Wilhelm Russo

I have decided to add a section about Wilhelm as I recently found a card from him to my mum written in 1944 in London and I hadn’t realised he had come back to London after being interned in Australia.

So I’ll summarize here what I know about him.

He was the youngest of Moritz and Maria’s children, born in 1900 in Wernigerode and the only boy. The children grew up in Wernigerode until they moved to Berlin after Moritz had established himself there. Wilhelm studied dramaturgy and was successful in theatre production. He worked as an assistant director at the Stadttheater Gera in Thuringia and became a young communist in the 1920’s. I do not know if he knew Wolf at that time who would have been 11 years older than him. He was imprisoned early on, in 1932, in Buchenwald, for a year because of communist activities and it appears, according to my dad, that he was denounced by his sister Grete, who later applied to join the Nazi Party with her husband (although they soon retracted their application).  Wilhelm then emigrated to Prague and when Hitler occupied the Sudetenland, fled to England. He could only find work in London as an unskilled worker and was interned on the Isle of Man in 1940 at the same time as my parents and two of my uncles. I wonder if they made contact there too.

The British government interned 12,000 German ‘enemy aliens’ in May 1940 even if they were refugees from Nazi Germany and the camps were overcrowded, leading them to send 7,500 to Canada and Australia. On July 10 1940, Wilhelm Russo was taken from the Isle of Man to Liverpool and then to Australia on board the infamous HMT Dunera, along with 2,000 Jewish refugees and another 500 internees, including Italian and German prisoners of war and Nazis. The passengers did not know where they were going. The journey lasted 57 days and the ship was under constant risk of enemy attack. “But it was the physical conditions and ill treatment that were the most deplorable.Internees were frequently abused, beaten, and robbed by the guards. An overcrowded hell-hole”. Medicines and luggage were thrown overboard and torpedoes were fired at the ship, although they did not explode. Afterwards, several of the British guards were court-martialled for their actions.

 Wilhelm, along with many others, was sent to Hay Camp in New South Wales, the most overtly political of the camps. On his service and casualty form, he described himself as without religion and named his sister Elisabeth as his next of kin. He gave his occupation as a welder and his status as single.Many plays and revues were produced, as described in a book chapter called Hay Days in Australia, but conditions in the camps were not good. We know that Wilhelm spent some time in the Tatura camps in Victoria, a large complex of many camps housing people from different areas. Although the general attitude to internment policy changed after the circumstances regarding the SS Arandora Star and the HMT Dunera came to light, it still took a long time before the internees were liberated from Australia and Canada and could return. I thought Wilhelm had stayed until the nd of the war but I recently found a card he had sent my mother in 1944:

Here he is writing to Erna after her separation from my dad when my brother was born. She was evacuated to Wales and he says he hopes to see her soon. After the war, he went to East Berlin, and worked as a librarian, presumably wanting to be part of building up the communist country but perhaps he was disillusioned as we know he fled to the West in 1953, after the protests on 17th June, and died (in the West) in a camp for so-called ‘unreliables’ in 1954. The cause of death given is “epileptic seizure”, although he had no previous history of epilepsy.