My fellow Listers, I know this is not exactly genealogy but it has so much bearing on what we are all trying to discover about our past that I reckon it worth sharing. I have just read the book Alien Enemy and recommend it to everyone. I cannot speak about how others have seen it but to me it had some reactions. I began the first few chapters saying to myself this cannot be all true and finished it in total disgust. I would never have believed that Australians could treat fellow Australians in this manner What comes to my mind is that these people treated in this manner were our Germanic ancestors. Fifty years before the governments of Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and New South Wales had sent agents to northern Europe to persuade, entice, bribe and whatever else it took to get the parents of these men to come here to go into the outback and open up the land. The English settlers weren't prepared to go there but the Germanic migrants did. In 1914 the government of the day both state and commonwealth rewarded their sons by making them prisoners of war and treating them worse than common criminals. Their crime was no more than claming to be Australian. The book can be summed up as typical political hysteria combined with bureaucratic lunacy. I find no other words to describe what was done. I now have an opinion that if we want governments to apologise to aboriginals or any other group they could well start by apologising to us the descendants of the 19th century Germanic migrants for the way our ancestors were treated in 1914-20. Actually the book frightens me a little because it depicts exactly what can happen again if the media, politicians and 'do-gooders' don't handle this so called War on Terror properly. I know from experience that in war people act differently than in normal times and it takes little to bring out the worst in us. Enemy Alien supports that knowledge. There were a number of instances that appalled me but two that amused me was the fourth generation couple who could not speak German and never left their little town in WA but who were sided up for deportation. The other was the fellow interned the day before his son was medivac home permanently injured from France. The book certainly helped me better understand the petty swipes that I would so often hear as a child. My father was German and mother was English. We were never let forget that we were German but there was some ill feeling there and now I think I understand it. I obtained a copy from the local library that especially got it in for me. Albert Grulke