World War II, Internment of Germans from Latin America in
From 1941 to 1945, the U.S. government, fearing Nazi subversion in Latin America, organized the expulsion of 4,058 German residents from 15 countries (Friedman 2003, 2). They were delivered to the U.S.
military and interned in camps in Texas, Louisiana, and other states. American intelligence agents identified them as particularly dangerous, but subsequent investigations showed most to be harmless. Three-quarters were repatriated to Germany during the war and exchanged for citizens of the Americas. The remainder returned to their homes in Latin America.Alarm at the prospect of Nazi plotting in Latin America began in the 1930s, when the Nazi Party’s Auslandsorganisation (Foreign Organization) sought to enroll new members throughout the hemisphere. The drive disappointed its organizers, with membership ranging from 3 to 9 percent of German citizens in most countries (Friedman 2003, 27). Nevertheless, public demonstrations and other highly visible activities by uniformed Nazis contributed to a menacing image. American newspapers on the eve of the war reported erroneously of secret Nazi schemes to smuggle weapons, overthrow governments, and seize the Panama Canal. The rapid fall of France and other European countries in 1940 strengthened Americans’ apprehensions over the possibility of sabotage by ethnic Germans.
When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the FBI to conduct surveillance of Fascist movements in Latin America. Working with agents from the army’s Military Intelligence Division and Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI drew up lists of suspected German subversives. The State Department then prevailed upon 15 Latin American countries to arrest these individuals and turn them over to the United States for detention. The operation also resulted in the seizure of 2,264 Japanese, mostly from Peru, and 288 Italians (Friedman 2003, 2).
Few if any of the Japanese had been politically active. Among the Italians were some supporters of Italy’s dictator Benito Mussolini who were accused of spreading Fascist propaganda, but most were selected on the basis of their nationality alone.The German contingent was more complex. The Department of Justice described the German group as “an ill-assorted miscellany of individuals representing... a complete cross-section of every political and national strain to be found in pre-war Germany” (Berle 1944). Between 10 and 15 percent of the German internees were Nazi Party members (Friedman 2003, 111). Several dozen were active recruiters for the Auslandsorganisation or had distributed pro-Nazi propaganda, and the FBI had evidence of espionage against eight internees. At the other end of the spectrum were eighty-one Jewish refugees who had fled Europe for Latin America, only to find themselves labeled suspected subversives and sent to the same camps as the real Nazis. The bulk of the group was made up of German immigrants who had lived for years or decades in Latin American countries. Most sympathized with their former homeland, but did nothing to further the German war effort. Some were deported by corrupt Latin American officials who then seized their property or were denounced by informants for cash payments from American intelligence. There were internment camps for Axis nationals in Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Mexico, Curasao, and the Panama Canal Zone as well.
While dictators such as Anastasio So- moza of Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic readily cooperated in the deportation program, the democratic governments of Costa Rica and Colombia at first resisted the request to expel their residents without legal process. The State Department used promises of increased aid and threats of economic boycott to encourage cooperation. The largest Latin American countries did not participate.
Argentina maintained a pro-German policy for most of the war. Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, for reasons of national sovereignty, insisted on interning any foreign suspected subversives on their own territory.Upon arrival from Latin America, the deportees were interned at Camp Kenedy, Camp Seagoville, and Camp Crystal City, Texas; Camp Blanding, Florida; Stringtown, Oklahoma; Ft. Lincoln, North Dakota; Camp Forrest, Tennessee; and other sites. After an initial period of disorganization, the U.S. internment camps were improved to provide living conditions that compared favorably to the War Relocation Authority camps for Japanese and Japanese Americans. Internees received three hot meals a day. They were allowed to work for wages if they wished, and had access to a commissary and mail-order catalogues. Single women and married couples without children were housed at Seagoville, a former minimum-security women’s prison that resembled a college campus and was the most comfortable of the camps. The worst facility was the state prison at Stringtown, where internees slept in filthy, overcrowded cells with inadequate drinking water and infested by vermin. (Stringtown was closed in May 1943.) Interned families lived in simple shacks at Crystal City, where children could attend school in their native languages and play sports or use the large swimming pool built with volunteer internee labor. There were no
reports of abuses by the guards, but tension and occasional violence flared between the hostile factions of pro- and anti-Fascists in the camps.
Before the war was over, three-quarters of the internees were repatriated to their countries of birth, or exchanged for citizens of the Americas interned by the Axis after protracted, indirect negotiations between the State Department and the Auswartiges Amt (German Foreign Ministry). All adult males repatriated in either direction were required to sign an oath promising not to bear arms during the current conflict. Perhaps surprisingly, the German government respected this oath, refusing to permit repatriated men to serve in the armed forces.
After the end of the fighting, the Truman administration sought to deport the remaining German internees to Germany, where they would go through the denazification process. Several filed suit in U.S. federal courts, which ruled that legal residents of foreign countries could not be detained without charge or deported to countries against their will, and so most Germans still in U.S. camps returned to their homes in Latin America. The remaining Japanese, and most German Jewish internees, stayed on and eventually became U.S. citizens.Max Paul Friedman
See also Latin America, Nazi Party in; World War II
References and Further Reading
Berle, Adolf. “‘Internment at Large’ Program of Department of Justice,” 27 June 1944, in folder 711.5, Costa Rica: San Jose Embassy, Confidential File, Record Group 84, National Archives, Washington, DC.
Friedman, Max Paul. Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2003.
Gaudig, Olaf, and Peter Veit. Der Widerschein des Nazismus: Das Bild des Nationalsozialismus in der deutschsprachigen Presse Argentiniens, Brasiliens und Chiles 1932—1945. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1997.
Muller, Jurgen. Nationalsozialismus in Lateinamerika: Die Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP in Argentinien, Brasilien, Chile und Mexico, 1931—1945. Stuttgart: Verlag Hans-Dieter Heinz, 1997.