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In the days after the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor, some 31,280 ``enemy aliens'' were swept up -- ostensibly because of possible allegiances to the Axis forces. Among them were about 10,000 Germans and 3,000 Italians, Christgau said. The rest were Japanese and smatterings of other European groups. Pearl Harbor forever changed the lives of Lothar Eiserloh and his family. He was an American-born Ohio school boy in 1941 when his father, Mathias, was picked up by the FBI and whisked off to an internment camp. Overnight, neighbors shunned them and customers no longer bought chickens from his mother. Their bank account was frozen. Unable to survive, they lost the house and, by 1943, the desperate family joined Mathias in the Crystal City, Texas, internment camp. Lothar was 8. His sister, Ingrid, 13; Ensi, just 2. ``Just the week before I'd been pledging allegiance to the flag in school, then I get there and I'm looking up at guard towers and men holding machine guns,'' Eiserloh recalled. In January 1945, in the middle of the war, the family survived a harrowing deportation to Germany for a prisoner exchange. Eiserloh's brother, Guenther, was born on the train that took them to New York, where they were put on the S.S. Gripsholm. His weakened mother and the sickly infant spent the entire 14-day journey to Marseille, France, in the infirmary, and suffered in winter cold during the hours of their ``exchange'' in Bregenz, Switzerland. When they finally settled in Johanna's hometown, the Gestapo set upon them, beat up Mathias and imprisoned him, apparently on suspicion of being a spy for the Allies. ``I remember my father saying, `I never want to have anything to do with Europe anymore -- all they do is fight wars, ancient battles, over and over again,' '' said Eiserloh, now 66 and living in the Ingleside Terrace neighborhood of San Francisco. They had immigrated to America to avoid that.

This was part of an article in the San Jose Mercury News. There were many Europeans from Latin America that were imprisoned in Crystal City in Texas but there were also Italians and Germans as well as people from other Axis nations who were Americans or legal residents who were imprisoned or had assets frozen. I do not say this to question the government during that time, only to say there were German and Italian immigrants and citizens who were interned as well as Japanese.