Written by Jeronimo Gonzalez-Tijerina
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The Pre-Planned Internments
It is now common knowledge that during WWII the United States of America rounded up and interned Japanese-Americans and people of Japanese descent. What is not common knowledge is that German Americans were interned with them. My research focuses on the role of the FBI in the internment of German Americans and their families in camps throughout the United States.
Reading FBI reports, one can find out that as early as 1939, fully two years before America joined the war, the US government already had a list of over 4,000 Japanese, German and Italian Americans to intern, as soon as the US did join the war.1 This list included descendants, US citizens, and sympathizers. The plan was ready, and the very day that the US declared war on Japan, the FBI sent an order to arrest all the people on that list. Dec 9th, 1941, two days after the US joined the war, there had already been a total of 1801 people arrested, with 497 of these being German Americans. It is important to note that at that point the US had not yet even declared war on Germany.2
On December 22nd 1941, General DeWitt, in charge of the US army defending the West, mostly Californian coast, requested a major simultaneous raid of all aliens, both those already rounded up in relocation camps and those still in normal residences. The plan was to confiscate weapons and radios in order to stop them from sabotage and espionage. This idea was backed by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover.3
Around this same time, by Dec 15th, 1941 the following numbers of warranted and unwarranted arrests had been performed4:
Germans: 1,757 Warrants Issued, 500 unwarranted arrests, Total: 2,257
Italian: 223 Warrants Issued, 85 unwarranted arrests Total 308
Japanese: 700 Warrants Issued, 628 unwarranted arrests Total 1,328
This all adds up to a grand total of: 2,680 warranted arrests, and 1,213 unwarranted arrests, with a total of 3.893 arrests. 4 Months later, in April 1942, there were 1,100,000 “Aliens” listed to be “visited” by the FBI and police forces. These numbers were not shown to the people, however, in order to stop them from being outraged at the number of people arrested and interned.5
In an FBI report to J. Edgar Hoover dated 2 June 1942, the agent states that not all of the arrests of Aliens were due to their nationality. Some of them were due to ordinary misdemeanors like breaking curfew and drunk driving. He also said that the Italian women married to service members were being considered for release due to their spouses’ service status6. Despite this report from those working on the ground that FBI strictness should be relaxed, Director Hoover reinforced strictness. By November 1942, Hoover felt compelled to send an order to all Special Agents in Charge of the FBI to document arrests, as some of them had stopped reporting them. He also instructed them to intern families together, an instruction that had not existed before7.
Are these measures simply an example of government overreach or violation of civil liberties? The FBI and State Department officials sought to justify their lists, searches, arrests, and internment measures on two grounds. The first and most immediate was the claim that if they did not “take charge” of the potentially dangerous “enemy aliens,” then American citizens would target innocents similar to how the public behaved in WWI when they lynched, tarred and feathered, accused, hanged, and convicted innocent German Americans. The second claim was that the US needed enemy nationals to exchange with the Axis powers in order to liberate American soldiers, diplomats, journalists, missionaries, businessmen and other civilians captured in Europe and Japan during World War II.
These methods and activities were not only unfair, but also inhumane. The American Government could have handled this issue with better options, such as using the energy and resources they put into arresting and interning German-Americans into protecting them and surveillance, which would accomplish both the goal of protecting innocents and the nation from saboteurs.
1 From a Hoover Memorandum to Major Lemuel B Schofield, Immigration and Naturalization Services, dated December 8, 1941, A memorandum from Hoover dated April 30 1941, A TWX from Hoover dated June 15 1940, and a TWX from Hoover to all SACs dated December 6th 1939.
2 Memorandum for The File, December 9 1941
3 Memo FBI-Attorney General, 22 December 1941
4 Memorandum for The File, December 15, 1941
5 The New York Times, April 1 1942, Page 23
6 Memo from SAC Peiper to Hoover, June 2, 1942
7 FBI Bulletin No.69, November 25 1942
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