"Internment: It Could Happen to YOU!" This eye-catching warning is splashed across the cab and rear door of a refurbished school bus, now painted fatigue-green. The TRACES museum traveling exhibit, called the "Bus-eum 3" reinforces important Constitutional guarantees and civil rights as it travels the US because...

...Internment did happen to a rather unlikely group in the US not long ago, within living memory of some.

German Americans are the largest ethnic group in the US-- about 60 million. Nevertheless, during World War II, the US government and many citizens viewed ethnic Germans and others of "enemy ancestry," particularly recent immigrants, as potentially dangerous. While the Japanese American World War II internment experience is well known, the German Americans' experience is largely unknown today.

The US government used many constitutionally questionable methods to control those of enemy ancestry, including internment, individual and group exclusion from military zones, internee exchanges for Americans held in Germany, deportation, "alien enemy" registration requirements, travel restrictions and property confiscation.

Families were ripped apart. Reputations were destroyed. They lost homes and possessions.

There's more: Pressured by the US, Latin American governments arrested at least 8500 German Latin Americans. An unknown number were sent directly to Germany, while 4050 were shipped in dark boat holds to the United States and interned. Few, if any, of those deported received any hearing. Many did not know the reasons for their deportation. Often they were deported based on hearsay or for other political reasons, according to the National Archives. 

By the end of the war, over 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families--including a few Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany-- suffered internment at Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) internment camps and military facilities throughout the United States.

Not all remained in internment for the entire war. The Department of Justice reviewed individual internee cases and granted parole to some. Several thousand internees chose or were forced to repatriate to their country of national origin: Italy, Germany or Japan. Some tried to fight for due process, avoid repatriation, and be released. When WWII ended, the government continued to repatriate some of the internees but also began releasing those no longer deemed as dangerous. It took several years to dismantle the internment program. By 1948, the Department of Justice closed the last internment camp and released the remaining few internees. 

From the German American Internee Coalition:

During World War II, our government had to do its utmost to ensure domestic security against dangerous elements in its midst. But it could have exercised greater vigilance to protect the liberties of those most vulnerable because of their ethnic ties to enemy nations. Some were dangerous, but too many were assumed guilty and never able to prove their innocence. Admittedly, US wartime governmental actions are difficult to assess decades later. To prevent possible future erosion of our civil liberties, however, the federal government must fully review and acknowledge its wartime civil liberties violations. A comprehensive federal review of the European American experience has never been done.  

A bill to create an independent commission to review US government policies directed against European "enemy" ethnic groups during World War II in the US and Latin America was introduced to Congress in March 2009. Read more on recent legislative efforts HERE.

The Bus-eum 3 carries its World War II history lesson across the post-9/11 United States through June 2010.

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Sources:

NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TRACES Museum and Bus-eum 3  www.traces.org

German American Internee Coalition http://www.gaic.info/