INTRODUCTION
The United States implemented three programs to identify and imprison civilians considered a threat to the country during the war years. In all three, both legal resident aliens and naturalized citizens whose ethnicity was suspect were targeted, as were their families. Under the War Relocation Authority (WRA)—based on Executive Order 9066 (issued February 19, 1942)—all German, Japanese, and Italian enemy aliens were asked to voluntarily relocate from zones that the U.S. Army felt were militarily sensitive. Soon the request became a command for all Japanese, while only selected German and Italian aliens were ordered to move.1
The end result was the forcible mass uprooting and detaining, in “relocation camps,” of most Japanese-American citizens and Japanese residing legally in the western states of California, Washington, and Oregon. Neither German nor Italian aliens were imprisoned under this program. No attempts were made to evaluate the risk individuals might pose.
Clearly, racial bias and overzealous security concerns motivated this policy. The United States recognized this in 1988, when all individuals affected by the WRA received a formal apology from Ronald Reagan; and in 1990, when each received $20,000 as redress.2
Somewhat more selectively, the Alien Enemy Control Unit, using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, did attempt to evaluate and classify the potential dangers of individual Germans, Italians, and Japanese legally residing in the United States. However, evaluations were often perfunctory and inaccurate—based on reports of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) using information gleaned from neighbors, business associates, and family members.3 Individuals and families picked up in this Department of Justice program were housed in camps run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Out of a population of approximately 300,000 German Americans and legal German residents, around 1 percent were arrested and interned, many with their wives and children. In numerous cases, family members were U.S. citizens.4 The Alien Enemies Act is still in use, most recently in the current “war on terror.”
In a third, separate program, run by the State Department, at least 8,500 German nationals and numerous other Axis residents in Latin-American countries were indiscriminately swept into local detention centers. An unknown number were sent by the United States directly to Germany, Japan, or Italy, while 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese, and 287 Italians were deported to the United States.5 Again, some of the prisoners and many of their family members were citizens of the country from which they were expelled. These captives were also housed in the INS camps. The Axis nationals from Latin America and their families, though civilians, were treated with the standards used for prisoners of war, in the hope that Axis countries holding U.S. prisoners would reciprocate.6 Under this program, which came to be called the Special War Problems Division, arrests and illegal deportations were so secret that the public knows little about it to this day. ...
The prime motive for these measures was to ensure hemispheric security, but commercial concerns were also incentives. Germans, in particular, had built up large businesses in Latin America. Destroying the businesses through blacklists and removing the German owners allowed U.S. firms to establish themselves. A third motive emerged as arrests and deportations continued, when government officials recognized that those interned could be exchanged for U.S. civilians imprisoned in Germany or Japan.
For readers interested in a broader look at the history behind United States policies toward citizen internment in Latin America prior to and during World War II, I have added a separate chapter, “A Wider View,” at the end of this text, as well as a selected bibliography.
My family was one of many caught in the far-flung net cast by U.S. authorities seeking the enemy in Latin America during World War II. My father and uncle, Werner Gurcke and Karl Oskar Gurcke, were German citizens who had lived in Costa Rica since the 1920s. In the early 1930s, Karl Oskar married a Costa Rican woman with one young daughter. In 1936, my father married an American—Starr Pait, my mother—and they made their home in the capital, San José, where my sister and I were born. Blacklisted by the British in August 1940 and the United States in 1941, my father and uncle were arrested as Nazis and dangerous enemy aliens in 1942 and held without charges for six months. Then both our families were deported to the United States and interned in a camp at Crystal City, Texas.
Was my father a Nazi? Absolutely not. In January 1942, when my father registered as a resident alien in Costa Rica, he made clear that he was not at all interested in politics, preferring to concentrate on family and business. Letters both my parents wrote during the war years indicated strong dislike for Nazi policies. A governmental review of my father’s case in 1946 concluded there was no evidence he even tacitly sympathized with Hitler’s aims. Our family’s whole ordeal hinged on unsubstantiated allegations by anonymous informants—and one fact; my father was born in Germany.
In several letters, both my father and mother stated that other members of his family did have Nazi leanings. I have no evidence that any of them belonged to the Nazi Party, although they may have been nationalistic. Because my uncle and his family chose to be sent to Germany, no U.S. government review of his case was ever done.
In 1946, my father’s status as alien enemy was finally dropped, after he received the first full hearing and review of his case, but charges of illegal entry into the United States threatened repatriation until 1948. From 1940, when my parents were blacklisted in Costa Rica, until the day my father became a citizen of the United States on April 21, 1952, my parents lived with uncertainty and fear. If they had realized that even naturalized U.S. citizenship would not have safeguarded my father during the war years, they would never have felt secure again.
I learned part of our story from my mother, who was in her eighties when she finally let me interview her. Her memories were so painful that it took over a month of visits to record her recollections, offered in fragments through her tears. My father never talked about any of it. He had faced not only the destruction of his own way of life, but also the distress of knowing his parents and youngest brother were living through another war in Germany. After his death, I found he’d saved numerous letters and governmental papers, tucking them into a shabby manila folder at the back of an old filing cabinet in the garage.
Other documents and information were obtained through Freedom of Information and Privacy Act requests to various government agencies. I have not altered the abbreviated spellings my mother often used in her letters. All translations are my own. (Book revised and updated, 2008.)
“Introduction” Endnotes
Tetsuden Kashima, Judgment Without Trial: Japanese American Imprisonment During World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 136–139.
2 See Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied (Seattle: The Civil Liberties Public Education Fund and the University of Washington Press, 1997); Max Paul Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Michi Weglyn, Years of Infamy: The Untold Story of America’s Concentration Camps (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). Japanese- and Italian-American groups affected by WWII internment policies have had governmental recognition. The apology and $20,000 given to Japanese Americans in the War Relocation Authority program were also extended to Japanese Americans interned by Alien Enemy Control. In 2000, a law was enacted authorizing a government report detailing injustices suffered by Italian Americans during World War II. The president signed a formal admission of these injustices. No acknowledgment has been made to civilians of German ancestry who experienced similar treatment.
3 Arnold Krammer, Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees (Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1997), 11.
4 Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors, 3, 120. In total, 10,905 Germans were interned, including those brought to the United States and voluntary internees, according to a letter from W. F. Kelly to A. Vulliet, 9 August 1948, which was reprinted in The World War Two Experience: The Internment of German-Americans, Vol. IV, German-Americans in the World Wars, Arthur D. Jacobs and Joseph E. Fallon, eds. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), 1513.
6 See Edward N. Barnhart, “Japanese Internees from Peru,” Pacific Historical Review 31 (1962): 172. See also Max Paul Friedman, Personal Justice Denied; “Private Memory, Public Record, and Contested Terrain: Weighing Oral Testimony in the Deportation of Germans from Latin America During World War II,” Oral History Review 27/1 (Winter/Spring 2000); and Friedman, Nazis and Good Neighbors, 2–3. In 1998, President Bill Clinton offered a public apology and agreed to pay $5,000 compensation to Peruvian Japanese, but no formal acknowledgment of similar injustices to Latin-American Germans and Italians has been made. In June 1942, the United States also ordered the evacuation of residents of the Aleutian and Pribiloff Islands in Alaska, as a precaution to ensure their safety during Japanese attacks on some of the islands. While not part of the prior programs, these people likewise suffered great losses economically and personally. Their story is told in Personal Justice Denied.
PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION:
March 1944—German language preschool, Crystal City, Texas Family Internment Camp
I am in nursery school, and we are playing a singing game. Sleeping Beauty lies in the center of our circle, giggling as she tries to keep still, and we crouch around her. Sometimes my sister or I get to be Sleeping Beauty, but usually we are part of the circle. We sing the verses and gradually stand taller, until finally we are all on tiptoe, hands held high over our heads, shouting the last verse—’The hedge grows very high!”—as we try to form an impenetrable barrier. A prince, chosen from the class, always gets through our hedge and frees our captive.
Our nursery school is surrounded by a different sort of hedge; the thorns are barbed wire. There are watchtowers and armed guards. There is no prince.
When I began looking into my family’s imprisonment in World War II, my idea was to record what had happened for my children. As I learned more, I realized our experiences did not represent an isolated injustice to one family, but a pattern that occurs whenever a nation feels threatened. Families around the world are at risk whenever government policy-makers assume that ethnicity alone decides loyalty. I hope this look at an almost-unknown chapter of United States history will be a reminder that there are lessons to be learned from our past.
A number of thoroughly researched, well-written books are available on the World War II internment of civilians from the United States. For readers interested in a more comprehensive account of U.S. involvement in the southern hemisphere, I recommend Max Paul Friedman’s Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign Against the Germans of Latin America in World War II; and Leslie B. Rout Jr. and John F. Bratzel’s The Shadow War: German Espionage and United States Counterespionage in Latin America During World War II. Stephen Fox’s Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans during World War II and the German American Internee Coalition Web site, www.gaic.info, are also good sources of information.
