- 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. __
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- What follows is shocking. I begin with low-level shock.
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- The Japanese Camps
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- 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.
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- The Western Hemisphere Kidnap Camps
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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. . . .
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- 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. . . .
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- 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 ñ much, much worse.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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:
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- 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.
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- 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. . . .
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The State Department citations herein are included in
their entirety in Volume IV, The World War Two Experience of German-Americans
of German-Americans in the World Wars, Edited by: Don Heinrich Tolzmann,
K.G. Saur, Munich, 1995, pp. 1671-1674.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- "My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,"
etc., etc.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- Conclusion
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- 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.
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- December 11 , 2001
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