On the 3 September 1940, a year to the day after Britain had declared war on Germany, Captain A.R. Heighway, the officer-in-charge of the Australian Prisoner of War Information Bureau, signed a detention order for one Georg Walter Heinz Brack, ‘being an enemy alien on board His Majesty’s Transport “Dunera,” who has been sent from the United Kingdom to Australia for internment.’[1]
Heinz George Walter Brack (1915-1966) was born in Berlin on 27 June 1915, but grew up in Magdeburg. He first came to Sherborne School in September 1936 as a temporary teacher in the Modern Languages Department, which had been established in 1930. He had enrolled at the University College of the South-West in Exeter in October 1935 and came to Sherborne with the personal recommendation of Professor John Murray (1879-1964), one of the School Governors and Principal of the University College.[2]
Heinz Brack was considered a delightful young man and remained at Sherborne for three terms from September 1936 to July 1937, teaching German alongside A.B. Gourlay, H.H. Baker, Frank King and H.F.W. Holmes, and taking ‘digs’ with the School’s science master, A.J.P. (‘Kippy’) Andrews, and his family at ‘Cameron’ in The Avenue.
On 5 October 1936, Heinz was invited by Sherborne Rotary Club to give a talk at the Digby Hotel about the Hitler regime in Germany with particular reference to the New Youth Movement[3]. Heinz Brack’s talk attracted a record attendance of twenty-seven and was so popular that he was invited by the Rotary Club to attend a luncheon at the Digby Hotel on 26 October 1936 so that members could have the opportunity of asking questions.[4] The President of the Rotary Club was then Major J.H. Randolph, a colleague of Heinz Brack’s at Sherborne School and later housemaster of Abbeylands. At Sherborne School, Heinz Brack also took part in a newly founded society, ‘Der Deutsche Leserkreis’, which met in the Oak Room where, presided over by H.H. Brown, boys read German literature and gave papers.[5]
Heinz Brack returned to Sherborne in 1939. However, as relations deteriorated between Britain and Germany, the Headmaster Alexander Ross Wallace became uncomfortable about his reasons for being in Sherborne and had him tailed during the holidays by Scotland Yard.[6]
Evidently, the Headmaster was not the only person in Sherborne to have his doubts about Brack. Victor Swatridge, the Aliens Officer at Police Divisional Headquarters in Sherborne, recalled in later years, how ‘I had to register a man of magnificent physique, a young blonde Prussian named Heinz Brack. Brack was a most charming man and regarded as a delightful person by his associates at the school. He quite often paid visits, under any pretext, to the divisional office, which aroused my suspicions, and when I refused the information he required, became arrogant and demanding… I intensified my enquiries and found that Brack was away from his lodgings every weekend, travelling extensively in the south-western counties. I was confident that he was busily engaged in subversion and had a great influence and control of German nationals in this area, possibly part of an espionage network.’[7]
On the evening of 27 September 1939, Heinz Brack turned up at School House while the Headmaster and his family were having dinner. On being asked why he hadn’t returned to Germany to fight for his country, he replied that he found it impossible to fight against his former friends and so had remained in Britain. The Headmaster gave him a bed for the night and the next morning handed him over to the Military Police. It later transpired that he had been working as a Nazi agent collecting information about Germans living in Dorset.[8]
After his arrest, Heinz Brack was sent to Dorchester Prison and then to an internment camp. On 1 July 1940 he was put, along with over 1,200 other German and Italian internees, onboard SS Arandora Star at Liverpool bound for internment camps in Canada. However, the next day the ship was sighted by U-47 commanded by Günther Prien (one of Germany’s top U-boat aces who was responsible in October 1939 for the audacious sinking of HMS Royal Oak at the Scapa Flow Naval Base) and torpedoed with the loss of over 800 lives. Heinz Brack survived, but lost all of his possessions. This, however, was not the end of his ordeal, for just nine days later he was put with 2,542 internees on HMT Dunera at Liverpool, this time destined for internment camps in Australia.
By a strange quirk of fate, a Sherborne schoolboy, Lothar Markiewicz, was also onboard the Dunera. Lothar and his sister Ellen had come to England in 1939 with the Kindertransport. In May 1939 Lothar was given a place at Sherborne School, but unaccountably in July 1940, aged just 16, he was taken from class and arrested as an enemy alien. After spending three days in a prison at Dorchester he was taken to Liverpool and put on the Dunera, but whether Heinz Brack or Lother Markiewicz were aware of each other’s presence is not known.
The voyage of HMT Dunera to Australia was later described by Winston Churchill as “a deplorable and regrettable mistake.” The ship was hugely overcrowded and the conditions were appalling with men kept below deck for all but 30 minutes a day and fresh water supplied only two or three times a week. When HMT Dunera arrived fifty-seven days later in Melbourne, the Australian medical army officer was shocked by the conditions he found on the ship and his subsequent report led to the court martial of the officer-in-charge.
Having arrived in Australia, Heinz Brack was placed in Tatura Internment Camp (no.1) in Victoria, which had been built in 1940 and was Australia’s first purpose-built internment camp. Camp no. 1 housed single males, mostly German and Italian internees, and over the next five years the internees developed tennis courts, workshops, a newspaper, and flower and vegetable gardens. Photographs of the Tatura Internment Camp held in the Australian War Memorial Archive show a happy and healthy-looking Heinz Brack with fellow internees.[9]
Following the surrender of Germany in May 1945, Heinz Brack was transferred back to Britain on the QSMV Dominion Monarch, arriving in Liverpool on 2 August 1945 in considerably more style than he had left five years earlier. But Heinz Brack’s story did not end there. Returning that year to his home in Magdeburg he was immediately arrested by the Russians on undisclosed charges and kept in confinement for ten years. On his release he moved to Bonn where he took up teaching again, but died there in 1966, aged just fifty-one.[10]
Rachel Hassall
Archivist, Sherborne School.
Further Information:
A.B. Gourlay, A History of Sherborne School (Sherborne, 2nd ed., 1971)
A.B. Gourlay & D.F. Gibbs, Chief: A Biography of Alexander Ross Wallace 1891-1982 (Sherborne, 1983)
Rodney Legg, Sherborne and Castleton (2004)
Sherborne’s Kindertransport Children
Sherborne School and the Second World War 1938-1945
Herr Brack: temporary German master – and Nazi spy? (pdf)
Australian War Memorial https://www.awm.gov.au/
Tatura Irrigation and Wartime Camps Museum https://www.taturamuseum.com/
References:
[1] Commonwealth of Australia Order for Detention of Enemy Alien, Georg Walter Heinz Brack, 3 September 1940.
[2] A.B. Gourlay & D.F. Gibbs, Chief: A Biography of Alexander Ross Wallace 1891-1982 (Sherborne, 1983), p.57.
[3] Western Gazette, 9 October 1936.
[4] Western Gazette, 30 October 1936.
[5] D.G.K. Frost, ‘Der Deutsche Leserkries’, The Shirburnian, December 1938.
[6] A.B. Gourlay & D.F. Gibbs, Chief: A Biography of Alexander Ross Wallace 1891-1982 (Sherborne, 1983), p.57.
[7] Rodney Legg, Sherborne and Castleton (2004), pp.125-126.
[8] A.B. Gourlay & D.F. Gibbs, Chief: A Biography of Alexander Ross Wallace 1891-1982 (Sherborne, 1983), p.57.
[9] Australian War Memorial – photographs of German internees in b Compound, no.1 Camp, Tatura, 16 March 1945 https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C327918
[10] Obituary for Heinz G. Brack, The Shirburnian, Michaelmas 1966.
See also:
- Online resources for Sherborne School and the Second World War
- A visit by the Hitler Youth to Sherborne School on 17 July 1934
For further information about the Sherborne School Archives please contact the School Archivist
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