19 March 2009—Committee on the Judiciary – Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. Video provided by U.S. House of Representatives and posted by House.Resource.Org.
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TRACES, a group focussed on the history of German immigrant experiences in the U.S. announces an upcoming program on U.S. WWII internment in Germany. Michael Luick-Thrams, executive director, announces the events below. Press release: It was wartime on the US home front. She was an American—wasn’t she? Anneliese had been born in New York, of […]
Joseph O’Rourke, who commanded the Crystal City, TX Family Internment Camp, wrote this “Historical Narrative of the Crystal City Internment Camp” in 1945, as the facility was slowly being emptied. The report detailed its establishment, construction, organization and administration, as well internee populations and census numbers, camp life, education and activities, procurement and supply, problems […]
Two additional inspection reports on the Crystal City, TX Family Internment Camp, and several lists of internees transferred there during the first days of the camp are now available for viewing. The transfer lists include the first internees in the camp in December 1942, a group of Germans who were expected to help build the […]
Simon and Schuster Books posted this video in 2015, with Jan Jarboe Russell, author of The Train to Crystal City, briefly presenting five facts about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the policy that led to the exchange of thousands of U.S. and Latin American civilians of German or Japanese ethnicity during WWII for U.S. citizens held behind […]
The German American Internee Coalition formed in 2005 to educate the public about our experiences, after United States officials declared U.S. and Latin American civilians of German background “enemy aliens” during WWII. Feared collectively because of our German ethnicity, our civil liberties were abused by the U.S. government. Similar indiscriminate presumptions should not be made […]
On February 15, 1944, the M.S. Gripsholm sailed from the New York harbor to Lisbon, Portugal, with 1,117 civilians of German descent, including children, scheduled to be exchanged for persons held in Germany. Most had been interned in Texas; many were from Latin America. Thanks to Teresa Van Hoy and her students at St. […]
Karin Harten Schramm, who was brought to the United States with her German Ecuadorian family 1944, has generously allowed us to post her family’s WWII experiences, largely compiled from contemporaneous letters and diaries Gertrud Harten, her mother, kept. There are descriptions of her father, Wolfgang’s, March 1944 transport to the U.S. on the S.S. Cuba, after […]
By Gertrud Harten – 1939 to 1948, and Karin Harten Schramm – 2019 My parents were both from Hamburg, Germany. My father, Wolfgang Harten, born in 1907, finished his apprenticeship in an import/export company in 1927. At that time Germany was suffering under the hyperinflation after World War I which caused considerable internal political and economical […]
Lars Hemingstam, author and founder of a website about the ships of the Swedish American Line, discusses the exchange voyages during World War 2 between the Allies and Axis Powers using the Swedish American Line’s chartered ocean liners Gripsholm and Drottningholm.
The Tenement Museum of New York City has an online exhibit highlighting the experiences of some former German American and Latin American internees. These brief accounts were written by students of St. Mary’s University, San Antonio, TX, as part of a year-long history project (2018-19) documenting German civilian internment in WWII and working to get […]