Military History: German American espionage?

About.com ^ | 5/10/2004

[Tailgunner Joe]

Expert:Major Robert A. Lynn, USMCR
Date:5/10/2004
Subject:German American espionage?

Question
5/10/04

Dear Mr. Lynn:

As an expert on history, you probably are aware that in 1942 the Japanese-American community on the West Coast of the U.S. was interned because of security and military concerns of espionage and sabotage.

I always thought this was suppose to be unfair because I have heard that German Americans and aliens were caught doing the same thing.

For example, at the FBI's own website at www.fbi.gov it states the case of the Duquesne Spy Ring. On January 2, 1942, 33 members of a Nazi spy ring headed by Frederick Duquesne in New York were sentenced to serve a total of over 300 years in prison.

Here are SOME of the names of the spies and also the espionage activities they were convicted for:

-Paul Bante, German American, was preparing a fuse bomb for sabotage.
-Franz Stigler, German American, sought to recruit amateur radio operators in the U.S. as channels of communication to German radio stations.
-Felix Jahnke, German American, had a radio set built so he could use it to transmit radio messages to Germany.
-Hartwig Kleiss, German American, obtained details on the construction and performance of new speedboats being developed by the U.S. Navy.

So these are the questions I would like to ask:

1. Would you know exactly how many German Americans and aliens were convicted, detained, or deported for espionage and sabotage? Were any of them pardoned or released?

2. Were there any German-American or German ethnic groups or organizations that were considered sympathetic to Nazi Germany?

3. Could you recommend any books that I can read to learn more about German-American espionage or sabotage?

I look forward to your view of the above questions.


Answer
Dear John,
Hereare the answers to your questions:

1. German 10,905
Italian 3,278
Japanese 11,229
Hungarian 52
Romanian 25
Bulgarian 5
Other 161

Total 31,375

*From Latin America:

German 4,058
Japanese 2,264
Italians 288

2.German American Bund and The Legion of the Silver
Shirts

3. World War Two Experience: The Internment Of German
Americans by Joseph E. Fallon

Undue Process: The Untold Story Of America´s German
Alien Internees by Arnold Krammer

There are no numbers given for conviction, deportation, pardoned, and or released.

I apologize for being late to respond but I´m getting ready
to shipout for Iraq. Please rate my response and May God Bless-Major Robert A. Lynn, USMCR

[Tailgunner Joe]

Where is FR's resident League for Anti-fascist Action to tell us what racist nazis we were to intern Germans and Italians during WWII?

I guess it doesn't bother them as much as the internment of the Japanese because those bad bad fascist Germans and Italians deserved it.

[leadpencil1]

Michele Malkins new book is about this exact topic.

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/000337.htm

[gcruse]

If any of that was surprising to you, this may pop your eyes out.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Everybody knows German soldiers rushed to surrender to the United States Army at the end of the war because they were afraid to surrender to the Soviet Union. What few realized until recently, however, was that they did not fare well even in American hands.

You might want to look into the post-war "Morgenthau Plan" to intentionally starve millions of Germans to death. Morgenthau turned out to be a Soviet spy.

[gcruse]

Awesome. That's the first I ever heard of the Morgenthau plan.

[CAPTAIN PHOTON]

His son is Manhattan nyc DA, but since when was papa a convicted spy?

[wideminded]

Morgenthau turned out to be a Soviet spy.

What is the evidence that Henry Morgenthau, Jr. was a Soviet spy? My impression was that three generations of Morgenthau's have been pretty decent public servants. Treasonable Doubt, a recent biography of Harry Dexter White, who was an assistant to Henry Morgenthau, Jr., concluded that White was involved in a "species of espionage", but I have not heard that Morgenthau himself was a spy.

[Tailgunner Joe]

I meant to say that Harry Dexter White, author of the Morgenthau plan, was exposed as a spy by the Venona transcripts.

Morgenthau himself was a Communist sympathizer.

[jnarcus]

And this is News because???? I have known this information for as long as I have known about WWII....Yes there were Germans and Italians interned...the difference with the Japanese internment of course is that so much of the property belonging to the Japanese, which was legally supposed to be held until the end of the war before anything else was done with it, was merely overrun and stolen ( yes stolen ) outright. I have no problem with the internment for WWII as such...if you weren't willing to swear loyalty to the US and renounce Japan ( or Germany or Italy) then you were moved away from the big cities....I do not understand the venom of your first comment at all....

[risk]

I guess it doesn't bother them as much as the internment of the Japanese because those bad bad fascist Germans and Italians deserved it.

It's not racism to the PC crowd because primarily Anglo-Saxon America looks so much like Germans and Italians to them. It was a "white on white" war crime in their twisted view of the world, so it doesn't matter; it doesn't serve their purpose of breaking down America's historic moral superiority during WWII. After all, we're the concentration camp keeping, incindiary dropping, nuking oppressors in historical perspective to them.

Revisionist history is too easy when our public schools are full of Marxist, tie-died, gender bending teachers. We've tried to raise 2-3 generations of propagandists. I hope the poor kids remember how to rebel! There's no need to buy this crap. They should think for themselves. What makes them free? It's not by accident.

[bunkerhill7]

Hi Tailgunner Joe, well my Grandmother from Napoli had a Grunow shortwave radio in her living room in a small town in upstate New Yorkin 1939 thru 1941... All the Italian ladies use to sit and listen to Mussolini all night in her house. They all loved Mussolini. Well, after Pear Harbor, the police came to her house and confiscated the radio and all their cameras including a movie camera.

She and my grandfather from Calabria were practically under house arrest: their movements were restricted and they were under constant surveillance by citizens patrols.
They somehow, though, managed to smuggle Italian newspapers from Rome through Brooklyn and New Jersey to their house.
Their children served in the Army in North Africa,in the WAVES and WACS, built F4U Corsairs for Britain and US Navy, and tested bombs. Her son was given the movie camera by the police before he went overseas and he took some nice shots of Casablanca in WWII.

After the War, the radio was given to her children by the police but my grandmother still was not allowed not use it anymore (go figure?). After my grandmother passed away in 1951, the Grunow was given to me by my aunt.
In 1957 I managed to pick up Sputnik I's beeps on its 3rd pass overhead on the my Grandma's Grunow radio using a 100 ft long copper wire antenna stretching from my bedroom window to the horsebarn.

[Wallace T.]

The difference between the treatment of Japanese Americans vs. German or Italian Americans was that all Japanese Americans who lived in the Western states were sent to internment camps irrespective of their attitude toward their homeland or involvement in subversive activity, whereas the German and Italian Americans imprisoned were sympathetic to the regimes in their homelands or were actively involved in subversive groups. Additionally, imprisoning the millions of German and Italian Americans (who could easily claim other ethnicities: German Americans could pass for persons of English, Scandinavian, Swiss, Dutch, or Austrian descent, Italians for French, Spanish, Greek, Portuguese) would have been practically impossible.