8 Civilian Germans of Persia and their Fate in Australian World War Two Internment Prison Camps

Pedram Khosronejad^[1]

Keywords

Iran, Persia, Germany, Turkey, Australia, World War Two Internment Prison Camp, Germans of Persia.

Introduction to Mrs Helga Griffin article

Until today, the lives and fates of those 512 German civilians of Persia, today’s Iran, the imprisoned inhabitants of Australian World War Two confinement centres, and their family members before, during, and after the war have been ignored by academia.

It was during August 2019 that I made contact with some of the “children” of the German expatriate colony of Persia (Iran), today’s Australians who had been detained or deported with their parents in Iran in 1941 after the country’s invasion by the British and Soviet Armies during World War Two.

512 of them (single males and six families with their children) were sent to the Australian internment prison camps, while the rest of the women and children were forced to separate from their husbands, deported from Iran, and sent to Europe during the war.

In 1947, after the end of war, some of these civilian German internees were deported or repatriated while many were able to stay in Australia. It was only from 1949 that most of the women and children were able to rejoin their husbands and continue family life in Australia.

This project concerns their life stories.

Brief History

After the First World War, at the time of the period of the great depression in Europe and also with the infrastructure development projects of Iran, between 1930 and 1941 many young and talented civilian Germans considered Iran as their land of opportunity. After moving there, they established a large expatriate community all around the cities, rural areas and also the territories of pastoral nomads.

The majority of the civilian German expatriates of Persia came to the country as young and top-rate scholars, engineers, technicians, architects, and trader-salesmen.

After June 1941, when Hitler had announced the details of Germany’s BARBAROSSA Operation accompanied by his massive assaults on the Soviet Union, the civilian German expatriates of Iran had acknowledged that things could not continue as they were forever and that their luxury life would soon end.

June 22^nd 1941, from the personal diary of Johann Friedrich Bambach (1883-1962), detained on August 16^th 1941 in Isfahan, Iran. Australian War Prison Registration No: R36428.

On August 25^th 1941, the British Army launched Operation Countenance. 19,000 British and Indian troops advanced across the Iraqi border into Iran, while 40,000 Soviet soldiers, under the rather ironic codename Operation Compassion, invaded Iran from the North. Neither invading forces met with much resistance from the Iranian side.

August 25^th 1941, from the personal diary of Johann Friedrich Bambach (1883-1962), detained on August 16^th 1941 in Isfahan, Iran. Australian War Prison Registration No: R36428.

Erwin Ettel, German Ambassador in Iran, negotiated with the British and Soviet forces and also the Iranian government to work out what was to happen with the civilian Germans in Iran. In the end it was decided that the civilian German women and children were permitted to leave the Embassy for Germany during the war via Turkey.

The remainder of the civilian German men, a number of non-civilian Germans (seamen), and six families, were sent to the Australian Internment Prison Camps.

Today, it is the case for the students of the field that it is quite impossible to understand whether the presence of civilian Germans in Iran between the two wars was an improvised action that happened in a pragmatic way, based on the infrastructure development projects of Reza Shah (1878-1944), the king of Iran (r. 1925-1941); or if indeed it was a carefully crafted project based on pre-coordinated policies designed by the Nazis.

However, I would like to openly emphasise that the presence of the civilian German expatriates of Persia should not even be considered as one of the main reasons for the invasion of the country by two foreign aggressor countries.

Methodology

In the past six decades, Australia, like other countries in the Global North, has received a growing number of Middle Eastern prisoners of war, refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers, including Iranians.

The importance of their tangible and intangible heritage to such refugees/migrants is a global phenomenon, and gives them a sense of identity and integration within the host and homeland society. Thus, migrant heritage can stretch beyond borders and across generations, and today, communities who may not identify as migrants themselves recognise migrant heritage in their own families. Migrant heritage offers a different entry point to the ongoing connections between peoples in different locations and the shared sense of belonging and communal identity that can flourish from those connections.

Our project feeds into growing academic debates in response to an urgent need to engage migrant communities, to move beyond previous classical ideas of “collaboration” towards co-design and reciprocal participation. Our project brings together multidisciplinary approaches to the questions about the participation of war migrant communities in Australia and their reciprocal collaboration in the practice of building and representing their migrant, multicultural, and family heritage with a special emphasis on migrant heritages and approaches that attempt to privilege and centre “non-expert voices”.

Our innovative project is a unique case study of cultural self-representation by members of the war migrant population of Australia, the civilian Germans of Persia, and goes beyond group negotiation and moves towards reciprocal collaboration, a practice that allows migrant participants agency in producing and controlling their narratives and voices.

Therefore, our project draws on the rich and overlapping fields of both theory and practice relating to heritage, memory and migration. Working on migrant heritage constructed within, beyond and between borders, our project responds to the challenge of how to bring aged Australian war migrants and refugees, prisoners of war, academics, and policymakers together to engage with migrant heritage as the political, cultural and social process of representing and preserving migratory experiences: the temporal and spatial dimensions of mobility and its emotional, familial, and community aftermath, both tangible and intangible.

Our project should be considered the first multidisciplinary (reciprocal anthropology, anthropology of aging, war studies, and material culture studies) and reciprocal academic attempt at the recollection of the socio-cultural history and memories of this special group of civilian German detainees of Persia, through their family collection and childhood memory.

Our project investigates the role of their intangible (e.g. childhood memories and autobiographies) and tangible heritage (e.g. family photo albums, personal diaries, letters, and arts of the camp) mostly from Iran or related to Iran, in their life and their resettlement in Australia.

In particular, our project aims to investigate how today, the children and descendants of this group of civilian Germans of Persia who have been living in Australia since the late 1940s remember and reconstruct their memories with the help of “migration mementos”, mostly their “Persian mementos”.

The overarching argument that we follow in our project is the multifaceted role and multifunctional usage of the tangible and the intangible heritage of this special group of civilian Germans of Persia as coping strategies during harsh life experiences such as detention and forced deportation from Iran, being war refugees in Germany during WWII, and imprisonment and forced resettlement in Australia.

Either Lost or Found? A Child’s Story from an Australian World War II Internment Camp^[2]

Helga (Girschik) Griffin^[3]

My Austrian father, Rudolf Girschik, as a 23-year old engineering graduate from Vienna, rode his bicycle in 1933 along the Danube River to the Black Sea and on to Istanbul, looking for work at a time of European economic depression. Rudolf found good work in Turkey and there met a German woman, Elfriede Bittnar, whom he married and who gave birth to me (1935) in a Turkish village. In early 1936, my parents took me to Persia, where my father worked on establishing railways and their associated buildings, roads, tunnels and bridges.  My brother Peter was born in Tehran.

When in August 1941, during World War II, British and Russian soldiers invaded neutral Iran to conserve essential materials from falling into German hands, all German guest workers and their families were deported. Close to 500 men were apprehended and sent into internment to an unknown destination, while nearly all their women and children were returned to their original homelands. By chance, six couples and four children, including me and my brother, eventually travelled by sea with the numerous men. We travelled as far as Bombay on the Rohna, and then to Adelaide, on the Rangitiki. The men were taken to internment at Loveday in South Australia, the few families to Victoria.

My family was interned in Tatura’s Camp 3, together with numerous families who had been deported from Palestine, where a different policy had been enacted. We 16 from Persia were a tiny minority within the family camp of between 900 and a thousand of mostly German persons. We lived for five years in Spartan military huts, within six and a half hectares, surrounded by walls of barbed wire, guarded by soldiers with machine guns and all-night light.

There was little privacy in our camp. Our quarters were cramped. Most activity was communal. It was mostly organised by the majority from Palestine. We learnt hardly anything about Australia in which we were marooned until well after the end of the war. My brother Herbert was born in a camp hospital in 1945. We called him Das Kriegskind^[4]. Opting to remain in Australia, in 1946 my parents chose to settle in Melbourne. As our father could not find proper work or accommodation, my brother Peter and I fortunately avoided an orphanage because Catholic nuns took us in for nothing for over a year. At the time my father’s qualifications from Vienna were not accepted in a Commonwealth country like Australia.

The greater detail of my story can be found in my book Sing Me That Lovely Song Again (2005) or its re-print as an e-book, At Home in Exile (2022) which can be read for free at ANU Press.

Does Civilian Internment, or Detention, Constitute an Abuse of Human Rights?   

In an important book produced by scholars from the University of New South Wales, Retreat from Injustice: Human Rights in Australia (1994, 508 pp., 2004 edition, 754 pp.), by Nicholas O’Neill and his associates, the treatment of refugees and illegal immigrants is discussed empathetically, but the internment of civilians is not mentioned. During the two world wars, internment of civilians was practiced for reasons of national security. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was framed only after the massive criminal genocide of Jewish people by the German regime during World War II, and the corresponding Nuremberg war crimes trials. Since then, the very act of warfare, its associated possession or destruction of other peoples’ property and lives, is being seriously considered in liberal democracies as crimes against humanity.^[5] The basic standard for human rights remains the promotion of security and liberty for all people, fair and respectful treatment of them, their freedom for religious practice, of peaceful public assembly, right to freedom of speech and the right to political self-determination. Australia is the only liberal democracy that does not yet have a national act or charter of human rights.

In our Girschik family’s civilian internment, we were defined as internees but were actually treated as prisoners. I, therefore, ask associated questions:

How legitimate is a military invasion of a neutral foreign country? Was the invasion of neutral Iran by Russian and British military forces not a crime?

What right did the invaders have to remove from Iran its professional German guest workers who had an impeccable relationship with the Iranian regime? One of the Geneva Conventions lists the “deportation of non-combatants “ as one of eleven war crimes.

How legitimate was it for the British soldiers to remove forever significant documents, like birth certificates, rendering the internees stateless?

How appropriate was it for the German diplomatic authority to separate men from their wives and children as a political bargaining exercise?

A still-current British Bill of Rights of 1660 states that degrading punishments should not be inflicted on prisoners.^[6] The journey of 500 male internees in 1941 on the relatively small Indian merchant ship, the Rohna, was ‘degrading’. Male prisoners lived mostly below deck, had their suitcases ransacked by guards and, on toilets, were supervised by soldiers with bayonets.

The journey across the Indian Ocean in late 1941 was endangered by enemy submarines and raiders^[7]. We had an escort of five war-ships at one time.

The civilian camps in Australia were heavily secured with barbed wire fencing and by guards with machine guns.  Any attempt to escape was punished by 28 days in solitary confinement.

To be deprived of personal freedom for well over five years, surely defies the basic tenets of human rights.

Camp living was pressured with little privacy. Internal divisions caused conflict between a majority of pro-Nazis and a minority of non-Nazis.

The camp was a promiscuous place with undue psychological pressures on girls by parents.

Some men released their frustrations on their children with harsh corporal punishments for minor acts of disobedience.

No doubt we all suffered post-war from traces of trauma. No one wanted to speak about their internment for many years. News of Nazi atrocities post war further fuelled the shame of having been labelled ‘enemy aliens’.

Pedram’s project nowadays has provided us with a broader perspective. We feel empathy for each other’s past dilemmas. Those separated from their fathers for up to eight years had been far worse off, living in terror of bombing raids and sometimes suffering near starvation in Europe. In camp we internees had military rations, with food enough to burn.

Interpreting our family photos, Pedram showed me how much my harsh father had actually loved me before the war. This softened my own empathy for him and made me understand better the pressured dad he had had to endure in the camp, having lost his daily professional engagements and walking a tight rope as a non-Nazi Austrian patriot.^[8] Pedram gave us literature dealing with the coping mechanisms afforded by material culture. My mother had done it instinctively in camp, having four of us sleep in double bunks in one room, and turning the other room into a kind of Iranian lounge, a home away from home.  Reading the letters my parents exchanged after dad was released from camp a few months before us,^[9] reveal our mother’s failure to understand her husband’s struggle to find work and accommodation. This also deepened my empathy for my father.

I reflect how in camp I had gained numerous practical skills not shared by my Australian peers at school in Melbourne.  I was able to pass on these skills to my children and grandchildren. But camp life had also fostered the excessive competitive German culture of that period. What the Irish nuns at school taught me to value more was that a shared culture of kindness, consideration and respect, was far more valuable in dealing with life’s complexities than winning the Olympic medals that our sports programs in the camp had fostered in us children.

Yes, I must admit overall, that what I have Found in Life turns out to be more valuable than what I once Lost. Pedram’s initiatives have led me to answer this question in the affirmative.

SDG Alignment

This chapter highlights poignantly the generational impacts of forced migration and civilian internments. The UN SDG 2030 framework emphasises peace, justice and strong institutions however, with rising global migration flows both forced and voluntary as a consequence of increased war and geopolitical tensions, economic pressures and climate impacts, greater consideration of this agenda for sustainable development is vital.

SDG 5 – Gender Equality

SDG 10 – Reduced Inequalities

SDG 16 – Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Target 16.a

Strengthen relevant national institutions, including through international cooperation, for building capacity at all levels, in particular in developing countries, to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime

How to Cite this Chapter

Khosronejad, P. (2025). Civilian Germans of Persia and their Fate in Australian World War Two Internment Prison Camps. In Boddington, E., Chandran, B., Dollin, J., Har, J. W., Hayes, K., Kofod, C., Salisbury, F., & Walton, L. (Eds.). Sustainable development without borders: Western Sydney University to the World  (2025 ed.). Sydney: Western Sydney University. Available from https://doi.org/10.61588/TESB2263

Attribution

Civilian Germans of Persia and their Fate in Australian World War Two Internment Prison Camps © 2024 by Pedram Khosronejad (introduction) and Helga (Girschik) Griffin (article) is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en