NEWS AND VIEWS THAT IMPACT LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT
"There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with
power to endanger the public liberty." - - - - John Adams
America is being "protected" by World War II technology: a navy of surface ships and expensive tanks that make easy targets for modern missile systems.
But even in World War II our navy ships were being sunk by the dozen. The U.S. Navy is good to bully small helpless nations. Against a modern navy our ships are scrap metal.
Sunk by Japanese kamikaze aircraft on 25 October 1944 in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. A total of 57 ships were sunk by Japanese kamikazes including 3 aircraft carriers and 14 destroyers. Some 368 other ships were damaged. About 4,900 sailors were killed and over 4,800 wounded. . Call me crazy, but if an aircraft carrier can be sunk by a "primitive" propeller driven fighter plane one has to ask how long these ultra-expensive ships will remain afloat in an age of modern missile technology or jet fighters piloted by Muslim suicide bombers.
Ka Boom Goes The Surface NavyTarget ship hit by two P-270 Moskit (NATO: SS-N-22 Sunburn) anti-ship missiles during Russian Navy Pacific Fleet exercises.
(LifeSiteNews) — The most senior medical oncologist in Japan recently slammed the COVID-19 mRNA shots as “the work of evil” that has caused “essentially murder.”
In an interview published April 19, Dr. Masanori Fukushima, who spearheaded the first cancer outpatient clinic at Kyoto University and launched the first course in pharmacoepidemiology there, listed a slew of problems with the COVID mRNA jabs, evidencing what he called an evil “abuse of science.”
He pointed out that “turbo cancers,” a kind “previously unseen by doctors” that progress extremely quickly and are typically in stage four by the time they are diagnosed, have started to appear after the jab rollouts. These “turbo cancers” are emerging along with excess mortality due to cancer in general, which Fukushima says cannot be explained only by lost opportunities for screenings or treatment during the COVID outbreak.
As a tragic example of the fatal danger of the COVID shots, the oncologist shared the story of a 28-year-old man who was found dead by his wife when she tried to wake him in the morning, five days after he received his second Pfizer shot.
“The doctor who did the autopsy said that when he tried to remove the heart, it was soft and had disintegrated,” Fukushima said. “And even just one case like this shows how dangerous this vaccine can be.”
He pointed out that these severe harms, including death, have been afflicting people – post-jab – who have a history of good health.
“It’s serious. It’s essentially murder.In the end, I want to state clearly that this is my view,” the doctor said.
He lamented that the media, including newspapers, generally have not reported on these harms, and that in fact those who question the safety of the COVID shots – just as with the flu shots – have been characterized as anti-science “heretics.” He described the attitude of those who shut down the voices COVID “vaccine” critics, however, as far from scientific, and “more akin to faith, hysteria or even cult behavior.”
As the U.S. sinks into debt, inflation, a collapsing petro-dollar and political chaos - - - The BRICS nations are attracting many new member nations and building a gold and commodities backed currency.
(Zerohedge) Today OPEC+ woke up and chose scorched-earth war against the Fed.
That's because while the US central bank is already trapped, and is desperately looking for any excuse to halt its tightening campaign now that inflation is accelerating . . . .
As the WSJ reports today, one of Washington’s closest allies in Asia is now buying oil at prices above the cap, in effect breaking with the sanctions regime imposed by US allies.
As the note adds, Japan got the U.S. to agree to the exception, saying it needed it to ensure access to Russian energy. The concession shows Japan’s reliance on Russia for fossil fuels, which analysts said contributed to a hesitancy in Tokyo to back Ukraine more fully in its war with Russia. It also shows why the price cap was imposed at a level where it doesn't actually adversely impact Russian oil exports. But the current price surge means that unless the price cap is lifted, the U.S. alliance is about to shoot itself in the leg.
Going back to Japan, it's the one country which - at a time when most European countries have at least claimed they are reducing their reliance on Russian energy supplies - has stepped up its purchases of Russian natural gas over the past year.
Japan is the only Group of Seven nation not to supply lethal weapons to Ukraine, and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was the last G-7 leader to visit Ukraine after Russia’s invasion.
In the first two months of this year, Japan bought about 748,000 barrels of Russian oil for a total of ¥6.9 billion, according to official trade statistics. At the current exchange rate, that translates to $52 million, or just under $70 a barrel.
A CIA Created Nightmare Aleppo, Syria before and after the unconstitutional CIAbacked war.
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From Saudi Arabia to Iran to Mexico, nations are pulling away from often insane U.S. policies and are aligning themselves with the BRICS nations. The BRICS represent about 40% of the world’s population.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.
Russia and Egypt military drills in the Mediterranean Sea.
For good or bad, other nations have figured out that there are alternatives to obeying American policies.
(Zerohedge) Tokyo Disney theme park will now be offering 20% cheaper rates for customers with proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test taken within 3 days of admission.
Unvaccinated customers get the old higher rates.
The move is a remnant of policy initiatives designed by government and corporate partnerships in 2020 – A collusion of big government and big business as a means to encourage or force the public to comply with vaccination demands (or any other demands). The carrot and stick approach is outlined in documents published by globalists at the Imperial College of London at the very beginning of the pandemic in 2020.
Specifically, government officials and corporations invented a series of incentives for vaxxed and punishments for the unvaxxed, mostly using denial of service measures such as exclusion from public places or even exclusion from economic participation.
Corporations would work hand-in-hand with government as enforcers, using private property arguments as a means to oppress unvaccinated people and refuse them access to goods and services.
In this way, governments could get around constitutional protections of individual liberties. They could claim they were not violating anyone's rights, and that corporate businesses had the right to refuse service to people they deemed a danger. It's a con game, but legally effective.
The head of the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Association has urged doctors and Covid-19 patients to begin a regimen of ivermectin, which he says is effective at treating and preventing the virus.
During an August 12 press conference, Dr. Haruo Ozaki called for the drug, which is proving effective in numerous studies, to be used due to the drastic rise in Covid cases.
“In Africa, if we compare countries distributing ivermectin once a year with countries which do not give ivermectin…I mean, they don’t give ivermectin to prevent Covid, but to prevent parasitic diseases…but anyway, if we look at Covid numbers in countries that give ivermectin, the number of cases is 134.4 per 100,000, and the number of death is 2.2 in 100,000.”
“Now, African countries which do not distribute ivermectin: 950.6 cases per 100,000 and 29.3 deaths per 100,000,” Ozaki highlighted.
“I believe the difference is clear.”
“Of course, one cannot conclude that ivermectin is effective only on the basis of these figures, but when we have all these elements, we cannot say that ivermectin is absolutely not effective, at least not me.”
(Infowars) - Japan’s Kyodo News reported on Wednesday that the nation’s health ministry is suspending the use of around 1.63 million doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine.
After eight vaccine distribution centers across Japan reported contamination of the Moderna jabs due to “foreign materials,” the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare made the call to halt the shots.
Japanese drugmaker Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. is in charge of overseeing sales and distribution of the Moderna vaccine in the country.
Moderna allegedly promised to conduct an investigation into the issue after a request from Takeda.
In the meantime, Takeda is asking medical institutions and others that may provide the vaccine to stop administering it immediately.
Over 10 million doses of the Moderna Covid jabs have been used in the country since it was approved for emergency use in May of 2021.
According to Japan’s contract with Moderna, the nation was set to receive 50 million doses by September.
The corrupt Media-Government Complex worked 24-7 to panic the American Sheeple and destroy our economy.
Meanwhile in Japan it was business as usual without a lockdown.
(Newsweek) - Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has announced the end of his state of emergency declaration for the novel coronavirus pandemic, with just 851 deaths reported and without ever implementing a lockdown.
"I have decided to end the state of emergency across the nation," Abe said during a televised press conference on Monday. "In just over a month and a half, we almost brought (the infection) situation under control."
Abe cautioned that lifting the order did not mean that the novel virus was gone from Japan. "Our battle against the virus will continue," he said, while urging the Japanese people to continue following stringent social distancing guidance.
Public health officials in Japan have warned the population to wear masks in public and continue to work from home if possible. The Japanese government has asked the population to adapt to a new lifestyle to avoid an uptick in new cases and prevent the spread of the virus. People have also been encouraged to avoid traveling for non-essential purposes to other regions of the country.
For reasons I don't fully understand the corrupt media machine and governments appear to want to create panic about Coronavirus.
The Center for Disease Controlshows 61,099 people died in the 2017 - 2018 flu season. So how are less than 3,000current deaths a pandemic?
Why the mad rush to create panic and fear?
(Newsmax) - Japanese officials Friday tried to dispel rumors of a toilet paper shortage amid the coronavirus outbreak – and urged people to quit stockpiling rolls, Japanese news outlet NKH reported. The pushback follows last week’s rush to stores by Japanese shoppers to snap up rolls amid reports the raw materials needed to make the paper couldn’t be imported from coronavirus-plagued China. “That’s fake news,” one manufacturer told the Global Times. “[Our] supplies have nothing to do with China.” The company told the Global Times all paper production in Japan is carried out domestically, with 70% of raw materials required for Japan's toilet paper production derived from recyclables, and 30% from wood imported from overseas. Raw materials from China only make up 2% of the overall total.
(Summit News) - A sex robot brothel in Japan says it has received a surge of enquiries from men asking for male sex dolls so that clients can experience bisexuality “without interacting directly with a man of flesh and blood”.
Yes, really.
The “hyper-realistic” sex doll brothel, which recently opened in the city of Nagoya, offers clients “futuristic sex” with their “favorite anime character”.
The female sexbots can be dressed in a choice of clothing while one with an E-cup breast size is available upon special request.
However, co-founder Sergio Prieto says that he is currently considering introducing male sex dolls following a surge in demand from men who want a ‘memorable’ bisexual experience.
“We have recently attended to several clients who request an appointment with male dolls and female dolls at the same time,” Prieto said, adding: “Probably bisexual, or heterosexual, who want to experience anal sex without interacting directly with a man of flesh and blood”.
On December 11 Japan’s Kyodo News Agency reported that“Japan plans to effectively upgrade its helicopter carriers to enable them to transport and launch fighter jets.” Concurrently the Indian Ministry of Defence noted that in the course of a large exercise being held in India by the US and Indian air forces, “two military pilots from Japan are also taking part in the exercise as observers.” There was also a Reuter's account of Tokyo’s plans “to boost defence spending over the next five years to help pay for new stealth fighters and other advanced US military equipment.” Coincidentally, these developments were reported in the same week as the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, which remembrance was totally unreported by the Western media but remembered in China where “over a period of six weeks, Imperial Japanese Army forces brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of people” and wreaked further death and destruction there and throughout Asia until 1945. They killed or otherwise caused the deaths of countless millions.
There was another anniversary in early December — that of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when 2,400 Americans were killed.
President Roosevelt had declared that “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
Japan Maritime Self Defense Forces’ latest helicopter destroyer Izumo anchors at its Yokosuka base in Yokosuka on March 31, 2015. The JS Izumo (DDH-183), with a length of 248-meters and displacing 19,500 tons, is the largest vessel procured by the MSDF ever. (Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP)
The date has not lived in infamy, or indeed in any other way so far as the New York Times or the Washington Post are concerned, because neither’s front pages mentioned Pearl Harbor on either December 7 or 8.
A few days later, however, the Post reported that “Japan will announce plans to buy 40 to 50 [Lockheed Martin] F-35s over the next five years but may ultimately purchase 100 planes [which cost about $100 million each]. That will have the added benefit of mollifying President Trump, who has complained about the US trade deficit with Japan as well as the cost of stationing tens of thousands of U.S. troops here.” And the NYT headlined that “Japan to Ramp Up Defense Spending to Pay for New Fighters, Radar.”
The message is that Japan is embarking on a military spending surge which is totally inconsistent with the provisions of its Constitution, but entirely in line with the anti-China alliance that is being forged by Washington with various nations.
At the end of the Second World War, Japan was devastated and reeling from US operations in the Pacific that culminated in two atomic bomb attacks. It had to be rebuilt, and the generous United States helped its former deadly enemy to rise from the ashes.
As officially recorded, “Between 1945 and 1952, the US occupying forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, enacted widespread military, political, economic, and social reforms . . . In 1947, Allied advisors essentially dictated a new constitution to Japan’s leaders. Some of the most profound changes in the document included... renouncing the right to wage war, which involved eliminating all non-defensive armed forces.”
There have not as yet been any amendments to Japan’s Constitution about waging war, and most Japanese people consider conflict undesirable.
The Constitution is precise in stating that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”
It could not be clearer: given its own fundamental principles, Japan cannot maintain armed forces. Yet a recent report indicates that “According to Japan’s 2018 Defense White Paper, the total strength of the Self-Defense Forces stands at 226,789 personnel,” including 138,126 in the army, 42,289 in the navy and 46,942 in the air force — or, to use the descriptions employed to fudge the fact that these are military forces with offensive capabilities, they are the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force (SDF), the Japan Maritime SDF (18 submarines, 37 destroyers; two more on the way), and the Japan Air SDF (260 advanced combat aircraft).
That is a potent military force, and under the government of Shinzo Abe it will continue to be enlarged and developed with the warm approval of the United States with which Japan has a Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security.
When Abe was re-elected head of his party in September he declared that “It's time to tackle a constitutional revision,” and everyone knows what “revision” he wants to make. As reported by Asahi Shimbun “He is proposing to add a clause to Article 9, which bans the use of force in settling international disputes, to explicitly permit the existence of Japan's military, now called the Self-Defense Force.” And if he succeeds in having that amendment approved, it will be downhill all the way from there.
Japan has territorial disputes with China and Russia, the former about sovereignty over some islands in the South China Sea, and that with Russia concerning the Kuril Island chain, which is inhabited by Russians, having been handed over to the Soviet Union a short time before the end of World War Two. The US Navy and Air Force, in Washington’s self-assumed role as Führer of the world’s oceans, continue to challenge China in the South China Sea in its confrontational “Freedom of Navigation” operations, and as recently as December 6 was involved in a similar naval fandango when, as the CNN headline had it: “US warship challenges Russia claims in Sea of Japan.”
CNN stated that the US had sent the guided missile destroyer USS McCampbell “to Peter the Great Bay to challenge Russia’s excessive maritime claims and uphold the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea enjoyed by the United States and other Nations.”
It is hardly coincidental that “Peter the Great Bay is the largest gulf in the Sea of Japan, also known as the East Sea, and home both to the Russian city of Vladivostok and the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet.” Little wonder that the US wants to challenge Russia in that region — and of course it is entirely fortuitous that this maritime provocation comes after Ukraine’s naval incursions in the Kerch Strait, which were intended to encourage domestic and international support for Ukraine’s President Poroshenko. (Russia called a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the affair, but that descended into an insult offensive by the US.)
It is apparent that Washington intends to continue challenging China and Russia in waters some 8,000 to 11,000 kilometres from the US West Coast, centred on a country in which the US has a vast military presence, with the Seventh Fleet being based in Yokosuka, the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force in Okinawa and some 150 combat aircraft of the USAF at three major air bases.
Along their borders in the Asia-Pacific region both China and Russia face increasingly confrontational US military manoeuvres which are intended to provoke them to take action. For the moment, Japan’s “self-defence” forces are constitutionally forbidden to get involved in anything that would involve the “threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. But the moment after Shinzo Abe succeeds in having Japan’s constitution amended, just watch developments, because Washington will welcome Japan’s return to militarism and will encourage it to join in its military provocations.
It’ll be just like the old days in Nanking and Pearl Harbor.
FDR kidnapped Jews from Latin America and put them in Concentration Camps with Nazis
(WWNO.org) - Marilyn Miller stands outside the U.S. Border Patrol Station in Algiers. The entire Gulf Coast arm of the U.S. Border Patrol is managed out of the site. Marilyn’s an Associate Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She’s interested in how this U.S. Border Patrol facility, right on the Mississippi River in Algiers, was used during World War II, when it was Camp Algiers. When people think of WWII internment camps they think of the Japanese Americans detained after Pearl Harbor. Over 100,000 people of Japanese descent were detained after that attack, the majority of them U.S. citizens. The Camp Algiers story is part of a much smaller government internment program, often overlooked, but now the subject of research by Miller “All these buildings would have been part of a facility that was used in the 1940s,” she says, looking at the facility from the facing levee, “to house enemy aliens who arrived to New Orleans from Latin America.” Let’s start on Dec 7, 1941. The Pearl Harbor attack. The FDR administration had become increasingly concerned that in addition to Western Europe and Japan, there might be a third Axis front: Latin America. More than a million and half Germans lived in Latin America, says Max Paul Friedman, a history professor at American University and an expert on the Latin American deportation operation during WWII. The Roosevelt administration asked FBI agents to go and find dangerous Nazis in Latin America. But they weren’t sending the best people, Friedman says, “because the best people were busy where the war really was, or security at home. So they sent people without Spanish or German or a lot of talent, and they were supposed to find Nazis in Latin America.”
A "Family" Camp The Graber family in 1943 on their way to the Crystal City, Texas "Family" Concentration Camp.
They'd “open wallets and offer to pay for information for anybody who would announce a Nazi. And that created a system that was riven with corruption where some of the Latin American dictators would say ‘oh you want Nazis? Well this guy who owns a farm next to my farm, he’s a Nazi.’ and they would deport some of their own residents to seize their property.” It sounds crazy. The U.S. government sending D-string FBI agents to find Nazis in Latin America, kidnap them, and bring them to America? But it’s true. Just days after Pearl Harbor, thousands of Europeans who had moved to Latin America were rounded up and eventually deported to New Orleans. “When they came to the U.S. they were stripped of their documents, they were stripped of their clothing,” says Miller. “So they were treated in a way as if they were prisoners even though they had done nothing.” The secretive program, called the Enemy Alien Control Program, was run by the State Department, and was in many ways illegal. It was against the law at that time for the U.S. to seize individuals outside the U.S. So, the State Department decided they would get around this by refusing to issue entry visas for the Latin American deportees. When the Latin American residents arrived to the port of New Orleans without papers, they were denied visas. Then, they were arrested on the grounds that they had attempted to enter the country illegally, and were then subject to internment. Nancy Cortés Reinbold lives in Honduras. As she was researching her family history, she came across these camps. Her grandfather came up on the list: Mr. Fritz Reinbold. Nancy's grandpa Fritz was born in Germany, but left before the war to live in Honduras, where he met and married her grandma. “He said that it was probably because he was rich!" she says, noting the reason someone would falsely identify him as a Nazi. "That was his only mistake.” Fritz worked at the German Embassy. He’s one example of someone who was framed as a Nazi, so that he would be forced to give up his property and assets to the Honduran government. He and his family were put on a ship to New Orleans in 1943. Most Latin American internees first arrived in New Orleans, and was then shipped off to one of the other camps. Her family was put on a train to Crystal City, Texas. “My grandfather never in his life talked about this," Nancy says. "This is unforgivable, I cannot imagine how they felt. They took away everything.” She knew her mom spent a few years in Texas, but never knew why. She discovered her family’s experience on the German American Internee Coalition website. And saw that they were amongst 5,000 Europeans with a similar story. Not only were many of these people rounded up between 1941 and 1943 innocent, they were the victims, says Harvey Strum, a faculty member at the Sage College of Albany. Approximately 81 Jews in various countries were rounded up, he says. So, in the search for Nazis, the United States deported and interned Jews? Correct, says Strum.
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.
Marilyn Miller continues. “The great irony is that many of these ‘aliens’, some small percentage of them were European Jews who had gone to Latin America when they were denied a visa to enter the U.S. for refuge. At least five had already been in concentration camps in Europe.” Imagine you amazingly manage escape from a concentration camp, try to enter the United States, are denied entry, so you go to Latin America instead, and are then kidnapped and sent to the U.S., only to once again live behind barbed wire, and face harassment and even beatings “at the hands of real Nazis in the [U.S.] camps” says Max Paul Friedman. Because of the faulty accusations of so many deportees, a majority had no affiliation with the Nazi party. But there were still a good number of Nazi sympathizers who were also sent to the camps. And they were pretty much allowed to do whatever they wanted, says Miller. “Because the United States wanted to protect the health and welfare of their own prisoners of war in Europe," she says, "they were very careful to provide good treatment to German prisoners of war here. And so they were allowed to fly the swastika flag or they were allowed to sing Nazi songs.” Which led to severe discrimination, and beatings of Jews in the camps. The Jewish detainees in various camps across Oklahoma, Texas, and Georgia demanded they have their own camp, a safe space where they wouldn’t need to share a bunk bed with a Nazi. Literally. There was additional pressure on the camps to do something, because the National Refugee Service, and various Jewish organizations got wind of what was happening, and supported the demand that the Jews be moved. Max Paul Friedman says it also helped that camp administrators were starting to see the absurdity of the situation. “Camp commanders started writing to Washington saying I thought we were going to be housing and guarding dangerous Nazis but you’re sending us whole families and old men and Spanish speakers and children, and we don’t understand,” he says. So officials decided that one of the camps would be used specifically to house those who opposed the Nazis. This is where Camp Algiers comes in, what’s now the U.S. Border Patrol facility on the West Bank. Miller explains. “When there were problems in other camps, we have news stories from the Jewish Telegraphic Service that says ‘Nazis and Jews fight in Camp X...’ and as a result of that, many times the Jews were sent to the Algiers facility as a refuge from this fighting. So Camp Algiers became known as the camp for the innocents.” Starting in 1942, most of the 81 Jews and other innocent prisoners held in camps from Texas to Oklahoma were relocated to New Orleans.
Lost story of German Latin Americans interned during second world war
(The Guardian) - With the Statue of Liberty looming overhead, an 11-year-old boy named Jurgen sat huddled in his coat, alongside his family and few pieces of luggage, as a cold wind blew off the Hudson River.
Ellis Island is best known as the former gateway for millions of immigrants entering the US, but in the winter of 1944, the boy – Jurgen – and his family were about to be deported to Germany.
“We were processed on Ellis Island as illegal immigrants,” said Jurgen, now 82. “In reality, we were kidnapped by the US government.”
Jurgen and his family were among thousands of Latin Americans of German origin who were rounded up by their respective governments on orders from the US following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.
They were detained in accordance with a little-known US state department program. The Special War Problems Division would orchestrate the detention of more than 4,000 Latin Americans from Germany, Japan and Italy in internment camps in Texas and elsewhere, as well as localized detention centers in Latin America.
In all, 15 Latin American countries would deport residents and citizens of German ancestry to detention centers in the United States, often without legal recourse, according to a statement from the National Archives.
The internment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans in camps has been recognized by the US Congress, but the story of Latin Americans with origins in axis countries has been largely lost to history.
As the 73rd anniversary of the US entry into the second world war approaches, fewer and fewer people remain who experienced firsthand the Immigration and Naturalization Service internment camps in the US.
The second world war arrived swiftly for Jurgen’s family and other Germans living in Costa Rica. Less than a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jurgen’s father was arrested by Costa Rican police on 2 January 1942.
By the late 1930s,the FBI had begun to identify possible Nazi sympathizers, fearing Axis forces would establish a foothold in Latin America. In the case of Costa Rica, the US Embassy in San José submitted a list of names to be deported to the government, a move acknowledged in a State Department memo dated 15 November 1943.
Larger countries like Mexico, Chile and Argentina resisted the demand to deport their citizens, but that was not an option for the small Central American nation. In 1942, the US state department announced that it would boycott all Costa Rican products from German-owned companies. Coffee accounted for more than half of the country’s exports between 1938 and 1945 – and the coffee business was dominated by German firms, according to Gertrud Peters, an economic historian at the National University of Costa Rica.
Unable to ship goods to Germany because of the allied blockade, Costa Rica – among many other Latin American nations – was forced to comply.
Two weeks after Jurgen’s father was detained, a letter arrived from the police informing his family that he had been deported to the US, where he was being held in the country’s largest internment camp, in Crystal City, Texas.
The dusty Texas town could not have been more different from the mild climate and green mountains of San José.
The 500-acre internment camp, which at its peak would house nearly 3,400 detainees, was still largely under construction when Jurgen arrived in late 1943.
“The camp was built on an old spinach field,” Jurgen said. “There was a statue of Popeye in the town.” The statue still stands in Crystal City today.
After rain the unpaved roads would become thick with mud, and Jurgen and the other children took to walking to the latrines on short stilts to protect their shoes.
Jurgen said that the camp provided all the basics for his family, including simple accommodation in three-unit row houses, communal latrines and food. His father, a businessman, found work laying asphalt for the camp’s roads and, briefly, plucking feathers off turkeys.
Jurgen and his younger brother cut beet greens with a knife to earn $1 an hour, which the family could use to order goods from the Montgomery Ward Catalog. The family was already saving up to buy coats for the next leg of their journey back to Germany.
Besides keeping axis nationals from supposedly impeding the US war effort at home, Crystal City served an important role for the US abroad: providing the country with a grab-bag of prisoners who could be traded for Americans held by the Third Reich.
Faced with the prospect of spending the remaining years of the war in detention, Jurgen’s family volunteered for deportation.
The family traveled by train to Ellis Island before they boarded a Red Cross ship and sailed back to Europe. Allied and Russian forces were beginning to close in on Germany. As Jurgen and his family filed off the boat in Lisbon, a line of American prisoners waited to board, bound back to the United States.
Jurgen’s family eventually returned to Costa Rica in 1948. They were able to recover their properties, but the same could not be said for many German families, whose businesses and land were seized by the government and sold to pay down the national debt and subsidize populist land reforms.
After years in war-torn Germany, what they found in Costa Rica was yet more conflict: following a disputed election in 1948, the country fell into a brief civil war. That war brought about the rise of President José Figueres, the leader who abolished Costa Rica’s army in 1948. The following year, Costa Rica declared its political neutrality.
