Fighting the Home Front’s ‘Enemy Within’
National security during the Second World War was threatened by the ‘enemy within’ – working-class women, suspected of betraying their country by taking in deserters and escapees.
Over Christmas 1941 newspaper readers around Britain were gripped by headlines screaming ‘Escaped German’ and ‘German Escapee’. ‘Soldiers Hunt 6ft. German’, claimed the Daily Mail, who warned that the enemy agent had ‘escaped from a party of aliens’. Other reports described the search for a ‘six-foot South African German, who escaped at Preston Station’ while being escorted to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. On Christmas Eve the press warned readers that the escapee was ‘still at large and may be posing as a Scottish doctor’ and ‘was last seen boarding a bus for Liverpool’. The British public was under no illusions: the enemy was in their midst.
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