While civilians in the metropole had mixed responses to concerted efforts to urge them to carry their gas masks, popular culture continued to make the gas mask an object of humor as well as something to manage panic or fear. As the war continued, new questions emerged that showed the limits of the gas mask’s reach, notably who was responsible for providing gas masks for internees in camps on the Isle of Man or for colonial subjects in places ranging from Aden to India to Singapore to the West Indies. Those planning for civil defense had not considered provisions for those in Britain’s extensive empire, and those in the colonies came to treat imperial civil defense with ambivalence. As Britain’s access to its overseas empire – and most importantly its source of rubber – shifted by the middle of 1942, so too did its instructions about gas masks. It now no longer asked its inhabitants to carry their gas masks everywhere but instead to ensure that they knew where they were and would keep them in good order. Despite poison gas not being deployed in massive attacks on civilians, as feared in the planning stages, the government continued to provide babies’ anti-gas protective helmets to all infants, and to inspect and repair gas masks for other ages throughout the war. At the war’s end, however, it decided not to collect these devices, just in case they could be of use in a future war.

Chapter 2 introduces the eighteen major camps created in Australia to intern “enemy aliens,” as well as overseas internees/refugees and POWs, as an expanding military-camp typology, an extension of the punitive-space typologies that had historically filtered entry into the continent. Unlike in other case studies, the proximity of POW and internee populations to both theaters of conflict forced Australia to devise evermore complex schemes that would segregate nationals of belligerent countries, as well as the political factions within them. The centerpiece of this chapter is the Waranga Basin’s Tatura group of seven camps – the key camp cluster in Victoria.

The conclusion reprises the book’s main arguments: about the need to understand internment at once as an important Allied measure in its own right, but also as one that intersected in complex ways with other measures such as prosecution, denazification, and demilitarization; about the severity and coerciveness of the Allied purge, but also its differentiation; and about the underlying commonality of western and Soviet internment as an extrajudicial attempt to remove core Nazi personnel. The conclusion also considers internees’ reactions and internment’s impact, highlighting its role in clearing the way for new political institutions and new political elites, and thus in the democratization of western and the Stalinization of eastern Germany. The conclusion then addresses the question of how the camps should be characterized, in particular critiquing arguments made by some scholars for labelling the Soviet camps ‘concentration camps’. In order to capture their underlying similarity with, as well as important, lethal differences, from the western camps, the conclusion suggests the Soviet camps in general be understood as Stalinist internment camps, while those that held internees and SMT convicts be termed Stalinist internment and prison camps.