggested that the authorities ‘sniffed out and rounded up’ numerous German residents – ‘even the many who had become naturalised and were an integral part of white communities’.¹⁴¹ The Hens case would suggest that internments were considered – weighing in several biographical and other factors – and executed, certainly at the start of the war, only after investigation and in a case-by-case fashion. There were no massed arrests in 1914 and there were no massed deportations after 1919. Instead, recent German immigrants were readily accepted by Afrikaans-speaking community, many of whom had German ancestry and connection, as valuable additions to white South African and especially Afrikaner society.

Historians have widely ‘mined’ the war-time correspondence of active service personnel. As Oliver Wilkinson notes, similar examination of the correspondence of military prisoners and civilian internees remains lacking.¹⁴² The historian must draw evidence from a variety of sources, which are marshalled, organised, analysed, and interpreted in an endeavour to produce a convincing account of an ever-elusive truth. In this way, personal recollection – whether in letters or memoirs – might usefully supplement other, more formal evidence, which invariably provides the larger context for the lives of ordinary people. The chance survival of at least some personal correspondence, which could be examined in conjunction with a range of official and demi-official records, enables a fascinating glance into the lives of Karl and Marie Hens and their battles to survive their Great War in South Africa.

There was much talk during the war, and after 1918, about the necessity of internment. The absence of disaster had led MI5 to believe that the Germans – not wanting to estrange the sympathy of the many – had not resorted to extremes in South Africa during the First World War. Notwithstanding, thousands of men, and some women, had had their basic freedoms removed through this the most severe form of ‘alien’ control. Hens had been one; he and his wife had joined the chorus proclaiming their innocence and protesting against the damage caused them. Annette Becker highlighted two prescient paradoxes applicable to internees in general. Both seemingly apply to Hens. Firstly, as a male internee of military age, his internment – however unfair and arbitrary it may have seemed – saved him the horrors of the battlefield and probable death or maiming ‘at Verdun, Ypres or Tannenberg’. And, secondly, like others in his situation, having lived for long periods in their adoptive countries, ‘rediscovered their original nationality’ in the camps where strong patriotism flourished. However, if there had been any doubts about Hens in 1914, they were seemingly dashed in September 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. He was again arrested: now for supplying German U-boats with fresh meat. He died on 19 July 1948 in his house at 12 Kennington Road, Nahoon, East London. There were no children from either marriage. He was 76 years of age and still working as a butcher. His second wife, Helena Hens, having suffered the period of her husband’s second internment, signed the death notice.¹⁴³

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledges the generous support of the Research Office at Rabdan Academy in finalising the research for this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Officer Commanding, Eastern Province Command to Director of Coast Defence, Oct 1, 1939, archives of the Deputy Chief of Staff (DCS), Box 22, file C.D.7/2 vol. 1. Seaward Defence, Department of Defence (DOD) Archives, Pretoria.

2. Born Karl Friedrich, Hens had anglicised his first name during the First World War; both he and his wife, Marie née Wagener, signed themselves on occasion as ‘Carl’ or ‘Mary’ – as the situation demanded.

3. The post-war Rein Mission to Berlin discovered the names of 398 South Africans who were registered, card-carrying members of the Nazi party as at December 31, 1939. Rein tabulated the numbers, and copied the index cards, but these – and a name list – are not on this file. Col R.W. Rein to the Secretary for External Affairs, March 31, 1946, JUS, vol. 1621, ref. 1/149/44, National Archives and Records Service of South Africa (NARSSA).

4. Officer Commanding, Eastern Province Command to Director of Coast Defence, October 1, 1939, DCS, Box 22, file C.D.7/2 vol. 1. Seaward Defence, DOD Archives. ‘Hopf’ may be H.W.A. Hopf naturalised in 1906: see CS, vol. 666, ref. 8741, NARSSA.

5. DC, Box 567, file 70,032 Control of Union Coast Line, DOD Archives. The standard works do not refer to this early U-boat activity in 1939; the sinkings, detailed in War in the Southern Oceans, are attributed to surface raiders only. L.C.F. Turner, H.R. Gordon-Cumming, and J.E. Betzler, War in the Southern Oceans, 1939–1945 (Cape Town: OUP, 1961); H.J. Martin and Neil D. Orpen, South Africa at War; Military and Industrial Organization and Operations in connection with the conduct of the War, 1939–1945 (Cape Town: Purnell, 1979). Recent literature – avoiding the problématique of early U-boat visits – rests in this regard solely on War in the Southern Oceans; see E. Kleynhans, Hitler’s Spies; Secret Agents and the Intelligence War in South Africa (Jeppestown: Jonathan Ball, 2021).

6. David French, “Spy Fever in Britain, 1900–1915,” The Historical Journal, vol.21, no.2 (1978), pp.355–370.

7. Cape Area Intelligence Notes No.6, February 5, 1940, SD, box 127, file 24 Intelligence Notes, DOD Archives.

8. Cape Area Intelligence Notes No.4, February 2, 1940, SD, box 127, file 24 Intelligence Notes, DOD Archives.

9. See for example the Report to Major Ransome, dated September 21, 1942, United Party Archives (UPA), Central Head Office, Intelligence Shipping, University of South Africa Libraries (Unisa). Reliable intelligence corroborated the details received from two separate sources. Axis submarines refuelled some 60 miles north of Port Elizabeth and 7 miles south of Bushman’s River. The exact position was the deep water immediately south of 3^rd Kwaaihoek, about 10 miles north of Bird Island. The investigation focused on the Scheepers brothers. One owned a farm at 3^rd Kwaaihoek; another, Carel Scheepers, owned the store at Bushman’s River; while their nephew, Philip Scheepers, was the local commandant of the Ossewa Brandwag. Large stores of dieseline – said to be held at the store, and by the local OB farmers – was reportedly smuggled down to 3^rd Kwaaihoek for shipment to Axis U-boats. A military officer – sent on leave to his mother, who had retired to Bushman’s River – “casually” investigated.

10. Deputy Director of Intelligence to Colonel Stanford, October 7, 1939, archives of the Officer Commanding, Coastal Artillery Brigade (CAB) Group 2, Box 114, file O(CD)20 Intelligence Reports, DOD Archives.

11. District Commandant East London to Deputy Commissioner, SAP, Grahamstown, December 1, 1939, archives of the Military Adviser, London (MAL), box 171, file M.A.63/A Gaertner Papers, DOD Archives.

12. Alan Kramer, “Recent Historiography of the First World War,” Journal of Modern European History, vol. 12, no. 1 (2014), pp.16–20.

13. Christopher Andrew, ed., The Security Service, 1908–1945: The Official History (Kew: Public Record Office, 1999), pp.73–74.

14. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm; The Authorized History of MI5 (), P.81.

15. Annette Becker, “Captive Civilians,” in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume III Civil Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p.261.

16. Becker, “Captive Civilians,” p.257.

17. Graham Duminy and Dieter Reusch, “Handicrafts, Philanthropy and Self-Help: The Fort Napier Kamp-Industrie during World War 1,” Natal Museum Journal of Humanities, vol. 5 (1993), pp. 207–224; Paul Thompson, ‘The Natal home front in the Great War (1914–1918)’ Historia, vol. 56, no. 1 (May 2011), pp. 101–137; Paul Thompson, “’Wipe out the Vons!’ The Pietermaritzburg Citizens Vigilance Committee and the sinking of the Lusitania, May 1915’, New Contree, no. 74 (Dec 2015), pp. 90–111; Stefan Manz and Tilman Dedering, “’Enemy Aliens’ in Wartime: Civilian Internment in South Africa during World War 1,” South African Historical Journal, vol. 68 (2016); Derek du Bruyn and André Wessels, ’13 May 1915: Bloemfontein’s night of broken glass,” New Contree, no. 76 (Nov 2016), pp. 148–170.

18. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, Enemies in the Empire; Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford: OUP, 2020), p. 185.

19. Graham Duminy and Dieter Reusch, “Handicrafts, Philanthropy and Self-Help: The Fort Napier Kamp-Industrie during World War 1,” Natal Museum Journal of Humanities, vol. 5 (1993), pp. 207–224; Paul Thompson, “The Natal home front in the Great War (1914–1918)” Historia, vol. 56, no. 1 (May 2011), pp. 101–137; Paul Thompson, “’Wipe out the Vons!’ The Pietermaritzburg Citizens Vigilance Committee and the sinking of the Lusitania, May 1915,” New Contree, no. 74 (Dec 2015), pp. 90–111; Stefan Manz and Tilman Dedering, ‘“Enemy Aliens” in Wartime: Civilian Internment in South Africa during World War 1,” South African Historical Journal, vol. 68 (2016); Derek du Bruyn and André Wessels, “May 13, 1915: Bloemfontein’s night of broken glass,” New Contree, no. 76 (Nov 2016), pp. 148–170.

20. Patrick Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika; The Impact of the radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist movement in the Fascist Era (Johannesburg: WUP, 1991). Christoph Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel; Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2008), Chapter 30.

21. Christoph Marx, Oxwagon Sentinel; Radical Afrikaner Nationalism and the History of the Ossewabrandwag (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 2008), Chapter 30.

22. Kramer, ‘Recent Historiography of the First World War’, p.18.

23. Report on Lt Col Pakenham’s Mission to South Africa, Sep 1, 1917, with Annexures, KV 1/16, TNA.

24. Lastbrief ter Apprehentie, 13 Jan 1898; see also, Affidavit by J.J. Kilian before public prosecutor A. de Villiers, Jan 13, 1898, and C. Niehaus to Public Prosecutor Boksburg, January 11, 1898, SP 159, file 444/98 Lastbrief ter apprehentie tegen Karl Hens ter publikatie, NARSSA. The Transvaal liquor laws – meeting ‘the interests of the mine owners, the government and the distillery’ – sought to keep a sober, compliant, largely African workforce in the mines. C. van Onselen, New Babylon, New Nineveh; Everyday Life on the Witwatersrand, 1886–1914 (Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 1982), p.88.

25. The Johannesburg jail, according to Charles van Onselen, was “effectively in administrative and disciplinary ruin;” this seems to have been the case for the whole Transvaal penal system. Fugitives sometimes favoured the escape route through Swaziland to Lourenço Marques. C. van Onselen, Masked Raiders; Irish Banditry in Southern Africa, 1880–1899 (Cape Town: Zebra, 2010), pp.57–58.

26. State Attorney to State Secretary, March 10, 1898, SSA 652, file 1072/98 Karl Hens, NARSSA.

27. The Second Anglo-Boer War broke out on October 11, 1899 and British troops entered Pretoria, the capital of the South African Republic, on 5 June 1900.

28. Karl Hens to General Louis Botha, October 15, 1914, archives of the Secretary for Defence (DC), Box 613, file A.143/9199 Meat Preservation, DOD Archives.

29. Principal Veterinary Surgeon to Chief of the Veterinary Section, Lourenço Marques, August 11, 1909, TAD 209, file A.4657 Karl Hens, Johannesburg, Offer of apparatus in connection with Preservation of Meat to Department of Agriculture, NARSSA.

30. Karl Hens to Manager, Rand Cold Storage & Supply Company, January 13, 1911; and Manager, Rand Cold Storage & Supply Company to Karl Hens, January 23, 1911, Hens Papers, file 1/1, KEIC.

31. Acting Secretary for Agriculture to Acting Secretary for Justice, November 18, 1910, TAD 214, file A.4807 Karl Hens Method of Eradication East Coast Fever, NARSSA.

32. Supreme Court of South Africa, Witwatersrand Local Division, WLD 3/138, file 26/1912 Illiquid Case between Karl Hens versus Angehrn and Piel, NARSSA.

33. Acting Secretary for Justice to K. Hens, August 11, 1913, Hens Papers, file 1/1, KEIC.

34. List of Enemy Subjects in East London Recommended for Internment, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

35. Maud Wyndham to Lady Leconfield, August 4, 1914, Petworth House Archives (PHA), West Sussex Record Office (WSRO), Chichester, United Kingdom. Maud’s husband, Lt Col Hon. Hugh Wyndham, became Chief Intelligence Officer of the Union in late September 1914.

36. Bill Nasson, “A great divide: popular responses to the Great War in South Africa,” War & Society, vol. XII (1994); Bill Nasson, “War opinion in South Africa, 1914,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. XXIII (1995); and L.W.F. Grundlingh, ‘Die Engelssprekende Suid-Afrikaners se reaksie op die uitbreek van die Eerste Wêreldoorlog’ (MA, UOVS, 1978).

37. Maud Wyndham to Lady Leconfield, August 4, 1914, PHA, WSRO.

38. Dedering, “Avenge the Lusitania,” p. 258.

39. Stefan Manz and Panikos Panayi, Enemies in the Empire; Civilian Internment in the British Empire during the First World War (Oxford: OUP, 2020), pp. 184–185, 250. H.B. Shawe, Acting Secretary for the Interior to all Magistrates in the Union, May 18, 1915, archives of the Provost Marshal – correspondence series (PMK), Box 101, file 2053 Enemy Subjects Internment Prisoners of War Prison Regulations, Department of Defence (DOD) Archives, Pretoria.

40. Provost Marshal to Decompol Pietermaritzburg, 15 May 1915, and Provost Marshal to Decompol Cape Town, May 27, 1915, PMK. Box 101, file 3/2053 Enemy Subjects Internment of British Subjects of Enemy Origin, DOD Archives.

41. DC, Box 596, file D.67/9199 Enemy Subjects Licences to reside and trade in the Union, DOD Archives.

42. Defence Pretoria to Disso East London, September 3, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

43. Memo from Magistrate’s Office, East London, September 2, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14 C. Hens East London, NARSSA.

44. Prisoner-of-War History Sheet: A. Grimme, CES 183, file ES70/4383/14 A. Grimme, NARSSA.

45. Prisoner-of-War Sheet, BNS 1/8/34, ref.1179 C.H.A. Grimme, NARSSA.

46. Disso East London to Defence Pretoria, September 3, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

47. See note 34 above.

48. The Secretary of State for the Colonies confirmed this point at the time of the anti-German riots following the sinking of the Lusitania. Harcourt to Buxton, May 14, 1915, FO 383/33, The National Archives, Kew, London, (TNA).

49. Karl Hens to Alfred Cohen, August 31, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

50. Defence to General Lukin, August 26, 1914, and Disso to Defence, 26 Aug 1914, DC, Box 612, file A.138/9199 Feeding Troops while Travelling and Rations General, DOD Archives.

51. Contract for the supply of meat dated at Port Nolloth on 1 Sep 1914, and AQMG to GOC, 2 Sep 1914, and GOC to AQMG, September 2, 1914, DC, Box 787, file 2/3 Supplies Meat Contract A Force, DOD Archives.

52. Extract from General Manager’s report for September 9, 1914, DC, Box 612, file A.138/9199 Feeding Troops while Travelling and Rations General, DOD Archives.

53. Magistrate, East London to Quartermaster General, September 29, 1914, DC, Box 613, file A.143/9199 Meat Preservation, DOD Archives.

54. I. van der Waag, “The battle of Sandfontein, September 26, 1914; South Africa, military reform and the German South West Africa campaign, 1914–15,” First World War Studies, vol. 4, no. 2 (2013), pp.141–165.

55. Bennett & Webster & Co to Colonel Harvey (AQMG, Port Nolloth), September 23, 1914, DC, Box 787, file 2/3 Supplies Meat Contract A Force, DOD Archives. On the problems of supply, see Ian van der Waag and Fransjohan Pretorius, ‘The Union Defence Force and the struggle to establish a South African canteen system, 1914–1916’, Historia, vol. 43, no. 2 (1998), pp. 40–54.

56. QMG to AQMG, October 3, 1914, DC, Box 787, file 2/3 Supplies Meat Contract A Force, DOD Archives.

57. Quartermaster General to Karl Hens, October 21, 1914, DC, Box 613, file A.143/9199 Meat Preservation, DOD Archives.

58. Sworn statement of W. Eldridge, September 7, 1914, PMK, box 101, file PM 1994 Enemy Subjects East London, DOD Archives.

59. Intelligence Officer, Railway Unit, to Lt Col Hugh Wyndham, December 24, 1914, PMK, box 101, file PM 1994 Enemy Subjects East London, DOD Archives.

60. Divisional Inspector SAP Eastern Cape Division to Deputy Commissioner SAP ECD Grahamstown, October 20, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

61. Ibid.

62. Sgt D.M. Bland to Detective Head Constable W.H. Anderson, October 17, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

63. Application for Release on Parole: Carl Hens, January 9, 1915, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

64. Inspector T.C. Whelehan, District Commandant No 15 District SAP, to Provost Marshal, Pretoria, January 7, 1915, PMK, box 101, file PM 1994 Enemy Subjects East London, DOD Archives.

65. Whelehan to Provost Marshal, Pretoria, January 7, 1915, PMK, box 101, file PM 1994 Enemy Subjects East London, DOD Archives. See also E.L.G. Schnell, For Men Must Work; An account of German immigration to the Cape with special reference to the German Military Settlers of 1857 and the German Immigrants of 1858 (Grahamstown, 1954).

66. A.2–1917 Special Report of the Custodian of Enemy Property, March 19, 1917, South African Parliamentary Papers. The sinking of the Lusitania by German torpedo in the Irish Sea on 7 May 1915, killing 1198 civilians, unleashed a storm of protest around the world, which was in some places – including South Africa’s large towns and cities – were associated with anti-German riots. See Dedering, “Avenge the Lusitania,” p.258.

67. Sir Edward Grey to US Ambassador Walter H. Page, London, 7 Sep 1914, and Page to Grey, 8 Sep 1914, FO 800/84, TNA.

68. Sir William Lawrence, POW Information Bureau, London, to CICR, Oct 2, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, Listes de prisonniers allemands et turcs capturés par les Britanniques et listes de prisonniers britanniques capturées par les Allemands, Archives du Comité International du Croix Rouge (CICR), Genève.

69. On the work of the ICRC in maintaining contact between military and civilian captives and their families in the 1914–19 period, see also Matthew Stibbe, “The Internment of Civilians by Belligerent States During the First World War and the Response of the International Committee of the Red Cross,” Journal of Contemporary History, 41.1 (2006), pp. 5–19.

70. Lawrence, POW Information Bureau, London, to CICR, October 13, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

71. Lawrence, POW Information Bureau, London, to CICR, October 16, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

72. A. Stanley, British Red Cross Society, London, to CICR, September 23, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

73. Zentralcomite rotkreuz to Internationales rotkreuz genf, November 7, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

74. CICR to Prisoners of War Information Bureau, London, November 16, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

75. Prisoners of War Information Bureau, London, to CICR, October 30, 1915, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

76. See note 23 above.

77. H.B. Shawe, Acting Secretary for the Interior to all Magistrates in the Union, May 18, 1915, PMK. Box 101, file 2053 Enemy Subjects Internment Prisoners of War Prison Regulations, DOD Archives.

78. Oliver Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p.15. Matthew Stibbe, “Civilian Internment and Civilian Internees in Europe, 1914–20,” Immigrants & Minorities, vol. 26, nos. 1–2 (2008).

79. Tilman Dedering, “Prisoners of War and Internees (Union of South Africa) 1914–1918.” Online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War.

80. UG 13–1916 Report of Commission of Enquiry into the Treatment of Prisoners of War by German Protectorate Authorities during the late Hostilities, South African Parliamentary Papers.

81. Annette Becker, “Captive Civilians,” p.258.

82. Major P.H. Newman, RAMC, writing during the next war, argued that – wrongly called a disease – it was “better termed a mental attitude.” R. Bing and A.L. Vischer, “Some remarks on the Psychology of Internment,” The Lancet, vol.193, no.4991 (April 26, 1919), pp. 696–97; and P.H. Newman, “The Prisoner-of-War Mentality: Its Effect After Repatriation,” The British Medical Journal, vol. 1, no. 4330 (January 1, 1944), p.8.

83. Bing and Vischer, “Some remarks on the Psychology of Internment,” p.696.

84. Manz and Panayi, Enemies in the Empire, pp.195–196. Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany, Chapter 5.

85. Alfred Cohen to Karl Hens, December 9, 1914, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

86. Ibid.

87. Commissioner for Enemy Subjects to Mary Hens, March 10, 1915, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

88. Dedering, “Prisoners of War and Internees (Union of South Africa) 1914–1918,” p.6.

89. See note 63 above.

90. Mary Hens to Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, January 9, 1915, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

91. Tilman Dedering, “’Avenge the Lusitania’: The Anti-German Riots in South Africa in 1915,” Immigrants & Minorities, vol. 31, no. 3 (2013), p. 256.

92. Karl Hens to Dr F. Bok, 8 Mar 1915, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

93. Marie Hens to Sir Andries Stockenstrom, March 31, 1915, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

94. Telegram ES758 of July 3, 1919, BNS, vol. 1/8/65, ref. 2394, NARSSA.

95. Provost Marshall to Deputy Commissioner, C.I.D., Marshall Square, Johannesburg, 7 Dec 1914, archives of the Provost Marshall of the Union (PM), Box 47, file Hans Plans value £50 to obtain, DOD Archives.

96. Provost Marshall, Cape Town to Provost Marshall, Pretoria, 15 Mar 1915, and Provost Marshall, Pretoria to Provost Marshall, Cape Town, March 16, 1915, PM, Box 47, file Hans Plans value £50 to obtain, DOD Archives.

97. Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany, p. 46.

98. See note 83 above.

99. J.E.P. Levyns, The Disciplines of War; Memories of the War of 1914–18 (New York: Vantage, 1984), pp. 20, 22.

100. Smuts to Wolstenholme, May 14, 1915, in W.K. Hancock and J. van der Poel, eds., Selections from the Smuts papers, Volume III: June 1910 – November 1918 (Cambridge: University Press, 1966), p. 274.

101. Botha, cited in, Trew, Botha Treks, p.134.

102. Matthew Stibbe, “Gendered Experiences of Civilian Internment during the First World War: A Forgotten Dimension of Wartime Violence,” in Ana Carden-Coyne (ed.), Gender and Conflict since 1914: Historical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2012), pp. 14–28.

103. Grimme to The Commandant German Internment Camps, 8 Dec 1915, and reply, 9 Dec 1915, Prisoner-of-War Sheet, BNS 1/8/34, ref.1179 C.H.A. Grimme, NARSSA.

104. Marie Hens to Sir Andries Stockenstrom, January 26, 1916, and Marie Hens to General Jan Smuts, 26 Jan 1916, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

105. Marie Hens to Sir Andries Stockenstrom, January 26, 1916, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

106. Marie Hens to Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, Oct 4, 1916, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

107. Commandant, P.W.I. Camps, Pietermaritzburg to Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, October 12, 1916, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

108. See note 88 above.

109. Karl Hens to Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, February 23, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

110. Marie Hens to Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, March 9, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

111. Whelehan to Chief Paymaster & Accountant, SAP, Pretoria, March 26, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

112. Lt Col W.H. Hamilton-Fowle, Commissioner for Enemy Subjects, to Chief Paymaster & Accountant, SAP, Pretoria, April 2, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

113. Provost Marshal to Secretary for Defence, PMK, Box 101, file 3/2053 Enemy Subjects Internment of British Subjects of Enemy Origin, DOD Archives.

114. Lawrence, POW Information Bureau, London, to Dr Ferrière, CICR, September 21, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

115. H.P. Harvey, POW Information Bureau, London, to M. Gustave Ador, President, CICR, October 31, 1914, C G1 A 10–02, CICR, Genève.

116. Karl Hens as quoted in Ludwig Hens, Neuwied, to German Red Cross Society, Hamburg, December 26, 1916, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

117. Ibid.

118. J. Halsted, “The South African Red Cross in War, 1939–45,” p.21, UWH, box 25, DOD Archives.

119. Commissioner for Enemy Subjects to Chief Censor, 28 Mar 1917, and reply, April 3, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

120. German Aid Society, Berlin, to their Branch in Cape Town, January 11, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

121. German Aid Society for Germans in British South Africa, Berlin, to Karl Hens, Fort Napier, June 22, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

122. Chief Censor to Provost Marshal, October 3, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

123. Marie Hens to General Louis Botha, September 3, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

124. Commissioner for Enemy Subjects to Marie Hens, September 15, 1917, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

125. Commissioner for Enemy Subjects to Secretary for Agriculture, January 7, 1918, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

126. Commissioner for Enemy Subjects to Director, POW Information Bureau, London, 20 Mar 1918, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

127. Chief Paymaster and Accountant, SAP, to Mrs Hens, June 1, 1918, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

128. Earl Buxton, General Botha (London: John Murray, 1924), pp. 267–69. Dedering, “Avenge the Lusitania,” p. 277.

129. Stefan Manz and Tilman Dedering, “’Enemy Aliens’ in Wartime: Civilian Internment in South Africa during World War 1,” South African Historical Journal, vol. 68 (2016), p.555.

130. Buxton, General Botha, p. 267.

131. Burton to Smuts, September 12, 1916, in Selections from the Smuts papers, Volume III, pp. 402–403.

132. See note 23 above.

133. Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany, p.19.

134. Newman, “The Prisoner-of-War Mentality,” p.8.

135. Chief Paymaster and Accountant to District Commandant SAP, East London, August 11, 1919, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

136. Statement by A. Burcharth, dated August 6, 1919, regarding Hens’s queries to the Relief Society, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

137. Custodian of Enemy Property to Secretary for the Interior, May 17, 1920, CES 109, file ES 70/2152/14, NARSSA.

138. Marriage certificate Karl Hens and Helena Frederika Augusta Kurz in East London in 1930, HAEC, vol. 1/2/6/1/16, ref. 13/1930, Western Cape Archives Repository, Cape Town (WCAR).

139. Major General Sir Vernon Kell to Sir Alexander Maxwell, 24 Mar 1939, HO 213/1894, TNA.

140. Dedering, “Avenge the Lusitania,” p. 260.

141. Bill Nasson, WWI and the People of South Africa (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2014), p.128.

142. Oliver Wilkinson, British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 227.

143. Karl Hens estate papers 1948, MOOC, vol. 6/9/15219, ref. 3779/48, WCAR.

144. See note 43 above.