THE ISLAND OF EXTRAORDINARY CAPTIVES: A Painter, a Poet, an Heiress, and a Spy in a World War II British Internment Camp, by Simon Parkin

A German invasion of mainland Britain never felt closer than during that period between 1940 and 1945, when thousands of Nazi soldiers occupied the Channel Islands, holding captive the British citizens of Guernsey, Jersey and Sark in isolating and punitive conditions. But hundreds of miles farther north in the cold, gray waters of the Irish Sea, halfway between Cumbria and the coast of Northern Ireland, lies an island on which these authoritarian circumstances occurred in reverse.

With its thatched cottages and seaside boardinghouses, the Isle of Man is today beloved as a peaceful holiday haven. But for much of the war, the island was the unwelcome host to 10 internment camps, including one reserved exclusively for women. The seventh complex, named Hutchinson, was a vast terrace of buildings behind whose veil of barbed wire 12,000 largely innocent German and Austrian refugees, the majority Jewish, were incarcerated. “The Island of Ordinary Captives,” a truly shocking story of what officials are wont to term “national misjudgment,” is electrifyingly told by the journalist and historian Simon Parkin, whose breadth and depth of original research has produced an account of cinematic vividness.

As the threat of conflict deepened in the immediate years before war broke out, thousands fled Nazi persecution for sanctuary in Britain. Encouraged by widespread antisemitism and anti-refugee sentiments, the government, led by Winston Churchill from 1940, feared other countries would consider Britain an easy touch for their own unwanted asylum seekers. Britain’s popular newspapers, especially The Daily Express and Daily Mail, fed on this prejudice and intensified their warnings against what came to be termed “the enemy in our midst.” “Act! Act! Act! Every German Is an Agent!” exhorted one typical headline, encouraging suspicion of anyone with a foreign accent. The government welcomed the deluge of tip-offs from a paranoid public energized to seek out the “Fifth Column” of Nazi agents in their midst. The slightest and most absurd premise could trigger “a panic measure born of historical ignorance and bedrock xenophobia.” A sequence of mysterious knocking noises behind a wall, reported by a zealous neighbor, proved to be sounds of enthusiastic lovemaking. A beekeeper was hauled in for questioning after his private diary fell into investigative hands — he’d noted his plan to “exchange British Queen for Italian Queen.”

One of Britain’s most shameful retaliatory actions concerned the S.S. Arandora Star. Packed with refugees being deported back to Newfoundland, the vessel was hit by a German U-boat, drowning the majority of the passengers. Britain was not alone in its policies of exclusion; citing a compassionate unwillingness to separate children from their parents, President Franklin Roosevelt returned thousands of underage innocents to their homeland, only for them to perish later in the Holocaust. As Parkin comments, “hysteria smothered logic,” and, he might well have added, mercy.