US Internment Camps

Some disappeared under cover of night; others were taken during raids on their place of employment. About a third were kidnapped by US agents in other countries and brought to the US by force. None had a lawyer, and none were charged with or convicted of a crime. Many were imprisoned for the duration of the war, and even after.

Terror suspects bound for Guantanamo Bay? Not quite. The scenario applied to thousands of German-Americans during World War II, whose experience of wartime internment has so far had little publicity, and even less sympathy, in the US.

The story of how the US treated Japanese-Americans during World War II is well known. Some 120,000 men, women and children living on the West Coast, the majority of them US citizens, were stripped of their property and sent to remote "war relocation camps" in the interior of the country.

But the plight of the 11,000 German resident aliens who were also sent to wartime internment in the US has gotten little attention so far. Earlier this month, US Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, whose constituency is heavily German-American, took a step toward changing that.

For the past six years, Feingold has been trying to pass a bill to create a commission that would examine the US treatment of interned German-Americans -- as well as Italians and other Europeans -- during World War II. A second commission would look at the treatment of Jewish refugees fleeing persecution.

"These people are dying"

A stand-alone bill on the "Wartime Treatment Study Act" has been blocked repeatedly over the last six years by an anonymous Republican senator. Now the legislation -- which was passed in the form of an amendment to the controversial immigration bill -- is uncertain.

"It is so urgent that we pass this legislation," the liberal Democrat Feingold said when he introduced the amendment. "We cannot wait any longer …The people who were affected by these policies are dying."

Congress "did the right thing by recognizing and apologizing for the mistreatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II," Feingold said. "But our work in this area is not done."

No reparations -- just accounting

Unlike surviving Japanese Americans, who were awarded $1.2 billion in reparations in 1988 as part of the modern "redress movement," Feingold's amendment does not seek reparations for the interned Germans or their families. Rather, it would "simply review the facts and circumstances the US government's treatment of German-Americans, Italian-Americans and other European-Americans during World War II."

Survivors from the era and historians alike have made clear that the situation in the camps was far from dire, and that the detainees were, on the whole, treated humanely. And many observers have seized the debate as a chance to slam the idea of creating a congressional commission to examine 60-year-old events.

But Stephen Fox, a historian and the author of "Fear Itself: Inside the FBI Roundup of German Americans during World War II: The Past as Prologue," argues that it is, indeed, important for the government to own up to past actions -- especially in light of the current government's "war on terror" and the newly casual attitudes toward civil liberties.

Parallels with Guantanamo?

In an introduction to his book, which contains oral histories and Justice Department documentation on 50 internees, Fox argues: "The most damning aspects of the American internment experience were decisions to hold persons for indeterminate periods on the basis of their political views, their attitudes toward authority, and their personalities -- even after it had been determined they were not dangerous."

Today, Americans are "attuned and sensitive to the issue that Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and racial profiling here in the US post 9/11, where people are rounded up and held indeterminately, are invasions of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution," Fox said.

The fact that Japanese-American internees were officially acknowledged in the 1980s angered a lot of the surviving Germans, Fox claimed. "Because they were in the same camps, they thought they should be treated equally," he said.

But he noted there are two "core problems" in stirring up public sympathy for German-Americans from that era. The first is Hitler and the Holocaust, which he called "a hurdle German-Americans will have a hard time overcoming."

The other problem is 9/11, Fox said. "That made it hard for people to have sympathy for people who attack us … And German-Americans were perceived during World War II as enemies of the country."

Numbers are "not too significant"

American historian Eric Kurlander, currently a research fellow at the University of Cologne in Germany, also advocates studying the past as a way to avoid repeating mistakes. But, he argued, "there are certainly more significant examples of authoritarian handling of suspects."

While careful to say that "every individual who suffered detainment deserves to have their stories told," Kurlander said he could think of other things that warrant more urgent attention from Congress.

The problem is, that compared to the huge German-American population in the US at the time, the number of German-Americans who were detained is miniscule, Kurlander argued.

"You're in the middle of an extremely destructive war with Germany. There are millions of soldiers on the battlefields, spies, double agents, and 50 million deaths world wide," Kurlander explained. Meanwhile, "tens and hundreds of thousands of people in every country had their lives displaced and disrupted; they had to flee to the countryside and live in conditions little better than at camps."

"Anyone wrongly put in jail has reason to complain," Kurlander acknowledged. "But given the scale of crimes committed in that war -- by the Russian and German governments, and what we ourselves were doing in the Pacific to the POWs and women and children there … detaining 10 or 11,000 people over a period of three years -- we are not talking about anything too significant."