Jewish Refugees, Nazi Passports and British Internment

How Two Jewish Refugees Escaped Nazi Germany, Only to Be Interned in Britain

Two passports. Two lives saved at the last possible moment. The German passports belonging to Lora and Ernst Drechsler, both stamped with the Nazi regime’s infamous red “J” for Jew, are more than collector’s items. They are primary-source evidence of one of the most overlooked chapters of World War II: Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution, reaching the safety of Britain, and then being locked up by the country that let them in.

Who Were Lora and Ernst Drechsler?

Ernst Robert Drechsler and Lora Drechsler were born in Vienna in 1906 and 1908 respectively, likely siblings, possibly a married couple. Both held German passports issued in Vienna, each bearing the compulsory red “J” stamp that Nazi authorities introduced in October 1938 to identify Jewish passport holders at a glance.

Their passports survive as two of the most historically significant documents in the passport-collector.com archive. Together, they tell the story of a race against time.

Ernst’s passport (No. 103423) was issued in Vienna on 14 March 1939. It records him as a sales agent. Inside, page 7 carries a currency control stamp dated 28 April 1939, confirming approval of luggage, a chilling reminder that emigrating Jews could take almost nothing with them. Page 8 shows a Kent County Constabulary stamp (Wingham Division) dated 15 May 1939, and page 9 carries both a UK visa granted in Vienna on 5 May 1939 and a Dover immigration stamp dated 12 May 1939.

Lora’s passport (No. 63899) was issued in Vienna on 23 December 1938. Her occupation is listed as “Household.” Page 9 holds a UK visa issued in Vienna on 27 July 1939 and a Dover immigration stamp dated 22 August 1939, just ten days before Germany invaded Poland and World War II began.

The Red J Stamp: What It Meant to Be Jewish in Nazi-Controlled Europe

Since July 1937, Jews in the Reich had been granted passports only under special circumstances. After Germany’s annexation of Austria, known as the Anschluss, in March 1938, that restriction extended to Austrian Jews as well. The compulsory red “J” stamp followed in October 1938, making Jewish identity visible to every border official, every police officer, and every Nazi checkpoint guard.

Emigrating Jews faced deliberate financial destruction. Their property was confiscated. They were permitted to leave with only minimal luggage and a small allowance of “pocket money.” After war broke out on 1 September 1939, escape became nearly impossible.

The numbers tell the story in the starkest terms. In 1933, approximately 500,000 Jews lived in the Reich. By the end of 1944, fewer than 15,000 remained. The regime described itself as 97 percent “Judenfrei,” a word that translates, chillingly, as “cleansed of Jews.”

Lora and Ernst were among the fraction who got out.

British Civilian Internment, 1939 to 1945: Refugees Behind British Barbed Wire

When Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, around 80,000 so-called “enemy aliens” were living in the UK. British authorities feared that among them could be spies or potential collaborators. All Germans and Austrians over the age of 16 were summoned before special tribunals and sorted into three categories:

• Category A (roughly 600 people): High security risk, interned immediately.
• Category B (roughly 6,500 people): Doubtful cases, subject to supervision and restrictions.
• Category C (roughly 64,000 people): No security risk, left at liberty. More than 55,000 in this group were officially recognized as refugees from Nazi oppression. The vast majority were Jewish.

By spring 1940, the atmosphere shifted. The failure of the Norwegian campaign triggered a wave of spy fever and public hostility toward enemy aliens. Mass roundups followed. When Italy entered the war in June 1940, Winston Churchill ordered the internment of at least 19,000 Italians living in Britain, many of whom had been settled there for decades.

The Isle of Man and the Camps: Boredom, Injustice, and Survival

Thousands of Germans, Austrians, and Italians were transported to hastily assembled camps, including one at Huyton outside Liverpool and several on the Isle of Man, where internment facilities had also operated during World War I. Conditions were basic. The real hardship was indefinite confinement with no clear end date.

In at least one Isle of Man camp, over 80 percent of internees were Jewish refugees, the very people who had fled Nazi terror. That they were now being held behind British wire as “German nationals” was a contradiction that took months to penetrate official thinking. Until it did, married women were barred from visiting their husbands in the camps. Visits were finally permitted in August 1940, and a dedicated family camp was established in late 1941.

More than 7,000 internees were deported overseas. The liner Arandora Star sailed for Canada on 1 July 1940, carrying German and Italian internees. It was torpedoed and sunk, killing 714 people, most of them internees. Those transported to Australia aboard the Dunera fared little better: guards stole possessions, threw luggage overboard, and subjected passengers to degrading treatment throughout a two-month voyage.

Parliamentary pressure eventually forced the government’s hand. The first releases came in August 1940. By February 1941, more than 10,000 internees had been freed. By the summer of 1942, only 5,000 remained in camps. Many released internees subsequently served in the British armed forces or contributed to the war effort on the Home Front.

Kitchener Camp: A Temporary Refuge Near Sandwich, Kent

If your family included a Jewish refugee from Germany, Austria, Poland, or Czechoslovakia who arrived in Britain in 1939, there is a strong chance they passed through Kitchener Camp, a former World War I military base near Sandwich in East Kent.

Between February 1939 and the outbreak of war on 3 September 1939, just under 4,000 adult Jewish men were put on trains in Berlin and Vienna. They traveled via Ostende and Dover to Sandwich, where the Central British Fund (CBF) had leased the old barracks now called Kitchener Camp. The site was one of seven First World War camps clustered around Richborough Port; it was sometimes also called Richborough transit camp.

The camp was managed by two Jewish brothers, Jonas and Phineas May, who drew on experience running summer camps for the Jewish Lads’ Brigade. Administering a facility housing 4,000 traumatized men, most of whom had been forced to leave their families behind in Nazi-controlled territory, was a far more demanding undertaking. During the summer of 1939, a small number of men succeeded in arranging for their wives to follow using domestic service visas, and for their children to come via the Kindertransport. For most families, that window closed too soon. Those left behind were killed in the Holocaust.

Ernst Drechsler’s Kent County Constabulary stamp, dated 15 May 1939, places him in exactly this part of England at exactly this moment in history. His passport may be one of very few surviving documents linking a named individual to the chain of events that ran from Vienna to Kitchener Camp.

Why These Passports Matter as Historical Evidence

Passport history is not a peripheral curiosity. Documents like the Drechsler passports are among the most precise surviving records of how Nazi policy operated on the ground and how individual lives intersected with that machinery. The stamps inside these two passports, currency controls, police checks, transit visas, immigration entries, trace a complete escape route across Europe, page by page.

You can explore more documents from this era in the passport-collector.com archive or review related research in Tom Topol’s published passport history books. For questions about a specific document or family research, contact Tom Topol directly.

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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