Being of German extraction, I was intrigued by your post, so I did a little digging. I did some searches in traditional journals. What I found was that about 31,000 "enemy aliens" were interned during World War II. Of those, about 10,000 were Germans. The big contrast with the treatment of the Japanese was that the Germans interred were aliens, not US citizens. About a third of the Japanese interned were in fact US citizens; they were targeted because of their ethnicity. It seems clear that the Germans were not detained on the basis of their ethnicity - if the government decided to target people purely because of their German ancestry, they would have needed pretty big camps!
The other issue is that there was, in fact, a pro-Nazi movement among German aliens in the US. The German American Bund was a scary organization, and it made sense to target them in wartime. Not to say that there weren't abuses. I would be surprised if some innocent and apolitical German aliens were not caught up in the net. But again, there was a genuine threat. At 09:15 PM 9/17/02 -0400, you wrote: >There was a question about why German Americans were not subjected to the same >interment as Japanese Americans during WWII. >The San Jose Mercury News article looked like a good overview. >Darice ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Deb Messling -^..^- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.386 / Virus Database: 218 - Release Date: 9/9/02
