Saturday, April 21, 2007

My Apostasy

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Lost story is told: Detention of German-Americans

Art Jacobs' father never came home.

Pops went to his job at a diaper laundering service on a Friday in November 1944, but didn't return for dinner.

Mom paced in front of the window of their Brooklyn, N.Y., flat all weekend, until she got the call: Lambert Jacobs — a German immigrant in the United States on a visa — had been arrested and detained because he was deemed a potential national security threat.

"I had no idea what was going on," said Art Jacobs, who was 12 at the time. "Our family as we knew it was destroyed after that moment. It was never the same again."

He and the rest of his family voluntarily joined Lambert Jacobs in captivity a few months later, and spent almost a year in camps at Ellis Island, N.Y., and Crystal City, Texas.

Art Jacobs, now 74 and living in Arizona, was among an estimated 11,000 people of German ancestry interned in the United States from 1941 to 1948, out of fear they might have allegiances with their mother country.

The internment of an estimated 120,000 Japanese-Americans is well-known and often the subject of school social studies classes. But the plight of German-Americans, as well as Italian-Americans, during World War II seems to have been largely lost in the annals of history.

The story of the Jacobs family and others will be on display locally this weekend in a traveling exhibit on German-American internment, hosted by the TRACES Museum Center for History and Culture in St. Paul, Minn.

The mobile museum — a retrofitted school bus — is touring eight Midwestern states to tell this largely unknown slice of American history. Photos and narratives will decorate the interior and exterior of the bus, and the back will serve as a makeshift movie theater for a Dateline NBC documentary and 1945 government propaganda film on internment.

Like Art Jacobs, some of the detainees were American-born children, and many were held after the war concluded. The TRACES center believes that 85 people of German ancestry from Missouri and 318 from Illinois were caught up in the internment. U.S. Department of Justice documents about the internments supplied by Jacobs say a man from Affton was arrested on March 16, 1942. An Italian man from St. Louis was taken away on March 27, 1942. A kitchen steward at the Jefferson Hotel in St. Louis was arrested on the same day.

The only crime listed in each case is "alien enemy."

This is getting silly. Everyone can see there were horrible excesses in the World War II internment policies, particularly among Japanese-Americans, but I think we might be over-reacting in the other direction now. I do not think we need to apologize for interning citizens of Nazi Germany who were in this country during the war. (What circumstances led to the forcible repatriations to Germany are not outlined. Perhaps they had no legal standing for being in the US to begin with, who knows? This may or may not be an example of overzealous behavior, but without more information the reader has no way to decide.)

Besides, exactly how unreasonable was the belief that Germany might conduct sabotage in the US with the help of German immigrants? Well, if the experience of the United States during the First World War was any guide, the answer had to be that such sabotage was very likely. As documented in the recent book The Detonators by Chad Millman, Germany conducted an extensive sabotage campaign in the (then) still neutral United States. Agents sent under diplomatic cover from Germany were able to recruit help both from Germany citizens stuck in the States because of circumstances (mainly German merchant sailors) and from American citizens of German descent. Munition plants and American ships were bombed, germ warfare (anthrax) was conducted against livestock destined for Europe, and the Black Tom cargo terminal in New York was destroyed in a massive explosion in 1916. The notion that Germans in the U.S. could possibly pose a threat was not pure fantasy and bigotry. When you combine this experience with the lack of an effective counter-espionage service, internment became the only policy option available. The fact it was used so indiscriminately was deplorable, and the confiscation of the property and livelihood of Americans of Japanese descent was beyond the pale. That being said, we shouldn't be ignorant that the world they were living in was in many ways very different from our own. The events of the First World War were still vivid memories for many of the people involved in policy making during the Second World War. Today it is unlikely that more than one out of ten even know there was a bombing campaign in the U.S. carried out by Imperial Germany. Unfortunately many of us are very comfortable living in our ignorance and have no problem condemning previous generations for not living up to our ill-informed "standards."

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