Five Surprises About US Internment During World War II

My parents were very high on FDR. As a child during WW II, I was
shocked that most of my school chums sported campaign buttons with,
"Time for a Change" written on them. FDR was almost as Almighty as
God! At least to this nine year old boy, in 1944.
Looking back, as a 79 year old, it is clear that although FDR was the
strong commander in chief, Eleanor Roosevelt was America's-heart.
It's hard to believe that Americans did not know that fellow Americans
were being interned and their property and possessions stolen. But I
never heard the subject discussed or even mentioned until many years
following the war. Some might remind me that I was only ten years old
when the war ended, but I was very much aware of social attitudes at
that time. I knew about prejudice, how Negroes were being treated as
non-citizens and as sub human. I knew how my school chums talked
about Jews, singing little songs like, "If I knew you were coming I'd
have baked a Kike", or chanting things like, "you Jewed me". If I was
accused of being cheap, I was told, "Don't be such a Jew". I knew all
the slurs Blacks were called, and I knew about Chinks, Wet Backs and
so many others. So I think if there had been common knowledge about
the internment camps, I'd have heard. I even recall my folks driving
the family to Puyallup,to the Fair Grounds, and we stared at the
"Enemies" walking back and forth behind the Barbed Wire fencing. It
wasn't until years later that I learned I had been staring at American
Citizens, who happened to be of Japanese descent. And while I'm on
the subject of our government hiding information from us, I was told,
and honestly believed that the Allied Forces did not kill innocent
civilians. Nor did we bomb houses. Only factories and military
bases. I never heard of a fire bomb until many years later. But the
USA could not hide the slaughter of innocent Japanese when we dropped
the two Atomic Bombs. Even to a ten year old boy there was something
wrong with the propaganda spread concerning our "Need" to drop those
bombs in order to save American lives. I clearly remember being told
by our president that we would have lost a million troops if we hadn't
dropped those Atomic Bombs.
I have no first hand knowledge about lies prior to the second world
war, but I can honestly say that the government has continuously told
deliberate lies and withheld vital information from the American
People, without a break. How can the government believe that we would
trust what they tell us. I trust only myself. And I am not too
certain about me, since my head has been filled with Fairy Tales.

Carl Jarvis

On 2/14/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Five Surprises About US Internment During World War II
> Saturday, 14 February 2015 10:57 By Jan Jarboe Russell, Truthout | Op-Ed
> In an undated handout photo from the National Archives, people of Japanese
> descent line up for a train that will take them to an internment camp at
> Gila River, Ariz. from the Santa Anita assembly camp in Arcadia, Calif., in
> 1942. The Supreme Court's 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United States
> endorsed an executive order that required 110,000 Americans of Japanese
> ancestry to be removed from their homes and confined in detention camps
> during World War II. (National Archives via The New York Times) The general
> history of America's internment of its own citizens during World War II has
> focused on the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them
> American-born, who were forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the
> bombing of Pearl Harbor.
> But few people know that the Executive Order 9066, signed by President
> Roosevelt, which permitted the roundup of Japanese and their American-born
> children, also paved the way for the arrest of Germans and Italians whom
> the
> FBI considered security risks and labeled "enemy aliens." Indeed, the day
> before Roosevelt signed the order, FBI agents had arrested 264 Italians,
> 1,296 Germans, and 2,209 on the East and West Coasts. The hunt for
> perceived
> enemies was on.
> Here are five surprising facts about the extent of FDR's internment
> program:
> Fact One: The arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national
> borders. Under provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the same act that
> allowed Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to intern modern-day
> suspected terrorists, Roosevelt orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans,
> 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from 13 Latin American countries - and
> locked them up around the United States, many in a secret government
> internment camp located in Crystal City, Texas, an isolated desert town
> located at the southern tip of Texas, only 30 miles from the Mexican
> border.
> His reason? Roosevelt feared security threats from Germans and Japanese in
> Latin America.
> Fact Two: Incredibly, among those taken from Latin America included a small
> number of Jews who had fled persecution in Germany. In his book, Nazis and
> Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman documented 81 Jews in Latin America who
> were part of the roundup. One Jewish family - the Jacobis from Columbia -
> was interned in the camp in Crystal City.
> Fact Three: The entire political and military establishment applied
> pressure
> on Roosevelt to pursue a vigorous internment policy. The only person close
> to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed the case against
> immigrants was driven by wartime hysteria. "These people were not convicted
> of any crime but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak
> vengeance on Oriental looking people," she wrote of the evacuation order
> for
> the Japanese.
> Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told Attorney General
> Francis Biddle to arrest Italians and Germans. "I don't care so much about
> the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are
> different: They may be dangerous." In response, Biddle widened the net of
> suspicion.
> Fact Four: One reason for the internment program was to create a pool of
> hostages to exchange for Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Europe and
> in the Pacific. FDR created a secret division within the Department of
> State
> called the Special War Problems Division, which negotiated numerous
> prisoner
> exchanges with Japan and Germany.
> Fact Five: The Crystal City Internment Camp was at the center of those
> exchanges. Some former internees, who were children in the camp, refer to
> it
> as The Kidnap Camp. Thousands of internees in Crystal City, including their
> American-born children, were exchanged for ostensibly more important
> Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries
> -
> behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
> The first of four exchanges in Crystal City took place in June 1942 and the
> second on September 2, 1943. During those exchanges, more than 2,000
> Japanese and Japanese Americans were traded for Americans caught in Japan.
> In February 1944, 634 German immigrants and their children were sent from
> Crystal City into Germany. On January 2, 1945, 428 more in Crystal City
> were
> traded into war.
> The tableau of today's headlines about government surveillance, internment
> and prisoner exchanges was written more than 70 years ago in Crystal City,
> Texas.
> C 2015 Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City: FDR's
> Secret
> Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During
> World War II
> See also: "Uncovering a World War II Prisoner Exchange Program Through
> Interned Immigrants' Stories."
> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
> JAN JARBOE RUSSELL
> Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City, is a former Nieman
> Fellow, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, and has written for the
> San
> Antonio Express-News, The New York Times, Slate and other magazines. She is
> the author of Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson and has also compiled
> and edited They Lived to Tell the Tale. She lives in San Antonio, Texas,
> with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr. For more information please
> visit her website, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.
> RELATED STORIES
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> By Staff, Truthout | Special Project
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> By Mattea Kramer, Chris Hellman, TomDispatch | News Analysis
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> By Anton Woronczuk, The Real News Network | Video Interview
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> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
> Five Surprises About US Internment During World War II
> Saturday, 14 February 2015 10:57 By Jan Jarboe Russell, Truthout | Op-Ed
> . font size Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink
> reference not valid.
> . In an undated handout photo from the National Archives, people of
> Japanese descent line up for a train that will take them to an internment
> camp at Gila River, Ariz. from the Santa Anita assembly camp in Arcadia,
> Calif., in 1942. The Supreme Court's 1944 decision in Korematsu v. United
> States endorsed an executive order that required 110,000 Americans of
> Japanese ancestry to be removed from their homes and confined in detention
> camps during World War II. (National Archives via The New York Times) The
> general history of America's internment of its own citizens during World
> War
> II has focused on the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese, 62 percent of them
> American-born, who were forcibly evacuated from the Pacific coast after the
> bombing of Pearl Harbor.
> . But few people know that the Executive Order 9066, signed by
> President Roosevelt, which permitted the roundup of Japanese and their
> American-born children, also paved the way for the arrest of Germans and
> Italians whom the FBI considered security risks and labeled "enemy aliens."
> Indeed, the day before Roosevelt signed the order, FBI agents had arrested
> 264 Italians, 1,296 Germans, and 2,209 on the East and West Coasts. The
> hunt
> for perceived enemies was on.
> Here are five surprising facts about the extent of FDR's internment
> program:
> Fact One: The arrests of suspected enemies extended far beyond our national
> borders. Under provisions of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, the same act that
> allowed Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to intern modern-day
> suspected terrorists, Roosevelt orchestrated the removal of 4,058 Germans,
> 2,264 Japanese and 288 Italians from 13 Latin American countries - and
> locked them up around the United States, many in a secret government
> internment camp located in Crystal City, Texas, an isolated desert town
> located at the southern tip of Texas, only 30 miles from the Mexican
> border.
> His reason? Roosevelt feared security threats from Germans and Japanese in
> Latin America.
> Fact Two: Incredibly, among those taken from Latin America included a small
> number of Jews who had fled persecution in Germany. In his book, Nazis and
> Good Neighbors, Max Paul Friedman documented 81 Jews in Latin America who
> were part of the roundup. One Jewish family - the Jacobis from Columbia -
> was interned in the camp in Crystal City.
> Fact Three: The entire political and military establishment applied
> pressure
> on Roosevelt to pursue a vigorous internment policy. The only person close
> to him who opposed it was Eleanor Roosevelt, who believed the case against
> immigrants was driven by wartime hysteria. "These people were not convicted
> of any crime but emotions ran too high, too many people wanted to wreak
> vengeance on Oriental looking people," she wrote of the evacuation order
> for
> the Japanese.
> Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt told Attorney General
> Francis Biddle to arrest Italians and Germans. "I don't care so much about
> the Italians. They are a lot of opera singers, but the Germans are
> different: They may be dangerous." In response, Biddle widened the net of
> suspicion.
> Fact Four: One reason for the internment program was to create a pool of
> hostages to exchange for Americans trapped behind enemy lines in Europe and
> in the Pacific. FDR created a secret division within the Department of
> State
> called the Special War Problems Division, which negotiated numerous
> prisoner
> exchanges with Japan and Germany.
> Fact Five: The Crystal City Internment Camp was at the center of those
> exchanges. Some former internees, who were children in the camp, refer to
> it
> as The Kidnap Camp. Thousands of internees in Crystal City, including their
> American-born children, were exchanged for ostensibly more important
> Americans - diplomats, businessmen, soldiers, physicians, and missionaries
> -
> behind enemy lines in Japan and Germany.
> The first of four exchanges in Crystal City took place in June 1942 and the
> second on September 2, 1943. During those exchanges, more than 2,000
> Japanese and Japanese Americans were traded for Americans caught in Japan.
> In February 1944, 634 German immigrants and their children were sent from
> Crystal City into Germany. On January 2, 1945, 428 more in Crystal City
> were
> traded into war.
> The tableau of today's headlines about government surveillance, internment
> and prisoner exchanges was written more than 70 years ago in Crystal City,
> Texas.
> C 2015 Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City: FDR's
> Secret
> Prisoner Exchange Program and America's Only Family Internment Camp During
> World War II
> See also: "Uncovering a World War II Prisoner Exchange Program Through
> Interned Immigrants' Stories."
> Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
> Jan Jarboe Russell
> Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City, is a former Nieman
> Fellow, a contributing editor for Texas Monthly, and has written for the
> San
> Antonio Express-News, The New York Times, Slate and other magazines. She is
> the author of Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson and has also compiled
> and edited They Lived to Tell the Tale. She lives in San Antonio, Texas,
> with her husband, Dr. Lewis F. Russell, Jr. For more information please
> visit her website, and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter.
> Related Stories
> Homeland Security: The Occupy Files
> By Staff, Truthout | Special Project"Homeland Security": The
> Trillion-Dollar
> Concept That No One Can Define
> By Mattea Kramer, Chris Hellman, TomDispatch | News AnalysisSecurity,
> Refugees and Profit at the US Border
> By Anton Woronczuk, The Real News Network | Video Interview
>
> Show Comments
>
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