Future Events
The Kitchener Camp Rescue: Prelude to Dunera
Illustrated talk by Professor Emerita Clare Ungerson
Join us on Wednesday 3 June at 7.30pm for the remarkable story of the 4,000 German-Jewish men rescued by the Central British Fund for German Jewry and brought to Britain in 1939 to be housed in the former WW1 Kitchener Camp at Sandwich, Kent. Clare Ungerson will explore how the rescue was organised, how the camp was received locally, its transformation into a Pioneer Corps training camp, and how 239 of the men later found themselves on the ill-fated Dunera voyage to Australia.
Clare, a second-generation member of the Association of Jewish Refugees is author of Four Thousand Lives: The Rescue of German Jewish Men to Britain, 1939. She has extensively researched the Kitchener Camp story in order to bring this little-known history vividly to life.
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Past Events
Heinz Henghes and the Dunera Artists in Hay
On Tues. 28th October 2025 at 7:00pm Ian Henghes, son of the sculptor Heinz Henghes, (formerly Gustav Heinrich Clusmann) shared insights into his father’s wartime internment in Australia, tracing his life and connections with fellow interned artists. His talk highlighted friendships such as with Hein Heckroth and memories preserved by Klaus Friedeberger, while situating these encounters within the broader currents of Surrealism, abstraction, and the Bauhaus, showing how creative exchanges in the camp shaped the lasting legacy of the Dunera artists.
Tracing the story of the HMT Dunera in the archives of
The Wiener Holocaust Library
Dr Barbara Warnock – Senior Curator and Head of Education
This online webinar took place on Monday 20th May 2024 at 8pm UK time
The event was organised by the UK Dunera Interest Group and the Association of Jewish Refugees. No recording is available.
Why were Jewish refugees deported to Australia on HMT Dunera in 1940?
History Explained & Your Questions Answered…
HMT Dunera set sail from Liverpool, UK for Australia on July 10, 1940, carrying 2546 civilian internees who had been detained by the British during the first year of the Second World War. These internees had been arrested because they were German, Austrian and Italian ‘enemy aliens’. But how did these individuals end up on HMT Dunera and why were the British deporting these ‘enemy aliens’ to other countries?
In this talk Dr Rachel Pistol (King’s College London) and Alan Morgenroth (Independent Researcher) investigate the circumstances that led to the voyage of the Dunera. Their talk explains the policy of internment, how Germans and Austrians were categorised by tribunals to assess whether they were a threat to national security, subsequent arrests, what happened when Italy joined the war, mass internment, deportation policy, and the early camps in which internees were held before they were boarded on HMT Dunera.
Dr Rachel Pistol is a digital historian of immigration and Second World War internment in the United Kingdom and United States. She is based in the Digital Humanities Department at King’s College London where she is the National Coordinator for EHRI-UK and on the Project Management Board of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). She is the Honorary Historical Advisor for World Jewish Relief and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. Rachel has published widely on Second World War internment in the United Kingdom and the United States including her monograph Internment during the Second World War: A Comparative Study of Great Britain and the USA (Bloomsbury, 2017) and British Internment and the Internment of Britons: Second World War Camps, History and Heritage (Bloomsbury, 2023) which she co-edited with Dr Gilly Carr.
Alan Morgenroth is an independent researcher into the experiences of the German and Austrian refugees interned by the British during 1940 and deported to Australia and Canada. Initially inspired by research into his own father’s experiences as a ‘Dunera internee’, he has spent fifteen years delving deep into all aspects of the subject. As a retired chartered accountant and entrepreneur, Alan has investigated the daily lives within the Australian camps, with particular attention to the camp economics and their banking systems. He recently published a book chapter in British Internment and the Internment of Britons (Bloomsbury, 2023) entitled ‘The British sent them to Australia from around the World: The internment of enemy aliens in the Second World War at Tatura Camps 1 to 4.’ This event will be relevant to all those who have an interest in WWII internment, in the UK, Isle of Man, Australia or Canada. This was a joint event held by The Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) and the UK Dunera Interest Group