American Concentration Camps



As a 17 year old boy Eb Fuhr was arrested by the FBI at his Ohio high school and sent to the Crystal City, Texas Concentration Camp.  No right to a trial.  No right to an attorney.



Bill of Rights?  What Bill of Rights?
During World War II German-Americans were also rounded up by the Federal Government and placed in Concentration Camps.



Every day a little more freedom is taken away from Americans in violation of the Bill of Rights.  Often the loss of freedom is declared "legal" by our corrupt court system.  Almost always the freedom is taken away in the name of either local or national security.

Words to fear:  "We are the government and we are here to help you."

Here is a story of a little known part of World War II where German and Italian Americans were rounded up for our protection.  No right to a trial.  No right to an attorney.

It should be noted that the Axis Powers had many allies:  Finland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and so on.  But immigrants from those nations were not rounded up and placed in camps.  I suspect the camps were more for public relations than real security.  Imprison some 41,000 Japanese, Germans and Italians and the public will think they are safe and will ignore the fact that millions of immigrants from Fascist nations were in the U.S.

Eberhard Fuhr's Story

82-year old Eberhard Fuhr says he has lived the American dream. Growing up in Cincinnati, Fuhr was called "Eb" by his friends and spent much of his time playing sports, including high school football.

"We had a rotten team. We lost every game," he reminisces.

While Fuhr described his childhood as idyllic, a dark shadow was cast on his own personal history.

One day in March of 1943, 17-year-old Fuhr was arrested. He was just six weeks shy of graduating.

"I was in my classroom at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon. The principal came in and asked me to step into the hallway. I was arrested by two FBI agents," he said.

Internee men at lunch at the Crystal City camp.

As he was being led away, Fuhr was aware that he might never see his friends at school again.

"They didn’t cuff me inside the school, but the minute we left the front door I was cuffed," he said.

Fuhr was charged with being an enemy alien for the German government and put in detention.

He came to the United States with his parents when he was 3-years-old and was still a nationalized German. His parents had already been arrested and put in a internment camp 8 months earlier. Now Eb and his U.S. born little brother were joining them in Crystal City, Texas.

Fuhr would spend the next four and half years in government custody, most of it at Crystal City, which was the site of the largest German internment camp in the nation. Click here for a drawing of the internment camp.

The Department of Justice made what some call a propaganda film about the Crystal City camp.

The film opens with a shot of the American flag and a woman with a deep Texas twang reads in a harsh school teacher tone the government’s view of life in the camp.

WWII German American Internment Camps

While the Japanese who were detained were organized, vocal and able to receive an apology from the United States government, the Germans seem almost embarrassed.

"Karen Ebel's father Max Ebel was a German citizen interned in the United States during World War II.  She said her father kept his experiences secret for most of his life."



The Graber family in 1943 on their way
to the Crystal City "Family" Camp.

 "He actually didn’t ever talk about it until he was in his eighties, and I was rather shocked to learn that he was in an internment camp during World War Two," she said.
 Ebel founded the German American Internee Coalition, which is pushing the government to take a new look at the internment program and ask some questions.

"What happened with the German-Americans and the Italian-Americans and the German and the Latin Americans who were brought up here? There were many Latin Americans who were brought up here from nineteen different Latin American countries," she said.

Ebel says the Department of Justice program was massive at a time when the government was scrambling for resources to fight WWII. But did the program make the United States any safer?

None of the German-Americans were found to have been spies or saboteurs for the Nazis.

Ebel says the legal process that put people in detention camps was not concerned with questions of innocence, just being a suspect made you guilty. And something as simple as subscribing to a German newspaper was enough to make you a suspect.

"They had no right to counsel. They couldn’t question the proceedings. They couldn’t question their accusers. It was pretty much a slam dunk process."

Crystal City, Texas Internment Camp 1945
A Department of Justice film 

Even legal challenges of habeas corpus failed in the courts. Historian Michael Luick-Thrams is an expert on the U.S. internment camps. He has created a special traveling exhibit about the German-American internment experience.

"The system wasn’t very practical. It wasn’t very effective. There were many more cost-effective and human resource-effective ways to have done this, but, in effect, we put fifteen thousand German-Americans, about six thousand Italian-Americans and one hundred and twenty thousand Japanese-Americans in camps. That’s a lot of people," said Luick-Thrams.

"In this country do we really round people up in the middle of the night, put them behind twelve foot tall barbed wire fences with searchlights and guards, and then give them no lawyers to get themselves out? Don’t we give people the opportunity to explain themselves? How do we want to live in this country? So those histories are much more relevant to how we live today than calico bonnets and log cabins," he said.   (Texas Public Radio)

Also read our article THE FEDERALIST - "Justice Department lied to the Supreme Court so Japanese-Americans could be shipped to internment camps."

1945 Texas Historical Commission photo of the Crystal City Concentration Camp.

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