Posted on 07/12/2013 7:27:07 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Little known is it that FDR is not the first president to have relocation camps, and Japanese Americans were not the original target. Nearly 30 years prior to World War two, German Americans were the targets and the most interesting thing is that very little is written about this. History has been virtually expunged of this topic. Historians do not write about it, so history books don't contain it, and even from various news journals at the time it was largely unreported. When it was reported, some of the blurbs on it were small and not noteworthy.
The first American President to have internment camps got away with it.
I could only find a handful such articles about the incident, one of which details the treatment of war captives. "How the United States Takes Care of German Prisoners (June, 1918)" The other stories I found are often times reported in passing, they detail the harassment of citizens, business owners, and others who clearly don't exist in a war or battle context.
One such citizen was Agathe Wilhelmine Richrath who:
MISS AGATHE WlLHELMINE RICHRATH, instructor in German at Vassar College, who has been taken into custody at Poughkeepsie on a charge of being pro-German and of circulating German propaganda, has tendered her resignation and it has been accepted. Miss Richrath will be interned as an alien enemy.
The paragraph above the one I quoted lists Dr.s Richard Goldschmidt and Rhoda Erdmann were both detained and interned as well.
Richrath's internment did actually get reported in the NY Times, along with the names of several other people in passing.
Finally, quite a scene was created when the government went after Heinrich Bockisch:
STATUS OF M. WELTE & SONS DEFINEDOfficial Statement Issued by Bureau of Investigation of the Alien Property Custodian
E. M. Atkin of the Bureau of Investigation, Alien Property Custodian, New York, issued the following statement on Tuesday last relative to M. Welte & Sons:
"Heinrich Bockisch, the factory manager and a large stockholder in M. Welte & Sons, Inc., was taken into custody by the United States Government on April 22, 1918, on charges of German propaganda. He was ordered interned and was removed July 2 to Fort Oglethorpe, with 17 other alien enemies.
The story talks about a fight on the street and more.
These are all names which are lost to history at this point, but what I'm getting at is that Woodrow Wilson's concentration camps were real. The government did not just intern foreigners(which is bad enough) but they also went after those who emigrated to our country, set up businesses, were attempting to be productive members of society, may have planned on staying, and some who were even full time citizens. One of the most "well known"(His name is specifically listed on Wikipedia) internees was Dr. Karl Muck, who once he was released from his year of detainment, left the country.
But were they starved and beaten? Made to work 18 hour days with little food, cabbage soup? Lay on maggot infested straw in barns?
Wilson, FDR, Klinton, Carter, LBJ, and Obama. How did America elect this bunch of communists??? How did America throw away 200 years of freedom and becoming the greatest nation on the face of this earth, for THIS!!!!
The German born conductor Karl Muck, who was then conducting the Boston Symphony, was interned at a camp in Georgia from March 1918 until August 1919.
The Confederates during the Civil War had what was in effect a concentration camp for Southern Unionists. The Democratic Party, the party of dirty tricks, has some skeletons in its closet.
Roger Baldwin was one of the catalysts.
The first concentration camps in America were authorized by Congress in 1851 with the passage of the Indian Appropriations Act. Millard Fillmore was in office at the time. That is, unless you want to count the entire territory of Oklahoma as one big concentration camp, in which case you’d have to look all the way back to Andrew Jackson.
Don't leave out Lincoln.
Internment camps for enemy aliens was standard operating procedure through WWII, for all countries.
There is one book on the subject, and it’s excellent: Nazi Prisoners of War in America by Arnold Krammer, a Texas A&M professor. (ISBN-10: 0812885619 /
ISBN-13: 978-0812885613)
Includes some rare photos, as well as interviews with the people who ran, and inhabited, the camps.
Many German prisoners had fond memories of their time in the US camps, and credited what they learned here for their successful careers after the war.
Are people in Staunton, VA, still proud of their Wilson tie?
The “Union” had a concentration camp in Elmira, NY.
And now the internment er re-location camps are for constitution loving patriotic conservatives.
One word: Andersonville.
I read that a large number of them stayed in the US after the war. Germany was in ruins, no jobs or income.
Don’t recall that he ever mentioned being a POW, but my first flight instructor had been an ME-110 pilot during the war.
I ran across a writeup a few years ago about the internment of the diplomatic embassy staffs of the German, Japanese and Italian Embassies who were on-site in early December ‘41.
I don’t recall the details; as I recall they didn’t give their American guards much trouble, but the three diplomatic delegations didn’t get along particularly well with each other.
One of the LARGEST non-nuclear detonations ever, was the infamous "Black Tom Explosion" in New York harbor in 1916. This explosion was so huge it not only destroyed a ship and a large munitions plant, but actually damaged the Statue of Liberty...something like a half-mile away. At the time, Americans were told it was an accident, but, the government knew (and revealed in the 1920s) with clear evidence that it was an act of German sabotage. Along with Black Tom, apparently over 50 acts of German sabotage were known during the war.
The fact of the matter was that the US government, and US corporations, were actively supporting the Allies from the very beginning of the war. Munitions manufacturers made tens of millions selling to the Allies, and Wilson, in spite of his promises to keep the US out of war, was actively looking for a pretext to get involved...so it really is no wonder that Germany saw the USA as its enemy long before we entered the war openly in 1917.
Once again, I wish we had stayed out...but we didn't, and since we were involved in WWI all along, given German sabotage, especially after the enormous Black Tom Explosion, no wonder Wilson was incredibly anti-German...even to the point of opening internment camps.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.