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.
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.
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?
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.
People should not confuse POW camps for internment camps. They’re not completely dissimilar but they’re not the same thing either.
You apparently missed reading about the German Bundts both in WWI and WWII. It was not just that people were interned. The interned were indeed antiUS and proGerman.
Eugene V. Debs
The only president worse than Woody is Barry.
.
sfl