Arnold Krammer (1941–2018)

I read this book as a follow-up to The Train to Crystal City, because I wanted to learn more about the persecution of German aliens (and in some cases, citizens) in the United States during World War II, a topic overshadowed in our history by the internment of Japanese-Americans.

This book is relevant for me because I am currently doing some research about a first cousin twice removed who, despite immigrating here from Germany in 1912 and serving in the Army, was still not naturalized when World War II broke out.  He too was arrested (apparently because his American-born wife had a short-wave radio, illegal for aliens) and briefly detained, and then was a parolee for most of the rest of the war.

Author Arnold Krammer is (now) a retired history professor at Texas A&M University (I might have had him; he was teaching when I was there).  Using mostly primary sources, such as government documents released soon before the book was written (1997), Krammer provides more background information on why and how the government identified "dangerous" aleins, and how they were arrested and processed.  He also discusses issues that arose after the Civil Rights Act of 1988 passed, which compensated Japanese-Americans who were unfairly interned, but completely ignored German-Americans.

The extensive end notes (19 pages), bibliography (eight pages), and index (four pages) should help me in my research.

© Amanda Pape - 2016

[This book was borrowed from and returned to my university library.]… (meer)

2073 Nazi Prisoners of War in America, by Arnold Krammer (read 13 Apr 1987) This tells of 400,000 German POWs in America during the Second World War. It was a subject I knew little about, so I thought the book would be interesting and it was. One certainly heard little about the subject during the War. There were prisoners at Algona and Cherokee in Iowa, but there were well over a hundred major internment camps in the U.S. One man escaped and was never recaptured. The escape rate was less than one-half of 1%, and most were recaptured very quickly. A good, easy-to-read book… (meer)