An Abuse of Power

Today Macdonald Park is used by the high school students of W.L. Seaton Secondary for various sport activities. But just over a century ago this was the Vernon Internment Camp.
It was here that hundreds of people, guilty of no crime save their nation of origin, were forcibly interned by the Canadian government. The only physical reminder of that chapter in Vernon's history is the plaque in front of you honouring the German, Ukrainians and other European internees who had been invited into this country with more or less open arms right up to the start of the war.
How could Canadian society have turned on them so quickly?
This is an important question that we will seek to understand in this tour. We will start by seeing how Canada even found itself embroiled in this European power struggle in the first place, the result of a baffling chain of events that would have incalculable consequences for the future of Canada and the whole world. As the military historian Gwynne Dyer writes, "There was probably not a single person in Canada in August 1914 (indeed, there were not even very many in Europe) who genuinely understood how the war had come about, but it made no difference."¹

This photo of the camp gives us a small sense of how the camp operated. In the foreground is a vegetable garden, used to supply the camp with fresh produce. A row of wooden bunkhouses at the back of the photo housed the single male prisoners, while in front of these buildings on the left-hand side is a group of women tending to the laundry as it hangs on a clothesline.
In 1914 some cautioned against stereotyping the hundreds of thousands of people of German and Austro-Hungarian descent living in Canada as enemies, but a culture of fear and paranoia quickly spread. The government passed the War Measures Act, requiring everyone deemed an 'enemy alien' to register with the government. This was the start of a mass surveillance system of 88,000 people, few of whom had loyalties to any nation except Canada.¹ Local authorities were given the latitude to round up any enemy aliens deemed a security risk and send them to one of the internment camps popping up around the country.

This building was built in 1902 and briefly used as a provincial jail. By 1904 the Provincial Insane Asylum in New Westminster was overcrowded, and this building in Vernon was repurposed as an asylum, and many of the inmates in New Westminster were transferred here. The building was surrounded by gardens and a tree-lined boulevard.¹
The asylum closed in 1912 and the building stood vacant until September 1914, when it became an internment camp. The initial trickle of internees turned into a flood but when the government expanded the criteria of who could be interned. Soon the old asylum building was overflowing, and in May 1915 the camp had to be expanded to the surrounding grounds. Bunkhouses, a mess hall, a guard room, and barbed wire stockade were built, so the camp could have a capacity of around 350.²

A group of internees put on an impressive acrobatic performance on the camp's parade ground. This was certainly one creative way for the prisoners to pass the time during their years of captivity.
The government itself was involved in a torturous set of legal acrobatics to legally justify the mass internment of civilians. While the Hague Convention stipulated that captured soldiers could be interned as Prisoners of War (POWs), but interning law-abiding civilians from an enemy nation without the right to a fair trial was quite illegal.
Furthermore, even if you accepted that these internees were POWs, then that meant the laws of war were supposed to apply to them. This was a problem for the Canadian government since they had no intention of following these laws in their treatment of the internees—they really wanted to make them do forced labour,, which was a violation of the laws of war. It took the justice ministry almost a year to cobble together a solution to this issue.

Internees playing hockey on the ice rink created on the grounds of the Vernon internment camp. Some of the men interned at this camp spent time reading up on international and Canadian law and lodged a number of legal complaints against their internment. These were invariably rebuffed by civil authorities.
This is actually quite surprising, given the justice ministry's preposterous legal position on internment. The ministry had realized they could call the internees POWs and ignore the laws of war at the same time: all they had to do was insist the internees were simultaneously POWs and enemy non-combatants. The laws of war didn't apply to noncombatants. They were going to have their cake and eat it too.
The historian Bohdan S. Kordan explains the result:
As POWs, they would work. But as non-combatants they were not entitled to protection under the laws of war. With no international legal framework to guarantee their rights, coercion would be used against those who resisted, either simply as a means of control or to extract labour. As the minister of the interior admitted in Parliament, this was the only way "we could get a lot of work done." The end result was that the internees were subjected to a strict work regime and a host of abuses.¹

One of the German prisoners, Baron Rochus von Luttwitz, outside his cabin in the first-class prisoner compound. The small cabins could hold families and had their own vegetable patches that the internees could use to supplement their diet. These cabins afforded a measure of privacy to the internees and were a privilege afforded to the Germans due to their first class status.
The total camp population hovered around 350 for most of the war, but a total of around 1,100 prisoners passed through the gates of the camp between 1914 and 1920.^{1 2} Across Canada some 8,579 enemy aliens were interned during the war, but less than 20% of them were actually German—the rest were mostly Ukrainians. In the Vernon camp however these figures were reversed: around 75-80% of all the prisoners were German.³
Who were these German prisoners?

Some men sit outside one of the bunkhouses in the second class compound. One is playing a guitar following along with the sheet music on the stand in front of him. It looks like a happy moment. The two compounds were separated by a gate, which was thought necessary because of the tensions between the German and non-German prisoners. Many non-German prisoners blamed the Germans for the war and their current predicament.
Most of the non-Germans held in the camp were mostly Ukrainains but there were also Croats, Serbians and Poles, among others. For the most part these men were interned not because they were considered a national security threat, but because they had been fired from their jobs and were living on the street.
These men usually only stayed in Vernon temporarily before being transferred to road-building camps in the mountains. As the economic situation changed by 1916, most of these men were paroled, meaning they were allowed out of the camp and could work for private businesses, though under heavy sanction. Only a relatively small number were kept in the camp until its closure in 1920, mostly men who indulged in ideas considered dangerous, like union organizing and political agitation.
The experiences of the non-German prisoners is covered in much greater detail in the Fernie, Morrissey, and Mara Lake tours.

A woman stands between two files of first class cabins once located on this part of the field. Judging by the rather solid state of the cabins and the verdant creepers crawling up the walls, this must be later in the war or after the war, when the camp had become well established and some of the families had been there for four or five years. Most of the women and children in the camp were German, as "[i]t seems care was taken to keep German families together." There's evidence that such "care was not necessarily true for the Ukrainian families."¹
We will return to the subject of the families of the German internees later on in this tour, but let's take a moment to consider the fate of the families of the Austro-Hungarian men.
Thousands of Austro-Hungarian men who entered captivity left behind wives and children outside the camp who were forced to fend for themselves. Many of these women, suddenly deprived of their menfolk, were also fired from their jobs for being 'alien enemies'. Only in rare cases was any provision made for these women and children. Poverty and starvation were the inevitable result.

This winter photo of the first class cabins camp shows the poor insulation the internees had during wintertime in the early years of internment. The daughter of one of the internees recalled how the housing in the camp developed over time: "Their place to stay was just a wooden floor with a tent pitched over it. Gradually boards were brought in and it became a shack. And the tent rotted, and ripped, and flew away--that sort of thing--as tents do."
Life in the Vernon camp was never easy. Though the internees weren't required to conduct hard labour while imprisoned here, 11 men still died at this camp. The food was substandard and insufficient, and the poor quality of housing contributed to outbreaks of disease. Despite their circumstances, some of the prisoners found time to escape the miseries of imprisonment through learning.

A rapt audience watches a motion picture in the YMCA recreation hall that was once located on this spot. The YMCA was allowed into the camps by the military authorities to organize recreational activities like putting on films, musical performances, and plays for the internees. The prisoners were expected to follow military discipline, but because at the Vernon camp they weren't expected to do much work, they had a lot of time on their hands.
They filled that time with physical activities like gardening and hockey, and more cerebral ones like self improvement through education. Some of the ideas spreading in the camp—socialism chief among them—were viewed as alarmingly subversive by the Canadian government.

This photograph shows Fred Kohse and his cousin Victor Heiny as toddlers inside the Vernon internment camp. Fred stands on the left holding a branch almost as tall as he is, and Victor is on the right. Just beside Victor you can make out a stretch of the barbed wire fence that forced these little boys to remain inside the camp.
The military authorities allowed women along with their children to voluntarily enter internment with their husbands. At Vernon they were kept in a "prisoners village" separate from the rest of the camp quarters. The conditions for these families were far better than those faced by the interned men doing road work on mountainsides, but they were still deprived of freedom and spent years languishing in boredom behind barbed wire.
Over the course of the war some 24 children were interned alongside their parents at the Vernon Camp. Some of them knew of no other life before their release; three babies were born in the camp.¹

A lone soldier stands guard by the barbed wire ringing the internment compound. A total of 107 internees died in captivity in Canada during the First World War. Six of these were men shot trying to escape.
The conditions at the Vernon internment camp were generally much better than those of the road construction camps in the mountains, but they were by no means pleasant. It was humiliating and boring, and they were deprived of most of life's pleasures and opportunities.
The conditions inspired many acts of resistance, the most spectacular of which was escape. In Vernon the endless monotony of camp life and the high proportion of first-class German prisoners not forced to work meant there was ample time to plot intricate and ingenious escape attempts.
Since this camp was also the main hub for all the other camps in British Columbia, many second-class prisoners were rotated in and out of Vernon from the road-building camps, and shared their nightmarish experiences with those interned here. The Vernon prisoners took it upon themselves to advocate for their comrades toiling in the mountains, writing to neutral diplomats and pursuing all available legal means to have the abuses put to an end.

We've returned to the entrance of the camp, showing an official vehicle carrying military officers departing the camp as guards stand at attention.
The Vernon internment camp stayed open long after the war, as the internment authorities spent years making arrangements to deport the last prisoners. When it finally closed in 1920 the buildings were dismantled and eventually the grounds turned over from the provincial government to the City of Vernon, where it became a children's playground. Ultimately the W.L. Seaton High School was built here. The dark chapter of internment faded into Vernon's history. It is only through the efforts of many dedicated historians, descendants of internees, and organizations like the Vernon Family History Society, and the Canada First World War Internment Recognition Fund, that the story can now be told in such detail.