Little has been said about Norbert Elias’s internment in one of the German refugee camps on the Isle of Man during in 1940 in his biography. His personal archives shed some light on this experience and can be used as a starting point to analyze the circumstances of the immigration of German intellectuals in England from 1930 – 1940 at first, and then subsequently, and in a more singular fashion, of the effects of this immigration experience on Elias’s intellectual path the reconstitution of the inter-relational network in which Elias evolves at that time being an essential element to this analysis.