Global Germanophobia during Wartime

This chapter provides the immediate global background to the internment of Germans in the British Empire during the Great War by explaining how this process formed part of a wider attack upon this minority not just within the Empire, but also in states either at war or about to enter war with Germany. The chapter argues that incarceration formed part of a wider policy of persecuting German minorities driven by a hostile public opinion which led to legislation to control the activities of this minority, whether through preventing German language use or by closing down German clubs. At the same time, property confiscation, born from pre-war economic animosity, became a key policy against German minorities. At the end of the war the solution to the presence of Germans within the Empire consisted of deportation, a process that had begun in the earlier stages of the conflict.