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.
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.
Posted by: Grace Kelly | April 11, 2008 at 02:48 PM