The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (49 page)

During the summer of 1943, as Jacobs’s documents and others reveal, camp officials struggled to distinguish German internees who held patriotic feelings for Germany but were not a security threat to America from Germans who were Nazis. According to Jacobs and Eb Fuhr, a principal character in this chapter, by that summer the term
Nazi
had become synonymous with
German.
For a variety of reasons—Germans had never been a minority in the United States, their anger at the FBI for their arrest and internment—many German nationals were hardened and labeled troublemakers by O’Rourke and his staff.

I appreciate Jacobs, Fuhr, and other German internees for offering their perspectives.

Only three months before
: NA1, RG85, Box 27.

“We believe”
: Complaint letter to Collaer, NA1, RG85, Box 28.

In response
: Collaer to Harrison, NA1, RG85, Box 27.

The Japanese
: HNCC, 7–8.

At the time of the flag
: Author interview, Dr. Heidi von Leszcynski, November 11, 2011.

Upon arrival
: NA1, RG85, Box 27.

In June 1943
: FK.

The Jacobis
: NA1, RG85, Box 58; and Jacobs and Fallon.

Despite Kuhn’s
: FK.

What the presidency
: FK. Given the dramatic nature of the extortion attempt of Helena Rubinstein, the following additional details are offered: On March 9, 1942, an agent in New York filed a report about an informant who claimed he acted under orders from Kuhn, a prisoner at Dannemora, to extort Rubinstein. The informant was a former prisoner with Kuhn who had recently been released. On April 16, 1942, agents filed a second report that described the interview with Rubinstein in her apartment.

In Crystal City
: FK.

Eberhard E. Fuhr
: Author interview, Eb Fuhr; as well as Fuhr’s account in Stephen Fox,
America’s Invisible Gulag
(New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2000), 51–56, 257–61.

A confidential memo
: “Circular to All Officers and Employees,” NA1, RG85, Box 1.

O’Rourke’s task
: HNCC, 5.

As a productive
: Texas Historical Commission, Crystal City.

However, Johanna
: Author interview, Ensi Eiserloh.

One afternoon, Ingrid and Lothar
: Author interviews.

Provisions of the Third Geneva Convention
: NA1, RG85, Box 6.

“Selling these employees”
: HNCC, 5.

“No living thing”
: Mangione, 329.

In August
: NA1, RG85, Box 6.

Contextual knowledge of how the Eiserloh and other families weathered the continuing conflicts in Crystal City emerged from primary documents at the National Archives and interviews. This chapter owes a particular debt to chapter 19, “Nazis and Troublemakers in the Internee Camps,” in Krammer,
Undue Process.

One of
: HNCC, 24.

All through
: Author interview, Ingrid Eiserloh.

Kazuko Shimahara; Karen Riley,
Schools Behind Barbed Wire
(Lanham, MD
: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 58.

on September 7, 1943
: HNCC, 25; and interviews with Ingrid and Lothar Eiserloh.

By October
: FK.

By December
: NA1, RG85, Box 3.

“Imitation Dictator”
: Ibid.

That fall
: “Be Patient,” Harrison,
Officers’ Handbook
, 18.

Kuhn was number 68
: NA2, SWPD, RG59, Box 69, as cited by Schmitz, 519.

Das Lager
:
Jacobs and Fallon,
Documents.

O’Rourke wrote
: NA1, RG85, Box 3.

The May 6, 1944
: Jacobs and Fallon.

Kreuzner threatened
: NA1, RG85, Box 17.

Mathias once went
: Ibid.

Only forty-nine years old
: O’Rourke’s INS personnel file.

His strategy
: HNCC, 9.

At first, Fujii
: Ibid., 17.

A small group of academics have focused on the infamous work of the Special Division within the Department of State, which negotiated exchanges between the United States and Japan and the United States and Germany. My baseline for understanding the complexities of the exchanges from Crystal City came from two books.

The first,
Quiet Passages: The Exchange of Civilians Between the United States and Japan During the Second World War
(Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1987), is by P. Scott Corbett, a professor of history at Ventura College in California. This book, which relied on primary documents of the Special Division, tells the story from the point of view of the United States. At the time, the diplomatic records of Japan were not yet available to researchers. More than ten years later, Bruce Elleman, an associate professor at the US Naval War College, found new documentation in Tokyo. His book,
Japanese-American Civilian Prisoner Exchanges and Detention Camps, 1941–45
(New York: Routledge, 2006), utilized primary documentation from both American and Japanese sources.

For the section on the American School, I relied on primary documents from the National Archives, a 1979 oral history of R. C. Tate, superintendent of schools. In addition, Karen Riley’s first-rate book about the three schools in Crystal City,
Schools Behind Barbed Wire: The Untold Story of Wartime Internment and the Children of Arrested Enemy Aliens
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), provided useful description of curricular and extracurricular activities, and insight into Tate, the teachers, and the students.

In addition to the thanks I owe to Sumi Utsushigawa for hours of interviews, I’m also grateful to her for sharing hundreds of copies of the
Crystal City Chatter
, a newsletter she has published from her home since 1980. Over the years, many internees in the camp have contributed primary documents and recorded their memories of internment in the
Chatter.
The issues of the newsletter provided irreplaceable insight into the lives of the children of the camp.

While fifteen-year-old
: Author interview, Sumi Utsushigawa.

At the New Jersey harbor
: Corbett, 93; and Elleman, 146.

During the first
: Corbett, 68.

Given the success
: Elleman, 146–55; and Corbett, 72–95.

To their surprise
: Author interview, Sumi Utsushigawa.

Not far away
: Author interview, Yae Aihara, March 23, 2011; and Densho Digital Archives, Japanese American Legacy Project,
http://denso.org
.

As the train
: Yoji J. Matsushima,
Crystal City Chatter
28 (December 1995).

In Heart Mountain
: Author interview, Sumi Utsushigawa; and videotaped interview conducted by Leslie Burns in November 1997, deposited at the Institute of Texan Cultures.

Somewhere in Mississippi
: Author interview, Sumi Utsushigawa; and Matshushima,
Crystal City Chatter.

When the train stopped
: Videotaped interview, Shoji Kanogawa, 1997, UTSA.

That first night
: HNCC, 10.

It often
: Ibid., 26.

By the time
: Riley, 47; and State Department of Education, Summer School Report, 1945, NA1, RG85, Box 65.

R. C. (Robert Clyde)
: Riley, 44; Thomas Walls’s interview with Tate, February 21, 1979, UTSA, Institute of Texan Cultures; and HNCC, 25–30.

Over time
: HNCC, 26.

“Yet the attitude”
: Tate interview with Walls.

Some Japanese American students
: Tai Uyeshima’s essay “The First Concentration Camp: Crystal City, Texas,” CC50, 26.

The September 1943
: Ibid., 43.

From time to time
: Author interview, Sumi Utsushigawa; and Riley, 105.

Like the other nisei
: SF-U.

Fortunately, much useful documentation of the Japanese and Japanese American experience of internment is available. Useful interviews of both the Uno family and the Taniguchi family and other now-deceased Japanese and Japanese American internees have been collected by universities, the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, National Japanese American Society in San Francisco, and elsewhere. Particularly useful here were the Taniguchi family interviews, as well as the collection edited by Lawson Fusao Inada,
Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience
(Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2000).

After Pearl Harbor
: Entire text of Roosevelt’s memo,
Only What We Could Carry
, 341.

The key word
: Michi Weglyn,
Years of Infamy
(New York: Morrow Quill Paperbacks, 1976), 136.

Mary Tsukamoto
: Ibid., 141.

In Crystal City, the battle
: Kay Uno Kanedo, 2010, Denso Digital Archives.

When war broke out
: Yuji Ichioka, “The Meaning of Loyalty: The Case of Kazumaro Buddy Uno,”
Amerasia Journal
23 (3) (1997): 47–59.

Kay Uno, the youngest
: Kay Uno, “Pearl Harbor Remembered,”
Only What We Could Carry
, 31.

As Ernie felt
: Letter from Stanley to Robert Uno, April 26, 1944, NA1, RG85, Box 190.

When Stanley wrote the letter
: Essay by Edison Uno, CC50, 23.

The family
: Interview with Izumi Taniguchi, March 2000, by Nancy Taniguchi for the Japanese American Historical Collection (JACL), archived at California State University, Fresno, 2–17.

On April 23, 1943
: Weglyn, 219.

“Everything is”
: Kearns Goodwin, 428.

In March 1943
:
Only What We Could Carry
, 263.

While in Gila River
: Taniguchi interview, 15–21.

Isamu and Sadayo
: Alan Taniguchi, biographical summary of his parents, September 1995.

In a speech
: Biddle, “Democracy and Racial Minorities,” December 14, 1943.

My account of the life of Yoshiaki Fukuda drew from his FBI file, which was heavily redacted, and his Special File, which contained many notations of his activities before and after his internment. In addition, Fukuda’s memoir,
My Six Years of Internment: An Issei’s Struggle for Justice
, published by the Konko Church of San Francisco in 1957, is a striking account that links his personal history with the political and religious events of his times. More than any other book that I have read about the experience of issei men during American internment, Fukuda’s memoir reveals their cultural values and the agonies of divided loyalty.

For an understanding of the Konko faith, founded in 1859 in Japan and which Fukuda brought to America in 1930, I am grateful to the Reverend Joanne Tolosa, the head minister of the Konko Church in San Francisco, who welcomed me there on several occasions and helped me understand the basic tenets of the faith. In addition, two other Konko ministers—the Reverend
Masato Kawahatsu in San Francisco and the Reverend Alfred Tsuyuki in Los Angeles—illuminated aspects of the faith. The Konko religion was originally a Shinto sect but established its independence in 1859. However, anyone associated with the Shinto religion, a cornerstone for Japanese culture, was immediately arrested and interned by FBI agents in 1941.

I would like to express my appreciation to Fukuda’s four living sons—Nobusuke, Saburo, Hiroshi, and Koichi—who provided personal papers, religious tracts written by Fukuda, documents from Japan, and photographs taken during their internment.

All he could see
: NA1, RG85, Box 50, and Fukuda,
My Six Years
, 22.

In his seat
: Author interview, Nobusuke Fukuda, April 29, 2011, San Francisco.

“I came”
: Fukuda,
My Six Years
, 40.

“The Issei”
: Essay by Nobusuke Fukuda,
Discover Nikkei
, May 8, 2008.

In Missoula and Lordsburg
: Fukuda,
My Six Years
, 68.

At 1
:30 a.m. on January 27, 1944: NA1, RG85.

O’Rourke approached
: Fukuda, memoir, 22.

Fukuda was born
: Ibid., 122; and author interviews with Fukuda’s four sons Nobusuke, Saburo, Hiroshi, and Koichi.

Three years
: The description of the send-off was found in an unpublished biography of Fukuda written in 1967 by Masayuki Fukibayashi, a schoolmate of Fukuda’s in Japan.

On December 7
: YF; Fukuda memoir, 7.

On Monday, December 8
:
San Francisco Call-Bulletin.

Fukuda and the others
: YF.

Her title
: Ibid., and essay by the Reverend Fumio Matsui, 1981, 50th Anniversary, Konko Church, San Francisco.

At his hearing
: YF.

The Konko religion
: Author interview, the Reverend J. L. Tolosa, head minister, Konko Church, San Francisco.

A tall, lean
: Author interview, Nobusuke Fukuda.

Shinko stayed
: Fukuda,
My Six Years
, 49.

During Fukuda’s
: Ibid., 52.

In Crystal City
: SF-F.

Despite the order
: Ibid.

On February 14
: Ibid.

A report from the Red Cross
: March 6, 1944, memo from Harrison to O’Rourke, NA1, RG85, Box 6.

On the morning of November
: Fukuda,
My Six Years
, 55–62.

As the flag controversy in the German section in the summer of 1943 illustrates the anger of German immigrant fathers, who realized the government—not them—controlled the lives of their children, two key events described in this chapter about the summer of 1944 revealed the helplessness of issei fathers.