Internment Camps USA - 2







   America's World War II
           Prison Camps
                         By Gary North

On this, the 60th anniversary of Adolph Hitler's declaration of war
against the United States, which he was not bound by Germany's
strictly defensive military treaty
with Japan to declare, I bring you
"the story behind the story" of how
the Roosevelt Administration was
able to persuade the Nazis to send
back some of those Americans who
were caught behind German lines
on this day, six decades ago. This
story is not in the textbooks, nor is
it likely to be anytime soon.

Most Americans have never heard of the prisoner of war camps in
the United States during World War II. Hans Sennholz, a Luftwaffe
pilot and later a Misesian
economist, worked on a
prisoner-run farm in Arkansas after
he had been shot down by British
anti-aircraft fire in North Africa.
They sent him from Britain through
Canada to the West Coast and
then to Arkansas.

Most estimates that I have seen
place the number of prisoners of war in the U.S. in the range of
50,000 to 70,000, but one reputable and detailed Website says it
was 425,000.

More than 150,000 men arrived after the surrender of Gen. Erwin
Rommel's Afrika Korps in April 1943, followed by an average of
20,000 new POWs a month. From the Normandy invasion in June
1944 through December 30,000 prisoners a month arrived; for the
last few months of the war 60,000 were arriving each month. When
the war was over, there were 425,000 enemy prisoners in 511 main
and branch camps throughout the United States.

This is a good example of history that never gets to the general
public. This is a little-known and long-forgotten story, but it is not
shocking.

What follows is shocking. I begin with low-level shock.

                The Japanese Camps

Most Americans know about the concentration camp system that
the United States created for Japanese residents of the West
Coast. There were 120,000 of these internees in a dozen camps,
mostly in the mountain states, but with two camps in eastern
Arkansas. A few Americans know that the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover
had opposed these mass arrests. Fewer still know of the forced
sale of everything these people owned at substantial discounts.
They were only allowed to bring into the camps what they could
carry in their arms in one trip. But until this year, only a handful of
Japanese-Americans knew that in 1944, the U.S. government
drafted the young men housed in these camps, and about 300
refused to be inducted. They said they were prisoners who were
not being treated as citizens, which they were. So, some of them
were put in jail for draft resistance, and the others became pariahs
in the camps. The other Japanese internees regarded them as
traitors. This story became public knowledge only this year, in law
professor Eric Muller's book, Free to Die for Their Country
(University of Chicago Press, 2001). You can get chapter one on
the Web.

    The Western Hemisphere Kidnap Camps

The following story would be a great case study for Memory Hole
101 (second semester). I stumbled onto it about three years ago. It
was on the Website of a local affiliate of NBC television. That Web
page is long gone, but because of www.google.com, I was able to
track down other pages in a few minutes. I used these search
terms: Japanese, Germans, Peru, World War II, Texas, camps. Of
course, had I not found that NBC affiliate site three years ago, I
never would have known which search terms to use. I never would
have known about this story. Prepare yourself for a shock. This is
from the Handbook of Texas Website. Its title is "World War II
Internment Camps." And what remarkable camps they were! You
will find no reference to these camps in any textbook on U.S.
history, I guarantee you.


Although many Americans are aware of the World War II
imprisonment of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation
centers, few know of the smaller internment camps operated by
the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Under the authority of
the Department of Justice, the INS directed about twenty such
facilities. Texas had three of them, located at Seagoville, Kenedy,
and Crystal City. Prisoners included Japanese Americans arrested
by the FBI, members of Axis nationalities residing in Latin-
American countries, and Axis sailors arrested in American ports
after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 3,000 Japanese, Germans,
and Italians from Latin America were deported to the United States,
and most of them were placed in the Texas internment camps.
Twelve Latin-American countries gave the United States
Department of State custody of the Axis nationals. Eighty percent
of the prisoners were from Peru, and about 70 percent were
Japanese. The official reasons for the deportations were to secure
the Western Hemisphere from internal sabotage and to provide
bartering pawns for exchange of American citizens captured by
Japan. However, the Axis nationals were often deported arbitrarily
as a result of racial prejudice and because they provided economic
competition for the other Latin Americans, not because they were a
security threat. Eventually, very few Japanese ever saw Latin
America again, although some Germans and Italians were returned
to their Latin American homes. The majority of Texas internment-
camp prisoners were Axis nationals from Latin America. . . . And
most of the Japanese internees from Peru and other Latin
American countries had resided in those countries for decades and
did not even speak Japanese.

In addition, prisoners were taken to Crystal City from other INS
internment camps in Hawaii and Alaska (not states at the time), the
United States, Puerto Rico, the West Indies, and South and Central
American countries. . . . And Puerto Ricans were taught in their
school systems that the enemy internees were all Nazis, a
sterotype that exists even today in 2009.

As we shall see, there is some debate about the numbers of these
victims of American-supervised international kidnapping. Was it
3,000, total? Or were there more? I think there were far more, for
reasons that you will soon see. In any case, what you have read so
far is a whitewashed version of the story. It gets worse – much,
much worse.

Add one word to the Google search list: "exchanged." Again, had I
not found that NBC affiliate site, I would not have known to use
this term. This brought me to a site run by the Freedom of
Information Times. This revealing site specializes in World War II
internment of German American civilians.

Here, we read the grim reality regarding what other use these
kidnapped Latin Americans had for the American government. I will
bet that nothing that you have ever read mentioned this legacy of
Roosevelt's New Deal.


Facts: During the hearings before the U.S. Commission on Wartime
Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Edward J. Ennis, the
Director of the Alien Enemy Control during World War II, on
November 3, 1981 testified:


Mr. Macbeth [a member of the Commission]: Did you have any
experience with the internment of enemy aliens who were outside
of the United States.

Mr. Ennis: Oh yes, we had two programs...Now the other program
was taking alien enemies from other countries in South America...If
we couldn't get the [Latin American] countries to intern them we
had to transmit them to the United States for internment...It was an
aborted program, I don't think it accomplished anything. It had a
security purpose to do in these countries [Latin America] what we
were doing in the United States, about 5,000 German aliens were
interned, and a few hundred German aliens in Cuba and in other
countries in South America. But it didn't work very well. [Source:
pp.157-159, Testimony of Edward J. Ennis before the Commission
on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 3,
1981, R.G. 220. . . .

The Latin Americans of German ancestry who [about 5,000] were
brought to this country by the United States were incarcerated in
several camps, most were in either of the following camps: Crystal
City, Texas; Seagoville, Texas; Camp Kenedy, Texas; Fort Lincoln,
Bismarck, North Dakota; and Ellis Island, New York Harbor, New
York.

Hundreds of the interned Latin Americans, many of whom were, by
birthright, citizens of one of the republics, were exchanged for
persons of the Americas held by the Third Reich, i.e., they were
deported to Germany.

Stephen Fox, "The Deportation of Latin American Germans, 1941-
47: Fresh Legs for Mr. Monroe's Doctrine," Yearbook of German-
American Studies 32 (1997): 117-42.

Prior to the exchange, lists of internees in the U.S., including the
names of German-Jews, were provided to the authorities of the
Third Reich.

The State Department citations herein are included in their entirety
in Volume IV, The World War Two Experience of German-
Americans in the World Wars, Edited by: Don Heinrich Tolzmann, K.
G. Saur, Munich, 1995, pp. 1671-1674.

Got that, folks? The U.S. government went to the trouble of
identifying the kidnapped victims of Jewish German background,
sent their names to Hitler's bureaucrats, knowing that these were
"high priority items," and then shipped them off to Germany in
exchange for Americans who had been inside the Third Reich when
Hitler declared War on December 11.

The only other explanation is that American bureaucrats
deliberately identified the captive Jews in order that the Germans
might be able to keep out those Germans whom they really didn't
want. That's the "favorable interpretation."

"My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty," etc., etc.

Franklin Roosevelt's Administration did many horrible things. This
is just one more example. Most of these things were covered up
then, and professional historians still do their best to cover them
up today, 56 years after FDR's death.

For the New Deal-justifying liberals who write all of the American
history textbooks, seeing just isn't believing. Facts like these are
dropped down the memory hole, where they are thought to belong.

Why don't Jews know about this neglected aspect of American
history? Because they haven't been told. Why not? Because most
academic Jews are political liberals, and their commitment to the
Roosevelt Administration has been greater than their commitment
to historical accuracy. So, politically conservative Jews don't know
the story.

Conclusion

Anyone who points out this sort of thing is dismissed by the
Establishment press and the Establishment academic community
(guild) as a "conspiracy nut." I confess: guilty as charged.

© 2001 LewRockwell.com

Gary North Archives


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LewRockwell.com Needs Your Support
Please make a donation to help them stay on the air.

_________________________________________________

From: Arthur D. Jacobs
To: president@pdxjacl.org;kominzl@pdx.edu

Sent: 2/14/2007 8:14:32 AM

Subject: Other victims of WWII internment in the US....

RE: Fighting for Civil Rights in an Era of Terror

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007, 1:00 4:00 p.m.

Portland State University

NEW LOCATION: George C. Hoffman Hall  1833 SW 11th, Portland,
OR 97201

Dear President Kodachi and Professor Kominz:

I was wondering why no German American or Italian American
speakers were invited to the Day of Remembrance? As you know H.
Res. 122, just passed, was designed to recognize all the victims of
internment, that is to say, the resolution reads as follows:

"Recognizing the significance of the 65th anniversary of the
signing of Executive Order 9066 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and supporting the goals of the Japanese American, German
American, and Italian American communities in recognizing a
National Day of Remembrance to increase public awareness of the
events surrounding the restriction, exclusion, and internment of
individuals and families during World War II."

Perhaps next year you will consider inviting other victims to your
Day of Remembrance program.

Sincerely,
Arthur D. Jacobs
Major, USAF Retired

Fair Use Notice:

"This website may contain copyrighted material the use of which
has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright
owner.  We are making such material available in our efforts to
advance the understanding of humanity's problems and
hopefully to help find solutions for those problems.