For a few months in 1944-45, a small number of Channel Islanders were interned in a camp in Spittal an der Drau, Austria. Because of the small size and short life of the camp, no examples of Channel Island internee mail were available to Roger Harris when he compiled Islanders Deported.
However, the National Archive in Kew holds the MI5 file on a suspected collaborator named William Percival, a file which preserves a great deal of his mail, including five postcards which he sent from Spittal between September and December 1944 (file KV 2/429). Percival was born in Lancashire and had no links with the Channel Islands, and neither were the post cards sent to islanders. But Percival’s wartime experiences include something of a tour of internment camps in which islanders were detained, and he would have been known to many of them.
In August 1939 Percival travelled to Germany as a freelance journalist in search of a story; he was also believed to have absconded with £40 belonging to the Air Defence Cadet Corps for whom he had worked, and this may have hastened his departure. Once in Germany, Percival was invited by the German Foreign Office Press Department to travel to the German-Polish border with a view to writing a newspaper article about the situation there. On his return, he broadcast over the radio from Berlin to Britain on 31 August, detailing the alleged atrocities committed by Poles against Germans, lies which were to be the pretext for the German invasion of Poland on the following day. Percival continued to work on Germany’s English-language radio propaganda, until the first instance of his gift for upsetting his hosts led to his internment in Ilag XIII Wülzburg in February 1940, and from there to Ilag VIII Tost in October 1941.
In these camps Percival earned a pro-German reputation amongst his fellow internees, by expressing pro-German sentiments, by working in the German camp censor’s office, and by proof-reading radio scripts for Berlin. He was released from Tost in February 1943 and accepted a job in Berlin with the Foreign Ministry, where he contributed scripts for broadcast on English-language radio, wrote various articles for propaganda magazines, and had some minor involvement in the creation of John Amery’s British Free Corps. A generous salary paid for his flat and car, supplemented by income from his black market activities.
After two further dismissals from jobs in Berlin, in June 1943 Percival was given the opportunity of writing a book about Richard Wagner, and for a while he was a guest in Bayreuth of Winnifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of the composer and ardent admirer of Hitler. But while in Bayreuth he upset the locals by talking loudly in English, a dangerous provocation during the bombing war. The Gestapo were called, and in February 1944 the local Gauleiter ordered Percival’s internment in Ilag VIII-Z Kreuzberg, the home of a number of Channel Island deportees. His fellow-internees were aware of his pro-German activities, and so in July 1944 he was moved to Laufen, possibly for his own safety, and from there to Ilag XVIII in Spittal an der Drau, Austria.
The camp at Spittal had originally been a sub-camp of Stalag XVIII-A at Wolfsberg, and then a ‘Lazarett’, or camp hospital. In September 1944 it was redesignated as Ilag XVIII, and thirty-five internees from Laufen – ‘volunteers’ according to Percival, and ‘troublemakers’ according to MI5 – were sent to Spittal, followed by another sixteen in October. Percival was made camp senior by the Germans, which favour he returned by informing on his fellow internees to the camp authorities. All of the British internees were then ordered back to Laufen on 21 January 1945.
The first of Percival’s five post cards to a friend in Denmark was written on 23 September 1944, shortly after his arrival in Spittal. For this message he used an internee post card which he had brought with him from Laufen.
See the following pages…………
The Germans seem not to have adjusted yet to the camp’s redesignation as an Ilag, and so the card bears a censor’s cachet for Stalag XVIII, and the Eagle and Swastika stamp normally associated with POW mail, also marked with Stalag 327 (apparently an alternative designation of Stalag XVIII-A). Percival crossed out the Laufen camp designation VII, and inserted XVIII.
Perhaps because of the size of the camp or the imminent end to the war, the Germans seem not to have thought it worthwhile to have internee post cards printed for Ilag XVIII, and simply issued internees with the POW’s Kriegsgefangenpost cards which they already held for Stalag XVIII-A. It is probable that all internees in Spittal were issued with these cards for the duration of their internment in Ilag XVIII.
For his card of 11 October (above), Percival made manual amendments to the camp designation, so that the pre-printed Stammlager XVIII A reads as Ilag XVIII, and for good measure added Spittal/Drau. This was done not out of pedantry, but in order to make sure the recipient was clear about which camp to reply to, this being Percival’s third camp in three months. The same manual changes were made to his three subsequent Kriegsgefangenpost cards sent in October, November and December. On the reverse, above the message, Percival crossed out Kriegsgefangenen and inserted Internierten.
From October the censor’s cachets were changed to the correct camp designation, and used a simpler font.
23 September 1944 11 October 1944
29 October 1944 November 1944
The military Eagle and Swastika stamp remained in use to the end – probably out of habit from the camp’s days as a Stalag – but from October it was changed to Ilag.
23 September 1044 11 October 1944
By late October the post mark had acquired the text SPITTAL (DRAU) between the inner and outer circles, best seen on this example from a card dated 1 December 1944.
September 1944 December 1944
Curiously, MI5 felt that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Percival. Once their investigations were concluded in 1946, Percival was released without charge from a British camp in Brussels.
The author would be delighted to hear from any member who may have items of correspondence from this Camp.
