While Karl sat in the First Baptist Church in Amherst — still in his home province of Nova Scotia — his eventual travel to the other territories and colonies of the British Empire must have felt worlds away. But it was only a mere 15 years later that the world would seem to get much closer to Nova Scotia.

In August of 1914, the British Empire was at war. Robert Borden, a Nova Scotian was the prime minister of Canada and consequently, Halifax became a significant shipping port for war supplies and the departure point for troops leaving for Europe.

Loyalties in Canada at that time were questioned. Would immigrants be loyal to their new country and the British Empire, or would they align with their birth nation? Not taking any chances, the Canadian Government labelled about 8,500 such immigrants as “enemy aliens” and sent them to prisoner-of-war (POW) camps across Canada.

The largest of these POW camps was a mere 2km away from the First Baptist Church and existed in Amherst from April 1915 to the end of the war in September 1919.

There were 853 prisoners imprisoned at the camp; a former iron foundry converted into a compound surrounded by barbed wire containing a camp hospital, medical room, barracks and mess hall. The majority of the prisoners were 640 sailors captured on the Kaiser Wilhelm Der Grosser, a German armed cruiser sunk in a battle with the British Royal Navy.

And then, in 1917, before the SS Kirstianiafjord crossed the Atlantic Ocean to Russia, it temporarily docked in the Halifax Harbour and was intercepted. One of the passengers travelling from New York City to his home in Russia was Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolutionary whose definitive views were labelled as Trotskyism.

Trotsky was moved from Halifax to the POW camp in Amherst and held for a month. Trotsky recorded in his biography: “The police left my wife and children in Halifax; the rest of us were taken by train to Amherst, Nova Scotia, a camp for German prisoners. And there, in the office, we were put through an examination the like of which I had never before experienced, even in the Peter and Paul fortress. The Amherst Concentration camp was located in an old and very dilapidated iron foundry that had been confiscated from its German owner. The sleeping bunks were arranged in three tiers, two deep on each side of the hall. About 800 of us lived in these conditions. The air in this dormitory at night can be imagined. Men hopelessly clogged the passages, elbowed their way through... Many of them practiced crafts, some with extraordinary skill. And yet in spite of the heroic efforts of the prisoners to keep themselves physically and morally fit, five of them had gone insane. We had to eat and sleep in the same room with these madmen." [When Trotsky was Interned in Amherst, N.S. Canadian Geographic, April/May 1988. p63]

Trotsky, released after one month of imprisonment, never forgave Canada and vowed that he would take action regarding the “outrageous treatment of Russian citizens by the Anglo-Canadian police.”

Today there is no evidence of the internment camp except for various artifacts made by the prisoners on display at the Cumberland County Museum and a gravestone at the local cemetery where 11 of the German soldiers were buried.

So dear reader, what does Trotsky have to do with our GlobeTrotters? Well, if it weren’t for my following Karl to the First Baptist Church in Amherst, I wouldn’t have stumbled on the POW camp information and the reference of Trotsky being interned in Nova Scotia. I find that linkage particularly fascinating, mainly because in 2018, I visited the Peter Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he had also been imprisoned. So essentially, let’s chalk this blog up to Globetrotters and Trotsky’s convergence in similar circles, although only one was a revolutionary.