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 […]
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 […]
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.
On February 14-15, the public is invited to attend free events planned by St. Mary’s University students and staff to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the M.S. Gripsholm voyage to Europe, carrying German American and Latin American internee families to be exchanged for U.S. civilians and soldiers held in Germany during WW II. The press release, […]
Our good friend and fellow GAIC board member, John Christgau, passed away unexpectedly on August 21, 2018 in Belmont, California. We first connected with John through his book, ENEMIES: WORLD WAR II ALIEN INTERNMENT, one of the first definitive books about the internment of German, Japanese and Italian immigrants during the World War II years. […]
St. Mary’s University, based in San Antonio, Texas, is hosting a “Day of Remembrance” in Chicago on Friday, Oct. 26, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of internment of German Americans during World War II. Three child-internees are featured in this Chicago commemoration: Frances Ott Allen, Jo Anna Wartemann Terwege Howell, and Eberhard Fuhr. Remembrance rallies […]
The War Outside, by Monica Hesse, is set in the confines of the Crystal City, Texas Family Internment Camp during WW II. Teenagers Haruko, a Japanese American from Colorado, and Margot, whose German American family are from Iowa, form a friendship, even as life in the camp shifts and changes their perceptions. “…an extraordinary novel […]