Bus-eum brings “Vanished: German-American Civilian Interment: 1941-48" to AL

The Albert Lea Tribune carries news of a TRACES traveling exhibit that has arrived in Freeborn County. While the interment of Japanese-American citizens is well-known, the detention of German-American civilians is far less so. The last paragraph points out an additional irony for some of the people rounded up:

During those years over 11,000 German-Americans were interned in various camps as alleged enemy aliens and supposedly dangerous to the nation’s security. However, some of those family members were actually children born in this nation. . .

. . .In what has to be one of the strangest aspects of this entire episode is the fact that a number of the internees were Jewish who had left Nazi Germany a few years earlier to escape the very real fate of death in the infamous concentration camps.

Some of the German-American citizens were housed at the Ramsey County jail and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. For those Jews who had fled Germany, imprisonment must have been a bitter pill indeed.

We did know that German prisoners of war were brought to Southern Minnesota, where they were put to work by farmers and others with war-related labor shortages. Both my parents recalled their presence and how they felt as children having the enemy (though disarmed) among them.  As adults they had a more compassionate opinion, but given their age, their brothers fighting in Europe and the movie Nazis they saw in local theaters, they were terrified at the time.

Comments

[Grace Kelly]

As always, awesome article. When I grew up there was still talk about the fear and internment. Germans were called "Dutchmen", which I think was meant to be "Deutsch Mann". Many long time residents changed their names to be less targeted.