Review -- Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America by Michael A. McDonnell

As soon as Europeans arrived in North America, they planted flags and boldly claimed possession of vast swathes of territory. Over the next several centuries they imagined that the few towns they set up, some scattered missions and outposts, and the travels of some trappers and traders amounted to sovereignty. In their eyes, small in number though they often were, they took the lead parts in a grand, world-historical drama about the winning of a new continent; the bit parts, the non-speaking parts, belonged to Indigenous people. That was not the reality. For centuries the crucial decisions were not made by the Europeans but by Indigenous leaders and the most fateful events took place not in London, Paris, or Quebec, but in “the woods.”

In the usual narrative, First Nations appear dimly in the background, brought into focus only when they impinge directly upon European ambitions—raiding colonists, fighting as allies in inter-European conflicts, signing treaties, ceding lands. Modern research, however, is revealing that First Nations were clearly dominant in North America from the first arrival of the Europeans until nearly the nineteenth century, after the American War of Independence. Until then the newcomers were utterly dependent on the good graces of the original inhabitants. And historians now understand that, far from fighting as auxiliaries for the French or English, when First Nations stood in battle beside European armies, they did so with their own agendas— agendas that had much to do with managing Indigenous tensions and little to do with wanting final victory for either of the European powers. The geopolitics of the region was settled around council fires, where rivalries and alliances among First Nations predominated over relations with the colonial powers.

Michael McDonnell’s Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America is an important contribution to Indigenous-oriented scholarship. Not only does it present the history of the Great Lakes region by “looking east,” it also reveals that the key players were not the nations of the lower Great Lakes, such as the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) or the Huron (Wendat), but a subgroup of the Anishinaabeg, the Ottawa (Odawa) living at the Straits of Michilimackinac where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet. Much undervalued by historians, theirs is shown to be the preeminent influence both on other First Nations and on the European powers. It derived partly from their strategic location in the Great Lakes system, a key point in the fur trade, giving them control over connections between the lower and upper lakes as well as access to the Mississippi Valley and the western plains; but also decisive was the tradition of their women marrying outside the group, creating a dense and extensive web of family connections stretching from Green Bay to the St. Lawrence, easily activated into alliances.

The title Masters of Empire is not a tribute to this network, to a European-style “empire” run by the Michilimackinac Odawa, but to their achievement in managing the nascent French and English empires. In the early period, the new neighbours, the French, were by no means uppermost in the minds of the Odawa. Some traders and a few military personnel were allowed to reside at Michilimackinac and voyageurs were allowed to travel through the region, but the Odawa controlled the newcomers easily through negotiations. The focus of the Odawa was on hunting, cultivating crops, overseeing their extensive trading relationships, and keeping abreast of political developments among other Indigenous peoples. The French were accepted in small numbers because in exchange for furs they provided valuable trade goods, such as cloth, metal cooking utensils, guns, and ammunition; but the grave decisions at Michilimackinac concerned other First Nations, especially Iroquois threats from the east, Fox and Sioux threats from the west, and Catawba incursions to the south. When the French lost their empire, the Odawa found the English more difficult to deal with—haughty and expansionist—so they set about checking English power, aiming to reduce them to fur traders. Only after America became an independent nation and settlers poured over the Appalachians by the thousands, backed by large armies, did outsiders become an existential threat. Even then, however, clever negotiating enabled the Odawa of Michilimackinac to avoid the fate of many other First Nations—being forcibly removed to distant lands.

A recurring theme of Masters of Empire is how events in the backwoods of North America often had repercussions around the world. Although France and England had long been rivals in the New World, their final struggle for supremacy in the Seven Years War began with an effort by Odawa and Ojibwe warriors to rebalance the influence of the two colonial powers, destabilized by recent British advances. Their successful attack on a British fort at Pickawillany in the Ohio Valley, unanswered by any English move, emboldened the French to reassert themselves south of the Great Lakes and spurred First Nations to send raiding parties to remove British settlers from traditional lands. A chain of reactions broadened into a global war between coalitions led by the French and British. Every European great power of the time, except the Ottoman Empire, joined in, and the fighting spread from North America to Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, India, and the Philippines.

At the end of the Seven Years War, First Nations were furious to learn that the French “gave away” their land to the British, and they launched a war against the British to establish that they were the masters in their own land. McDonnell calls it “the first war for American independence in North America.” So effective were they that finally the British promised to ban settlements west of the Appalachians, a move welcomed by First Nations but decried by the American colonies. Then Britain, alarmed at the drain on its treasury resulting from so many wars, decided to offset its costs by taxing the American colonists, thus laying the groundwork for the American War of Independence.

Master of Empire is academic history, offering only moderate concessions to the general reader in terms of prose style and narrative structure. However, its Indigenous perspective easily compensates us for our effort, making us re-think some of what we long took for granted and, like an infrared image of a familiar scene, making the familiar seem unfamiliar again.review -- 

Review -- The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens

When the Panama Papers were leaked in May of 2016, the scheming of the super-rich to avoid paying taxes by hiding their identities offshore was thrown into headlines around the world. Some journalists, scrambling to make sense of the 11.5 million documents, set about trying to uncover the identities of the shadowy figures behind the web of deceit, while others valiantly tried to explain the complex financial mechanisms. What the public needed was an overview by an expert, a clear analysis of how tax havens work, in simple language, with enough detail to make the picture complete yet without being too technical.

In The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens, Gabriel Zucman has done that brilliantly—and much more. Eschewing scandals and the naming of individuals, he provides a clear description of how the system works, revealing, perhaps surprisingly, that it is, at its core, rather simple. But he goes much further, calculating the true extent of tax evasion, in dollar terms, by crunching publicly available economic numbers in ways that have not been used before. (Tax evasion, in his analysis, includes what lawyers call “tax avoidance,” the legal exploitation of loopholes, since both evasion and avoidance exist only to dodge the taxman.) He shows that more than 8% of global financial wealth, consisting of stocks and bonds, shares in mutual funds, and bank deposits, is hidden from tax authorities, amounting to 7.6 trillion dollars. That enormous figure is a minimum, because it does not include non-financial forms of wealth such as real estate, gold, jewelry, art, etc. Now that governments are at long last in possession of real numbers, they are much better placed to address the problem of tax havens and lost taxes. Finally, Zucman presents a simple plan for bringing global tax cheating to an end. It’s a breathtaking achievement to do so much in a book consisting of only 120 pages. But is it to be believed? In the foreword no less a luminary than Thomas Piketty, author of the monumental Capital in the Twenty-First Century, calls The Hidden Wealth of Nations “probably the best book that has ever been written on tax havens and what we can do about them.”

While the book is certainly an important handbook for policy makers, and while it might yield deeper insights to readers with a background in business and finance, Zucman has written it with the layperson in mind. Because governments, he says, “have not been stellar” in fighting the scourge of tax havens, an informed and mobilized public is needed to drive the campaign against tax havens to its conclusion.

What do his numbers reveal? Nine percent of Canadian financial wealth or US$300 bn is held offshore by Canadian citizens, resulting in an annual loss of US$6 bn in tax revenue. If back taxes were collected and penalties assessed for not declaring assets, the government would reap an enormous windfall. Even more, these numbers do not include losses incurred when governments had to lower tax rates to slow the flight of capital to tax havens. Four percent of U.S. wealth is held offshore, representing $1,200 bn in annual lost tax revenue. Ten percent of the financial wealth of Europe is held offshore, depriving European governments annually of $87 bn. The numbers for Russia show the extent of the oligarchy, with 52% of financial wealth held offshore. Sadly, Africa, which needs its tax revenue sorely for basic services and development, has 40% of its financial wealth hidden from tax authorities.

After tracing the history of tax havens from the end of World War I, when governments instituted progressive taxes in order to offset their huge debts and provide benefits to veterans, and following a chapter on the failed efforts of governments to address the problem of tax havens, Zucman proposes a straightforward solution, a global financial register. Such a record, listing who owns all financial securities in circulation—all stocks, bonds, and shares in mutual funds worldwide—perhaps managed by the IMF, would strip tax cheaters of their anonymity and enable nations to collect the taxes due to them. Reporting must be automatic, leaving bankers in tax havens with no discretion to falsify information about their clients, as Swiss bankers did on a huge scale at two critical points in the past. Also because of past failures to eliminate tax havens, Zucman insists that countries tempted to continue operating as tax havens must be compelled to participate through sanctions. In plain economic terms he demonstrates how the threat of carefully crafted trade tariffs against recalcitrant countries, designed to capture lost tax revenue, would leave tax havens no choice but to surrender, and he points out that such a move is allowed under current treaties.

Fiscal dissimulation does not end with wealthy individuals; there is also the problem of corporations avoiding taxes through profit shifting. Various accounting tricks are used to ensure that branches in high tax countries show little or no profit, while most of the company’s profits show up in countries with low taxes, Luxembourg being a favourite destination because of its “modest”`corporate tax rate of 0%. Again Zucman provides numbers: 55% of foreign profits of U.S. firms are declared in tax havens; and U.S. tax losses amount to 20% of all U.S. profits. Rather than asking governments to play cat and mouse with the corporations over their profits (the tax department of GE consists of almost 1,000 employees), Zucman proposes that corporate profits not be approached country by country; rather, the worldwide profit of a corporation should be calculated. Each country would then be assigned a weighting based on sales, capital, and employees, and based on its weighting the country could then assess taxes according to the rate of its choice. This corporate solution, he explains, would be easier to implement than the global financial register for individuals. He even proposes a method for ensuring that corporations would pay up.

For all his proposed solutions, Zucman preempts objections that they are “utopian” by demonstrating how they are currently operating successfully in smaller jurisdictions.

The big surprise about large-scale tax dodging is how essentially simple it is, resting entirely on anonymity, and how relatively straightforward the solutions are. While the G20 summit in 2009 made a good, if unsuccessful, effort at eliminating the scourge of tax havens, Zucman`s book may make it possible that we truly will one day see the much sought-after “end of banking secrecy.” 

Review -- Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History

Before the United States won independence from Britain, pirates from the Barbary states (Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli) had a long history of depradations in the Mediterranean, beginning as far back as the era of the Crusades. In the sixteenth century, upon becoming part of the powerful Ottoman Empire, they expanded into the Atlantic, raiding not only shipping but even European coastal towns as far north as Iceland. Plunder was not their greatest prize; more than anything, they sought captives, some to hold for ransom but most to sell into slavery in the Ottoman and Arab worlds. It is estimated that over one million Europeans were thus enslaved, some doomed to wretched lives as labourers, perhaps manning the oars of a pirate galley, some kept as house slaves, a lucky few given positions as high-level officials, women, and especially young boys, kept as sex slaves. The European powers never subdued the pirates or their political masters militarily, apparently finding it preferable to make annual “tribute” payments as well as putting up with periodic demands for luxury gifts, such as diamond-studded daggers and gold-inlaid pistols, by the various beys and pashaws.

At the end of the War of Independence in 1783, the U.S. lost its protection under Britain`s deal with the Barbary states, and soon several American merchant ships were captured. The Americans on board were enslaved, chained, and set to work breaking rocks. Several died.

The U.S. was not in a position to do much. It had sold off its Continental Navy, and its treasury was so depleted that tribute payments to pirate nations were almost beyond its capacity. Yet it needed to keep its trade with Europe and the Mediterranean free in order to pay off its war debts. In 1786 Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then ambassadors to France and Britain respectively, met in London with the ambassador from Tripoli to Britain, hoping to negotiate a reasonable settlement that would free American captives and protect American shipping. Instead, they were met with demands for tribute payments of enormous proportions. And, what shocked them even more, the ambassador blithely told them that the Quran made it a right and a duty for Muslims to plunder and enslave unbelievers. By 1793 ten American merchant ships had been captured and hundreds of American citizens were imprisoned. The pirates built a new fleet aimed specifically at American shipping.

Although it took thirty years of effort, both diplomatic and military, the young U.S. finally achieved what no other nation had done, ending Barbary piracy through military force, although not without some serious setbacks. Today the First and Second Barbary Wars are mostly forgotten, the memory kept alive mainly by the U.S. Marine Corps in a song memorializing their first victory on land (“From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”) and in their ceremonial sword, which is fashioned after the Ottoman-style, Mameluke sword presented to the Marine commander who won that battle.

Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates is a vivid account the Barbary wars, well researched from original sources, detailed enough to satisfy ordinary curiosity but with no unnecessary digressions, always keeping its focus on action and narrative. The big surprise of the story is how badly the effort went for the U.S. for so long, the number of mistakes, defeats, and humiliations. Interesting characters appear amid all the action. Remarkable for his lack of heroism is the American naval commander, Richard Morris, sent with the U.S.S. Chesapeake to blockade Tripoli. His wife wrote to the secretary of the navy for permission to accompany her husband on the mission and before the day of departure showed up with their son, too. Morris delayed his departure a month or two to avoid the rough weather of early spring. Arriving at Gibraltar for repairs, he delayed for three more months while he and Mrs. Morris enjoyed the local social life, hobnobbing with the British elite. Finally under direct orders to join the blockade immediately, he sailed out of Gibraltar but only to visit friendly ports along the southern European coast. In the first report he gave of his progress, he explained that he did not plan to advance toward North Africa until early in the following year because of the “advanced period of the season.” Not long afterward, he was relieved of duty. There is also the renegade Scotsman Peter Lisle who, after being captured, converted to Islam, took the name Murat Rais, and became captain of a pirate ship. Eventually he was promoted to admiral of Tripoli’s navy, and he married a daughter of the dey of Tripoli. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams presented a stark contrast. Adams always advocated negotiating with the pirate nations, even after the dey of Tripoli declared war. During his term as president he reduced the size of the navy. Early on Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, decided that force would be necessary to bring the pirates to heel, and throughout his career as ambassador, secretary of defense, and as president, he sought to expand the navy and gain the authority to use military force.

One of the most shocking incidents occurred when an American ship, arriving with tribute in Algiers, was found not to have all the promised goods. Infuriated, the dey took control of the ship, replaced the American flag with his own, and forced the American crew to sail to Istanbul with the tribute he owed to the Ottoman emperor. Since slaves were part of his cargo, an American naval ship suffered the humiliation, not just of serving as an Ottoman cargo ship but of working as a slave transport.

After several military engagements, not all of which redounded to American glory, treaties were signed with all four Barbary nations. Then, during the War of 1812 Britain urged them to capture American ships again and take captives, and Algiers declared war on America. When the war with Britain ended in 1815, a much stronger U.S. sent a formidable fleet of eleven warships to the North African ports as gunboat diplomacy, and the era of Barbary piracy came to a quick end.

Review — "The Secret History of the Mongol Queens"

Genghis Khan is not remembered kindly in the West. Medieval chroniclers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were so terrified by his reputation that they never saw past the appalling idea of what would happen if they resisted him. They regarded him as a ruthless barbarian, a demon, an Asian Horseman of the Apocalypse, and their fearful image of him remains with us today. In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World anthropology professor Jack Weatherford attempted to expand our understanding of the great Mongol conqueror, reminding us that not only did Genghis Khan create the largest empire in the history of the world, but he also provided reasonable government and, by placing the state above religion, offered religious tolerance at a time when that was extremely rare. Most important of all, he developed the Silk Road, turning an unreliable, often dangerous caravan route controlled by a string of unpredictable warlords into a commercial superhighway. The trickle of commerce turned into a torrent, with the flow of goods, people, and ideas cross-fertilizing and advancing the cultures of both East and West. Under the Mongols, according to Weatherford, the Silk Road laid the foundations for modernity and served as a prototype for modern communication systems. It was an achievement sought after but never realized by Alexander, the Romans, Muslims or Christians.

In The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, Weatherford illuminates another surprising feature of the Mongol leader, how he gave the top roles in the Mongol Empire to women. This fact was obscured not only by European writers; some unknown person doctored the historical record. In the classic Mongol chronicle, The Secret History of the Mongols, written soon after the death of Genghis Khan, there is only one hint of what he did, a single revealing sentence. Preceding that sentence is a report of how Genghis Khan distributes titles, offices, and territories to various male members of his family. Then come the words, “Let us reward our female offspring.” At that point the document is mutilated, an unknown number of words being cut out. Nothing remains about his female offspring. Professor Weatherford, however, has managed to piece together what really happened by poring over non-Mongolian sources—Chinese, Korean, Persian, Tibetan, Russian, Italian, French. It makes a fascinating story.

The view that women can rule as well as men came easily to Genghis Khan. Both his mother, Hoelun, and his wife, Borte, came from steppe tribes in which women played influential roles. They raised his daughters to rule, and even as his daughters matured and strengthened under their imperial tutelage, Genghis recognized that his four sons were drunks and wastrels. In preparation for his first major military campaign beyond the Mongolian Plateau, he gave his most important appointment to his daughter Alaqai, to rule over the lands adjacent to China south of the Gobi desert, his springboard for a massive invasion. During her reign, which lasted 21 years, Alaqai began by making herself literate, then set up administrative and cultural organizations so effective that they became models for the entire Mongol Empire. Her capital was the model for Karakorum, the capital of Ogodie, Genghis Khan’s son, and for Beijing, the capital of Khublai Khan. Genghis put two other daughters in charge of kingdoms controlling the Silk Road, the gateway between China and the Muslim lands to the southwest—and an arrow pointing at Russia and Europe. A fourth ruled over the northern lands reaching into Siberia. The four sons administered the stable, nomadic Mongolian heartland. The daughters were given full power, not expected to be puppets of a central government. To ensure that no one would infringe on their freedom, Genghis was careful about how he installed them. Upon marrying a daughter to the leader of a vassal state, he designated her as queen and demoted her new husband to mere “prince consort.” The prince consort had to divorce all his existing wives. Then the hapless husband was conscripted into the Mongol army and sent to the front lines, where he usually died in battle within a few years. The daughters of Genghis Khan thus ruled without opposition or interference of any kind.

After the death of Genghis Khan and, later, his daughters, the empire began to unravel as members of the ruling clan fought for power. When the dust settled after the first round, the widows of Genghis Khan’s sons emerged victorious—another group of Mongol queens, who ruled from Korea to the Caucasus, and from the Arctic to the Indus, the largest empire ever ruled by women. Cleverest and most powerful was Sorkhokhtani, a Christian, who, by avoiding marriage to Genghis Khan’s son and successor, enabled her to advance her own sons, all four of whom took the title of Great Khan. So impressive was she that her fame spread far beyond the empire, a Syriac scholar writing, “If I were to see among the race of women another woman like this, I should say that the race of women was far superior to that of men.” Unfortunately, the daughters-in-law of Genghis Khan struggled ceaselessly against each other, as well as other ambitious relatives. After several generations of such infighting, the empire was torn to shreds. The great Mongol Empire was reduced once again to little more than a tribal power.

Even during this period of decline, remarkable Mongol women appeared. Khutulun, who lived in the fourteenth century, declared that she would never marry a man unless he could defeat her in wrestling. No man ever did, and it is said she won 10,000 horses from the men who tried. She went on military campaigns with her father, the Great Khan, and was a fearsome warrior who, according to Marco Polo, could ride into enemy ranks and snatch a captive as easily as a hawk snatches a chicken. In the late fifteenth century, almost three hundred years after Genghis Khan, Queen Manduhai the Wise arose virtually out of nowhere to unite the Mongols once again, if not in a great empire at least as a proud and independent nation. Hers is an amazing story. Taking in hand seven-year-old Dayan, Genghis Khan’s last, sickly male descendant, who had barely escaped assassination by several pretenders to the throne, she maneuvred so brilliantly from her small power base, winning battle after battle, that she was finally able to have him installed as Great Khan over all the Mongols. She married him when he grew up, and they ruled as a pair.

In a fascinating final chapter, Weatherford contends that it is impossible to suppress history forever. Everything that happens leaves traces of itself. Traces of the Mongol queens can be found, for example, in Chaucer’s “The Squire’s Tale,” in Milton, even in the Taj Mahal. Khutulun surfaced in an Italian play in the seventeenth century as a woman warrior named Turandot. The play was translated by Schiller, directed by Goethe in 1802, and turned into an opera by Puccini in 1924.


Jack Weatherford is an anthropology professor who spent his earlier career studying and writing on tribal peoples, beginning with indigenous North American cultures. His later research and writings on the Mongols led him to receiving the Order of the Polar Star, Mongolia’s highest national honor for foreigners. He has retired to live in Mongolia.

Review — The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R

The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R

by Ernest Zimmerman

  

After a childhood in Cologne under the Nazis and the terror bombing of the war years, Ernest Zimmerman emigrated to Canada in 1953, eventually becoming head of the history department at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. After some students mentioned to him that at the start of the war there had been a prisoner of war camp in the town of Red Rock, just east of Thunder Bay, Zimmerman gave himself the task of learning all he could learn and documenting the place, known as Camp R. It turned out, surprisingly, not to hold any POWs at all, but only German civilians. The research and writing extended over many years. In 2008 he told several of his students that, if anything happened to him, he’d like them to finish the book, and a few weeks later he suddenly died of a heart attack. The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior is Zimmerman's book, completed by two of his students who are listed as editors.

It is a thorough study, adding to the sizeable body of work already done on Canada’s internment camps. Virtually all aspects of the Camp R are described for its entire 17-month history, from the circumstances leading to the first round-up of prisoners in Britain to the final closure of the camp in the summer of 1941 on the grounds of its inadequate facilities. Even before the camp was opened, we learn of the purchase and preparation of the site, and the voyage of the prisoners across the Atlantic. On one ship swaggering Nazis, intoxicated by German victories in Europe, concocted a foolish plan to rush the machine guns and attempt a takeover of the ship, hoping to steer it to Hamburg, somehow passing through the British blockade. Luckily for them, the were talked down by cooler heads. One ship was torpedoed with the loss of 830 lives. One Camp R was up and running, with all its administration, guards and prisoners in place, there is extensive information on virtually all aspects of its operation, its routines, its personnel, supplies, health, morale, escape attempts, and much more.

What made Camp R special was, in addition to its holding only German civilians, the fact that it mixed committed Nazis with Jews and anti-Nazis who had fled Germany. Such a volatile mix, a microcosm of the Third Reich, inevitably led to constant tension and occasional violence. Internees at other camps in Canada dreaded being transferred to Camp R, which had a reputation as a snake-pit.

For readers with no special interest in Canadian internment camps or Lake Superior regional history, the most compelling part of the book is probably the story of how these three hostile groups came to be thrown together into the same camp. It was the result of shocking bad behaviour on the part of the Churchill government, its panic in the early years of the war, its anti-Semitic and anti-German racism,  and its chicanery in duping Canada into accepting three boatloads of prisoners labeled as “dangerous enemy aliens,” knowing that some were refugees who clamoured to join the battle against Germany.

After the war began in earnest and the German juggernaut overran western Europe, Britain became terrified of a German invasion. Invasion fears spawned rumours of landings by German parachutists and a widespread belief in sleeper cells, a “fifth column” of agents waiting to rise up and assist the invaders. Although no evidence existed of either parachutists or fifth columnists, the myths gripped the nation, and all 75,000 German nationals, including refugees from Hitler’s Germany, who had been welcomed in earlier years, were declared “enemy aliens.” It seems clear that, whether the government believed the rumours of fifth columnists or not, it benefited from the idea because it distracted the public from its own failures, no only its defeats on the continent, but also the loss of Norway, which was an enormous fiasco, the result of Churchill's incompetence. “Intern the lot” became the watchword, taken up by the public and spurred on by the country's leadership, by Churchill, parliament, the military, and the newspapers. Especially outrageous were right-wing periodicals and members of the aristocracy who had previously led the call for appeasement of Hitler. The security services, eerily echoing Nazi racial theories, warned that, even in the case of Germans who had lived in Britain for many decades, “ancestral blood” would triumph over political loyalties. Even German Jews, it declared, were unreliable because of their German blood.

Everyone in Britain holding German citizenship had to appear before a system of one-man tribunals, usually run by retired judges, some of whom were badly out of touch, prejudiced, or both. In the end, most people were judged as Category C enemy aliens, allowed to go free but required to report weekly to the police. However, some judges issued extraordinarily arbitrary judgments. Refugees who had brought money to Britain as they fled Germany could be branded as currency smugglers who had broken the laws of their country, therefore sentenced to internment camp as Category A, “dangerous enemy aliens.” Jews could be condemned because in fleeing Germany they showed “typical disloyalty” to their home country. One man, when asked if he hated Germany, replied no, that he only hated the current regime. The judge ruled that therefore he desired German victory.

The British government put all the pressure it could muster on a reluctant and unprepared Canada to accept about 8,000 prisoners, all of whom, it declared, were “a bad lot,” dangerous enemy aliens and POWs—German parachutists, downed Luftwaffe pilots, submarine crews. Yet among the 1,150 prisoners finally sent to Camp R were no POWs, several priests, 78 Jews, including several rabbis, 144 boys under the age of 18, one boy only 15, an old man of 71, and 770 merchant seamen, some of whom had fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. About 100 prisoners were genuine Nazis. As Canada slowly began to realize how it had been deceived and sought to sort out the confusion, British authorities held back the documentation that would reveal their own duplicity.

Camp R held one prisoner whose name will go down in history. Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, a cultured, Harvard-educated businessman, was an important member of Hitler’s inner circle before he came to power. Hitler was smitten by Hanfstaengl’s American wife, Helene, and when the Beer Hall Putsch failed, he fled to the Hanfstaengl mansion. Putzi was gone, having fled to Austria. Hitler, injured and in despair, standing before Helen, took out his revolver and made as if to shoot himself. She scolded him, took the revolver out of his hand and buried it in a large flour bin. Thus Hanfstaengl became a name linked with one of the great what-ifs of history.