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Wartime Treatment of Germans Questioned
"Whenever you have a conflict, the danger to those who are of the same background that include our enemies is real," Feingold added. "And you always have to guard against that."
According to retired history professor Stephen Fox, who has written a book about the FBI roundup of German Americans during World War II, roughly 3,000 Italians and 11,000 Germans were detained in the U.S., including some Germans who were sent here from Latin America and some German Jews.
  Eberhard Fuhr holds up a government brochure as he speaks as part of a traveling exhibit in Milltown, Wis., Friday, June 8, 2007, about internment during World War II. In 1943, 17-year-old Fuhr was taken out of his high school classroom in Cincinnati, arrested by FBI agents, and eventually sent to an internment camp for "enemy aliens" in Texas, where he spent the next 4 1/2 years with his family. The Senate voted this week to establish a commission to look into the treatment of German and other Europeans in the U.S. during World War II. i (AP Photo/Ann Heisenfelt) (Ann Heisenfelt - AP) 
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More than 120,000 Japanese-Americans, including U.S. citizens, were imprisoned during World War II.
In general, Fox said, the FBI targeted resident alien Germans who were involved in German organizations, or made comments sympathetic to Hitler, or had contact with relatives in Germany. "By far, most were innocent," he said.
Fuhr said he was arrested several months after his parents had been arrested and interned. They were reunited along with his two brothers at a camp in Crystal City, Texas. Now 82, Fuhr lives outside Chicago.
Life at the camp was boring but not unpleasant, Fuhr said. What angers him is he remained an internee until 1947, two years after the war ended. He spent the last months at Ellis Island, where he faced possible deportation.
"I really don't object to that time until V-E Day," Fuhr said, referring to the day the Allies defeated Nazi Germany, "but I resent every minute after that."
Anneliese Krauter, 72, the U.S.-born daughter of German immigrants, went to the Crystal City camp in 1943 with her mother and brother to be reunited with her father, who had been arrested the year before. He had unknowingly rented a room to a German spy, she said. The family was forced to close its butcher shop in the New York City borough of Brooklyn.
Krauter, who now lives outside Indianapolis, described life at Crystal City as "campy," with movies, cultural exchanges with Japanese internees, and classes. "It was certainly not an existence that would compare in any way to a gulag or concentration camp," she said.
In 1944, the family took the U.S. up on its offer to return them to Germany.
"This was by my father's choice," Krauter recalled. "At this point, he was disillusioned and disappointed." She returned to live in the United States in 1953.
Both Fuhr and Krauter are participating in an exhibit called "VANISHED: German-American Civilian Internment, 1941-1948," by the TRACES Center for History and Culture in St. Paul, Minn.
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On the Web:
German American Internee Coalition: http:/
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