Art Jacobs, former internee, U.S. Air Force Major, and educator at Arizona State University, died November 20, 2023, at the age of 90, in Tempe, Arizona. Art was the one of the first former internees to educate the public about internment policies with a website, a book about his family’s experiences, and a lifelong campaign to have the government acknowledge publicly that innocent people of German ethnicity were interned along with Japanese Americans. In a 2010 interview for the Texas Historical Commission, he said: “I would want everybody to remember that Germans, Italians, and Japanese were arrested and interned because they were of the ethnicity of the enemy. That was their only ‘crime.’..Anything else is not true. I mean, I know that people who committed crimes weren’t interned. They were arrested and jailed. All these people that were interned were innocent victims.”
Many in the internee group will miss him and his kind helpfulness. His obituary can be read here, but below are some of the comments former internees have made.
Art’s experience and desire to get the truth out brought us together over a common cause.
I…credit Art’s early website and book to get me researching my father’s journey.
Heartfelt thanks to Art Jacobs for answering some questions I had.
Art was a great help to all of us GAICers in our quest for documentation.
Any time we had a question, he would mobilize for hours to help us ferret out the sources we needed.
He will be missed.