Dan Pinese
(Reprinted from Quebec Heritage News, Sept-Oct, 2006)

Prisoners of the Home Front: German POWs and
‘Enemy Aliens’ in Southern Quebec
By Martin F. Auger
UBC Press, 228 pages
$29.95

When one thinks of Canada's contribution to the World War II effort, one thinks of its navy maintaining open sea lanes to North America, its air force playing a significant role in Britain's Bomber Command and its army assuring victories in various campaigns in Italy and Northwest Europe. These significant contributions represent the crux of historical research and our knowledge of Canada's story during the war, the action and drama of the battle field often obscuring events on the home front.

At home and as a result of the war, Canada became an industrial giant, producing a variety of armaments for the allied cause. Though there is no disputing the fact that Canadian society was deeply affected by the war, the Canadian home front is one that is historically looked upon as directly untouched by the destruction of war. Canada exported its contributions — its soldiers, its goods, and its industry — and, as a result, history rarely recognizes what was imported to Canada during the war.

Indeed, to read Martin F. Auger's book, Prisoners of the Home Front is to encounter one of the rare accounts of enemy troops and non-combatants setting foot on Canadian soil in the 20th century. In his detailed and precise language, Auger's book takes the reader away from the battlefield and into the intriguing drama of one of war's inevitable results: prisoners of war. It is Auger’s contention that Canada treated its prisoners humanely and in accordance with the stipulations outlined in the Geneva Convention, a fact that is well argued and impressive as Auger takes the reader through some of the pitfalls associated with the detaining of nearly 40,000 German POWs and non-combatants in makeshift camps converted from disused building like farmhouses.

Away from interesting statistics and policy that brought about the creation and regulations of the camps, Auger also details the lives their detainees. The activity of detainees was highly scrutinized and monitored for fear of escape and possible relay of intelligence back to Germany. Detainees were classified according to the potential threat and importance as a result of programs offered at the camps, programs meant to “re-educate” those infused with Nazi doctrine with the benefits of a democratic society. It is these attempts to re-create the often paranoid mentality that is inevitably associated with controlling a camp full of possible enemies that makes Auger's book a fascinating read. Though written in the fact-based prose that can often alienate readers from any historical text, Auger maintains interest by also focussing on the inner-workings of the camps in southern Quebec. For example, Auger recounts the formation of the HARIKARI Club among the German soldiers in the camp at Grande Ligne (Sainte Blaise, south of Saint Jean). Here prisoners grouped themselves according to rank and maintained Nazi sections of Gestapo, propaganda and intelligence in hopes to “prepare a suicidal mass escape in order to slaughter as many Canadians and inflict as much sabotage and destruction as possible before being killed ... as soon as the Nazi prisoners regarded the war as absolutely lost or in the event of Germany's unconditional surrender.”

Prisoners of the Home Front illustrates the lesser known behind-the-scenes facts of war and Canada's, specifically Quebec's contribution to the effort to humanely accommodate the captured.