AHMADNAGAR CENTRAL ALIENS INTERNMENT CAMP
To be held in detention as an internee, for whatever period of time, is an experience written deeply upon an individual’s life. For the person outside the camp there is the opportunity to visit his Christian brother in internment and offer him encouragement. During World War II most of the Christian and Missions leaders in India had too little or no idea as to the situation of the German brethren in internment. It was less controversial not to contend the action of the British removing German missionaries from their stations, nor to concern oneself with these officially categorized as enemy aliens.
In a letter, dated 2nd November, 1939, Johannes Stosch reported to his home board: „We have nothing to complain about, although we feel how difficult it is to be separated from our work.“47 The abrupt detention within the confines of the Ahmadnagar camp was a distressing situation for the seasoned or the younger missionary, both with their ideals and dreams for the mission church. There was some comfort in the knowledge, that the „mission work, where that has had to be abandoned by Germans,“48 now was under the guidance of neighbouring missionary societies. Yet more unsettling as an emotional experience for the German missionaries was the separation from their wives and families, and particularly for those awaiting additions to their families.49
Ahmadnagar was a „pukka old military settlement,50 a fine solid camp used by the British for their troops, in particular for the 11th Infantry Brigade, which had its headquarters in the old fort itself.51 Naturally Paul Gäbler saw his internment from inside the camp;
It was surrounded with Stacheldraht (barbed wire). We were guarded by Indian soldiers. They continuously marched up and down. And there were very strong lights. You couldn’t escape, though a few did escape; but as white people you couldn’t get very far.52
Furthermore, „too many people came“53 to the internment camp, and likely too early. „There were crowds of Germans“ collected from all over India, so that „about 2,000 were interned at that time“,54 at the East Ridge Barracks of the cantonment. With „a big group of Germans there,“55 of businessmen, Jewish refugees and Lutheran and Roman Catholic missionaries, one internee remarked:
It was a bad time in the beginning, because we were all put into tents, four each into one tent at Ahmadnagar. There were terrible rains (monsoons), and it went through the tents. And we felt very uncomfortable. But the reason for that was that the barracks were not yet free. First the soldiers had to be removed and then we moved into the barracks; then it became quite a bearable life.56
Contrasted to these words of Gäbler, was the more public-conscious depiction of Ahmadnagar by the Swiss Chairman of the Basel Mission in India, who first visited his German brethren only in January, 1940.57 The Mission monthly, Der Evangelische Heidenbote. reported:
India. Through a letter, dated September 27th, from President Streckeisen, it can be concluded that … the climate there is good, the quarters satisfactory with enough freedom for movement and the opportunity for sports.58
For purposes of this study it is possible to define the weeks and months of late 1939, as into 1940, at the Central Aliens Internment Camp into distinct, functional spheres. They might be categorized as the life at Ahmadnagar, the pressure within the camp, the concern outside the barracks, the principle of discrimination, the Darling Commission of Enquiry and the missionaries‘ release.