Concentration Camps in Scotland

Dr. Yvette Alt Millerprint article

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A little-known network of concentration camps operated in Scotland during World War II.

The Jewish prisoners were beaten and starved. Some were chained in their cells; at least one inmate was shot by a guard on a seeming whim. It was the early 1940s and the Holocaust was raging across Europe. Anti-Semitic soldiers who’d fought with Hitler ran brutal concentration camps where violence was common – but these were not the famous concentration camps of Germany and Poland.

Many Jewish prisoners – as well as other non-Jewish victims – were held in camps across Scotland, run by Polish prisoners who were given autonomy to run these brutal prisons however they wanted. Between 1940 and 1946, untold numbers of prisoners – many of them Jews – were held in a network of secretive wartime concentration camps across Scotland. Their stories of these Holocaust victims have seldom been told.

Polish Soldiers in Scotland

In 1939, German forces overran Poland, defeating Poland’s armed forces in just 35 days. Gen. Władysław Sikorski, a former Prime Minister of Poland, travelled to Britain and formed Poland’s Government in Exile. This was crucial work, and Gen. Sikorski forged warm relations with the leaders of the Allied nations as well as the other heads of Governments in Exile whose lands were also being occupied by Nazi troops and governed by puppet leaders.

In June 1940, as Nazi Germany was in the last stages of overcoming France’s military and occupying most off Western Europe, Britain completed the largest evacuation of troops in human history: 340,000 Allied troops were brought from the Belgian town of Dunkirk to safety in the United Kingdom.

Stobs internment camp near Hawick in the Scottish Borders held around 4,500 civilians and military prisoners of war

Among these troops were over 20,000 Polish soldiers. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Sikorski came to an agreement about the use of these men: they would be stationed along the east coast of Scotland, which was being threatened with invasion from Norway. Gen. Sikorski’s task was enormous, and he was given relatively free reign to use Polish personnel as he saw fit. Polish bases in Scotland were treated as having Polish sovereignty. Any crimes or problems were a matter for the Polish Government in Exile. Scottish police didn’t even have any jurisdiction in the case of violence or criminal activity.

Throughout the war, this large contingent of Polish troops in Scotland expanded. It was British policy to turn over any Polish soldiers they captured in Europe to Poland’s Government in Exile in Scotland, rather than keep them in POW camps with soldiers from other Nazi-occupied nations. By the end of World War II in 1945, a majority of the Polish troops in Scotland had previously fought alongside German forces.

Despite their Nazi associations, these Polish soldiers were generally appreciated by local Scottish civilians. But many of the Polish soldiers harbored deep anti-Jewish sentiments. This was reflected in their leadership. Some British people got a glimpse into just how deep Polish anti-Semitism could be when a British MP, Evelyn Walkden, asked a question in the House of Commons on April 16, 1944. “The Polish Army Command made it a condition that the (British) Entertainments National Service Association should not send a single concert party to the Polish army which in included a Jewish artist, and that they insist upon that condition,” Mr. Walkden explained, asking, “Has that condition been repudiated or annulled?” (No satisfactory answer was forthcoming.)

Concentration Camps in Scotland

As well as tolerating extreme anti-Jewish sentiments in his troops, Gen. Sikorski was also suspicious of his fellow Polish politicians in exile, fearing they were plotting against him. At a July 18, 1940 meeting of the Polish National Council in London, Gen. Sikorski made a chilling announcement about the type of Polish Government in Exile he was creating. “There is no Polish judiciary,” he announced; “Those who conspire will be sent to a concentration camp.”

The general set up a concentration camp at Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute, near Glasgow, to hold Polish opposition figures and anyone else the Polish Government in Exile authorities decided to imprison. There was seemingly no accountability or judicial process. The famous Polish military leader and historian Gen. Marian Kukiel was given the title Commander of Camps and Polish Army Units in Scotland. Among his tasks was to imprison Polish nationals.

An image of Rothesay Bay in Bute, taken in 1943

Soon, Gens. Sikorski and Kukiel found that one secretive concentration camp in Scotland wasn’t enough. They built another in the village of Tighnabruich, on Scotland’s mainland. Eventually, they built more camps. The towns of Kingledoors and Auchterarder were among the quiet Scottish locations that housed brutal prisons.

Eventually, the Polish Government in Exile ran about half a dozen concentration camps across Scotland. Many were forbidding prisons, surrounded by watchtowers and barbed wire and patrolled by armed men. One, at Inverkeithing, was only eight miles from Scotland’s capital Edinburgh. Scottish locals were told that the prisons housed Nazi sympathizers, so that they wouldn’t feel sorry for the prisoners. Nevertheless, tales of horrible conditions began to leak out and be whispered about in the Scottish communities near the camps.

Some of the most high profile Polish politicians in exile were imprisoned in these camps, including Gen. Ludomil Antoni Rayski, the former Commander of Poland’s Air Force, and former Polish Prime Minister Marian Zyndram-Koscialkowski. Some Polish nationals were imprisoned for drunkenness or other reasons. Many of the prisoners, however, were Jews. It seemed that Gen. Sikorski reserved his particular distaste for Jews, and was eager to lock up as many as he could in the brutal prison network he was building.

Jewish Prisoners

Tragically, the names of many of the Jews imprisoned in the Polish concentration camps in Scotland are lost to history. Some prisoners seemed to want to erase the memory of their wartime torture.

One famous Jew who is known to have spent time in the camps was the noted poet and writer Isaac Deutscher. He travelled to Britain from Poland in 1939 to work for a newspaper; that assignment saved his life. Deutscher remained in Britain after Germany invaded Poland. When Britain mobilized troops to fight Hitler, he decided to travel to Scotland and volunteer to fight with the Polish army in exile that was based there. Deutscher managed to enlist but was soon arrested and imprisoned in the concentration camp at Rothesay.

On June 10, 1945, The New York Times announced that Dr. Jan Jagodzinski, the Jewish editor of Polpress, the Polish Government in Exile’s news agency in London, was “arrested” by plainclothes “officers” in London. These weren’t British police officers: they were self-appointed officers of the Polish Government in Exile and they kidnapped Dr. Jagodzinski. They took him north to Scotland, where they imprisoned him in the concentration camp they were running in the small Scottish town of Inverkeithing.

Instead of showing outrage at this abduction, a British Foreign Office official dismissed the kidnapping as “just an accident of police procedure” and called the targeting of Dr. Jagodzinski “most unfortunate”.

At least two other Jews are also known to have been abducted from London by Polish forces: Benjamin and Jack Ajzenberg were brothers who were “arrested” by Polish agents in London – with the help of the British police – and imprisoned in Scotland. Their fate was only made public in February 1941, when a Jewish MP, Samuel Silverman, asked about their fate during a debate in the House of Commons.

Torture and Death

Though it’s not entirely known just how many Jews and others were imprisoned, tortured and killed in these camps, some reports did get out. On October 29, 1940, at the camp in the rural Scottish area of Kingledoors, Jewish prisoner Edward Jakubowsky was shot to death by a guard who justified his actions saying Mr. Jakubowsky had been “insolent”. The Scottish police were not informed at the time.

How the papers broke the story of camp conditions

At the camp in Inverkeithing, reporters were finally able to talk to prisoners in 1945. A 23-year-old Jew named Josef Dobosiewicz told reporters that he’d previously fought with the Canadian army. He’d been held at Inverkeithing for over two months and had seen prisoners chained in their cells. Another prisoner told the journalists that he’d previously been held in a German POW camp, and the conditions there were better than in the Polish run camp in Scotland. The reporters also found that just two weeks prior, a prisoner had been shot while trying to escape and had died of his wounds. (Discussed in British Concentration Camps: A Brief History from 1900-1975 by Simon Webb. Pen and Sword History: 2016)

British MPs Raising Questions

On February 19, 1941 MP Samuel Silverman asked a formal question in Parliament: was the Secretary of State for War “aware that Benjamin Ajzenberg and his brother Jack were arrested by two Polish soldiers accompanied by a British police officer, detained for one night in a London prison, removed under escort to another prison in Scotland, detained there for six weeks without trial, then detained for a further 10 days without trial in a Polish military camp and finally released; whether these persons are stateless civilians, and under what authority they were deprived of their liberty?”

This question described the fate of many other Polish Jews in Britain as well, but went largely unanswered – then and for many years afterwards.

In addition to Mr. Silverman, a few other British MPs raised concerns about the brutal tactics of Polish forces in Scotland. In 1942 the Scottish MP Adam McKinley asked a formal question about what was happening behind the prison walls on the Isle of Bute. Hoping to avoid any tension with their wartime ally, the British offered no information. The Allied Forces Act ensured that the British Government had no right to oversee what was going on in the Polish run prisons or on their bases.

At the end of the war, after Nazi Germany had already surrendered, another Scottish MP, Robert McIntyre, asked in the House of Commons: “Will the government make provision for the inspection, at any time, by representatives of the various districts of Scotland of any penal settlements, concentration camps, detention barracks, prisons, etc. within their area, whether these institutions are under the control of the British, American, French or Polish governments or any other authority; and for the issuing of a public report by those representatives?”

That same day, a Moscow radio station announced, “The Polish Fascist concentration camp system…was preserved when the Poles fled from Poland. They found a cosy shelter at Inverkeithing (in Scotland), where in the midst of British rules and customs, and surrounded by barbed wire, lies a patch of Fascist Poland. Patriots refusing to serve under the clique headed by (then Polish Government in Exile leader Tomasz) Arecisewski, also democratically minded Poles and members of the Polish Workers Party are being ruthlessly treated or killed when attempting to escape.” This report, which was clearly designed as a piece of Communist propaganda, was for the most part true.

Still Operating in 1946

World War II ended in 1945, and a year later the Polish concentration camps in Scotland were still in operation. On April 16, 1946, the Scottish MP William Gallcher asked the following questions in the House of Commons:

“Is he (Secretary of State for War Frederick Bellenger) aware that two Polish Jewish soldiers, David Glicenstein and Shimon Getreuthendler, have been sentenced by Polish court martial to terms of imprisonment; if he will enquire into these cases which represent victimisation of two Jewish soldiers who were among those who left the Polish army owing to anti-Semitic conditions in 1944…and if he will cause the sentences to be rescinded so that these Polish Jewish soldiers can return to their own country as they wish to do.”

It’s not recorded what became of Mr. Glicenstein and Mr. Getreuthendler, but the Polish-run prisons were in the process of being closed at long last.

After World War II, the new British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, pressured Polish authorities to shut down the prison camps. By the end of 1946 they were no longer operating.

For years, the stories of the Polish-run concentration camps in Scotland remained little known. This shameful blot on Britain’s and Poland’s wartime record deserves to be remembered. The Jewish victims who were imprisoned, tortured and murdered in Scotland’s brutal concentration camps must not be forgotten.

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The graphic above is for illustrative purposes only

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