Home » The detainment of ethnic Germans in the US during WWI and WWII

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The detainment of ethnic Germans in the US during WWI and WWII — 20 Comments

  1. Interesting history, I did not know that. Nothing is without nuance!

    In movies from those times, spotting the German spy was catching them using their cutlery like a European when they ate in a diner.

    My mother, being born in Europe, taught us to eat that way. I hadn’t noticed there was a difference until I was angrily interrogated about it a few times. So I taught myself to eat American style so as not to draw attention.

  2. Yes, I read the comments on that other post and thought about commenting. But, it seems more appropriate to post my thoughts here.

    One fact that is too often ignored/overlooked is that the Japanese Americans, unlike the Italian-Americans and German-Americans, belong to Japanese-American Benefit Societies in a much greater percent.

    I’m not saying that there weren’t such organizations for Italians or Germans – there most certainly were.

    However, for the Japanese-Americans (and other Asian-Americans) their benefit organizations functioned sort of like churches did for other immigrant groups. These organizations, in addition to religious and cultural instructions, offered social support as well as financial support. (loans for those who couldn’t get traditional bank loans) This meant that the vast majority of Japanese immigrants and their children belonged to such groups.

    However, the Japanese-American Benefit Societies (with only ONE exception) had as their first order of business “Allegiance to the Emperor of Japan.”

    Now, it could, and rightly would, be argued that this was a part of their native Shinto religion. This would be true. And, perhaps many of them didn’t quite follow their beliefs quite so strictly.

    But, it doesn’t change the fact that so many Japanese-Americans belonged to organizations that claimed allegiance to a head of state that was now at war with the US.

    I’m not arguing for, or trying to justify civil rights violations that happened; but, what should the US have done? Ignore that allegiance? Say, “well it is okay if your religion says to put our enemy’s head of state before all else we will trust you to not follow through on that”?

    My point is that, yes, racism may have had a part in what happened – but not completely. Other issues/conditions came into play as well.

    Oh, and that one group that was the exception that didn’t put “allegiance to the Emperor” as their first order of business? A group of professors and students at a University in California (I think it was UCLA) Japanese-American Benefit Society who knew that such an allegiance, even if only meant in a religious sort of way, was also political. They “got it” that such an allegiance would not be good.

    Cross-cultural understanding (and misunderstanding) are often a two-way street.

    P.S. Neo, thanks for all your blogging/posting – very informative and interesting!

  3. I worked with a German national in South America.(As his university years were the only ones he spent in Germany, and he spoke English with an oil field Texafied/Southern accent, it was hard for me to think of him as German. But he did speak German to his three year old.) His uncle had been interned in the US during WW2. His uncle’s US internment was a rather pleasant experience, he told me.

    What a lot of people ignore, in comparing the German versus Japanese US internment experience during WW2, is that this was the second war we had with Germany. In the Midwest, due to the large proportion of German ancestry in the population, I don’t believe there was much anti-German sentiment expressed in the Midwest during WW1. At least my German ancestry relatives didn’t tell me of any.

    This was not necessarily the case during WW1 in parts of the US with relatively few people of German background. A neighbor of German background in my New England hometown told me and my parents that when she was a child during WW1, the anti-German sentiment she was exposed to resulted in her dropping out of school. As she had the family farm to fall back on, dropping out could have been worse.

    Beginning in the late 1800s, a number of Germans purchased land in the Verapaz region for cultivating coffee. Many did not become Guatemalan citizens. When Guatemala declared war against Germany in WW2, it deported the German citizen coffee growers and confiscated their land. (ironic foretaste of what Arbenz did ? 🙂 )

    There are still German traces in that part of Guatemala, such as people who don’t look German at all, but who have German surnames. Then there are canches– blond-haired, blue-eyed types- chatting away in Kekchí, the local language.

    I struck up a conversation on a Guatemalan bus one time with someone who told me his German grandfather had experienced deportation and land confiscation during WW2. After the war he returned to Guatemala, because that is what he knew- and 1945 Germany had its problems.

    He also told me something rather surprising. His grandfather who had (partial?) Jewish ancestry, survived WW2 in Germany in spite of his Jewish background. It appeared that the Nazis considered “deported to the Vaterland” status sufficient to be labeled “Aryan.” I wonder if this guy was pulling my leg.

  4. It could also have something to do with the huge numbers of assimilated Germans who have live in the US since before the revolution ( like my family). They probably offered recent immigrants a real American community they could belong to.

  5. My great-grandfather emigrated from Germany around the turn of the last century, leaving all the rest of his family behind. He came by himself and I don’t think he ever saw any of them again. At least two of his sons fought in Europe against Germany in World War I, and his grandsons fought against the Nazis in World War II. I always wondered how that felt to him – but he died before I was born, so I didn’t get to ask him.

  6. If you weren’t ,alive at the time of Pearl Harbor, it is hard to understand the feelings of outrage about the Japanese sneak attack. In the little mountain village in Colorado where I lived people were up in arms about the treachery of the Japanese. There was a Japanese family of four who operated a book store in the town. They were quietly removed and rumors flew around town that the FBI had found a secret radio transmitter in their home. Whether the rumor was true or not, most people were happy to have possible spies and saboteurs removed to the camps. You had to live through those days to understand how high the feelings were running. In many cases, it may well have been a good idea to protect the Japanese from vigilante justice by separating them from the Caucasian population. In hindsight it all seems quite racist and jingoistic, but you had to live through it to understand why it was done and why there was little or no outcry.

    I worked with two airline pilots of Japanese ancestry. Both of them were in the camps as children. Neither had any ill feelings about it. Or if they did, they never expressed them to me, and I was pretty close with both. They did tell me that the conditions in the camps were spartan but never cruel and their education went on as if they were regular American kids.

    I have a friend who grew up around Salina Kansas. Like me, he was a kid during WWII. There were a lot of German immigrants around Salina. He told me that in the early part of the war, when the Germans seemed to be winning, there were bund meetings being held by the German immigrants in which many expressed their allegiance to the German cause. He said these groups were being watched by the FBI. (and their non German neighbors) As the Allies began to win, that activity gradually came to a halt and the German immigrants decided they were real Americans after all. The non-Germans around Salina, who had been watching all this transpire, had a bit of contempt for their German neighbors for years after.

    When I see the level of vitriol the left has for their fellow citizens over differences of opinion on policies, the suspicions about immigrants from Japan and Germany during WWII don’t seem so over the top. In fact, I’m afraid the internments were far more rational and limited than what the progressives would do to conservatives if they felt free to act. In the over the top animus they have expressed, the specter of re-education camps does not seem distant at all.

  7. Another factor was economic. White farmers wanted the land that the Japanese had, some Japanese businesses were in direct competition to white owned businesses.

  8. Another difference that impacted the Japanese interment was the Niihau Incident.
    From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident

    “A Japanese Zero pilot Shigenori Nishikaichi crash-landed on the Hawaiian island of Ni?ihau after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The island’s Native Hawaiian residents were initially unaware of the attack, but apprehended Nishikaichi when the gravity of the situation became apparent. Nishikaichi then sought and received the assistance of the three Hawaiian locals of Japanese descent on the island in overcoming his captors, finding weapons, and taking several hostages. Eventually, Nishikaichi was killed by Niihauans Benehakaka “Ben” Kanahele and Kealoha “Ella” Kanahele; Ben Kanahele was wounded in the process, and one of Nishikaichi’s supporters, Yoshio Harada, committed suicide. The incident and the actions of Nishikaichi’s abettors demonstrated the potential for Japanese national allegiance among immigrant Japanese populations to work against the US war effort.”

    I know of no similar incident with the German or Italian community. Tempers were high at the time and this didn’t help especially with the military commanders. MacArthur lost most of his air assets while on the ground in the Philippines because he was more worried about protecting them from sabotage than protecting them from air attack.

    Japanese Internment was regrettable but given the temper of the times may have been the best of a lot of bad choices. The Zoot Suit riots showed there was little tolerance for anything that was considered unpatriotic. Look at how the antifa and left wing is reacting to Trump supporters and magnify those emotions by a real sneak attack on Pearl Harbor to consider how ugly things might have become.

    As an aside, after the way the Japanese began the Russo-Japanese war with a surprise attack the the Russian’s main navel base, and the fact that war plans tend to repeat themselves (see the the Schlieffen Plan) should have figured in the planning in the Pacific.

  9. Read a book called ‘Dark Invasion’ by Howard Blum a few years ago about German spying in the WWI years before the US entered the war. It was very prevalent and because of obvious physical reasons and surely some racism it was easier to get away with.

    My mom has talked many times about seeing as a little girl the Japanese internment camp in Puyallup, Wa on what is now the Washington State Fairgrounds. It’s always easy to judge with 75 years time in the rear view.

  10. Rick Vogel,

    There is solid evidence that MacArthur lost his air assets in the Phillipines due to sheer incompetence and dereliction of duty. He dismissively and gravely underestimated the military prowess of the Japanese.

    That early in the war, America needed heroes and FDR, who viewed MacArthur with contempt, agreed to bury the scandal rather than cashier the man.

    MacArthur was probably our finest strategist and the perfect choice to act as the military governor of Japan.

    But he was insufferably arrogant, a shameless self-promoter and a petty man. His actions throughout his life reveal a man bereft of a moral compass.

  11. Michelle Malkin wrote a book – In Defense of Internment – which focused on Japanese version but also discusses German and Italian internment.

    One point the more sanctimonious of the left like to make about this is that not one Japanese American was ever convicted for spying, etc. The US authorities were well aware of lots of spying by the Japanese Americans but decided to not pursue the matter during the war because it would have revealed too much about methods of detecting the messages being exchanged between Japan and the spies very active around Hawaii and the West Coast and after the war they decided not to bother.

    The decision to intern was a complex one and certainly not as black and white as it is usually portrayed. And probably most of us if put in the same situation and given the same information (e.g. the Niihau incident) would have reached the same conclusion.

  12. If I understand correctly, interning enemy aliens in wartime is universally accepted, it’s interning citizens that is questionable.

    Some of the Jews who fled Germany in the 1930s were interned as enemy aliens when war was declared, and released from prison directly into the US Army. Actually into US Army INTELLIGENCE. (see ‘Sons and Soldiers’ by Bruce Henderson or the movie “The Ritchie Boys’).

  13. What JJ said, about Japanese-Americans being interned at least in part for their own protection — certainly applied in California, also. My mother’s best friend at the time was the daughter of a Japanese plant nursery owner, a gentleman who was a supplier to the grand estate that my grandfather worked in as the chief gardener. Mom said some of the things that she overheard people saying about the Japanese after Pearl Harbor were horrific. Feelings ran terribly high … anything could have happened to the local Japanese … including her friend’s family.
    And there were ethnic Germans in Texas who were interned; I’ve been told that it was forbidden to speak German in public at the time, which was a very great trial, as many German enclaves in the Texas Hill Country still maintained the language in church, local newspapers and social clubs. A local history expert who advised me when I was writing the Adelsverein Trilogy told me two stories about locals who were interned in the Crystal City camp. One was an out-and-out Nazi sympathizer, who was always trying to recruit supporters among the Hill Country Germans for spying and sabotage – mostly to their embarrassment and horror. He was locked up almost at once. The other was a recently-arrived Swiss-German who had been called to one of the German-speaking churches in Fredericksburg. He spoke English – but he kept forgetting and lapsing back into his native language, in spite of being warned repeatedly. He also was interned in Crystal City, but didn’t much mind, as he always had a full house on Sunday mornings for services.
    And the book Sons and Soldiers is terrific. I reviewed it for Amazon Vine when it first was released.

  14. BFD.
    It is all about falsely and excessively generating white American shame for what’s happening on our southern border. MS-13 “children” should be welcomed, “families” must be kept together though relationships cannot be proven and can be faked. When the weather’s bad outside here in the Gulf South, the roaches head indoors. Same thing with people.
    The Left, smart, clever and malign as it is, is slow to learn some lessons. See anti-immigration in Italy. One can but hope while working against Leftism.

  15. My grandmother and one brother were both born in the US in the 1890’s, while their three older brothers were born in Germany in the 1880’s. The older brothers were brought to NY and Phila as babies when their parents emigrated to the US.

    The boys, all of them, were during World War I harassed, discriminated against, even beaten, because their first names were associated with Germans. Their surname had been Anglicized at immigration customs, but Herman and Otto were enemies. Both changed their first names and moved when they could to other cities.
    Funny part was Hans was always John from the moment he reached the shores, but poor John was beaten nearly to death by anti-German mobs.

  16. I remember being told that my German (US-citizen) relatives stopped reading German-language newspapers on the subway during WWI in order to keep a low profile.

  17. Joe Dimaggio’s father was a commercial fisherman in SF.
    The US gov’t confiscated his boat for the duration of the war.
    Hundreds of Italian-Americans were also incarcerated.

  18. The concentration camps were the FBI and FDR’s way to make Americans stop questioning Demoncrat lies about Pearl Harbor, the breaking of Japanese intel codes, and the promises of not going to war.

    What US citizens needed to be protected from was their ill gotten property. When certain families were required to move, carpet baggers could go in and buy up all the family treasures for the penny to the dollar. That’s American Capitalism as protected and enforced by gov goons.

    As for the spies, leaving the spies alone meant that FDr knew where they were, as the Japanese military codes were broken days before Pearl Harbor. There was no need for internment camps because they weren’t interning the spies. Hoover and the FBI needed the spies to be free and keep sending information, which then was cracked by US intel.

    The rogue US intel agencies and departments like the FBI, have always justified questionable powers as being justified due to the exigencies of war time or national security. They still do it concerning the 2018 President. It’s a national security issue if Russia! Americans keep falling for it. They fell for the story of the Lusitania. Pearl Harbor. Gulf of Tonkin. Diem. Tet Offensive. They’ll keep falling for it, even if they think they know not to trust the media. Their problem is that they are human and humans are relatively easy to manipulate and deceive.

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