Category Archives: South of the Border

Reading a new book on the WWII internment (read concentration) camp in South Texas for thousands of Japanese, Germans and some Italians. What drew me to read it was not the fact of the camp’s existence (on vegetable-growing land southwest of San Antonio near the Mexican border) which I knew about, but that it was for whole families. And more, below.

They’d been arrested and uprooted from California, Ohio and elsewhere—including some kidnapped by the FBI from Peru and other South American countries—losing all of their property and possessions. Father, mother and their American-born children. For simply being from enemy countries.

Okay, except for the kidnappings, I’d heard most of that. But not this: to compound the injustice, the “Greatest Generation” designated some 4,500 of the Germans, including whole families, as “trade bait.” They were dispatched to Nazi Germany during the war in exchange for other Americans held prisoner there. One Ohio family’s then-teenage daughter tells their sad tale.

And who did they have to thank for all this? Why the great Democrat saint FDR, who engineered it all and stamped it secret. The guy Barry likes to compare himself to. When he isn’t channeling Abraham Lincoln.

More when I finish the book.

Via Instapundit.

UPDATE:  I was almost done when I wrote this and I’m finished now. It’s a good tale about federal perfidy with some stunning personal stories. The author found a Dutch Jewish family who were freed from Bergen Belsen apparently in conjunction with the dispatch of a German-American family from Crystal City to Naziland.  The Nazis were keeping “trade Jews” in their camps for just such an occasion.

See the comments for more. Arthur Jacobs who was a child at CC when he was shipped to the Nazis (and wrote a book about it) sent me jpeg’s of some docs from the Nazi archives gathered by Texas A&M Prof Arnold Krammer apparently showing the names of 15 German Jews kidnapped from Panama and Honduras by the FBI who were interned at a Seagoville camp near Dallas. Jacobs said Krammer found no evidence they or other German Jews were sent to the Nazis, but given the docs from the Nazi archives you have to wonder.