Bias History, Citizenship and German Heritage
One of the fascinating things I often come across when I talk to people about history is how American History that is taught in school can be so biased. There are many topics in American History that are simply not taught to us. Take for example the American German Internment Camps.
The what???
Yeah I see that puzzled look on your face.
You’ve heard of the Japanese Internment Camps but rarely you’ve heard of the German Internment Camps.
We had them.
German Americans! Yes, that’s what I said. AMERICANS! We as a nation gathered up German Americans just as we did to the Japanese Americans and placed them into internment camps all over our country. Some of these camps were located in Marfa, Texas, Crystal City, Texas and Fort Lincoln, North Dakota. Most of the Germans that were arrested went to self - sufficient communities and weren’t released until 1948. If the German American families were forntuate enough to go to the camps and not be harassed for being German.
My grandparents weren’t so fortunate. They lived in New York and had a thriving ice cream parlor. During WWI and WWII, there were many who harassed them and tormented their shop all because they were German. One day, immigration came to my grandparents home and took my grandmother because she had a green card. My grandfather was a citizen and my uncle had been born in the states. My father hadn’t been born yet. They took my grandmother and put her on a ship, separating her from her family. The ship made it to the Norway. They told her they would leave her there or she can declare herself a citizen of the United States and she will be reunited with her family. There was no choice! She became a citizen.
My grandmother’s immigration picture.
That was a family secret until I uncovered it while doing genealogy. Today my family and I are trying to find our family in Germany and reunite with our family.
Can you image living in America when we are telling Japanese and German AMERICANS you can’t be one of us?
