8. How did German concentration camps differ from American relocation camps
which interned Japanese, German- and Italian-Americans during World War II?

Ernst
Zündel Replies:

Rebuttal # 8

Germany's treatment of "Bandenverdächtige," - namely
suspected terrorist or guerilla gangs, many of whom were Jews hurting the war
effort, particularly on the Eastern Front - will be dealt with in Question # 9
where it more logically belongs.

The main thrust of this part of the "66 QA"
is whether or not race played a part in unjust persecution in Germany. Implied
in this question is the moral judgment that in Germany it did - whereas in
"democratic countries" such as Canada and the US, it didn't.

Consider this:

Tens of thousands of Jews lived in National-Socialist Germany during the entire
war, working often in essential war industries. A good source for this claim is
Holocaust Promotion Expert, Sol Litman, who in an article in the Canadian
Jewish News dated December 2, 1993 claims that 48,000 Jews were still
living in war time Berlin, Hitlers Capitol, alone in 1942.

The famous Rabbi Leo Baeck was a practicing Rabbi in Berlin as late as 1943.
Jewish organizations listed in the Berlin phone book in 1943 numbered as high
as several dozen, running such social services as soup kitchens, pension and
welfare offices, Jewish hospitals etc.

For other salient details on Jewish life in wartime Germany, check the
"Book II - The Last Jews in Berlin."

Now, by comparison, take a close look at Japanese
camps in California. Below are excerpts from a paper painstakingly
researched and referenced by Mark Weber of the Institute
for Historical Review:

his full document can be seen at http://ihr.org/jhr/v02/v02p-45_Weber.html

". . . In the months following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
many expected an immediate attack against the West Coast. Fear gripped the
country and a wave of hysterical antipathy against the Japanese engulfed the
Pacific Coast.

The FBI quickly began rounding up any and all "suspicious" Japanese
for internment. None was ever charged with any crime. Almost all were simply
Japanese community leaders, Buddhist or Shinto priests, newspaper editors,
language or Judo instructors, or labor organizers. The Japanese community
leadership was liquidated in one quick operation.

..

Men were taken away without notice. Most families knew nothing about why
their men had suddenly disappeared, (or) where they were taken, or when they
would be released. . . Some families learned what had happened to their men
only several years later. The action also included the freezing of bank accounts,
seizure of contraband, drastic limitation on travel, curfew and other severely
restrictive measures. But this FBI operation merely set the stage for the mass
evacuation to come.

In February 1942, Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, Commanding General of the Western
Defense Command, requested authorization from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson
to evacuate "Japanese and other subversive persons" from the West
Coast area. On 19 February, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order
No. 9066 authorizing the Secretary of War or any military commander to
establish "military areas" and to exclude from them "any or all
persons" (of Japanese descent). A month later, President Roosevelt signed
Executive Order No. 9102 establishing the War Relocation Authority, which
eventually operated the internment camps.

Without a murmur of dissent, the Congress quickly affirmed Executive Order
9066 with the passage of Public Law 77-503.

Posters appeared the length of the West Coast ordering the Japanese to
evacuation points. "Instructions to all persons of JAPANESE
ancestry," read the bold headline on a typical poster. The text read:
"All Japanese persons, both alien and non-alien, will be evacuated from
the above designated areas by 12:00 o'clock noon Tuesday, April 7, 1942."
The evacuees were told to report for internment with bedrolls and only as much
baggage as could be carried by hand. (A postwar survey showed that 80 percent
of the privately stored goods belonging to the interned Japanese were
"rifled, stolen or sold during absence.")

The 23,000 Japanese living on the West Coast of Canada, three-fourths of whom
were Canadian citizens, were also rounded up. They were not permitted back into
British Columbia until March 1949, seven years after the evacuation and three
and a half years after the end of the war.

The State Department told the Latin American countries to round up their
Japanese. The United States paid for the cost of the hemispheric evacuation.
Over 2000 Japanese were shipped from more than a dozen Latin American countries
to detention camps in the United States. Most were sent by Peru, which wanted
to permanently eliminate all Japanese and refused to allow re-entry of those
held in the U.S. after the end of the war.

.

Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay set up their own internment camp programs. To
their credit, Argentina and Chile did not break diplomatic relations with the
Axis until late in the war, and only then under tremendous U.S. pressure. As a
result, their Japanese were not rounded up. The rationale for the West Coast
evacuation was "military necessity." But that claim was inconsistent
with the fact that the Japanese living on Hawaii were not subject to mass
incarceration. Hawaii was in far greater danger of invasion than the West
Coast. The population of Hawaii was 38 percent Japanese, as compared to only
about one percent in California. All except a small percentage of the Hawaiian
Japanese remained free to keep the important island economy functioning.

The evacuation, ostensibly to protect against possible sabotage and espionage,
moreover included babies, orphans, adopted children, and the infirm or
bedridden elderly. Children of mixed blood, even from orphanages, were included
if they had any Japanese ancestry at all. Colonel Karl Bendetsen, who directly
administered the program, declared: "I am determined that if they have one
drop of Japanese blood in them, they must go to camp."

It should be noted that throughout the war, members of the Communist Party
actively worked to promote the interests of a foreign power and an
international organization committed to the overthrow of the constitutional
government of the United States. But the Communists in America were not only
not restricted, they were openly encouraged and supported.

The U.S. government told Americans that our detention centers had nothing in
common with the horrible concentration camps established by the enemy in
Europe. The Army public relations agency continually referred to the centers as
"resettlement camps" and "havens of refuge." The State
Department denied that the centers were concentration camps, " but are on
the contrary areas where communities are being established in which the
Japanese may organize their social and economic life in safety and security
under the protection of the central authorities of the United States." In
a public relations piece which appeared in the September 1942 issue of
Harper's, a military official writing under a false name told Americans that
"In the long run the Japanese will probably profit by this painful and
distressing experience."

A total of 120,000 were ultimately detained in the ten permanent mass detention
camps built by the government. Were these internment centers really
concentration camps? Chief Judge William Denman of the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals described the Tule Lake camp this way:

The barbed-wire stockade surrounding the 18 000 people there was like that of
the prison camps of the Germans. There were the same turrets for the soldiers
and the same machine guns for those who might attempt to climb the high wiring

.

The buildings were covered with tarred paper over green and shrinking
shiplap-this for the low winter temperatures of the high elevation of Tule
Lake. No federal penitentiary so treats its adult prisoners. Here were the
children and babies as well.

To reach the unheated latrines, which were in the center of the blocks of
fourteen buildings, meant leaving the residential shacks and walking through
the rain and snow- again a lower than penitentiary treatment, even disregarding
the sick and the children.

So also was the crowding of the 18 000 people in the one storey shacks. In the
cells of a federal penitentiary there is no such crowding. (Weglyn, p156)

The Army used six tanks and a battalion of military police (899 men and 31
officers) to guard the Japanese at Tule Lake, California. Several camps had
electrically charged fencing, which made little sense since all the camps were
invariably located in deserts or other remote and desolate areas. Every camp
had searchlights which played over the living quarters at night.

Dozens of inmates were shot and wounded. Eight were killed by guards. Japanese
were sometimes brutally beaten and seriously injured without reason. At Tule
Lake, guards beat inmates with baseball bats.

When Japanese organized a protest demonstration at Manzanar camp in California,
soldiers threw tear gas grenades on the crowd and fired into it. One inmate was
killed instantly and another died later. Nine were injured.

Some Japanese committed suicide out of despair and many more died prematurely
due to harsh conditions.

Three generations often lived in a single bare room, 20 by 24 feet. which
comprised a "family apartment." Sometimes two or three families were
crowded into a single such room. The only fixture was a hanging light bulb,
except for whatever furniture the inmates could construct for themselves. In
some assembly areas, families were assigned to rudely converted horse stables
where the stench became oppressive in the summer heat.

All incoming and outgoing mail was censored. All internal communications were
strictly controlled. The Japanese language was banned at public meetings and
Japanese religious services were suppressed.

The inmates were forced to salute the flag, sing patriotic songs, and declare
their allegiance to "one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for
all."

One of the most significant aspects of this act of racist repression is the
fact that it was not the work of a clique of fascists and right-wing
militarists, who according to liberal dogma are invariably behind such deeds.
Rather, it was advocated, justified and administered by men well known for
their support of liberalism and democracy.

Given the almost universal condemnation of the Japanese internment program
today, it is hard to realize just how solid support was for it at the time. The
vast operation, as one writer points out, was "initiated by the generals,
advised, ordered and supervised by the civilian heads of the War Department,
authorized by the President, implemented by Congress, approved by the Supreme
Court, and supported by the people." (Ten Broek, p325)

The first public call to intern the Japanese seems to have been made at the
beginning of January 1942 by John B. Hughes, a prominent radio commentator of
the Mutual Broadcasting Company. Shortly thereafter, Henry McLemore, syndicated
columnist of the Hearst newspapers told his readers:

I am for immediate removal of every Japanese on the West Coast to a point deep
in the interior. I don't mean a nice part of the interior either. Herd 'em up,
pack 'em off and give 'em the inside room in the badlands. Let 'em be pinched,
hurt, hungry and dead up against it ...

Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them. (Ten Broek,
p75)

Popular movie actor Leo Carillo telegrammed his Congressman:

Why wait until (the Japanese) pull something before we act ... Let's get them
off the coast and into the interior ... May I urge you in behalf of the safety
of the people of California to start action at once. (Ten Broek, p77)

In February a delegation of West Coast Congressmen sent a letter to the
President calling for the "immediate evacuation of all persons of Japanese
lineage ... aliens and citizens alike" from the Pacific coast.

Speaking to southern California on a Lincoln's birthday radio broadcast,
Fletcher Bowron, reform Mayor of Los Angeles, denounced the "sickly
sentimentality" of those who worried about injustices to the Japanese
living in the United States. He told his radio audience that if Abraham Lincoln
were alive, he would round up "the people born on American soil who have
secret loyalty to the Japanese Emperor."

"There isn't a shadow of a doubt," Bowron told his listeners,
"but that Lincoln, the mild-mannered man whose memory we regard with
almost saint-like reverence, would make short work of rounding up the Japanese
and putting them where they could do no harm."

Walter Lippmann, probably the country's most influential liberal columnist,
strongly supported mass evacuation in a February syndicated piece entitled
"The Fifth Column on the Coast." Conservative counterpart Westbrook
Pegler followed suit a few days later.

Only a week after Pearl Harbor, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin told the
House of Representatives:

I'm for catching every Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii now and putting
them in concentration camps and shipping them back to Asia as soon as possible
... This is a race war, as far as the Pacific side of the conflict is concerned
... The White man's civilization has come into conflict with Japanese barbarism
... One of them must be destroyed ... Damn them! Let's get rid of them now!
(Ten Broek, p87)

Another member of Congress proposed mandatory sterilization of the Japanese.

All
of these statements were quite in keeping with popular sentiment. Immediately
after Pearl Harbor, Japanese were excluded from various labor unions. Between 8
December and 31 March, anti-Japanese rage resulted in 36 cases of vigilantism,
including seven murders. And a March 1942 national public opinion poll showed
93 percent in favor of evacuating alien Japanese. While 59 percent wanted to
evacuate U.S. citizens of Japanese origin, only 25 percent disapproved.

A great deal was made of the fact that immigrants born in Japan, but living
for decades in the United States (the Issei), had not become U.S. citizens -
proof of their continued loyalty to the Emperor. But no mention was made of the
fact that long-standing American law forbade them from taking out U.S.
citizenship - a ban that was not lifted until 1952!

Since the war, the myth has been that powerful racist anti-Japanese groups
engineered the evacuation to remove their economic competitors. But the truth
is something quite different. While many White small-businessmen urged
evacuation, big business interests did not. More importantly, the Japanese were
evacuated at a moment when the country was willing to support whatever measures
the Federal government authorized in the name of winning the war.

The fact is that the Japanese were sent to concentration camps not by a group
of West Coast racists seeking economic advantage, but by a popular and powerful
government run by democratic liberals. At the top of the list of those
responsible for not only authorizing the program, but also for keeping it in
operation was President Franklin Roosevelt.

Before the President promulgated Executive Order 9066, Attorney General Francis
Biddle told Roosevelt that security interests did not justify evacuating the
Japanese. The Attorney General's office also determined that the proposed
evacuation would be a violation of the Constitution.

The dean of American Revisionist historians, Prof. James J. Martin, called the
incarceration program "a breach of the Bill of Rights on a scale so large
as to beggar the sum total of all such violations from the beginning of the
United States down to that time." (Weglyn, p67)

Roosevelt authorized, supported and maintained an action which he knew to be
racist and blatantly unconstitutional. But this was only one more sterling
example of the gross hypocrisy which characterized his entire regime.

The man responsible for implementing the evacuation, Lt. Gen. DeWitt, declared:

In
the war in which we are now engaged, racial affinities are not severed by
migration. The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third
generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States
citizenship, have become "Americanized," the racial strains are
undiluted ... It therefore follows that along the vital Pacific Coast over 112
000 potential enemies of Japanese extraction are at large today. (Ten Broek,
pp4, 110, 337 n.6)

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson was more succinct: "Their racial
characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen
Japanese."

Another man, well known for his liberal outlook, who helped implement the
evacuation and internment was Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy. For
four years he served as War Department liaison with the War Relocation
Authority, the agency which ran the camps. After the war, McCloy was named High
Commissioner for Germany. As the highest civilian allied occupation official,
McCloy worked to impose democratic rule on the defeated German people.

Perhaps the most surprising advocate of evacuation was Earl Warren. Considering
his later career as a vociferous liberal, it is at least ironic that, more than
any other person, Warren led the popular sentiment to uproot and incarcerate
the Japanese. As Attorney General of California, Warren cultivated popular
racist feeling in an apparent effort to further his political career. He was an
outstanding member of the xenophobia "Native Sons of the Golden
West," an organization dedicated to keeping California "as it has
always been and God Himself intended it shall always be-the White Man's
Paradise." The "Native Sons" worked "to save California
from the yellow-Jap peaceful invaders and their White-Jap
co-conspirators."

In February 1942, Warren testified before a special Congressional committee on
the Japanese question. He would be running for Governor of the state that year,
and would be elected. Warren testified, falsely, that the Japanese had
"infiltrated themselves into every strategic spot in our coastal and
valley counties." In one of the most amazing feats of logic ever performed
by a lawyer, Warren next claimed that the very fact that no Japanese had so far
committed any disloyal act was proof that they intended to do so in the future!

After the Japanese had been evacuated, very few wanted them back. Newspaper
columnist Elsie Robinson threatened to "cut the throat" of any evacuee
who dared return. U.S. Representative Clair Engle of California declared:
"We don't want those Japs back in California and the more we can get rid
of the better." A poll conducted by a Los Angeles newspaper in late 1943
showed that Californians would vote ten to one against letting citizens of
Japanese origin ever return to normal life from the camps.

Perhaps the only honest personality in this whole story was Norman Thomas, the
American socialist leader. He was at least non-hypocritical, if not actually
heroic. Thomas had been an outspoken and effective leader in the movement to
keep America out of the Second World War. He was the only personality of
national stature to vehemently oppose the evacuation program. Thomas denounced
the policy of the American Civil Liberties Union, which he had cofounded. The
ACLU decided that the evacuation fell within the proper limits of the
President's power. "What is perhaps as ominous as the evacuation of the
Japanese," Thomas retorted, "is the general acceptance of this
procedure by those who are proud to call themselves liberals."

This rare "honest liberal" was dismayed at the general toleration of
the program. "In an experience of nearly three decades," Thomas
wrote,

I have never found it harder to arouse the American public on any important
issue than on this. Men and women who know nothing of the facts (except
possibly the rose-colored version which appears in the public press) hotly deny
that there are concentration camps. Apparently that is a term to be used only
if the guards speak German and carry a whip as well as a rifle. (Weglyn,
pp111-12)

Comparisons have often been made between the Second World War concentration
camps in America with those in Germany, although Topaz, Poston, and Gila River
have never become as well known as Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau.
Starvation and disease epidemics never ravaged the camps in this country as
they did in Germany.

In America, economic and social life remained basically intact throughout the
war. The great cities here were spared annihilation under showers of bombs. No
hordes of foreign invaders poured across the American frontiers. The U.S.
government could run its concentration camps on a virtual peace-time basis.

The German situation was completely different. In the final months of the war,
Germany was waging a losing struggle for naked existence. The social-economic
system collapsed completely in the face of total military defeat. The
horrendous scenes photographed in the German camps by the Allied conquerors and
distributed as propaganda around the world resulted from the starvation and
disease that reigned unchecked throughout Europe as a consequence of the
military catastrophe.

At the Nuremberg show trials, the German defendants compared the evacuation of
the Jews of Europe and the deportation of the West Coast Japanese. In both
cases, the programs were allegedly based upon "military necessity."

Actually, the Germans had far greater cause to intern the Jews of Europe than
the Americans did to incarcerate the West Coast Japanese. The Japanese were
sent to camps solely on suspicion of what they might do. Not a single Japanese
had committed an act of espionage or sabotage.

But many thousands of Jews throughout Europe had committed countless acts of murder,
destruction, sabotage, arson and theft before the Germans began their general
evacuation.

The Germans, moreover, had greater legal justification for their policy. The
great majority of the Japanese internees were U.S. citizens and legally
entitled to equal protection under the law. The Jews of Germany had not been
full citizens for several years before the war began. Elsewhere in Europe, the
Jews were evacuated from militarily occupied territories or by countries allied
with Germany.

The post-war mass media has spent years hammering away at the "guilt"
of the German people for generally doing nothing while the Jews were being
evacuated to the East. How does the German experience compare with the American
record of popular enthusiasm for evacuating the West Coast Japanese?

Since the war, the Germans have paid over tens of billions of dollars (Ed: more
than 100 billion Deutschmarks) in restitution to Jewish organizations, the
state of Israel and to individual Jews around the world for "those who suffered
in mind and body, or had been deprived unjustly of their freedom." But no
American concentration camp inmate has ever received a penny for hardship,
humiliation or income lost during the years of internment.

The German defendants at Nuremberg were declared guilty of "crimes against
humanity" for, among other things, victimizing members of a group on the
basis of ancestry. What responsibility did the countries, including the United
States, which set up the International Military Tribunal have in upholding
that principle in their own territories? Why have no Americans ever been called
to account for committing the same "crimes" for which Germans were
put to death in Nuremberg?"

(Full references for the summary above may be obtained by contacting the Institute for Historical Review)

So much for the United States and Canada sitting in judgment of Germany on the
question of "internment on the basis of race." A jingle comes to
mind:

"He blamed and protested,

but joined in the plan.

He shared in the plunder,

but pitied the man."

Bibliography

Bosworth, Allan R., America's Concentration Camps, New York, 1967.

Japanese American Citizens League, The Japanese American Incarceration: A
Case for Redress, San Francisco, 1978.

Myer, Dillon S., Uprooted Americans (The Japanese Americans and the War
Relocation Authority During World War II) Tucson, AZ, 1971.

Petersen, William, "The Incarceration of the Japanese-Americans,"
National Review, 8 December 1972, pp1349ff.

Spicer, Edward H., A.T. Hansen, K. Luomala, M.K. Opler, Impounded People
(Japanese-Americans in the Relocation Centers), Tucson, AZ, 1969.

Ten Broek, Jacobus, E.H. Barnhart, F.W. Matson, Prejudice, War and the
Constitution, Berkeley, 1968.

Weglyn, Michi, Years of Infamy (The Untold Story of America's Concentration
Camps), New York, 1976.

_____

May 4, 1996