The Ruling Elite
Page 20
Even before World War II, the government justified its practice of depriving certain “dangerous” citizens, actually innocent people, of their civil liberties. Government agents conducted raids, illegally searched homes, practiced discriminatory internment, and exchanged and repatriated individuals. They apprehended American citizens and lawful residents of German, Italian, and Japanese ancestry and incarcerated them in detention camps during the war and afterward. In 1936, Roosevelt, allegedly worried about Germany, began to discuss his concerns with officials in government departments.529
In September 1936, Roosevelt asked J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, to initiate a clandestine five-year plan that included identifying potential security risks among American citizens and legal residents. Hoover, strongly biased against immigrants, ordered his agents to register anyone that he or they viewed as a security risk. He directed them to collect information on certain people, without regard for its accuracy or source. FDR again exceeded his authority and sought support from politically precarious Latin American republics because he claimed that the Germans had established agencies in Central and South America. He wanted to obligate the Latin American governments to “compulsory consultation” with America in the event of any attack. On June 26, 1939, FDR issued a mandate creating an intelligence agency for espionage in Latin America under the direction of the FBI, the Military Intelligence Division, and the Office of Naval Intelligence.530
In 1939, Hoover admitted to Congress that the FBI was scrutinizing at least ten million people, mostly foreigners, all alphabetized, and categorized geographically. If war erupted, and there was a good likelihood that it would, the FBI could react and apprehend potential saboteurs. To assuage congressional concerns, Hoover merged his register to create a categorized Custodial Detention Index. The index listed everyone that the FBI should watch, those who had donated money to certain groups, and those subject to apprehension and immediate detention, regardless of occupation or political affiliation, should war begin.531
FDR directed Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle to prepare an official document tasking the FBI with responsibility for foreign intelligence work in the Western Hemisphere as requested by the State Department. He directed military and naval intelligence to take the responsibility for the rest of the world. On June 24, 1940, Berle presented the document. At Roosevelt’s direction, Hoover created a covert intelligence service to categorize questionable American citizens and legal residents, people who might seek to harm the United States. FDR was also concerned about German agents operating in Central and South America. Therefore, he directed Hoover to create a clandestine, albeit illegal, intelligence operation, the Special Intelligence Service, in Latin America, which he accomplished on July 1, 1940.532
Within four months, the government had registered 4,741,971 aliens whom it prohibited from entering restricted areas. Violators of the law were subject to arrest and incarceration for the remainder of the war.533 Howard W. Smith proposed the anticommunist Alien Registration Act, enacted June 29, 1940, otherwise known as the Smith Act, which required all resident aliens to register. The law also prohibited calling for the overthrow of the US government or its political subdivisions. The government convicted Gus Hall, chairman of America’s communist party, for violating the law. However, prosecutors did not apply the law to all of the covert communists working within the government who had, in fact, already altered the government’s structure.
Working in conjunction with Britain’s William Stephenson, Hoover charged his agents with compiling a list of people, presumably sympathetic to the Nazis, who might prove to be threats to the security of the United States. Stephenson, associated with the British Security Coordination, worked out of New York. The British and the Americans placed their agents in diplomatic positions in Central and South America in exchange for technical assistance. In February 1941, Berle, in behalf of the State Department, wrote The Pattern of Nazi Organization and Their Activities in the Other American Republics, in which he indiscriminately accused several German groups of sedition. He claimed that leaders of certain German firms and all non-Jewish Germans were National Socialist supporters or part of the Nazi leadership.534
In a confidential memo dated February 6, 1941, Berle described several Latin American German groups as seditious, calling German business firms essential to the success of National Socialism. He claimed that all German-born individuals in Latin America supported the Hitler regime. Berle, a Jew, argued that “virtually every non-Jewish German citizen belongs to some branch of the Nazi hierarchy.” He asked that all ambassadors convey information about Germans engaging in business enterprises. He also told them to intimidate Latin American officials into arresting and incarcerating all citizens of Axis countries in such a way that there would be no connection to the United States.535
FDR’s administration pressed for enactment of the Lend-Lease Act of March 11, 1941, which allowed the president to lend or lease war materials to supportive nations like Britain despite American neutrality. The US soon offered the lend-lease program to Latin American republics on the condition that those countries cooperate in the detention and deportation of ethnic Italians, Germans, and Japanese and seize their assets.536
In April 1941, Hoover attempted to acquire legal authorization for FDR’s program from Attorney General Robert Jackson, who told Hoover that the FBI could investigate only those people who had committed crimes or who had engaged in subversive activities. Opinions based on race couldn’t justify investigations. Hoover ignored Jackson and secretly persisted in compiling a list with names of A, B, and C individuals. Officials should immediately arrest and imprison those in the A classification if war erupted, along with others whose activities officials felt warranted constant surveillance.537 The US government would begin those arrests on December 7, 1941.
Also in April 1941, Roosevelt recommended William J. Donovan as the coordinator of information for a new consolidated intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services. William Stephenson would function as his British counterpart. The OSS began investigating Axis support in Latin-American and Caribbean countries.538 Donovan and others in the intelligence community often recruited OSS operatives from Murder, Inc. and from Detroit’s Purple Gang.539 After all, they had the kind of experience that Donovan really appreciated, skills that he needed in numerous places.
Donovan, a Buffalo, New York, native, was an assistant to the US attorney general from 1925 to 1929. He was the government’s unofficial observer in Italy, Spain, and the Balkans from 1935 to 1941. Roosevelt assigned him to a fact-finding mission in Europe. Germany had seized the Austrian-based Interpol (International Police) after its invasion and annexation of that country and had transferred all Interpol assets to Wannsee. There, under the direction of Intelligence Chief Reinhard Heydrich, it became the world’s premier intelligence force. When Donovan returned to the United States, he advised FDR to organize a similar intelligence agency. On July 11, 1941, in anticipation of entering yet another war, Roosevelt created the Office of Coordinator of Information and appointed Donovan, a millionaire Wall Street lawyer, as its head.540
Using Executive Order 9066 following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the US government evicted nearly 120,000 Japanese residents from the Pacific coast and moved them to internment camps in more than thirty states.541 On that same day, FDR issued Presidential Proclamation 25256, authorizing the arrest and detention of individuals of Japanese descent, considered “enemy aliens,” who were living in America. The government also placed restrictions on travel and on their use of property. On December 8, FDR released two more directives, 25267 and 25278, sanctioning the apprehension and incarceration of Germans and Italians. The directive said the Justice Department could use the services of the FBI to execute those arrests. Hoover sent a memo to all of the special agents in charge with instructions.542
The so-called dangerous enemies were merely butchers, bakers, sho
pkeepers, and mechanics, not saboteurs but common people. The Geneva Convention of 1929 applied to all prisoners since the United States was a signatory. The inmates were kept behind barbed wire, secured by guards holding machine guns. With Executive Order 9066, ratified by Congress, FDR imposed additional constraints on the prisoners that the military would implement. The government forbade any “dangerous” Germans to live in areas that the Department of Justice, in conjunction with the secretary of war, designated as militarily sensitive zones on the East and West coasts and in the Great Lakes area. The government compelled “dangerous” people who lived in these areas to move without compensation or assistance and without remuneration for the loss of their businesses.543
On December 8, 1941, early in the morning, FBI agents began arresting Germans and Italians before there was even a declaration of war, which occurred on December 11.544 German officials were stunned when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Despite Hitler’s Tripartite Pact with Japan, he did not anticipate that Japan would initiate a war. On December 8, Japanese Ambassador Oshima approached German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop to acquire an official obligatory declaration of war against America. Ribbentrop was fully aware that another antagonist, the formidable United States, might crush Germany. Though Germany had pledged to assist Japan if another country attacked that nation, Japan was the aggressor. Hitler was certain that America would soon declare war on Germany, because the US Navy was already attacking German U-boats. FDR had repeatedly insulted the National Socialist ideology. Hitler misjudged Japan’s military strength and thought that Japan might defeat America and then assist Germany in fighting the Soviets. On December 11, late in the afternoon, the German charge d’affaires in Washington gave Secretary of State Cordell Hull a copy of the declaration of war.
On that same day, Hitler defended the declaration in the Reichstag, maintaining that Roosevelt’s failed New Deal was the real justification for the war, a means of covering up the disintegration of his economic programs. Hitler said, “First he incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war.” The members of the Reichstag responded with thunderous applause.
Federal agents, with unsubstantiated proof, immediately began knocking on doors in cities throughout the nation and even in Honolulu. They arrested men and women whom the government considered “enemy aliens,” frequently forcing them to abandon children who ended up in orphanages or with friends or relatives. In their search for “evidence,” the agents destroyed private property. US attorneys and FBI agents, certain of detainees’ guilt, subjected those they arrested, many less than fluent in English, to accusations, coercion, and hostility. Following each hearing, the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit, created on May 19, 1942, would determine whether to release or to incarcerate the detainee for the remainder of the war. These actions regularly destroyed and impoverished families and jeopardized long-term relationships with family members and spouses left behind.545
On June 13, 1942, the coordinator of information’s propaganda department merged into the Office of Strategic Services under Donovan’s direction.546 The OSS developed worldwide clandestine capability and employed almost thirteen thousand men and women.547 It conducted psychological warfare, often used by governments to marshal troops for battle. This included repetition of fabricated atrocity stories to prove that the enemy was evil and merited elimination so the “good guys” could live in peace.”548
Roosevelt and Donovan had ties beyond partisan politics. They were both 33rd degree Freemasons, a status that routinely trumps all other considerations and allegiances—borders, constitutions, political parties, and philosophies. Allegedly, Donovan frequented Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis camp, an elite occult Masonic playground in Nyack, New York, similar to Bohemian Grove.549 Donovan was a Hoover Republican. Yet, because of their other connections, FDR, whose philosophies were allegedly opposed to Wall Street, chose him to manage espionage, black propaganda, guerrilla warfare, and other un-American subversive activities. James P. Warburg thought it was a great idea.550 Warburg, a Pilgrims Society member, declared to the Senate, “We shall have World Government, whether or not we like it. The only question is whether World Government will be achieved by conquest or consent.”551
From January 15 to 28, 1942, delegates from western-hemisphere countries met in a conference in Rio de Janeiro.552 By then, the Latin American republics, because of American pressure, had cut all connections to Axis nations and had entered the war on the side of the Allies. The United States insisted on creating the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense to observe the activities of “alien enemies” in Latin America. The program entailed mandatory registration, escalating Soviet-style surveillance, decreased internal travel, a prohibition on gun ownership, and no access to radios or radio transmitters. Apparently, the Soviets and the Americans were using the same procedure manual since authorities imposed the same constraints in the United States. The government withdrew the naturalization process so that aliens could not enjoy citizenship. Officials suggested the termination of citizenship for anyone who supported the Axis powers in any way.553
In the summer of 1942, Starr Gurcke, the mother of a German family in Costa Rica, faced imminent deportation. However, she had American citizenship and held a US passport. She went to the American consul for help, but officials told her they could do nothing and shifted the blame to the Costa Ricans. When she approached them, they said, “Oh, it’s the Americans.” Gurcke concluded that they were collaborating. The government had already detained her husband, Werner, a ten-year resident of Costa Rica, in a camp five months prior and was preparing to deport him. In early December 1942, two Costa Rican policemen arrested Gurcke, briefly taking her and her two daughters to the German Club, once a nice facility but now a holding facility for the families of incarcerated men. Its “indescribable sanitary conditions” included a pool that was now “a reeking, fermenting sewer.”554
On January 20, 1943, officials told the wives of the incarcerated Germans to prepare for deportation. Women and children traveled by bus all night to a railroad station where they joined husbands and fathers. They were then taken to Puntarenas, a Pacific port, to a ship anchored offshore, the US Army transport Puebla. The military police checked luggage, seized passports and visas, and issued receipts. They housed the men in the ship’s filthy hold. With open-bucket latrines and the stench of vomit and sweat, this certainly was not a place fit for human habitation. They crowded women and children into small, hot, humid, airless cabins, putrid with the stink of dirty diapers. The ship departed on January 26. Many passengers were already ill with infections, whooping cough, and conjunctivitis from staying at the filthy, overcrowded German Club.555
At 7:00 a.m. on February 6, the Puebla arrived at the immigration detention station on Terminal Island in San Pedro, California, with children who were even sicker than they were at the beginning of their hellish trip. By January 16, immigration officials from the Justice Department’s Alien Enemy Control Unit were prepared for Starr Gurcke, an American citizen, the wife of Werner Gurcke, whom they claimed was dangerous and had “engaged in subversive activities.” To justify Gurcke’s deportation and continued imprisonment in an American concentration camp, along with her family, the US government arrested her on the grounds that she had entered the country illegally, without a passport, an immigration visa, or an identification card as required by the Immigration Act of 1924. Authorities had seized her passport and other papers when she and her family boarded the ship in Puntarenas and had deliberately failed to return these documents upon arrival.556
Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, called for the internment of Americans of Japanese descent classified as enemy aliens with no risk evaluation or evidence of incriminating behavior. The order, one of three programs targeting aliens, asked that these people voluntarily transfer from
areas that the US Army considered militarily sensitive. That resulted in the compulsory incarceration of the majority of Japanese-Americans legally living in California, Washington, and Oregon. The order did not stipulate the mass detention in “relocation camps” of Germans or Italians. In the second program, the government selectively used the Alien Enemy Control Unit to classify the possible threat posed by individual Germans, Italians, and Japanese. The FBI used reports gathered from neighbors, business associates, and family members.557
In March 1942, the government confiscated the property and assets of the Japanese Americans it held. The administration created the War Relocation Authority to “assist” the Japanese-Americans as they were being driven from several states and relocated to military prison camps in California, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas. By the summer of 1942, the government had evacuated more than a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. FDR’s executive order also accommodated Caucasian farmers who had grievances against competing Japanese American farmers. The Japanese charged less for their produce. The media depiction of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, anticipated by the US government, predictably outraged Americans—so much so that they accepted the government’s mistreatment of fellow citizens.
The State Department’s Special War Problems Division supervised the third very secret program under which authorities in Latin American countries apprehended 8,500 German nationals and others, legal citizens of these countries, and temporarily interned them in local detention centers. American authorities then deported a number of these people to Germany, Japan, or Italy and extradited 4,058 Germans, 2,264 Japanese, and 287 Italians to the United States. When they arrived in America, officials viewed these illegally detained Axis nationals as prisoners of war and interned them in detention camps. The US government wanted to exchange these people and their families for American prisoners that Axis nations might be holding.558