The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (40 page)

She boarded another boat to San Francisco, stayed a week with friends who were her neighbors at Heart Mountain Relocation Camp, and at long last arrived in Los Angeles. It was the end of summer. The wind off the Pacific Ocean was warm and smelled briny. How many times during the years lost to the war had Sumi yearned to return to Los Angeles? Finally she was home.

Like New York, Los Angeles was filled with soldiers, and it was difficult to find a place to live. At last a friend from Crystal City helped Sumi find a place to live and a part-time job. She worked as a “schoolgirl” for the secretary of Harry Warner, president of Warner Bros. Studios, and enrolled at Fairfax High School to finish her senior year. In return for room and board, Sumi helped keep the woman’s house and was given $20 a week. The secretary, whom Sumi knew as Mrs. Stern, was at the center of things in Hollywood. She and her husband treated Sumi well. Even though they were Jewish, they decorated an eight-foot Christmas tree for Sumi that year and put presents for her all around it. Though she missed her mother, the Sterns made it a happy Christmas.

By then, Sumi was well into her senior year at Fairfax High School, near the border of West Hollywood. She studied hard and in her free time went to movies and to restaurants with some of her friends from Crystal City who had also made it back to Los Angeles.
When she graduated from high school in Los Angeles, friends from Crystal City attended the ceremony. She wrote regularly to Nobu in Sendai, buoyant letters that did not conceal her happiness. “I was just so grateful to be home, to be an American citizen and not have to look over my shoulder,” Sumi recalled.

While Ingrid, Lothar, and Sumi were mired in the process of re-adjusting to life in the United States, others were still struggling to win their freedom.
By August 1945, the machinery of internment, implemented during the run-up to the war in December 1941, was steadily being taken apart. Already many of the fifty-four internment camps operated by the US military and the thirty camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service had shut down. The camp at Crystal City, the only family camp, was still open, but with a reduced population. That summer 2,548 Japanese, 756 Germans, and 12 Italian internees were left.

When O’Rourke arrived at the camp in September 1943, the job seemed clear. During wartime, the country had the right, arguably the imperative, to protect itself from suspected enemies. However, over the next two years, O’Rourke dealt with only a handful of internees who represented a real threat to US security. Most of those
in Crystal City were caught up in a web of fear and intrigue not of their own making, especially the American-born children who made up the majority and whose loyalty to their country of birth was severely stressed by the humiliation of internment. At the start, O’Rourke thought of the camp in Crystal City as a humane project—a place where families were reunited. However, the undesirable aspects of family internment—the lack of freedom, the secret exchanges, and the forced repatriations—now outweighed the good.

By 1945 O’Rourke was forty-nine years old and had been
remarried to a woman named Mary, a native of the West Texas town of Big Spring. They lived in a rock house just outside the barbed-wire fence in Crystal City, in close proximity to the internees on the other side of the fence. Sometimes Mary joined O’Rourke for the daily count of internees. He continued to be a melancholic drinker, and was still alienated from his only daughter. More than one of the young people who were interned in Crystal City—the ones who once thought of him as a Pied Piper—believed O’Rourke drank because he felt guilty over the internment of the American-born children in camp. At the end of the war, O’Rourke asked for a transfer to an easy desk job with the INS office in Kansas City, Missouri. He requested that the new job not involve internment, just routine immigration issues.

While he waited for a transfer, O’Rourke focused on winding down operations in Crystal City, which proved to be almost as challenging as opening the camp years before. During the summer of 1945, O’Rourke was at work on a report to INS headquarters in Washington about the history of the Crystal City camp and his reflections on the future of family internment. All that summer he and members of his staff labored over the report. In the historical narrative, O’Rourke described the opening in the fall of 1942, detailed rules and regulations, explained the operation of the schools, and highlighted camp activities.

He also described what he viewed as the source of the main problems in camp: the intense rivalry between the repatriates, whom he saw as loyal to the countries of their origin, and the nonrepatriates, who generally were loyal to the United States. “Although many of the nonrepatriates sympathized with the cause of their fatherland, a large number of this group evidenced a pro-American attitude,” wrote O’Rourke. “This division of attitude was the basic cause of most differences among the internees, as the repatriates loudly blew the horn of loyalty to their home country and branded the others as traitors.”

His tone was somber, even regretful: “Many discouragements
have been experienced and burdens have oftentimes seemed insurmountable.” Given a chance, most of his employees made clear to O’Rourke they would never again work in an internment camp. “Admittedly, many mistakes have been made,” said O’Rourke, “but we feel most have been corrected and that our operations have been consistent.”

Finally, he offered advice. In the future, if the government decided to intern families of different nationalities, O’Rourke suggested creating separate camps for each nationality, rather than mixing Germans, Japanese, Italians, and other nationalities in one large camp. If that option proved too expensive, O’Rourke suggested strict segregation of nationalities into separate compounds within one large camp, which ironically was how Bergen-Belsen was organized in Germany. The problem with the mix of nationalities in Crystal City, O’Rourke noted, was that “they have very little in common and just are not compatible.”

O’Rourke concluded that a family camp comprising enemy alien fathers who were involuntarily interned by the government and reunited with wives and children who were forced to volunteer for internment, was a flawed model and should not be repeated. The wives and children had volunteered under duress; they had lost their homes and had nowhere else to go. In effect, it was emotional blackmail. O’Rourke said he had watched “typical American boys and girls” develop deep feelings of betrayal by their government. Wives, too, became embittered. “We would caution extra careful consideration of evidence in the case of any woman, since our observation has formed the opinion that a woman, because of her usual emotional state, will generally develop an anti-American complex through internment, even if no such prior attitude existed.”

His dry words, written as a bureaucratic duty, reflect the sentiments of a twentieth-century man, a career Border Patrol agent who year by year had observed the alienating effects of internment on women and children in Crystal City. His conclusion, preserved for posterity, was that the experiment of interning families of suspected nationalities—German, Japanese, Italians, and others—was a failure.

Nonetheless, near the end of the report O’Rourke could not resist an expression of sentiment for the majority of American-born children who had demonstrated loyalty to their country under the strains of internment. “This office greatly admires the children of interned parents who have weathered the storm of sentiment. We do not attempt to restrain our emotions when we see these children, many of whom are members of our military forces, visit their parents who are here as dangerous enemy aliens.”

Even after the end of the war, internees were considered to be enemy aliens and continued to be repatriated, willingly or not. Many internees in Crystal City fought not to be deported. In June 1945, as O’Rourke was working on his report, a group of twenty-four Germans in Crystal City filed a lawsuit in opposition to the forced deportations. They argued that since the United States was no longer at war with Germany they could not be legally deported as enemy aliens. Though they ultimately lost the case in May 1946 in a hearing before the United States Court of Appeals in Washington, many other lawsuits by both German and Japanese internees challenged the constitutionality of their arrest and incarceration, an early indication of how blighted the legacy of American internment would become.

On September 8, 1945, Truman issued Proclamation 2655, which required any enemy alien considered dangerous to be repatriated, willingly or not. The first person in Crystal City deported under Truman’s ruling was Fritz Kuhn, the American leader of the German Bund. In September 1945, the same month O’Rourke’s report was delivered to the Alien Control Central Office, Kuhn boarded the
Antioch Victory
and sailed to Germany. O’Rourke was not unhappy about that as Kuhn had been a troublemaker in Crystal City.

But Truman’s edict posed problems for
the Department of Justice, the INS, and O’Rourke. How was O’Rourke to separate the “dangerous”
internees in Crystal City from those who were not dangerous? What was the status of American-born wives and children? Were they to be deported as well? American military commanders in occupied Japan and Germany made clear that German and Japanese deportees from America weren’t wanted; the local populations mistrusted them, and the military commanders already had their hands full. Nonetheless, O’Rourke was instructed by the INS commissioner Carusi to release internees that he thought were not dangerous, ship out those who had agreed to repatriate before the war was over, many of whom were now having second thoughts, and deport as many as possible to locations outside the United States.

O’Rourke’s mandate from Washington was to encourage resistant deportees to end their fight. As an incentive for Japanese and German internees to leave camp, O’Rourke decided to close the German and Japanese schools, announcing the closure on January 24, 1946, in a brusque memorandum: “Since the necessity or desirability of this program no longer exists, these schools will be discontinued.”
By then, O’Rourke had the freedom to close the schools no matter what the parents thought. At the end of the war, Spain and Switzerland had withdrawn as the protecting powers for Japanese and German internees in Crystal City, so the internees had no “neutral power” to whom they could register their complaints. The German and Japanese camp schools were closed, and the few remaining German and Japanese students were transferred to the American schools.

Attorney General Tom Clark appointed O’Rourke chairman of a special hearing board in Crystal City to review the cases of internees, and decide if they should stay in Crystal City or be deported.
In April 1946, hearings were held under tight security in crowded quarters. Transcripts were compiled.

One example was the case of Karl Eppeler, a forty-eight-year-old man born in Germany who had lived in the United States for twenty-three years, most of it in New York City. In 1930, Eppeler became a naturalized citizen, but his American citizenship was revoked in 1942 when the FBI arrested him as an enemy alien. His wife, a
citizen of the United States, followed him to Crystal City. In July 1945, Eppeler had been placed on the list of repatriates to Germany and initially agreed to go. Now he had changed his mind and wanted to stay in the United States.

“Why did you change your mind?” O’Rourke asked moments after convening the hearing in his office.

“Well, the news that transpired during the last year or so brought my wife to the point where she just would not come along,” replied Eppeler. “In all fairness, I must say she’s right.”

Eppeler also worried he would not be able to support himself and his wife in Germany: “I have been away from Germany for almost twenty-three years—I have no money. I see only one way to keep out of trouble in the future and to make a living in the future, and that is by becoming self-sufficient, and the only way I can see that is right here.”

“Were you ever a member of the Nazi Party?” O’Rourke asked.

“No.” Eppeler admitted that he’d belonged to the Bund from 1937 until its dissolution in 1941. His membership in the Bund was the reason his citizenship was revoked after he was arrested.

O’Rourke asked why Eppeler decided to become a naturalized citizen, and he replied, “I realized that I was going to stay here. I was married here and had quite a few friends and ties. To me that was the only logical way.”

“You were a citizen. That citizenship was revoked and you were interned. Do you think you could live in this country and have respect for it after the way your case has developed? Have you formed any bitterness?”

Eppeler acknowledged his anger but explained it was harmless. “I don’t think being mad is the same as bitterness. Don’t you think a man who is born in this country sometimes has a gripe against the government—or a disagreement?”

“Don’t you wish one side or another would win?” asked O’Rourke, pressing Eppeler to declare loyalty to either Germany or to the United States.

“I quit wishing long ago. I guess I am sort of a fatalist about this question.”

In his written findings on Eppeler’s hearing, dated August 26, 1946, O’Rourke noted that Eppeler’s conduct in Crystal City had been satisfactory and his wife’s US citizenship was a factor in his behalf and he gave Eppeler the benefit of the doubt. After three long years as officer in charge, O’Rourke still was capable of empathy. O’Rourke recommended that Eppeler’s request to stay in the United States be granted and that he be paroled.

The Department of Justice rejected O’Rourke’s suggestion. “I am troubled by your recommendation of release,” wrote Thomas N. Cooley, one of Clark’s assistants. Cooley did not believe that Eppeler’s wife’s American citizenship was reason enough to justify their release. Eppeler and his wife were involuntarily deported to Germany.

While internees like Eppeler were coming to terms with the decisions made for their future as the result of the hearings that O’Rourke conducted, other, younger internees were looking to the future they hoped to shape for themselves. In June 1946, only six students, the last graduating class of the Federal High School, walked across the stage of Harrison Hall and received their diplomas. The valedictorian of the class of 1946 was Barbara Minner, the only German in the six-person class. Barbara was the girlfriend of Eb Fuhr, whose family was also still interned in camp. Barbara and her family were not in danger of deportation and were scheduled for parole to New York not long after her graduation.