The Planemaker in Internment Camp 3

“By the work one knows the workman.” - Jean de La Fontaine (1668)

Fritz Kazenwadel arrived at the Tatura internment camp on a bitterly cold afternoon in 1941. He and his fellow Templers, a German religious group from Palestine, had been traveling for nearly a month, by ship, train and finally a fleet of buses. The Templers had lived in the Middle East since the late 1800s, but they were also German nationals. Britain, which controlled Palestine in the lead up to World War 2, viewed them as enemy aliens. As the war spread across Europe, about 530 Templers were deported to Tatura, near Melbourne, Australia. They quickly went to work building out the internment camp, called Camp 3, with gardens, a school, and a theater. Kazenwadel, a blacksmith, made many of the tools they needed.¹

Kazenwadel made at least three planes, all of which are housed in a museum in Tatura. I acquired a plane (above) at auction earlier this year that I believe he also made. At the time I didn’t know who the maker was, but I was intrigued by what looked like coins on the sides the plane. It took some detective work to identify Kazenwadel. His bench planes are nondescript European-style horned planes with single or double irons. The bodies are made from a local wood he salvaged from the camp site. He clearly understood the basics of planemaking; the bodies and horn mortises are standard. But on my plane it took him several attempts to scribe throat layout lines on the body. All the planes have been heavily used.²

Photo by Tatura Irrigation & Wartime Camps Museum.

Two of his planes (mine and one in the Tatura museum) use internment camp currency, as washers or decoration or both, on the nails that hold the wedge pin in place. The tokens, which came in penny, three pence, and one, two and five shilling denominations, were issued by the Australian government for use in the country’s various interment camps. After WWII, nearly all the tokens were exchanged for real money. Today they’re rare.

Was Fritz Kazenwadel a Nazi? It’s likely he was. Internees in Camp 3, which was known as the “German Camp,” were allowed to flout camp rules and keep Nazi paraphernalia like swastika badges and images of Hitler. They elected Nazi Party leaders as their camp representatives and used swastikas on official documents in the camp’s school. “The camp’s spirit is excellent. All comrades believe in the victory of German weapons and in Germany,” a prisoner wrote to officials in Germany in 1943. As one researcher put it, “There can be little doubt that the ‘German Camp’ was also a ‘Nazi Camp.’”³

Fritz Kazenwadel, March 7, 1945.

Kazenwadel married and had two children while in camp. In a remembrance published 75 years later, internees recalled how he helped build a still used to make schnapps. On the evening of May 16, 1945, about two weeks after Germany surrendered to the Allied powers, the Templers gathered in the Camp 3 courtyard. They sang German patriotic songs while burning their National Socialist flags, banners, books and pictures. It was, as one of the internees described it, “a gloomy and defiant ceremony.” The Templers were barred from returning to Palestine. Many of them settled in the Melbourne area. Two generations later they remain a close-knit community.⁴

What do you do with a plane that built a safe place for Nazis while their contemporaries systematically murdered millions of Jews? After the war, the Templers became Australians. What do their internment camp tools mean now? I think planes are often imbued with the stories of the people who made and used them. Sometimes those stories are inspirational. Sometimes those stories leave an indelible stain that cannot be cleaned away.

Interested in more stories about crime and war?

• Who Stole This Solid Ivory Plow Plane?
• Why Did an Arsonist Keep Setting This Planemaker's Shop on Fire?
• Offcuts: Plane Murders and a Brass Ribbon Plow Plane
• 'A hot fire from all sides': Planemakers in the American Revolutionary War
• The Assassination of the Duke of Planes
• The Planemaker in Internment Camp 3

James Krenov's personal planes.

“The experience of planing is an inner dimension: a condition rather than an activity. A state of serene satisfaction. Your attention is on what is happening, on the changes taking place in the wood rather than on your hands or the plane or the fact of an effort you are making. You watch the results of your movements instead of thinking about them. Like when you’ve hit the ball well, and know it — without remembering the stroke. You will see a surface change from dull to clear: rough-sawn or even machined it is dull and as you plane it clears in little waves, the burnished patches are spreading like sunshine touching a field under scattered clouds.” — James Krenov, The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking, 1977.