    [House Hearing, 111 Congress]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

     TREATMENT OF LATIN AMERICANS OF JAPANESE DESCENT, EUROPEAN AMERICANS,
                    AND JEWISH REFUGEES DURING WORLD WAR II

    =======================================================================

                                    HEARING

                                   BEFORE THE

                          SUBCOMMITTEE ON IMMIGRATION,
                    CITIZENSHIP, REFUGEES, BORDER SECURITY,
                             AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

                                     OF THE

                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
                            HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

                         ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS

                                 FIRST SESSION

                                   __________

                                 MARCH 19, 2009

                                   __________

                               Serial No. 111-13

                                   __________

             Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary

          Available via the World Wide Web: http://judiciary.house.gov

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    48-322                    WASHINGTON : 2009
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                           COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

                     JOHN CONYERS, Jr., Michigan, Chairman
    HOWARD L. BERMAN, California         LAMAR SMITH, Texas
    RICK BOUCHER, Virginia               F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
    JERROLD NADLER, New York                 Wisconsin
    ROBERT C. ``BOBBY'' SCOTT, Virginia  HOWARD COBLE, North Carolina
    MELVIN L. WATT, North Carolina       ELTON GALLEGLY, California
    ZOE LOFGREN, California              BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia
    SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas            DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
    MAXINE WATERS, California            DARRELL E. ISSA, California
    WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts   J. RANDY FORBES, Virginia
    ROBERT WEXLER, Florida               STEVE KING, Iowa
    STEVE COHEN, Tennessee               TRENT FRANKS, Arizona
    HENRY C. ``HANK'' JOHNSON, Jr.,      LOUIE GOHMERT, Texas
      Georgia                            JIM JORDAN, Ohio
    PEDRO PIERLUISI, Puerto Rico         TED POE, Texas
    LUIS V. GUTIERREZ, Illinois          JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah
    BRAD SHERMAN, California             TOM ROONEY, Florida
    TAMMY BALDWIN, Wisconsin             GREGG HARPER, Mississippi
    CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas
    ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York
    ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
    LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California
    DEBBIE WASSERMAN SCHULTZ, Florida
    DANIEL MAFFEI, New York
    [Vacant]

           Perry Apelbaum, Majority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
          Sean McLaughlin, Minority Chief of Staff and General Counsel
                                     ------

              Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees,
                     Border Security, and International Law

                      ZOE LOFGREN, California, Chairwoman

    HOWARD L. BERMAN, California         STEVE KING, Iowa
    SHEILA JACKSON LEE, Texas            GREGG HARPER, Mississippi
    MAXINE WATERS, California            ELTON GALLEGLY, California
    PEDRO PIERLUISI, Puerto Rico         DANIEL E. LUNGREN, California
    LUIS V. GUTIERREZ, Illinois          TED POE, Texas
    LINDA T. SANCHEZ, California         JASON CHAFFETZ, Utah
    ANTHONY D. WEINER, New York
    CHARLES A. GONZALEZ, Texas
    WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts

                        Ur Mendoza Jaddou, Chief Counsel

                        George Fishman, Minority Counsel

                                C O N T E N T S

                                  ----------

                                 MARCH 19, 2009

                                                                       Page

                               OPENING STATEMENTS

    The Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Representative in Congress from the
      State of California, and Chairwoman, Subcommittee on
      Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and
      International Law..............................................     1
    The Honorable Steve King, a Representative in Congress from the
      State of Iowa, and Ranking Member, Subcommittee on Immigration,
      Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law..     4

                                   WITNESSES

    Mr. Daniel M. Masterson, Professor of Latin American History,
      U.S. Naval Academy
      Oral Testimony.................................................     6
      Prepared Statement.............................................     8
    Ms. Grace Shimizu, Director, Japanese Peruvian Oral History
      Project (JPOHP)
      Oral Testimony.................................................    11
      Prepared Statement.............................................    12
    Ms. Libia Yamamoto, former Japanese of Latin American Descent
      Internee
      Oral Testimony.................................................    14
      Prepared Statement.............................................    16
    Mr. John Christgau, author of ``Enemies: World War II Alien
      Internment''
      Oral Testimony.................................................    25
      Prepared Statement.............................................    27
    Ms. Karen E. Ebel, President, German American Internee Coalition
      Oral Testimony.................................................    31
      Prepared Statement.............................................    33
    Ms. Heidi Gurcke Donald, Board and Founding Member, German
      American Internee Coalition
      Oral Testimony.................................................    40
      Prepared Statement.............................................    42
    Mr. John Fonte, Director of Center for American Common Culture
      and Senior Fellow, Hudson Instutute
      Oral Testimony.................................................    48
      Prepared Statement.............................................    49
    Mr. David A. Harris, Executive Director, American Jewish
      Committee (AJC)
      Oral Testimony.................................................    62
      Prepared Statement.............................................    64
    Mr. Leo Bretholz, author of ``Leap Into Darkness''
      Oral Testimony.................................................    67
      Prepared Statement.............................................    68
    Mr. Valery Bazarov, Director of Location and Family History
      Service, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS)
      Oral Testimony.................................................    70
      Prepared Statement.............................................    72
    Mr. Michael Horowitz, Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
      Oral Testimony.................................................    81
      Prepared Statement.............................................    83

                                    APPENDIX
                   Material Submitted for the Hearing Record

    Prepared Statement of the Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Representative
      in Congress from the State of California, and Chairwoman,
      Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border
      Security, and International Law................................    93
    Prepared Statement of the Honorable John Conyers, Jr., a
      Representative in Congress from the State of Michigan, and
      Chairman, Committee on the Judiciary...........................    93
    Prepared Statement of the Honorable Sheila Jackson Lee, a
      Representative in Congress from the State of Texas, and Member,
      Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border
      Security, and International Law................................    94
    Additional Material submitted for the Record.....................    95

                            OFFICIAL HEARING RECORD
          Material Submitted for the Hearing Record but not Reprinted

    ``Last Man Out: Glenn McDole, USMC, Survivor of the Palawan Massacre in
        World War II,'' by Bob Wilbanks

    ``The Misplaced American,'' based on the memoirs of Elsie, Karl, Henry,
        Marta, Lisbeth, Armin and Ursula Vogt, by Ursula Vogt Potter

    ``We Were Not the Enemy: Remembering the United States' Latin-American
        Civilian Interment Program of World War II,'' by Heidi Gurcke
        Donald

    ``From the Heart's Closet,'' A Young Girl's World War II Story, by
        Anneliese ``Lee'' Krauter

    ``Magic: The untold story of U.S. Intelligence and evacuation of
        Japanese Residents from the West Coast During WWII,'' by David D.
        Lowman

    ``Enemies: World War II Alien Internment,'' by John Christgau

     TREATMENT OF LATIN AMERICANS OF JAPANESE DESCENT, EUROPEAN AMERICANS,
                    AND JEWISH REFUGEES DURING WORLD WAR II

                                  ----------

                            THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 2009

                  House of Representatives,
          Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship,
       Refugees, Border Security, and International Law
                                    Committee on the Judiciary,
                                                        Washington, DC.

        The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 12:15 p.m., in
    room 2237, Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable Zoe
    Lofgren (Chairwoman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
        Present: Representatives Lofgren, Sanchez, Waters, King,
    and Lungren.
        Also present: Representative Wexler.
        Staff present: Ur Mendoza Jaddou, Majority Subcommittee
    Chief Counsel; Andres Jimenez, Majority Professional Staff
    Member; and Andrea Loving, Minority Counsel.
        Ms. Lofgren. The Subcommittee will come to order. This is a
    hearing not on any bills, but on the issues of a part of our
    U.S. history that many of us are unfamiliar with. Much is known
    about the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World
    War II, partly due to the enactment of the Commission on
    Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act in 1980, the
    commission's report in 1983, and the subsequent Civil Liberties
    Act of 1988, that provided an official apology.
        What is not as well-known to today is the mistreatment of
    thousands of Japanese and European Latin Americans, European
    Americans, and Jewish refugees prior to and during World War
    II. The 1980 commission did detail the mistreatment of
    Japanese, German, and Italian Latin Americans, but only in the
    appendix of the report. It also included one chapter, 13, on
    the mistreatment of German and Italian Americans in the United
    States.
        Further, no recommendations were made on these populations;
    no apology, as was done for the Japanese internment, pursuant
    of the Civil Liberties Act. And I think it is time for this
    history to be fully heard and considered.
        As I mentioned, although there are two bills that have been
    referred to the Subcommittee concerning the issues we are
    examining today, this is not a legislative hearing. Before we
    consider specific legislation on an issue that many are very
    unfamiliar with, it is important that we learn the facts and
    listen to the history to determine whether legislation is the
    appropriate response. If it is, we will then turn to those
    referred to this Subcommittee and examine whether the specific
    language in the bills is appropriate or whether amendments
    would be needed.
        I welcome comments in the bills and will consider them if
    we decide to move legislation in the area. Today, however, I am
    particularly interested in learning about the issue and whether
    another commission is indeed necessary to review history that
    has not been told in an adequate way.
        Before recognizing the Ranking Member, I would like to ask
    unanimous consent to submit to the record a statement from our
    colleague, Congressman Becerra, and without objection that is
    made a part of the record and I would also like to note the
    presence of our colleague and my fellow Santa Fean, Congressman
    Mike Honda, who is here with us.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Becerra follows:]
    Prepared Statement of the Honorable Xavier Becerra, a Representative in
                     Congress from the State of California
        Chairwoman Lofgren, Ranking Member King and distinguished members
    of the subcommittee, thank you for scheduling today's hearing. I
    appreciate your efforts to examine the United States government's
    treatment of Latin Americans of Japanese descent during World War II,
    an issue and a community whose story been overlooked far too long.
        To ensure that the United States properly examined this issue, I
    introduced H.R. 42, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment
    of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act. This legislation
    establishes a commission to investigate and review the facts relating
    to the abduction and internment of Japanese Latin Americans during
    World War II by the U.S. government.
        Before I proceed any further, I would like to thank Grace Shimizu,
    Libia Yamamoto, and Professor Daniel Masterson who will be testifying
    in the first panel of today's hearing. Their extensive knowledge and
    poignant stories of the Japanese Latin American experience will provide
    valuable insight and a deeper understanding of the tragedy this
    community endured during World War II.
        I would also like to recognize and honor the wonderful men and
    women of the Campaign for Justice and the Japanese American Citizens
    League for their constructive advice and indispensable support. These
    groups can be an invaluable resource to this committee as you continue
    to study this issue.
        Finally, I want to thank Senator Daniel K. Inouye of Hawaii, a
    decorated World War II hero and an exemplary public servant who has
    been a tireless advocate in moving the Japanese Latin American issue
    forward in the Senate.
        Nearly 70 years ago, nations of the world engaged in a battle that
    determined if the principles of democracy would be the predominant form
    of government around the world. When the Empire of Japan attacked Pearl
    Harbor in 1941, the United States entered World War II and led the
    battle to topple tyranny and restore liberty. However, in the course of
    this unrelenting and necessary fight, the government took extraordinary
    actions under the mantle of domestic security and sent 120,000 Japanese
    Americans to internment camps across the country. Even as U.S.
    servicemen fought in the Pacific to liberate Allied soldiers from
    Imperial Japanese prisons, our own government held thousands of people
    in camps across the country solely on the basis of their ethnic
    background.
        It took another thirty five years for America to come to terms with
    and acknowledge its egregious actions during the war. In 1980, Congress
    established the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of
    Civilians and charged it with the responsibility of reviewing the facts
    and circumstances surrounding the internment of people of Japanese
    descent and to recommend appropriate remedies. After twenty days of
    hearings, testimony from 750 witnesses, and review of thousands of
    government and military records, the Commission concluded that
    internment of Japanese Americans was the result of racism and wartime
    hysteria. Their findings vindicated these loyal Americans and President
    Ronald Reagan's signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 brought
    closure for thousands who suffered unspeakable indignities and
    tremendous losses.
        Unfortunately, the Commission did not fully address our
    government's treatment of Japanese Latin Americans. As a result,
    Japanese Latin Americans who were unjustly abducted and interned by the
    U.S. continue to live with the painful memories of those lost years.
    Many remain hopeful they will one day be able to have their important
    accounts included in the official narrative.
        Art Shibayama is one of the few remaining living Japanese Latin
    American internee and he anxiously waits every day to share his
    experiences before time runs out. Art served this nation as a corporal
    in the U.S. Army from 1952 to 1954. Like many veterans, he was not born
    in the U.S. He was born in Lima, Peru to Isseis, first generation
    immigrants from Fukuoka, Japan. Despite uncertainty and war ravaging
    abroad, Art and his family had an idyllic life. His parents had a
    thriving textile business and he spent leisure time with his two
    brothers, three sisters and grandparents. That life ended when the
    entire Shibayama family was detained and transported to an internment
    facility in Crystal City, Texas. In addition to losing all their
    material belongings, Art's grandparents were forcibly sent to Japan
    shortly after the family's arrival in the United States. Art and his
    family never saw them again. After two and a half years in the
    internment camp, he and his family were released and they moved to
    Seabrook Farms, New Jersey and then to Chicago in 1949. After receiving
    his citizenship in 1970, Art moved to California where he continues to
    reside today. Art was unable to travel to participate in today's
    hearing, but I want him to know that he is in our thoughts at this
    moment.
        Art's experience is not uncommon. There are hundreds of other
    internees from Latin America who can tell similar stories about the
    fear endured while being led out of their home at gunpoint, about the
    trauma of a 21-day boat ride from Peru to New Orleans and of the
    humiliation of being forced to strip naked upon arrival in the U.S. and
    sprayed with insecticides. Others can share vivid accounts of living in
    the squalor of an internment camp barrack, the emotions of being a
    ``stateless'' person facing language barriers and having to traverse
    the federal bureaucracy to obtain legal resident status, and about the
    heartbreak of being permanently separated from a family member. This is
    the reality thousands of Japanese Latin Americans faced.
        In fact, approximately 2,300 men, women, and children of Japanese
    ancestry were abducted from 13 Latin American countries and deported to
    internment camps in the United States during the World War II. The U.S.
    government orchestrated and financed this operation with the intention
    of using these individuals as hostages in exchange for Americans held
    by Japan. Over 800 people, some who were second or third generation
    Latin Americans and had no familial or linguistic ties to Japan, were
    used in two prisoner of war exchanges. This was the ultimate fate of
    Art Shibayama's grandparents. Some of the remaining detainees were held
    in U.S. internment camps until after the end of the war.
        The virtue of our nation lies in its ability to reconcile the past
    and come to terms with its mistakes. There is no better way to do so
    than to complete the historical narrative on this part of our nation's
    history. In the appendix of the Commission's report to Congress,
    Personal Justice Denied, the federal government's role in kidnapping
    and detaining Japanese Latin Americans was recognized. However, the
    Commission acknowledged it had not researched documents that existed in
    distant archives or received official testimony from government
    officials or internees. Surviving internees must be given the
    opportunity to testify so they may have the closure and justice they
    deserve.
        H.R. 42, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of
    Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act, would establish an official
    record of this tragic incident in American history. Nine commissioners
    appointed by the President, the Speaker of the House of
    Representatives, and the President pro tempore of the Senate would be
    charged with holding public hearings and submitting a report of their
    findings and recommending appropriate actions to Congress.
        Madam Chair, thank you for examining the issue of our government's
    treatment of Japanese Latin Americans during World War II. With the
    advanced age of many of the remaining internees, there is an urgent
    need to act expeditiously. I urge this committee to promptly consider
    and report H.R. 42 so that surviving Japanese Latin American internees
    can finally have their experiences registered in the official account
    of our nation's history. I look forward to working with you and my
    colleagues to pass the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment
    of Latin Americans of Japanese Descent Act.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Mr. King, you are recognized.
        Mr. King. Thank you, Madam Chair. I want to thank the
    witnesses in advance.
        Congress and the Executive Branch have addressed the issue
    of World War II internment many times. In fact, a quick perusal
    of the issue finds no fewer than four pieces of legislation
    passed by Congress and enacted into law. Two sets of amendments
    made to some made some of the point that legislation at least
    two commissions established to report on the issue, at least
    four occasions when the Federal Government financially
    compensated individuals for their relocation, two apologies
    from the office of the President of the United States, and at
    least $2 billion spent investigating, researching, and
    providing compensation to individuals affected by these
    policies.
        There is no shortage of the Federal Government's
    acknowledgement of the World War II relocation policies. What I
    might point out, however, is that I could find relatively
    little mention of the country's predicament at the time of the
    enactment of these policies, and then-President Franklin
    Roosevelt's issuing of Executive Order 9066, which was on
    February 19 of 1942.
        The context is that the United States was being attacked in
    an all-out global war that we did not seek. U.S. citizens were
    being killed. The future of civilized society lay in the
    balance, and the President has a responsibility to protect the
    population from future attack and from the theft of military
    and intelligence secrets and acts of sabotage by our enemies.
        There have been a few writings on the issue. For instance,
    David Lowman, former special assistant to the director of the
    National Security Agency, wrote about espionage tactics by the
    Japanese that involved soliciting Japanese Americans to spy on
    U.S. institutions. I would have liked to have invited Mr.
    Lowman to testify today, but he is deceased; however, he did
    testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee about this
    same topic in June 1984.
        I also looked at the report of the Commission of Wartime
    Relocation and Internment of Civilians, thinking it would
    surely mention the intelligence gathered by the Roosevelt
    administration as a reason for the enacting of the relocation
    policies, but there didn't seem to be any mention of it in that
    report either. In fact, Mr. Lowman points out in his book, the
    commission concluded, ``The commission concluded that there was
    no evidence of espionage by west coast Japanese residents.''
        He does go on to note that the commission overlooked the
    intelligence on the subject which was charged to--which it was
    charged to investigate and that this same intelligence was the
    reason Executive Order 9066 was issued by President Roosevelt
    in the first place. Such a rewriting of history is indefensible
    and does a disservice to good people who had to make tough
    decisions in trying times.
        Maybe what we need is a commission on useful accounting of
    the espionage, sabotage, and pro-Nazi, pro-Hitler agitation
    that did take place on our shores before and during World War
    II. I understand that there have been some groups of people not
    included in the reports previously issued on the topic of
    treatment of civilians during World War II. But how many more
    times will we be forced to revisit this issue?
        To establish a commission to review how U.S. government
    treated every person during World War II is ludicrous, yet that
    is exactly where we are heading each time this issue is raised.
    There is no getting around the fact that the Federal Government
    must take appropriate actions during times of war to protect
    its citizens.
        In fact, our founding fathers recognized, and they
    recognized that when they enacted the Alien Enemies Act; that
    was in 1798. Not taking necessary action would be abdicating
    perhaps the foremost responsibility of the Federal Government:
    to protect its population from those who would do us harm.
        Let me also discuss, briefly, where I think this is going
    and what kind of a pattern that we are in. We held at least one
    hearing in the last Congress on slavery reparations. We have
    had a President who apologized to an entire continent for
    slavery--for America's act in slavery. And I will point out
    that when we judge our predecessors by contemporary values, we
    always lose something in that contextual analysis.
        When a nation is under attack--well, let me just take it
    back to slavery. When you have a--I think that we deserve a lot
    of credit as a Nation and as a civilization for eradicating
    slavery, and yet we are wallowing in a guilt for these
    generations for sins that were committed by previous
    generations. I think we need to recognize the accurate history
    and do so objectively, but I don't think that we can
    legitimately atone for those mistakes by rewarding the third
    generation of people who perhaps were disenfranchised for a
    time.
        And I think we have to take this into the context of,
    President Roosevelt had intelligence; he acted on that
    intelligence, whether or not it was in good faith. We can't
    really help the people that had their lives altered by that.
        But I would also point out that we are not here talking
    about reparations or compensation for the descendents of those
    who were killed in World War II, that same war where about
    450,000 Americans lost their lives--and in fact, there is a
    missing generation there for those children that were never
    born because their fathers were killed defending the freedom
    that we enjoy. So if we are really serious about compensating
    those who have suffered an injustice, it more goes to those who
    have had their parents lose their lives in these previous wars.
        And I want to add, also, that, you know, this pattern of
    finding another victims group and finding a way to reach into
    the pocket of the American taxpayer and eventually, through
    this process, whether it is at not a formal hearing today, but
    eventually we get to this point where there is a request for
    reparations and a request for an appropriation. This is the
    process, this is the pattern, and I don't think that America
    has enough to be guilty about that we ought to be wallowing in
    self-guilt here today, under the third and fourth generation,
    and that is biblical.
        And if I could just conclude my statement, Madam Chair, I
    would do so in a sentence, and that is that it has been
    reported that about 645,000 slaves were brought into this
    country, and I would say that there is also a reference to
    about 1.25 million Christian slaves who were also enslaved in
    the previous centuries, and I hear no mention of that as well.
    So let us get on with our future lives and stop wallowing in
    this thing that we would propose upon our ancestors that would
    be a request for funding from today's producers.
        I thank you, and I yield back.
        Ms. Lofgren. The gentleman's time is expired. I am going to
    introduce the witnesses and ask unanimous consent that your
    full statements be made part of the official record. And we
    have time for 5 minutes of oral testimony; I am going to be
    strict on the 5 minutes because we have many witnesses today,
    and we want to make sure they all have a chance to be heard.
        So let me first introduce the first panel. We have
    Professor Daniel Masterson, who teaches Latin American history
    at the Naval Academy. He has written extensively on militarism,
    insurgencies, immigration, race relations. He has a number of
    important books to his credit, and we are pleased to have him
    as a witness today.
        We also have Grace Shimizu, who is the director of the
    Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project and the coordinator for
    the Campaign for Justice: Redress Now for Japanese Latin
    Americans. She is also the project director of a groundbreaking
    traveling exhibit, and we are very pleased that she is here all
    the way from California to be a witness for us today.
        And finally, I would like to introduce Libia Dideko Mauki
    Yamamoto. Ms. Yamamoto was born is Chiclayo, Peru, at the age
    of seven was interned in the Crystal City Internment Camp in
    Texas. After release from camp, she and her family resettled in
    California. She is the founding member of the Japanese Peruvian
    Oral History Project. She is trilingual, in English, Spanish,
    and Japanese, and lectures often about her internment
    experiences. And she is a resident of Richmond, California, and
    we are grateful to her as well, coming all the way from
    California.
        We have this little machine, and when the light turns
    yellow it means you only have 1 minute left; and when the light
    turns red it means your 5 minutes are up and I will ask you to
    cede the testimony to the next witness.
        If we could begin with you, Professor Masterson?
        Could you turn on your microphone?

     TESTIMONY OF DANIEL M. MASTERSON, PROFESSOR OF LATIN AMERICAN
                      HISTORY, U.S. NAVAL ACADEMY

        Mr. Masterson. Okay. Thank you all for inviting me and
    giving me an opportunity to speak on this issue. I have studied
    and written on this for about 20 years, but my books don't
    exactly reach bestseller proportions, so I think it needs a
    wider audience, to say the least.
        I just want to do three things today as quickly as I can:
    to talk about the Japanese relocation and internment issue, to
    speak about the nature about the Japanese in Latin America, and
    also to look at the question of whether or not a commission
    should go ahead and address this issue with wider study.
        The internment issue, I think, is only known to a small
    number of scholars and the participants themselves, despite the
    fact that there are a number of books written on this topic. We
    obviously had a situation between 1942 and 1945 in Latin
    America where the United States felt compelled to, number one--
    this was one option--to have the Latin American governments
    intern their own Japanese, which they did. This was the case in
    Mexico; this was the case in Brazil; this was the case in
    Paraguay. Those nations chose not to participate in the
    internment and relocation process.
        Twenty-two hundred and sixty or so chose--the
    representative governments chose to send 2,260 to the United
    States in the relocation process, which was primarily designed
    not so much for internal security issues, but for a prisoner
    exchange to Japan. Ultimately, about 1,400 of these ended up in
    Japan in a prisoner exchange, primarily because they entered
    the United States as stateless citizens; their passports were
    taken from them upon their departure from Peru, in most cases,
    where there were about 1,800 Peruvian nationals who were
    essentially sent over.
        What this does, basically, is establish a precedent for
    prisoner exchange, which, in many instances, thefts the
    credibility of international law, at this point. Many of these
    people were selected not through a systematic process of
    identification and counter-espionage activity, but rather
    through dragnets in Lima, Peru, for example, where the Lima
    police, in most cases, simply selected an individual or someone
    who was easily available.
        The third secretary of the Peruvian embassy at this point,
    a man named John Emerson, looked upon this situation very
    carefully from 1943 through 1945 and said it was a very
    haphazard process, one in which--it did not involve a
    systematic detaining of Latin American Japanese who were
    primarily perceived of as a difficult--I should say a
    possibility for espionage threats. These people eventually
    ended up in war-torn Japan without recourse for the citizenship
    status, because Peru would not accept them back when the United
    States chose to deport them between 1943 and 1945--actually
    through 1947.
        Now, were they guilty of espionage? This is a question
    which has to be addressed, perhaps in the pursuit of this
    commission, but I have looked--and a number of other people
    have looked--at Federal Bureau of Investigation files available
    at the Franklin Roosevelt Library in New York, and they
    concluded, as did John Emerson, that there was no evidence of
    any espionage whatsoever within the realm of the Peruvian
    Japanese or the Japanese Peruvians during World War II. The FBI
    was given responsibility for counter-espionage activities in
    Latin America, and they pursued this quite diligently in Peru,
    quite diligently in Panama, where the Panamanians in Japan were
    interned, and their files are available for further perusal,
    which would be, I think, a very good possibility for some
    future commission to justify this point.
        Who were these Japanese Peruvians? Who were these Japanese
    Latin Americans? They came from the southern prefectures of
    Japan beginning in 1899; they went to Mexico, where they were
    cotton farmers; they went to Mexico and northern Mexico to work
    on the railroads; they worked as miners; in Brazil they worked
    as coffee pickers. They ended up, in many cases, in Brazil upon
    established colonies in the interior, in San Paulo state, and
    became some of the most productive agriculturalists in all of
    Brazil.
        In Peru, they came as sugarcane cutters, where almost
    immediately they found the conditions on the sugarcane fields
    to be so abhorrent that they fled and ended up in large numbers
    in Lima, Peru. About 85 percent of all Japanese Peruvians today
    live in Lima. There, they established very profitable
    commercial enterprises and, in fact, became the commercial
    backbone of many Lima businesses.
        Small numbers of these business memcores were basically
    just trying to survive, and I think I would be instrumental to
    point out one of them. He was the father of Alberto Fujimori,
    who was----
        Ms. Lofgren. Professor, we are going to ask you to wrap up
    because your time is expired.
        Mr. Masterson. Okay. I am wrapping up.
        He was the father of Alberto Fujimori, who later became
    president of Peru. He, like many thousands of Japanese
    Peruvians, had his property seized during World War II.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Masterson follows:]
                   Prepared Statement of Daniel M. Masterson
        It is well known that the great trauma of World War II caused
    untold suffering for tens of millions of people throughout the world.
    Nearly forgotten in the context of this enormous tragedy is the fate of
    more than two thousand Japanese Latin Americans. Their war time
    experience in many ways mirrors that of the 120,000 people of Japanese
    heritage in the United States who were interned for most of the
    duration of the War in camps throughout the Western United States. But
    in important ways these Japanese Latin Americas were even more
    vulnerable and their circumstances even more devastating than their
    U.S. counterparts. These Japanese residents of eight different Latin
    American nations, were arrested often without charges, briefly detained
    and then deported to the United States for internment in camps in the
    Southwest. Most significantly, before entering the United States these
    deportees were compelled to turn over their passports to U.S.
    officials. They thus entered the United States as ``illegal aliens'
    making them subject to deportation once their internment in the U.S
    came to an end. When the vast majority of their former Latin American
    nations refused to allow them to return after the War, these detainees
    became ``stateless'' and unwilling refugees who were powerless to
    prevent their deportation to devastated post war Japan. Over the past
    two decades a handful of historians, journalists and activists have
    attempted to shed light on the story of these individuals whom one
    historian called ``Pawns in a Triangle of Hate.'' This committee
    hearing represents a very important effort to further U.S. government
    awareness of misguided U.S. policy during the World War II years.
                            japanese latin americans
        Who were these Japanese Latin Americans, why did they emigrate, and
    what prompted some Latin American governments to willing cooperate in
    their deportation to the U.S. and not others? The first Japanese
    emigrants arrived in Mexico and Peru in the late 1890's. Within a
    decade thousands more would settle in Brazil, which would become home
    to nearly 200,000 Japanese-Brazilians by the beginning of World War II.
    These emigrants came mainly from the poorest southern prefectures of
    Japan and the Ryukyu islands, mainly Okinawa. Seeking relief from
    increasing agrarian and working class unrest, the Japanese government
    saw emigration as a ``safety valve'' that might relieve some of the
    suffering caused by the nation's rapid modernization during the Meiji
    era.\1\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \1\ Taoke Endoh, Exporting Japan: The Politics of Emigration in
    Latin America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        In Mexico these Japanese emigrants settled in Baja California and
    successfully raised cotton, They also worked in the mines and on the
    railroads of the Northern states of Coahuila, Sonora, and Durango. In
    Peru, mostly male Japanese emigrants were enlisted as contract laborers
    to work in coastal sugar and cotton plantations. Terrible working
    conditions on these coastal estates drove many of them to flee and
    settle in Lima where they turned to small scale commerce and the
    building trades with good success. By World War II, at least 75 per
    cent of Peru's Japanese lived in the Lima metropolitan area where they
    proved vulnerable to government agents once the deportation process
    began.
        Brazil received the largest number of Japan emigrants because it
    needed laborers for its huge coffee estates and because large tracts of
    land were available in its Southern states of Rio de Janeiro and Sao
    Paulo. Japan heavily subsidized the establishment of Japanese colonies
    in Brazil in the hope that it would become the principal haven for its
    overseas Japanese. This policy succeeded as Brazil today has more
    people of Japanese descent (1.2 million) than any nation outside of
    Japan.
        Most Japanese who migrated to Latin America did so with a sojourner
    mentality. That is, they firmly intended to return to Japan after their
    hard earned savings allowed them to live comfortably ``near the bones
    of their ancestors.'' But this hope was rarely realized. Instead, the
    vast majority of the Japanese established tightly knit and comforting
    communities within the Latin American nations. Japanese culture
    flourished within these communities, Japanese schools taught the
    Japanese language and Japanese language newspapers kept the news of
    Japan and these communities available to their readers. The vitality of
    the Japanese communities cultural bonds was both a great strength, and
    a telling weakness. The insularity of the Japanese in Latin America
    caused them to be accused of being unwilling to assimilate. Of course,
    this same accusation could have been leveled against other ethnic
    groups, but it rarely was. In fact, Peru's most prominent Japanese,
    Alberto Fujimori took pride in being more Peruvian than Japanese. He
    was educated in non Japanese Schools in Peru, France and Milwaukee and
    distanced himself from the Japanese community when he ran for president
    in 1990.
        The 1930's saw Latin America's Japanese face increasing resentment
    brought on by their relative economic success in the midst of the
    Depression as well as Japan's increasing militarism. Prior to World War
    II, for example, Japanese-Brazilian farmers were eight times as
    productive as their Brazilian counterparts.\2\ Still, the nations with
    the two largest Japanese populations, Brazil and Peru enacted
    legislation that effectively ended Japanese emigration to their
    countries. Brazil's president Getulio Vargas issued decrees that
    severely restricted the Japanese communities' activities. Most
    importantly, Japanese-Brazilian schools were closed and the use
    Japanese language was prohibited in public. In May 1940, the worst
    anti-Japanese riots to occur in the Western Hemisphere flared in the
    capital's Japanese neighborhoods and in the agricultural centers of
    Chancay and Huaral. Fueled by false rumors Japanese military
    activities, two days of nearly unrestrained destruction and looting of
    Japanese properties ruined the livelihoods of many Japanese-Peruvians.
    Nearly every Japanese-Peruvian business was either completely destroyed
    or badly damaged. In Lima police stood by while the rioters wrought
    their havoc. The capital's major newspapers choose not to report on the
    riots.\3\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \2\ Daniel M. Masterson, with Sayaka Funada Classen, The Japanese
    in Latin America (Urbana, Illinois: 2003), 131
        \3\ Ibid, 156-157.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                      arrest, deportation and internment:
        Washington had plans for the internment of Japanese-Latin Americas
    a few months before Pearl Harbor. These plans called for the round up
    of Panama small group of four hundred Japanese and relocate them on the
    isthmus. The protection of the Canal was indeed the primary reason
    given for the interment of Japanese Latin Americans on the west coast
    of South America. The other primary reason: the exchange of Japanese-
    Latin Americans for United States citizens caught behind Japanese
    military lines seems to have been suggested by the Chairman of the
    Joint Chiefs of Staff, George Marshall and
        Secretary of State Cordell Hull in late 1942. The U.S. citizens in
    question numbered 7,000 civilians captured in China, the Philippines,
    Guam and Wake Island.\4\ Hull advocated the deportation and internment
    of Japanese Latin Americans for the specific
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \4\ George Marshall to Commanding General Caribbean Defense
    Command, 11 December 1942, National Archives, College Park, Md. Records
    of World War II, Army file AG 014.311 as quoted in Thomas Connell,
    America's Japanese Hostages: The World War II Plans for a Japanese
    Latin America (Westport, CT. 2002), 152, and Connell, Japanese
    Hostages, 100-101.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
                              plans for internment
        purposes of exchange. The Secretary of State seemed indifferent to
    the fact that many of these potential deportees were second generation
    Nisei and had never seen Japan. Hull at one point advocated the removal
    of all Japanese from Latin America for security purposes, not seeming
    to be aware of the enormous logistical, diplomatic or legal
    implications of this policy. Relocating Brazil 200,000 Japanese was
    never even a remote policy, even if the that country's leadership had
    that intention. Since the Japanese were Brazil's most productive
    farmers, that hardly seemed possible. President Franklin Roosevelt even
    weighed in on the issue of internment. Commenting on the supposedly
    delightful climate of the Galapagos Island, F.D.R. suggested that the
    Japanese from the west coast of South America could be interned on one
    or more of the island off Ecuador.\5\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \5\ Connell, America's Japanese Hostages, 5
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Not all Latin American nations allowed their Japanese residents to
    be deported to the United States for reasons of security or possible
    exchange. Mexico, seeking to maintain a nationalist and independent
    status relocated its Japanese from Baja California and it northern
    states to centers in the Federal District in central Mexico. Much of
    their property was lost as a result but most were able to rebuild their
    lives in Mexico City after the War. Brazil confined its Japanese to
    their remote agricultural cooperatives in the states of Sao Paulo and
    Rio de Janeiro during the war but did not technically intern them. Very
    importantly, families were allowed to remain intact and the property of
    the Japanese-Brazilians remained largely intact. After the War, the
    large Japanese-Brazilian community thrived.
                          the internees and their fate
        More than 3 of 4 of the more than 2,000 deportees from Latin
    American from 1942 to 1945 were from Peru. The government of President
    Manuel Prado saw the expulsion of the Japanese from his nation as
    benefit to his political popularity. He pursued this process of
    deportation with vigor. Additionally, some in Peru wanted to take
    advantage of the dilemma of the Japanese-Peruvians for their own
    financial benefit. U.S. officials were fully aware of this. One U.S.
    intelligence official noted in late 1941 that ``for every Japanese
    owner of a hardware or price goods store or barber shop, there are at
    least three (Peruvian) candidates (waiting) to take over their
    business.'' \6\
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        \6\ Office of Strategic Services Memo, 12294, 20 December 1941, RG
    226, U.S. National Archives.
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
        How were these Japanese Latin America identified for deportation?
    In the case of most Latin American nations, F.B.I. agents assigned to
    intelligence work in Latin America worked with the U.S. Embassy and
    Latin American governments to create ``Black Lists'' of suspect
    Japanese for possible deportation. Since none of the F.B.I. agents in
    Peru, for example, spoke or read Japanese, these blacklists were
    largely drawn from membership lists of prominent Japanese associations.
    Further, when many of these suspects went into hiding or bribed
    Peruvian officials, Prado's police in exasperation arrested the
    majority of detainees haphazardly to fulfill arrest quotas.
        These injustices were compounded when the deportees reached their
    debarkation location at New Orleans. Their passports were taken from
    them and never returned. They were thus declared illegal enemy aliens
    and were subject to deportation when their confinement in the United
    States came to an end. Taken from their families, these early internees
    were without a family and without a country. A good number of these
    detainees were reunited with their families when their wives and
    children chose to join them in confinement. The vast majority of these
    nearly 2,000 Japanese-Peruvian never returned to Peru. The Peruvian
    government refused to readmit all but seventy-nine in a policy that
    remained firm through the 1950's. Peru has not issued a formal apology
    for its war time deportation, but in the mid 1960's the government of
    Fernando Belaunde Terry donated a sector of land in central Lima for
    the construction of the Japanese Cultural Center. Of the 2,200 Latin
    American deportees only about 15 per cent were able to remain in the
    United States. The case of the ``stateless'' internees was taken up by
    the lawyer Wayne Collins who successfully argued for their continued
    residency in the U.S. The remainder of these unfortunate Japanese Latin
    Americans were deported to a Japan that lay in ruins. It was a country
    most had never seen and only existed in the images wrought by their
    parents or in their schoolbooks. The reality of the destruction and
    death they encountered was a great trauma. Nearly unbelievably, some of
    these Japanese Latin Americans were ``relocated'' to Hiroshima!
        The narrative of these Japanese Latin American during World War II
    has been told in books, articles and movies by talented filmmakers. But
    it is narrative that is still not widely known. Almost every U.S.
    citizens knows the story of the internment of our own 120,000 Japanese
    American. Congress needs to encourage the discussion of U.S. policy
    toward the Latin American Japanese during World War II. U.S. archivists
    have diligently collected and declassified the documentation in
    thousands of pages in material in the Special War Problems Division
    files of the Department of State. Our full understanding of this
    injustice in the past, may help the prevention of this type of policy
    in the future.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much, Professor.
        We are now going to turn to Ms. Shimizu.

     TESTIMONY OF GRACE SHIMIZU, DIRECTOR, JAPANESE PERUVIAN ORAL
                        HISTORY PROJECT (JPOHP)

        Ms. Shimizu. My father was born in 1906 in Hiroshima, Japan
    and immigrated to Peru when he was 18 years old to work with
    his brother in a family business. During World War II, our
    family charcoal business was put on La Lista Negra, the
    blacklist of so-called potentially dangerous enemy aliens,
    which affected successful businesses and individuals, often
    with no connection to the Axis powers, but who were community
    leaders like journalists, teachers, business owners, priests,
    or officers of prefectural clubs or cultural organizations. My
    family members and others on this list were never charged with
    a crime; there were no search warrants issued, no hearings
    held.
        When U.S. transport ships came into the harbor of Callao,
    some men on the blacklist went into hiding, my uncle included.
    The first time the Peruvian authorities came looking for my
    uncle, who headed our family business, they took my cousin
    instead. My cousin was interned in the U.S. and used in the
    second prisoner exchange.
        In 1944, when my father was 38 years old, the authorities
    deported him to a U.S. military camp in the Panama Canal Zone
    for detention and hard labor, which was in violation of the
    Geneva Convention. My father never shared his experience in the
    Panama camp, but we do have the statement of another Japanese
    Peruvian who recalled being put to work clearing the jungle
    around the camp.
        One humid day the internees, many of whom were elderly,
    were told to dig a pit. He thought he was digging his own
    grave. When they were told to fill the pit with buckets of
    human waste from the guards' latrines, then the older men were
    so tired that they could not run fast enough to please the
    guards, they were poked and shoved by guards with bayonets.
        My father was detained in the Panama camp for several
    months. When the next U.S. transport arrived, the prisoners
    included his first wife, his brother, and his brother's wife
    and children. They were taken to the U.S. for indefinite
    internment at Crystal City, Texas for the purpose of prisoner
    exchange. My father's wife died in that camp due to the trauma
    of the imprisonment and lack of adequate medical care.
        While interned, my father also learned that seven other
    members of our family who remained in Peru had been killed, and
    circumstances surrounding their murders were never solved.
        At the end of the war, my uncle and his family were
    deported to Japan and dumped off to find their way to the home
    of my grandmother in Hiroshima. My father was released on
    parole from camp under the sponsorship of Japanese American
    relatives living in northern California. His intention was to
    return to his home, business, and surviving relatives in Peru,
    but internees were not allowed reentry by the Peruvian
    government, initially.
        He eventually remarried and started a family with my mother
    in Berkeley, California. In the 1950's, with changes in the
    immigration laws, he was allowed to change his status from
    illegal alien to legal permanent resident. I have come to
    understand the significance of my father's wartime experience
    through the work of the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project.
    We are learning that our families' wartime experiences were
    part of a larger Latin American program whereby the U.S.
    government went outside its borders to 13 Latin American
    countries and seized 2,264 men, women, and children of Japanese
    ancestry, both citizen and immigrant residents of those
    country, forcibly deported them to the U.S. internment camps
    without legal extradition, without due process, without
    charges, and deprived of legal counsel.
        We are also learning that German and Italian communities in
    the U.S. and Latin America were also swept up in this turmoil.
    In total, over 31,000 so-called enemy aliens of German,
    Italian, and Japanese ancestry in the U.S. and from Latin
    America were apprehended and detained, and thousands interned
    in camps, which were different from the 10 War Relocation
    Authority camps where Japanese American were incarcerated.
        We are also learning more about the prisoner exchange
    program, where over 4,800 men, women, and children were
    forcibly thrust into the warzones of the Far East and Europe.
    Of these, over 2,800 were of Japanese ancestry, about half of
    whom were Japanese Latin Americans.
        What is being uncovered is a shocking picture of how the
    U.S. government initiated and orchestrated a program of massive
    civil rights violations, crimes against humanity, and war
    crimes spanning two continents before, during, and after World
    War II. U.S. government policies and actions and what our
    former Japanese Latin American and other enemy alien internees
    endured during World War II warrants deeper investigation.
        We are here today to urge your support for passage of H.R.
    42. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Shimizu follows:]
                      Prepared Statement of Grace Shimizu
        My name is Grace Shimizu. I am the director of the Japanese
    Peruvian Oral History Project and the daughter of a Japanese internee
    from Peru. On behalf of the former Japanese Latin American internees
    and our families, I would like to express our appreciation to
    Chairperson Zoe Lofgren and members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee
    on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and
    International Law. It is so heartening to be able to share our wartime
    experiences. This hearing is very significant to us because our
    experiences have never been part of the mainstream historical narrative
    of this country, nor have our experiences been included as part of our
    own community's narratives--both Japanese American and Latino
    communities. Our story is a hidden part of our community history and a
    suppressed part of US wartime history.
        My father was born in 1906 in Hiroshima, Japan and immigrated to
    Peru when he was 18 years old. He joined his brother who had arrived
    earlier as a contract laborer and begun to develop a family business.
    During World War II, our family charcoal business was put on ``La Lista
    Negra,'' the blacklist, the informal name for what the US called ``The
    Proclaimed List of Certain Blocked Nationals.'' This list of
    ``potentially dangerous enemy aliens'' affected businesses and
    individuals, often with no connection to the Axis powers, like
    journalists, teachers, business owners, priests, or anyone who held a
    position in the many prefecture clubs or cultural organizations. My
    family members and others on this list were never charged with a crime.
    There were no search warrants issued, no hearings held.
        When the US transport ships would come into the harbor of Callao,
    many on the blacklist would go into hiding, my uncle included. The
    first time the Peruvian authorities came looking for my uncle who
    headed our family business, they took my cousin instead. My cousin was
    interned in the US and used in the second prisoner exchange. In 1944,
    when my father was 38 years old, he was taken by the authorities. He
    was forcibly deported from his home in Peru to a US military camp in
    the Panama Canal Zone for detention and put to hard labor, which was in
    violation of the Geneva Convention. My father never shared his
    experience in the Panama camp but we do have an interview of another
    Japanese Peruvian who recalled being put to work clearing the jungle
    around the camp. One humid day, the internees, many of whom were
    elderly, were told to dig a pit. He thought that he was digging his own
    grave. Then they were told to fill the pit with buckets of human waste
    from the guards' latrines. When the older men were so tired that they
    could not run fast enough to please the guards, they were poked and
    shoved by the guards with bayonets. After three months at hard labor,
    the young man was taken to the US for internment.
        My father was detained in the Panama camp for several months. When
    the next US transport arrived, the prisoners included his first wife,
    his brother and his brother's wife and children. They were taken to the
    US for indefinite internment at Crystal City, Texas for the purpose of
    hostage exchange. During internment, my father's wife died in that
    Texas camp due to the trauma of imprisonment and lack of adequate
    medical care. My father also learned that seven other members of our
    family who remained in Peru had been killed and circumstances
    surrounding their murders were never resolved.
        At the end of the war, my uncle and his family were deported to
    Japan and dumped off to find their way to the home of my grandmother in
    Hiroshima. My father was released on parole from camp under the
    sponsorship of Japanese American relatives living in northern
    California. His intention was to return to his home, business and
    surviving relatives in Peru, but he along with other Japanese Peruvians
    were initially not allowed reentry by the Peruvian government. He
    eventually remarried and started a family with my mother in Berkeley,
    California. In the 1950s, with changes in the immigration laws, he was
    allowed to change his status from ``illegal alien'' to legal permanent
    resident. Despite his decision to live the rest of his life in the US,
    he never became a US citizen. Part of his thinking was, if the US were
    ever to violate the rights of persons of Japanese ancestry again, he
    and his family would not become stateless and would be able to find
    refuge in the country of his birth.
        I didn't understand the significance of my father's wartime
    experience until I began to work with the Japanese Peruvian Oral
    History Project, which was established in 1991 by six families in the
    SF Bay Area. Like other Japanese Americans of my generation born in the
    US, I was lucky to have read about the Japanese American incarceration
    in a US history book, even if it was just one sentence. And there was
    never mention about the internment of Japanese Peruvians. Also, my
    parents and I, like so many other Japanese Americans and Japanese Latin
    American families at that time, didn't talk much about the war,
    internment or the traumatic impact that experience had on us
    personally, our families and community.
        Through our work in the Japanese Peruvian Oral History Project, we
    are learning how the WWII internment history of Japanese Americans and
    Japanese Latin is integrally linked. We share many similarities with
    Japanese American families, including our immigrant roots. We formed
    community with Japanese Americans while living side by side in
    Department of Justice internment camps and US Army facilities and being
    used as human pawns in hostage exchanges. During the resettlement years
    after the war, Japanese American and Japanese Latin American families
    in the US struggled to reestablish our lives, with many Japanese Latin
    Americans becoming part of Japanese American neighborhoods and marrying
    into Japanese American families.
        Through our work, we are learning that our families' wartime
    experiences were part of a larger Latin American program whereby the US
    government went outside its borders to 13 Latin American countries and
    seized 2264 men, women and children of Japanese ancestry (both citizens
    and immigrant residents), forcibly transported them to US internment
    camps without legal extradition, without due process, without charges
    and deprived of legal counsel.
        We are also learning that such wartime experience of civil and
    human rights violations was not limited to persons of Japanese
    ancestry. German and Italian communities in the US and Latin America
    were also swept up in this turmoil. Following the Japanese military
    attack on Pearl Harbor, over one million immigrants in the German,
    Italian and Japanese American communities in the US became ``enemy
    aliens'' overnight. From about 19 Latin American countries, over 200
    persons of Italian ancestry and over 4,000 persons of German ancestry
    (including 81 Jewish refugees) were seized and deported to the US for
    internment. In total over 31,000 enemy aliens of German, Italian and
    Japanese ancestry in the US and from Latin America were apprehended and
    detained. Many thousands of them were interned for reasons of
    ``national security'' in over 50 facilities run by the US Department of
    Justice and the US Army, which were different from the ten War
    Relocation Authority camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated.
        We are also learning more about the hostage exchange program. In
    time of war, civilians from warring nations should be allowed safe
    passage to their home countries. But what should have been a
    humanitarian program became a program of human rights violations. Over
    4,800 men, women and children were forcibly deported to war zones of
    the Far East and Europe in the prisoner exchange. These included US
    citizens who were the minor children of permanent resident aliens. For
    persons of German ancestry in the US and from Latin America, there were
    about six separate exchanges with a total of at least 2,000 people. Of
    them, it is unclear how many were German Latin Americans. For persons
    of Japanese ancestry, there were two separate exchanges with over 2,800
    civilians, half of whom were Japanese Latin Americans.
        It is now widely recognized that the incarceration of 110,000 US
    citizens and residents of Japanese ancestry during WWII was one of the
    worst violations of the constitution in our nation's history based on
    wartime hysteria, racial prejudice and failure of political leadership.
    With growing knowledge of the WWII Enemy Alien Program and its Latin
    American component, that mass imprisonment of the Japanese American
    community is now put into a broader international context of
    relocation, internment and forced deportation of persons of Japanese,
    German and Italian ancestry What is being uncovered is a shocking
    picture of how the US government initiated and orchestrated a program
    of massive civil rights violations, crimes against humanity and war
    crimes spanning two continents before, during and after WWII.
        Later review of records of these so-called ``dangerous'' enemy
    aliens shows there was often no specific evidence of subversive
    activities. Rather they lost years of their lives on the basis of
    ``potential'' danger. The impact of these violations has been long
    lasting in our communities and has current day significance for our
    democratic institutions and freedoms.
        We, former internees and our families, are here today to register
    our plea with you, members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on
    Immigration. We ask for your support of HR 42, the Commission on
    Wartime Relocation and Internment of Latin Americans of Japanese
    Descent Act, to investigate the treatment of Japanese Latin Americans
    during WWII.
        In 1980, the Congress authorized a similar fact finding study which
    examined the treatment of Japanese Americans during WWII. During the
    course of that study, information began to be uncovered about the
    treatment of the Japanese Latin Americans. Such information was found
    significant enough to be included in the published Commission report
    and warrants deeper investigation. The Japanese Latin American
    commission bill would extend the initial investigation of the 1980
    Commission.
        We ask your support to get this commission bill passed.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very, very much.
        And finally you, Ms. Yamamoto. Thank you so much for being
    with us today.

    TESTIMONY OF LIBIA YAMAMOTO, FORMER JAPANESE OF LATIN AMERICAN
                            DESCENT INTERNEE

        Ms. Yamamoto. My father migrated to Peru in 1914, at the
    age of 20, as a contract laborer from Japan. Through hard work
    and dedication, my father rose from his humble beginnings to
    become a successful businessperson and establish our family as
    one of the many respected in the Peruvian city of Chiclayo and
    a nearby sugar plantation of Hacienda Toman.
        The period during World War II was very confusing for
    everyone in our community as we began to feel the effects of
    the war. Still, I never thought that our family would be
    affected. I was wrong.
        On the night of January 6, 1943, the police came to our
    house in the Hacienda and said to my father, ``Senor Maoki, we
    have to take you by the order of the United States of
    America.'' That night they took him to jail. We did not get any
    explanation; everything happened so suddenly that my father had
    no time to pack any of his things.
        We knew nothing of his situation until the next morning
    when my father was moved to the city jail, and I went with my
    mother to visit my father there. During this time, the mothers
    who were there to see their husbands in jail held their tears
    in and tried to be strong; some were more successful than
    others.
        Then a truck came and our fathers were forced to get on it.
    That truck drove away, and we didn't know where they were
    taking them, why, for how long, or if they would come back. As
    my father and the others waved goodbye, I remember our mothers
    lost their composure and collective weeping erupted into loud
    cries.
        This was an extremely traumatic experience for me at age
    seven. Finally, after an entire month, we received a letter
    from my father in Panama. We were just so happy to hear that he
    was alive. Later, we learned that his passport was confiscated
    and he was interned in a Department of Justice camp in Texas.
    There my father learned that the men from Peru were going to be
    shipped to Japan in a prisoner exchange. My father and the
    others began protesting because they knew this meant indefinite
    separation from their families.
        The so-called solution to this problem was to reunite these
    men with their families in Department of Justice camps. I think
    the U.S. government did not mind this because, in effect, it
    provided more hostages. Still, there were some families who
    were never able to reunite.
        We left Peru from the Port of Callao in July 1943. Boarding
    the ship was horrifying because there were U.S. soldiers on
    board pointing their big guns at us as if we were criminals.
    When we got to New Orleans officials inspected our baggage and
    some families had precious belongings thrown into the water.
        The Peruvians on our ship were among the lucky ones,
    because I later learned from my friend that she and other women
    and children were let off their ship first and marched to a
    warehouse. They were ordered to strip and stand in line naked,
    and then were sprayed with insecticide. I can't imagine the
    humiliation my friend felt having to strip her clothes off in
    front of boys who are our age. How awful this must have been
    for our mothers, whose modesty was violated.
        Despite the physical conditions of the camps, my family was
    glad to be reunited with my father. At the end of the war the
    U.S. government told us to leave the country because we were
    illegal aliens. My sister and her family were deported first to
    Japan. She later wrote to us in camp that many people were
    starving and her family had to pull out weeds from the ground
    just to feed themselves, and her 5-month-old baby died from
    malnutrition.
        When it was my family's turn to leave, my father became
    very ill and our deportation to Japan was canceled.
    Fortunately, we had Japanese American relatives in Berkeley who
    sponsored us out of camp in 1947, and we moved to Berkeley,
    California as parolees.
        I am now 73 years old, and many of my friends my age who
    had similar experiences have passed on. I come here today to
    ask that you support this commission bill to study what
    happened to families like mine. Please help pass this bill
    before it is too late. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Yamamoto follows:]

                      Prepared Statement of Libia Yamamoto

                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much, Ms. Yamamoto, for sharing
    your story. I know it is difficult to speak, but it is
    important that your voice be heard, and we do appreciate your
    testimony.
        We now have a time when Members of the panel can pose
    questions to the panel for as long as 5 minutes. Mr. King,
    would you have questions?
        Mr. King. I do, Madam Chair. I thank you, and I would say
    again to the witnesses, thanks for your testimony.
        And Ms. Yamamoto, I understand that it is very difficult to
    relive this after all these years, and I recall you saying that
    you were 7 years old at the time. I appreciate you all coming,
    and there are things that we do to serve our countries and to
    serve humanity that cause us to have to rise above, sometimes,
    the things we might not want to do.
        So I am not going to ask any questions. I will give you a
    little relief in that; maybe you can sigh a little. And I will
    direct the other witnesses, who I think maybe can illuminate
    this a little bit for me, too.
        And I would ask Ms. Shimizu, is it your position that there
    should be an apology by the United States?
        Ms. Shimizu. We are here today to urge that what happened
    to our parents, our families, really be investigated further.
    And through that investigation, as more of the information
    comes out and the background becomes more clear, I think our
    faith is put in the commissioners to make the appropriate
    recommendations.
        Mr. King. Then if that investigation--if there is full
    acknowledgement, then if that investigation concludes, I think,
    a conclusion that you have drawn, then would you, then, be
    asking for proper redress?
        Ms. Shimizu. Well, I would be looking at what the
    recommendations were, and then at that point, I mean, we would
    be at a better position to respond to that.
        Mr. King. Okay. Thank you, Ms. Shimizu.
        I would ask Professor Masterson, and you mentioned that
    there was very little public knowledge about the Peruvian
    detainees, and I mentioned in my testimony a book--I have the
    copies of it--by David Lowman, called ``Magic.'' Are you
    familiar with it?
        Mr. Masterson. Well, there is three books on this topic--at
    least three--and two more that I have written that deal with
    it. But what we have to be aware of is that the scholarly
    community is a relatively small scholarly community, and does
    this information get to the public?
        Mr. King. So excuse me, but are you familiar with this
    copy?
        Mr. Masterson. Yes, I have heard of it, yes.
        Mr. King. Thank you. And have you had an opportunity to
    read it?
        Mr. Masterson. No, I haven't.
        Mr. King. Okay. I would encourage you to do that, because
    to have a balance in the history that you are talking about, I
    think it is important for you to understand the other side of
    this. And I would just comment that as I listened to your
    testimony, one thing stood out to me, that the Japanese workers
    fled from fields in Peru, and, you know, I might have
    characterized it that they migrated to better opportunities;
    there were a lot of bad circumstances during those times.
        And then what I mentioned in my testimony about the
    historical chronology of the Christian slaves--1.25 million,
    which is about twice as many Christian slaves as there were
    African Americans brought here under slavery, at least by some
    accounts--is that is a piece of history that you have had an
    opportunity to study?
        Mr. Masterson. Of course. But you are looking at two
    different situations.
        Mr. King. Sure I am.
        Mr. Masterson. You really are. And what you have, of
    course, is a situation in Peru where individuals are taken from
    their individual environments, many of whom have no
    justification whatsoever with regard to association with
    espionage, and in fact, you could argue that it wasn't directly
    related to the security of the United States; it was more right
    directly related to the welfare of American citizens who were
    behind American lines, and the exchange was being done for
    them----
        Mr. King [continuing]. My clock is ticking. I want to be
    respectful, but--and I think that that is true, they are
    different circumstances, and I would go--I would ask it this
    way: This was a global war----
        Mr. Masterson. Yes.
        Mr. King [continuing]. It was a world war, and there were
    political entities for every nation state, and there were sub-
    entities within the nation states, and each of them are
    operating for national survival as well as doing a calculus off
    the intelligence that they had at the time.
        And so we had internments that went on around the world,
    and there were some horrible things that took place, and I
    would ask unanimous consent to introduce this book, called
    ``Last Man Out.'' It is about the internment also of some
    American prisoners in the Philippines, and I think it is
    important to add to this scholarship as well.
        Mr. Masterson. May I respond to that?
        I would then just----
        Mr. King. Professor Masterson, you have done a thorough
    study of this, and in the time we have left I would just offer
    back to you to conclude your statement so--respectful of your
    testimony.
        Mr. Masterson. There is a parallel to this, and it is that
    many of the Latin American governments who were involved in
    counter-insurgency wars during the 1970's and 1980's, where
    substantial violations of human rights occurred, have created--
    reconciliation commissions. Argentina has done one, Peru has
    done one, and that is designed to do exactly what we are
    talking about today: rectify a situation, which needs to be
    done, with regards to the----
        Ms. Lofgren [continuing]. The gentleman's time has expired.
    I am going to ask, since we have three panels, that we go to
    see if Mr. Lungren has questions.
        Mr. King. Madam Chair, could I just ask unanimous consent
    that I may just pose a brief yes or no question to the witness?
        I thank you, Madam Chair, and--do you support or oppose,
    then, reparations?
        Mr. Masterson. I am of the opinion that the reparations
    issue should be resolved by a commission which we are asking to
    be formed. We are not prejudging any of this until the
    commission does so.
        Mr. King. Thank you.
        Thank you, Madam Chair.
        Ms. Lofgren. Ms. Sanchez has no questions.
        Mr. Lungren, do you have questions, or can we move to the
    next panel?
        Mr. Lungren. Thank you very much.
        Ms. Lofgren. Then we will thank you, witnesses, for being
    here and ask the second panel to come forward.
        As the second panel is coming forward, I would like to
    introduce them. First, we have John Christgau. Mr. Christgau is
    the author of eight nonfiction books, including ``Enemies:
    World War II Alien Internment,'' the first book published on
    the subject. For the past 8 years, he has been a member of the
    Enemy Alien Files Consortium, creators of the photo exhibit,
    the ``Enemy Alien Files: Hidden Stories of World War II.''
        I am also pleased to introduce Karen Ebel. Ms. Ebel is the
    daughter of a recently deceased German American World War II
    internee. She is president and a founding member of the German
    American Internee Coalition, which was created to educate the
    public about and advocate ethnic German American and Latin
    American internees and their families. She is also a member of
    the multiethnic Enemy Alien Files Consortium, representing the
    German American community.
        Next I would like to introduce Heidi Gurcke Donald. Ms.
    Donald and six members of her family were deported from Costa
    Rica for internment in the United States during World War II. A
    founding member of the German American Internee Coalition, she
    serves on their board and writes for their Web site. She is the
    author of, ``We Were Not the Enemy,'' a book about her family's
    World War II experiences.
        And finally, I would like to introduce Dr. John Fonte. Dr.
    Fonte joined the Hudson Institute in March 1999 as a senior
    fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture.
    He has been a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise
    Institute, where he directed the committee to review national
    standards under the chairmanship of Lynne Cheney. He also
    served as a senior researcher at the U.S. Department of
    Education and a program administrator at the National Endowment
    for the Humanities.
        As noted with the first panel, your full written statements
    will be made part of the official record. We would ask that
    your oral testimony consume 5 minutes. When you have 1 minute
    left the yellow light will go on, and we are going to be strict
    about the timeframe because we have still a third panel after
    you. We want to hear everyone.
        So if you would begin, Mr. Christgau?
        If you could turn on your microphone, thank you.

                TESTIMONY OF JOHN CHRISTGAU, AUTHOR OF
               ``ENEMIES: WORLD WAR II ALIEN INTERNMENT''

        Mr. Christgau. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
        I appreciate this opportunity to talk about a piece of
    World War II history that has been largely ignored. At
    nightfall on December 10, 1941, just 3 days after the Japanese
    attack on Pearl Harbor, an unusual thunderstorm struck southern
    California. The deep booming thunder sounded like an enemy
    bombardment, and jittery citizens of Los Angeles and San Diego
    feared they were under attack.
        An immediate lights out order was issued from Bakersfield
    to San Diego, and the coast went dark. Los Angeles residents
    shot out streetlights in the frenzy to black out the city.
    Hospitals were swamped with calls for ambulances to cover
    traffic accidents involving panicked drivers.
        That panic did not disappear, especially from the west
    coast, and in the weeks after, long-held ethnic and racial
    prejudices aggravated by the wartime panic led to the
    internment of over 30,000 so-called enemy aliens of German,
    Italian, and Japanese nationality. The arrests were done under
    the provisions of the Alien Enemies Act, which says that
    whenever war is threatened or declared, all citizens of the
    hostile nation who shall be within the United States shall be
    liable to be apprehended, arrested, detained, and removed as
    enemy aliens.
        For months prior to the start of World War II, the FBI had
    been investigating so-called enemy aliens. The FBI sent its
    investigative reports to the Special Defense Unit of the
    Justice Department. That unit created what was called a
    custodial detention index, or ABC lists, which classified the
    aliens with respect to how dangerous the government considered
    them.
        Aliens on the A list were considered the most dangerous and
    were subject to immediate arrest and detention in case of war.
    Those lists were based on hearsay gathered mainly from
    confidential informants. In San Francisco, a Jewish immigrant
    named Eddie Friede, who had narrowly escaped death in a
    concentration camp in Germany, was arrested, detained, and then
    interned in North Dakota. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt he
    pleaded, ``Please see what you can do to get me released from
    internment.''
        Eventually, wartime Attorney General Francis Biddle
    recognized the unreliability of the lists and wrote, ``It is
    clear to me that this ABC classification system is inherently
    unreliable. It should not be used.'' Still, eight internment
    camps for enemy aliens were established in Texas, North Dakota,
    New Mexico, and Idaho. In addition to those eight camps, there
    were dozens of other sites, from hastily constructed detention
    centers to compounds run by the Army.
        Those combined facilities detained and interned a total of
    31,285 enemy aliens and their families between 1941 and 1948.
    Approximately 16,000 were Japanese; nearly 11,000 were German;
    and 3,000 were Italian.
        Beyond those who were interned, tens of thousands more,
    mainly Japanese but also Italians in large numbers and some
    Germans were forced to evacuate their homes in critical
    military zones on the east and west coast and relocate their
    families. Once the aliens and their families were detained or
    interned, they were given a brief hearing before an alien enemy
    hearing board to determine their guilt or their innocence. The
    hearings lasted from 5 to 15 minutes, and there was no
    opportunity for the internees to learn the FBI's charges
    against them.
        So why has so little historical attention been paid to the
    World War II Alien Enemy Control Program, which affected so
    many thousands of people from German, Italian, and Japanese
    communities? Perhaps the answer lies in something one German
    internee chose to call ``Gitterkrankheit,'' the fence sickness.
    After you have been behind barbed wire for months and years,
    the internee explained, a part of you begins to feel like a
    criminal even if you have done nothing wrong. When you finally
    get out, he said, you would rather not talk about the past.
        Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Christgau follows:]
                      Prepared Statement of John Christgau
        The United States is a nation of immigrants who were drawn here by
    economic opportunity and the promises of democracy. The fragility of
    immigrants' rights in times of war and economic stress is a global
    concern. An understanding of the history of the WWII Alien Enemy
    Control Program is important to the creation of effective national
    security policy
        Italian and German immigrants began arriving in the U.S. in large
    numbers in the 19th century, with influx to the West beginning during
    the 1850s Gold Rush. Japanese immigration began in 1868 to Hawaii for
    plantation labor. Later, many went on to the U.S. mainland, mostly
    California. By 1940, Italians constituted the largest foreign-born
    group in the U.S., with Germans as the second largest.
        In 1936, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) started
    compiling lists of so-called ``dangerous persons.'' The lists included
    prominent business, cultural, and religious leaders in the German,
    Italian and Japanese communities. Officially known as the ``Custodial
    Detention Index,'' the list identified those ``potentially dangerous''
    persons who would be arrested if the U.S. entered the war. The lists
    were the product of rumor, hearsay, gossip, and ethnic and racial
    prejudices gathered from confidential informants. The FBI also
    maintained a ``Suspected Organizations List'' for Italians, Germans,
    and Japanese in the USA.
        In 1940, as fears of German and Japanese aggression escalated, the
    Federal Alien Registration Act (``Smith Act'') required all aliens to
    register, to be fingerprinted, to provide information about their
    membership in organizations, and to report regularly to designated
    authorities. By the spring of 1941, the Justice Department had
    developed procedures to detain and intern aliens and ``potentially
    dangerous persons.''
        At dawn on December 7, 1941, the Japanese military attacked the
    U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Later that day, Franklin D.
    Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation 2525, authorizing FBI agents
    to arrest without warrants any Japanese citizen fourteen years or
    older. On the following day, the President issued similar proclamations
    against German and Italian aliens, and declared war on Japan.
    Overnight, a million immigrants were transformed into ``enemy aliens.''
        The Justice Department's arrest and detention of thousands of
    Germans, Italians, and Japanese was authorized by the Alien Enemies Act
    of 1918--US Code, Title 50, Sections 21-24--which governs war and
    national defense. The Alien Enemies Act is based on the 1798 Alien and
    Sedition Laws, which specified that citizens (age 14 and over) of enemy
    nations can be ``apprehended, restrained, secured and removed'' in case
    of declared war, or actual or threatened invasion by a foreign nation.
    No distinction is made between resident immigrants and aliens in the
    U.S. on a temporary basis.
                restrictions, evacuation, individual exclusions
        By nightfall of December 7, 1941, even before the U.S. formally
    declared war, FBI and other agents of the government descended upon the
    homes and businesses of people they had deemed to be dangerous. Three
    days after Pearl Harbor, 3,846 Germans, Italians, and Japanese had been
    apprehended without being charged with any crimes. Local FBI agents
    especially targeted community and religious leaders, people with
    business, cultural, or political ties to their home country, editors/
    publishers of German, Italian, and Japanese language newspapers, and
    teachers at language schools. Homes were searched and possessions
    seized. Many were arrested and jailed without explanation. Their
    families had no idea where or why their loved ones were taken.
        Within a month, all German, Italian, and Japanese aliens residing
    in the U.S. were ordered to be fingerprinted, photographed, and to
    carry photo-bearing ``enemy alien registration cards'' at all times.
    German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants who were designated as enemy
    aliens were ordered to turn over ``contraband'' to local police.
    Prohibited items included all firearms, short-wave radios, cameras,
    knives, and ``signaling devices'' such as flashlights. FBI agents
    searched homes and confiscated personal property, much of which was
    never returned. Ownership of such property could later be grounds for
    internment. The Coast Guard appropriated fishing boats belonging to
    Italian and Japanese fishermen, depriving them of their livelihood. In
    addition, all German, Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens in the Western
    Defense Command were subject to a curfew between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m.
    daily and were not allowed to travel more than five miles from home
    unless a travel permit was applied for and granted. Many aliens'
    assets, such as bank accounts, were frozen, making life even more
    difficult for those affected.
        In January of 1942, the Department of Justice designated restricted
    areas around military sites. By the first week of February, the
    Attorney General had designated 133 prohibited zones for ``any person''
    around airports, damns, power plants, and military installations. In
    addition, the DOJ set up 88 prohibited zones in California for German,
    Italian, and Japanese enemy aliens. Thousands of enemy aliens living in
    the prohibited zones were ordered to move elsewhere. These individuals
    were given ten days to close their businesses and homes. Most sought
    out family and friends in other states who could help them relocate and
    find jobs. In many cases, the government advised new employers of the
    excludees' circumstances, making resettlement even more difficult. Some
    excludees had been U.S. citizens since the turn of the century and many
    had been in the U.S. for at least twenty years. To keep families
    together, many citizen spouses and children went with the alien head of
    the family, who was often the only breadwinner. Families who stayed
    behind were left without financial support.
        Not all government officials agreed with the mass orders. U.S.
    Attorney General Francis Biddle, head of the Justice Department, issued
    a memo in July 1943 stating that the FBI should only investigate
    activities of persons who may have violated the law, rather than
    classifying persons as to dangerousness. ``The notion that it is
    possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is
    in the abstract and without reference to time, environment and other
    relevant circumstances is impractical, unwise and dangerous,'' he
    wrote. The ``dangerous person'' label should never again be used to
    justify arrests or internment because it was not based on valid
    evidence.
        Biddle ordered the FBI to abolish its Custodial Detention Index,
    but FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover simply changed the name to ``Security
    Index'' and concealed its existence from the Justice Department.
    Nevertheless, the Justice Department relied on FBI reports to support
    its program of arrests and detention of German, Italian, and Japanese
    nationals in the U.S. and Latin America, which continued throughout the
    war, with some Germans held in U.S. camps until 1949.
        Restrictions on Italian aliens were lifted in October 1942, largely
    because of the impending Congressional elections that November, and
    because of the reported morale problems among military personnel due to
    restrictions on their parents. The support of Italian Americans was
    needed for the impending U.S. invasion of Italy and for the Italian
    population's own revolt against Mussolini. However, the status of
    Italian excludees and internees remained unchanged until late 1943
    after an armistice with Italy.
                            detention and internment
        The arrest and internment of U.S. resident enemy aliens began the
    evening of December 7, 1941. The arrests were done on the basis of the
    Security Defense Unit's ABC lists, which were in tern based largely on
    hearsay information gathered from confidential FBI informants. Among
    those arrested and detained was Eddie Friede, a Jewish immigrant in San
    Francisco who had narrowly escaped death in a concentration camp in
    Germany. Eddie was arrested the evening of December 7, detained, and
    then interned in North Dakota. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, he
    pleaded with her, ``Please, would you see what you can do to get me
    released from internment.''
        By war's end, the number of aliens arrested and detained had
    reached 31,275: 16,849 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, and 3,278 Italians,
    and some 200 Hungarians, Bulgarians and Romanians. Some were U.S.
    citizens. Though not all were formally interned, they were held for
    periods ranging from a few days to several years without ever learning
    the charges against them. After arrest, the aliens were turned over to
    the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for detention. The
    detainees received cursory hearings, in some cases not until after
    months of detention. During the hearings, they were not able to have an
    attorney, question witnesses, or see the evidence against them. The
    hearing boards recommended release, parole, or internment. There were
    eventually eight permanent INS internment camps--in North Dakota,
    Idaho, New Mexico, and Texas--and over fifty additional detention
    centers and internment facilities, from small local jails to Army POW
    camps, that held enemy aliens.
        Detainees' families often did not know where they were for weeks.
    Sometimes both parents were taken and the children were left to fend
    for themselves until relatives or the local government took custody.
    Many women struggled to support their families and, having lost
    everything, sought refuge in a family internment camp. Border Patrol
    agents of the INS operated the DOJ camps, located at migrant worker and
    Civilian Conservation Corps camps, military bases, and prisons. Some
    housed men only, others women only, still others married couples. Camp
    conditions varied widely.
        Many internees were shifted from camp to camp. Italian internees at
    Fort Meade were sent after some months to a similar facility at Fort
    McAlester, Oklahoma. The very first West Coast German, Italian, and
    Japanese internees, arrested in early December 1941, were sent to the
    INS internment camps at Fort Missoula, Montana, and Fort Lincoln, North
    Dakota, before they had hearings. After hearings, they were either
    transferred to army-run internment camps in Texas and Oklahoma, or
    paroled..
        In May of 1943, with captured Axis military personnel coming to the
    United States for imprisonment, the Army asked to be relieved of its
    civilian internees. Thus, all internees were returned to the custody of
    the INS, with Italians returning to Fort Missoula, and most Germans
    sent to Fort Lincoln. Japanese internees were kept mainly at Fort
    Lincoln, Fort Missoula and Santa Fe in New Mexico, until many went to
    War Relocation Authority camps to join their families.
        In addition, nearly 3,000 German and Italian merchant seamen whose
    ships happened to be docked in U.S. or Latin American ports were also
    turned into ``illegal aliens''. Their ships impounded, these sailors
    were sent to internment at Fort Lincoln, North Dakota and Fort
    Missoula, Montana.
          release from camp: hostage exchange and postwar deportation
        When the German government learned that some of its overseas
    citizens had been seized in Latin America and interned in the United
    States, it ordered the seizure of U.S. and Latin American citizens
    living in Europe. Complex negotiations followed, resulting in several
    exchanges of civilian prisoners. From 1942 to 1945, at least 2,000
    persons of German ancestry and at least 37 Italians, including women
    and children, from the U.S. and Latin America were sent to Europe in
    six exchanges across the Atlantic Ocean at the height of the war.
        The U.S. did not want to return any aliens who might aid the Axis
    war effort, and State Department policy was to exchange only harmless
    people of German or Japanese ancestry. Repatriates to Germany signed an
    oath not to perform military service. Some died as civilians, killed by
    Allied bombs, while others were imprisoned under suspicion of being US
    spies.
        Japan also agreed to prisoner exchanges but did not want to accept
    ``repatriates'' who did not want to return. There was also difficulty
    in finding ships. Two exchanges occurred in 1942 and 1943 involving
    2,800 persons of Japanese ancestry from the U.S. and Latin America.
    Some deportees were drafted into the military service of Japan and died
    in combat. Others lost their lives in air raids as civilians.
        The Alien Enemy Act only permitted internment for the duration of
    the war. After the European hostilities ended in May 1945, President
    Harry Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2655 ordering deportation
    of ``dangerous enemy aliens'' who were still interned. Thus, many
    Germans and their U.S. citizen families were involuntarily
    ``repatriated'' to war-devastated Germany and left there to fend for
    themselves. Germans who did not want to repatriate remained interned
    and fought desperately for years to avoid being deported. By mid-1948,
    the camps were empty, though some internees remained in custody on
    Ellis Island until 1949. Some had been interned for seven years.
      impact on families, uncovering hidden stories, breaking the silence
        During WWII, the U.S. government assured the public that it was
    protecting national security by publicizing arrests of enemy aliens.
    However, officials made efforts to conceal specific details of the
    Justice Department camps and the hostage exchange program from the
    American public. Guards at the alien internment camps were required to
    sign statements agreeing not to reveal information about the camps. The
    internees themselves were also warned not to talk. Some have reported
    signing oaths of silence with which they complied all their lives,
    fearing the FBI would again come to their doors.
        For half a century, internees kept their stories hidden. Many felt
    shame and fear long after the war and refused to discuss their
    experiences, even with their families. Even today, after more than six
    decades, many internees are reluctant to talk to researchers or allow
    their real names to be used in books and articles.
        Yet the emotional toll from their wartime trauma was extensive.
    After being labeled as enemy aliens and incarcerated, internees
    conducted daily life behind barbed-wire fences, klieg lights, and
    watchtowers patrolled by armed guards with dogs, experiencing all the
    problems associated with imprisonment. Mail was restricted and heavily
    censored, with no drawings, erasures or references to movements of
    internees or to the enemy nation allowed. For those in camps far from
    home, visitors were rare. Most of the internees were men separated from
    their families and loved ones. Army restrictions for internees tended
    to be even more severe than those imposed by the INS. Internees were
    housed in tents with wooden floors, four to a tent. Most were given POW
    uniforms to wear. Any lapse into the ``enemy language'' was forbidden.
    Internees were paid 10 cents a day for chores they performed.
        Having lost the fruits of a lifetime of labor, and facing an
    uncertain future, many adults suffered depression, listlessness, and
    despair. Many had grown children in the U.S. military, fighting
    overseas for a country which had locked up their parents. Many
    internees spent their days appealing to the government for release.
    Their pleas for rehearings were generally ignored. When the government
    persistently asked whether they wanted to repatriate to Germany or
    Japan, some grudgingly accepted this alternative to indefinite
    internment. Some were offered the chance to work outside the camps,
    such as on railroad construction. Most preferred the hard labor to
    incarceration.
        There were also tensions and violence in some camps. A few hard-
    core German loyalists in the camps occasionally quarreled with and
    intimidated those with whom they disagreed politically. Jewish
    internees, unaccountably placed near pro-Nazi prisoners, were harassed
    and sometimes beaten. Pro- and anti-fascist factions among the Italians
    occasionally scuffled.
        Most internees had a very difficult time reentering society after
    their long incarceration. They had lost their homes and belongings and
    could not go back to their old jobs. Many were stigmatized,
    particularly in the communities where the arrests and internment were
    well publicized. Others, particularly children, had their educational
    and economic opportunities seriously curtailed. Most internees never
    completely made the transition back to life before the FBI first
    knocked on their doors. Deportees trying to return to the United States
    had an even more difficult time adjusting.
                     legacy of the world war ii experience
        The Alien Enemy Act of 1918, which authorized internment of ``enemy
    aliens'' during WWII, remains intact. It permits arrests, evacuation,
    internment and other actions against ``enemy aliens'' if the United
    States becomes involved in a war, or a foreign country threatens
    invasion. Resident aliens who have not become naturalized citizens are
    still vulnerable any time their birth-country is perceived as a threat
    to U.S. interests.
        All of the communities affected by the wartime treatment of enemy
    aliens agree that public education about the past is vital to
    preventing future mistreatment of immigrants. As former Chief Justice
    Charles Evans Hughes wrote during his term from 1930-42:

            ``You may think that the Constitution is your security--it is
            nothing but a piece of paper. You may think that the statutes
            are your security--they are nothing but words in a book. You
            may think that [the] elaborate mechanism of government is your
            security--it is nothing at all, unless you have sound and
            uncorrupted public opinion to give life to your Constitution,
            to give vitality to your statutes, to make efficient your
            government machinery.''

        An understanding of the history of the Alien Enemy Control Program
    can help policy makers avoid the mistakes of World War II.
        What were those mistakes?
        First, we relied on weak intelligence to help us separate the very
    few who were truly dangerous from the many who were innocent.
        Second, we assumed that aliens are the enemy. The very title of the
    Alien Enemies Act weds the two ideas. It led to a dragnet approach in
    which a net was thrown over entire German, Italian, and Japanese
    communities in the hopes of catching a few spies or saboteurs.
        Finally, in dealing with our immigrant population, we ignored the
    very due process provisions of the Constitution that bought those
    immigrants here seeking freedom and opportunity.
        So why has so little historical attention been paid to the Alien
    Enemy Program which affected so many thousands of people from German,
    Italian, and Japanese communities? The simple answer is historical
    neglect and governmental shame. But perhaps the answer also lies in
    something one German internee chose to call ``Gitterkrankheit,'' the
    fence sickness. After you've been behind barbed wire for months and
    years, the internee explained, a part of you begins to feel like a
    criminal. When you finally get out, he said, you would rather not talk
    about the past.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you so much. And I didn't know the Los
    Angeles storm story; it is fascinating.
        Ms. Ebel, I would like to hear from you.

                TESTIMONY OF KAREN E. EBEL, PRESIDENT,
                   GERMAN AMERICAN INTERNEE COALITION

        Ms. Ebel. My father, Max Ebel, a German internee, died in
    May 2007.
        Ms. Lofgren. Could you turn on your microphone, please?
        Ms. Ebel. I am sorry.
        Ms. Lofgren. Very good.
        Ms. Ebel. My father, Max Ebel, a German internee, died in
    May 2007. I am sitting where my father should be. One of the
    last times we talked, he told me how sad he was that the
    Wartime Treatment Study Act had not passed. He said, ``Karen,
    this is important. Don't give up.'' Moments after he died, all
    I could think of was that I had failed. Almost 88, Dad still
    didn't live long enough to hear his government acknowledge his
    internment. He didn't even talk about it until he was 80, and
    then only with much prodding.
        Only 17, Dad arrived in New York Harbor in 1937. He left
    Germany because he had had a dangerous knife fight with local
    members of the Hitler Youth. They were angry because he
    wouldn't join in their activities. Following his father to
    America, Dad boarded the ``SS New York'' with a nickel in his
    pocket, new woolen knickerbockers, and hope. He once told me
    ``I was an American right from the beginning, and I always will
    be. I appreciated my freedom as much as a fish let out of a
    bowl.''
        On December 5, 1941, Dad learned that his citizenship
    application was accepted. Two days later, he and a million
    Germans, Japanese, and Italians became the enemy with a stroke
    of FDR's pen. Our country was in grave danger, and America had
    to protect itself. Most escaped the internment disaster and
    some deserved what they got, but thousands didn't. My father
    was one of them.
        Dad was arrested and detained in September 1942, his
    adversarial hearing board recommended parole, but the
    Department of Justice deemed him potentially dangerous to the
    public peace and safety of the United States. Internment was
    ordered. After 3 months in a Boston detention center, he was
    sent to Ellis Island, where he joined hundreds of other
    internees living in squalid conditions.
        Then, by blacked out railcar under guard, it was on to Army
    facilities at Fort Meade, and later Camp Forrest in Tennessee.
    Finally, he landed at Fort Lincoln, in Bismarck, in May 1943.
    The only descriptive note in his calendar says, ``Arrived.
    North Dakota. This is Hell.''
        Dad was back in the fishbowl he thought he had left behind.
    He had no idea why or how he would get out. This was not his
    American dream.
        He eventually found a way out that he was happy helped his
    new country, too. That fall, about 100 trustworthy internees
    marched out of Fort Lincoln. For several months they lived in
    boxcars, still under guard, replacing rails on the North Dakota
    plains.
        In April 1944, he was drafted into the Army. Now my
    dangerous father was trustworthy enough to fight, but he
    flunked his pre-induction physical and remained interned.
    Because the railroaders' good work helped the U.S. war effort,
    he got a rare rehearing.
        Dad really never knew why he was interned, but the release
    recommendation he got years later implied it was because he
    didn't want to fight in Europe and made pacifist remarks. He
    apparently once said Hitler builds good roads. It states that
    Dad was in no sense disloyal, that his further internment was
    unjustifiable and recommends unconditional release. He was
    paroled.
        Back in Boston, he was not allowed near railroads. Three
    years after his arrest, he was finally free. One day in the
    '80's listening to the news about Japanese Americans, Dad said,
    ``You know, something like that happened to me.'' I didn't
    pursue it; he didn't either.
        Ten years ago, we did. We learned about the enemy alien
    laws, the camps, the exchanges, and the Latin American Program.
    I think my country is better than this. The internees deserve
    recognition, and the public should know what happened. Progress
    has been made, but slowly and not enough.
        Many still don't believe Germans and Italians were
    interned. Others think there really weren't enough to care
    about, that the internees were mostly only aliens, and that
    they must have been guilty of something to be there in the
    first place. Many internees are still afraid to speak.
        Eight years ago, the Wartime Treatment Study Act was
    introduced for the first time. It was a wonderful, miraculous
    day for the internees. The bill was just introduced for the
    fifth time. We are so grateful to Representative Wexler,
    Senators Russ Feingold and Charles Grassley, for their
    diligence.
        The advanced age of the remaining internees weighs heavily
    on my mind. Acknowledgment is long overdue. Sadly, my dad can't
    be here to see it. You can help make sure the remaining
    internees do. Please make the study commission a reality. Thank
    you.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Ebel follows:]
                      Prepared Statement of Karen E. Ebel

                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much. Before we ask Ms. Donald
    to give her testimony we would note that we have been joined by
    Congressman Robert Wexler, a Member of the Committee.
        Ms. Donald, we would love to hear from you now.

     TESTIMONY OF HEIDI GURCKE DONALD, BOARD AND FOUNDING MEMBER,
                   GERMAN AMERICAN INTERNEE COALITION

        Ms. Donald Libia Yamamoto, from the last panel, and I are
    sisters, sort of, since she came from Peru and my family came
    from Costa Rica. Seven members of my family were taken from
    Costa Rica for internment in the United States in 1943: my
    parents, my aunt and uncle, my cousin, my sister and I were
    all--and thousands of others--lost our livelihoods, our homes,
    our personal property, our countries, and our freedom.
        Over 3,000 ethnic Germans of Latin America were also
    deported through the United States to war-torn Germany. Some of
    them lost their lives. So when I tell you my story, realize
    that my story is one of the least terrible of the stories.
        In World War II, my father was labeled by the United States
    as one of Costa Rica's 35 most dangerous enemy aliens. After
    the war, in a U.S. governmental review done in 1946, they found
    that there were no facts to that claim. Our family's whole
    ordeal hinged on unsubstantiated allegations by anonymous
    informants with one true fact: My father had been born in
    Germany.
        By mid-1941, the U.S. Proclaimed List had ruined my
    father's business. He and my mother, who had barely ever
    gardened, tried to figure out a way to eke their way through
    the war years. They ended up with the idea of a farm, and for
    about a year they were semi-successful. By mid-1942, though, my
    father and my uncle were thrown into a dirty, vermin-filled,
    overcrowded prison. My mother, Starr, who was a United States
    citizen, born and raised in San Jose, California, wrote this
    anguished letter to her brother:
        ``July 17, 1942. Since the day before yesterday, Werner has
    been in the local penitentiary. We haven't the remotest idea
    why they arrested him or what is going to happen to him and the
    many others there, and they won't let me see anyone to find out
    the charges against him or to do any explaining. Heidi wakes up
    at night screaming, `Papi, Papi,' and today is Ingrid's first
    birthday.''
        My father also wrote desperately to the United States
    officials. On the 8th of September, ``In a last effort to solve
    the situation of my family, I, Werner Gurcke now interned in
    the concentration camp in San Jose, Costa Rica, sincerely ask
    to consider the following points: There does not exist a real
    motive for my internment otherwise than that I am German. Even
    if you do think so, there must be a mistake, and I am sure to
    convince you of it if you will have the kindness to present to
    me the reasons.''
        But there was no kindness. There were no hearings; there
    were no legal proceedings; there was nothing.
        So in January 1943 we were loaded onto the United States
    Army Transport Puebla for deportation to the United States. We
    sailed on January 26 and arrived in San Pedro, California on
    February 6. There, we were declared to have entered the country
    illegally because our passports and our visas had been
    confiscated on shipboard.
        We were given tags to tie to our clothes--these are my
    family's tag. Imagine: tagged like a piece of baggage--loaded
    onto a train to the Crystal City Alien Detention Station, which
    later euphemistically has been called a family camp. There,
    public health officials found that of our group of 131 people,
    66 people required immediate medical attention. Two children
    required immediate hospitalization, and 55 of us children were
    sick with whooping cough, including my sister and me.
        Then finally, over 1\1/2\ years after my father was
    arrested, in January 1944, he was finally given a real hearing,
    and by May of that year we were allowed to leave camp, although
    we were forbidden to go home to Costa Rica. My uncle, Karl
    Oscar, and his Costa Rican wife and daughter were sent to
    Germany that same year.
        Did our experience leave scars? Consider these facts and
    draw your own conclusions: My parents lived with uncertainty
    and fear for almost a decade. My father was barely 61 when he
    died of lung cancer caused or exacerbated by chain-smoking
    begun during the long ordeal. And more than 50 years later my
    mother, at age 83, finally tried to tell me the story. It took
    me a month of daily visits, collecting her memories through her
    tears.
        Our suffering, our pain, our loss of civil rights has never
    been acknowledged by Congress. Thousands of lives were damaged;
    enormous amounts of money, which could be better spent
    somewhere else, were spent with no tangible results except
    broken families and destroyed lives. Without a commission we
    are being written out of history. I think we, as a people, can
    and should do better than that.
        [The prepared statement of Ms. Donald follows:]
                   Prepared Statement of Heidi Gurcke Donald

                                   __________
        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much.
        And finally we will turn to you, Doctor.

    TESTIMONY OF JOHN FONTE, DIRECTOR OF CENTER FOR AMERICAN COMMON
              CULTURE AND SENIOR FELLOW, HUDSON INSTUTUTE

        Mr. Fonte. Thank you, Madam Chairman and Ranking Member
    King.
        Many historical facts cited in the Feingold-Wexler
    legislation are wrong. It is charged that the actions of the
    U.S. government during World War II had a devastating impact on
    Italian American communities. Now, I am an Italian American,
    and for decades have visited many little Italys, but there is
    no evidence offered in this bill of any devastated Italian
    American communities.
        The FBI rightly picked up pro-fascist, pro-Nazi aliens and
    citizens, including members of the German American Bund, and
    the blackshirts. Those interned were a relatively small number
    of people compared to the huge German American and Italian
    American populations in the United States who were
    overwhelmingly loyal.
        It is significant, there is not reference in any of this
    legislation to pro-Nazi, pro-fascist, and pro-Imperial Japanese
    activities by residents of the United States, including aliens
    and citizens. Why not?
        Distinguished historian Robert Abzug, in a review of Mr.
    Christgau's book in the Holocaust Review, wrote that, ``One is
    struck''--this is from Mr. Christgau's book; reading the book,
    Abzug said, ``One is struck by the benign treatment of the
    aliens and the extraordinary access they had to the legal
    system and to appeal procedures.'' He said even pro-Nazi German
    aliens were given all of these rights. Professor Abzug noted
    that most German aliens returned home or became American
    citizens and, ``few emerged with permanent scars.''
        In 2007 the Department of Justice sent a letter to Senate
    Judiciary Chairman Leahy. The DOJ letter stated that Justice
    had contacted the senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust
    Museum. The historian said that the bill's intended depiction
    of the treatment of Axis citizens and European American
    citizens were, ``outrageously exaggerated.'' The Holocaust
    Museum historian, when asked about the bill's accusations that
    the U.S. government violated the civil rights of European
    American citizens, said that he is aware of no historical facts
    to support these conclusions.
        Now, the facts concerning the Jewish refugees in this bill
    are accurate, whereas the facts in the rest of the bills are
    not. So the Jewish refugee section could be made into a
    separate bill, perhaps.
        The bill's very terminology is fraudulent. It defines
    German American as American citizens and resident aliens of
    German ancestry. But a German alien living in the United States
    in 1941 is not a German American, but a German national, a
    citizen of the Third Reich living in the United States.
        The bill establishes an independent commission, but there
    is nothing independent about it. The commission includes two
    members representing the interests of the Italian American
    community, two representing the interests of the German
    American community. Italian American community--am I going to
    be represented, or millions of other people? Who is going to be
    representing the interests of the American community?
        The activists will have four of the seven seats on the
    commission. They will recommend appropriate remedies, which, as
    the Justice Department letter noted, could include financial
    compensation, reparations.
        There is nothing in this bill that would prevent the
    commission from making recommendations for financial
    compensation for former supporters of the Nazi and Fascist
    regimes. The commission is also charged with making
    recommendations for public education programs. These public
    education programs could become the propaganda of moral
    equivalence: they did bad things in the war, we did bad things
    in the war. They had concentration camps, we had concentration
    camps. That term has been thrown around today.
        In fact, we heard in the earlier panel a direct reference
    to the language used in the Nuremburg Trials in describing the
    actions of the U.S. government during World War II. I quote--
    earlier, on the first panel--``war crimes and crimes against
    humanity. This is the level of severity of the human rights
    violations for which the United States has not been held
    accountable.''
        This phrase is the exact charge brought against the major
    Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. The use of the term suggests
    similarity between the behavior of Franklin Roosevelt's America
    and Adolf Hitler's Germany.
        If this commission goes into effect, we, as a Nation, have
    moved from honoring the greatest generation to trashing it. The
    commission is supposed to make recommendations affecting
    American national security, protecting the civil liberties in
    wartime. The agenda is clear. The implicit logic of this bill
    says that there can be no special scrutiny under any
    circumstance for any group at any time.
        During World War II, my Italian American relatives were
    subject to special scrutiny. And they should have been. Today,
    we are in a conflict with radical Islam. Common sense tells us
    that there should be, in some cases, special scrutiny for some
    Muslims.
        If there is a conflict with China, then common sense would
    tell us there should be special scrutiy for some Chinese
    nationals. If there is a conflict with Iran, or Serbia, or
    Luxembourg, the principles of common sense, special scrutiny
    should apply for resident aliens and American citizens
    connected to this foreign power.
        This bill is not only historically inaccurate, it will
    teach us the wrong lessons of how best to protect our country
    in the future. Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Fonte follows:]
                        Prepared Statement of John Fonte
        Thank you Chairman Lofgren and Ranking Member King.
        To begin with many historical facts cited in the Wartime Treatment
    Study Act are wrong. It is charged that the actions of the government
    of Franklin D Roosevelt's during World War II had a ``devastating''
    impact on Italian-American communities whose ``detrimental'' effects
    ``are still being experienced.'' I am an Italian American and for
    decades visited many relatives in a lot of ``little Italys'' through
    our country. There is no evidence that Italian-American communities
    were ``devastated.'' No proof has been offered in this bill of any
    ``devastated'' Italian American community.
        The FBI rightly picked up those Italian aliens and Italian-American
    citizens, who were pro-Fascist and those German aliens and German-
    American citizens who were pro-Nazi, like members of the German
    American Bund, the German-American Settlement League and participants
    in the pro-Nazi Camp Siegfried in New York state. They were a
    relatively small number of people. My grandparents and hundreds of
    thousands of other resident aliens (at that point, enemy aliens) were
    not disturbed. About 11, 000 people of German ancestry (mostly aliens)
    and about 1, 500 people of Italian ancestry (mostly aliens) were
    interned, The numbers are disputed, but, in any case, they are small
    compared to the huge German-American and Italian American populations
    in the United States that were overwhelmingly loyal and deeply involved
    in the wartime struggle.
        It is significant that there is no reference in this legislation to
    pro-Nazi, pro-Fascist, and pro-Imperial Japan activities by residents
    of the United States including aliens and citizens during the period
    from the late 1930s through the Second World War. This certainly
    existed and was successfully combated by the Roosevelt Administration.
    Why isn't pro-Axis activity by residents of the United States discussed
    or examined in this legislation?
        History Professor Robert H. Abzug of University of Texas (who is an
    expert on Jewish studies) in a review of John Christgau's book, Enemies
    wrote that, ``one is struck by the benign treatment of aliens and the
    extraordinary access they had to the legal system and to the appeal
    procedures.'' This included ``even pro-Nazi German aliens.'' He notes
    most of the German aliens returned home or became American citizens and
    ``few emerged with permanent scars.'' [source: Holocaust and Genocide
    Studies, Vol., I, No. 2, pp 330-31 (Washington: US Holocaust Memorial
    Museum, 1986)]
        The inclusion of the issue of Jewish refugees to this bill was not
    part of the original concept of the bill and is an obvious fig-leaf,
    added later. On May 8, 2007 the Department of Justice sent a letter to
    Senate Judiciary Chairman Leahy on the Wartime Treatment Study Act
    signed by Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Richard A.
    Hertling. The DOJ letter stated that in 2001 Justice had contacted the
    Senior Historian at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the historian
    said ``that the bill's identical depiction of the treatment of Axis
    citizens and European Americans [US citizens] was ``outrageously
    exaggerated.'' The Holocaust Museum historian when asked about the
    bill's accusation that ``the United States Government violated the
    civil rights of European-American citizens'' stated that he is ``aware
    of no historical facts to support those conclusions.''
        The facts concerning the Jewish refugees are accurate, whereas the
    facts in the rest of the bill are not. Therefore, if this issue is
    going to advance further, it would make sense to separate the Jewish
    refugee section into perhaps another bill and not include it in the
    issue of wartime treatment of German and Italian nationals.
        The bill's terminology is fraudulent. It defines ``German-
    American'' as US citizens and resident aliens of German ancestry. But a
    German alien living in the United States in 1941, that is to say, a
    citizen of Nazi Germany who is not a citizen of the United States is
    clearly not a ``German-American,'' but a German national living in
    America. The same fraudulent terminology is used in the term ``Italian-
    American.'' Italian Americans should be defined as American citizens of
    Italian ancestry, not citizens of Italy living in the United States.
    This misuse of terminology comes from the earlier Japanese American
    legislation and this also should be corrected.
        For the most part, the Roosevelt Administration was not dealing
    with American citizens (except for those who had shown an affinity for
    Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. We have heard complaints that American
    born children of German nationals (who would be American citizens by
    birth) were returned to Germany with their parents. Under the
    circumstances what was the administration of Franklin D Roosevelt
    supposed to do: separate the children from their parents?
        It is charged by the activists for this legislation that, for
    example, Italian resident aliens and Italian-American fishermen were
    unfairly prohibited from fishing in certain areas. Stephen Sulejman
    Schwartz, a moderate Muslim-American journalist discussed this issue in
    the Weekly Standard as follows:
        ``Venturing into restricted waters was forbidden to all vessels of
    every kind, whether commercial or pleasure boats, without regard for
    their owner's citizenship. Allegations that Italian-American fishing
    boats were confiscated also turn out to be a hoax. Boats were
    requisitioned by the federal authorities through charter or purchase,
    and the only craft confiscated belonged to owners who had repeatedly
    made incursions into prohibited waters.''[source: The Weekly Standard,
    December 10, 2001]
        There are complaints by the activists supporting this legislation
    about loss of civil liberties because of travel restrictions and the
    requirement to carry an identity card, and the like. But, as the same
    Weekly Standard article notes:
        ``What American's freedom was not restricted during World War II? A
    draft was instituted, and evaders of it were imprisoned; consumer goods
    were rationed, wages, prices, rents, and other transactions were
    controlled . . . travel was limited and ordinary people were regularly
    stopped and interrogated. . . . Wars are by definition unfair and
    uncomfortable. Loyalty tests may be especially uncomfortable to some,
    but should not trouble those whose loyalties are clear.'' [source: same
    Weekly Standard article as above]
        The bill allegedly establishes a so-called ``independent''
    commission. But there is nothing ``independent'' about it. As the
    Justice Department letter stated, the results are already
    ``predetermined.'' We have already been told in the bill that the
    administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt was guilty of gross human
    rights violations. The commission is to include ``two members
    representing the interests of the Italian American community'' and
    ``two members representing the interests of the German American
    community.'' How is that going to be determined? As an Italian American
    are my interests going to be represented? Remember the fraudulent
    definition of German American and Italian American communities means
    that we are not necessarily taking about the interests of American
    citizens when using these terms. Who, one wonders, is going to be
    representing the interests of the ``American community.''
        In short, the activists are going to be in charge with four of the
    seven seats on the commission. They are supposed to recommend
    ``appropriate remedies,'' which, as the Justice Department letter
    notes, ``could include financial compensation.'' In other words, they
    could recommend ``reparations.'' Certainly, there is nothing in the
    bill that would prevent the commission from making recommendations for
    financial compensation for former supporters of the Nazi and Fascist
    regimes, whether the beneficiaries are American citizens or German or
    Italian citizens. Clearly, there is nothing to prevent the commission
    from making such recommendations as the legislation is currently
    written.
        The commission is also charged with making recommendations for
    ``public education programs related to the US Government's Wartime
    Treatment of European Americans.'' Is there any doubt that these
    ``public education programs'' will be the propaganda of moral
    equivalence: ``they did bad things, so did we; they interned people in
    camps, so did we.'' For example, one activist who is testifying here
    today used the direct language of the Nuremberg Trials in describing
    the actions of the United States government during World War II in a
    speech five years ago:
        The activist declared: ``War crimes and crimes against humanity--
    this is the level of the severity of the human rights violations for
    which the United States has not been held accountable.'' The phrase,
    ``War crimes and crimes against humanity'' were the exact charges
    brought against the major Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, many of whom
    were found guilty and executed. The use of the terms ``war crimes and
    crimes against humanity'' cannot be accidental, but an attempt to
    suggest similarities of behavior between Franklin Roosevelt's America
    and Adolf Hitler's Germany during World War II. [source: http://
    www.campaignforjusticejla.org/resources/speeches/
    dor2004_grace_shimizu.html
        If this commission goes into effect, we, as a nation, will have
    moved from honoring the ``greatest generation'' to trashing it. The
    generation that through tremendous sacrifices defeated the totalitarian
    axis of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and the militarists of Imperial
    Japan.
                                 future issues
        Worst of all, this stacked commission of activists and special
    interest pleaders is supposed to make recommendations for the future
    affecting American national security such as ``assessing the continued
    viability of the Alien Enemies Act'' and protecting ``civil liberties
    in wartime.'' There is, of course, nothing in this legislation about
    how to combat internal subversion in wartime from residents (aliens and
    citizens) of our country whose loyalty is not to the United States.
        What recommendations for the future will be forthcoming from this
    commission? One of the activists, who is a majority witness here today
    declared:
        ``The necessity for this [public] education has been underscored in
    the aftermath of 9/11 and the unfolding of the global and domestic `war
    on terrorism.' ''
        What happened during World War II ``is history repeating itself in
    the government's current racial profiling.'' [source, same as previous
    web listing on Campaign for Justice website]
        The agenda here is clear and it weakens American security. The
    implicit logic of the bill says that there can be no special scrutiny
    for any particular group at any time, as, for example, occurred was
    during World War II. However, we should implement common sense special
    scrutiny actions where appropriate. For example, it makes sense for
    security at our nation's airports (TSA) to examine special scrutiny
    measures used by other liberal democratic nation--states such as Israel
    and Spain in dealing with potential threats.
        In fact, if we are serious about protecting lives, we need at
    different times to exercise a particular type of special scrutiny.
    During World War II it made sense to treat the communities of German
    and Italian aliens and citizens differently from other citizens and
    residents of the US. It certainly made sense to treat those who had
    expressed an ideological affinity with Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese
    imperialism differently from other residents and citizens of the US.
        My relatives as Italian Americans during World War II were subject
    to special scrutiny and they should have been. Today, we are in
    conflict (whether admitted or not) with radical Islam. This means that
    common sense tells us that there should be, in some cases (not blanket,
    but in some cases), special scrutiny for Muslims (residents and
    citizens) in America. If there is a conflict with China, say over
    Taiwan, then common sense would tell us that there should be special
    scrutiny for Chinese nationals (and some other residents, including
    citizens) living in the US. Likewise, if there is a conflict with
    Venezuela, Iran, Serbia, Somalia or Luxembourg, the same principle of
    common sense special scrutiny should apply for resident aliens and
    American citizens connected with the foreign power.
        The Wartime Treatment Study act is not only historically
    inaccurate, most importantly, it will teach us the wrong lessons on how
    best to protect our country in the future.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you. The gentleman's time has expired.
        Now we will turn to Members of the Committee to see if
    there are questions for any of the panel members.
        First I will turn to you, Mr. King.
        Mr. King. Thank you, Madam Chair.
        Again, I thank all the witnesses for their testimony. A
    series of questions arise for me, but I would--before I ask
    them, I have an article here that is the ``Campaign for
    Justice,'' dated February 22, 2004, an article written by Grace
    Shimizu, that I ask unanimous consent to introduce into the
    record.
        Ms. Lofgren. Without objection.
        [The information referred to follows:]

                                   __________

        Mr. King. Thank you, Madam Chair, and all. That is direct
    contradiction to the earlier testimony. And I wanted to point
    out that ``Hill or Bill's good rules by all account, I think
    so,'' on a statement made that turned out to apparently be the
    lead of our pejorative.
        But some of the questions that come to mind to me would be,
    as I listen to Mr. Christgau, this tone of America. And I am
    just asking myself as I listen to your testimony, if you were
    to list the countries in the world and in order of their
    morality, or their relative morality, where would you put the
    United States with----
        Mr. Christgau. Number one.
        Mr. King. As the most moral Nation?
        Mr. Christgau. Yes.
        Mr. King. Very good. That really helps me put your
    testimony on a different perspective, and I just appreciate
    that.
        And I would ask also of Ms. Ebel this question, and I know
    that this gets focused on the family history and the things
    that you know because of personal experience, et cetera, but
    have you rolled over the thought about how everybody's destiny
    is changed by a war? And I know that your testimony reflects
    upon how your family's destiny was changed because of the
    actions that took place within the context of this war.
        Have you speculated on how different it might be if the
    internees had been drafted rather than interned? A certain
    percentage would have gone into combat and been put at great
    risk. Would that have been an injustice to draft them into the
    military rather than intern?
        Ms. Ebel. It is true that they could have been interned or
    they could have been drafted and gone into the war. In my
    father's case, he objected to it because he had family in
    Europe, and he was concerned about fighting against his brother
    and his cousin, and so that is why he objected to it. In his
    release recommendation, they also noted that he was
    disappointed that he had flunked his pre-induction physical,
    and that he was willing, then, to go and fight.
        But are you asking me whether it would be better to draft
    enemy aliens and have them fight in the war than intern them?
        Mr. King. I would like to ask you a more general question,
    and less specific. But, if there was a conscientious
    objections, or as going back to Germany where my uncles went
    even though my grandmother came from there the previous
    generation, there was another theater in Japan, which we have
    heard about, so from that perspective, I would just ask if you
    have contemplated about, as you speak for many others, I
    believe, here as a witness, how the destiny might have changed
    had some of them been sent into the front and perhaps been
    captured by the enemy and put through those camps instead?
    Wouldn't we have had more fatalities--some fatalities among
    this group that you are representing today that wouldn't have
    lived through the war?
        Ms. Ebel. Yes, I think we would have.
        Mr. King. And would that have been a worse atrocity?
        Ms. Ebel. For them to go in and fight in a war and die for
    their country? Yes. But I also wanted----
        Mr. King. And many of our contemporaries and many of our
    parents were engaged in that in a noble patriotic effort and
    lost their lives. So I raise that at the beginning. I just am
    having trouble getting past that comparison.
        I think I should turn to Mr. Fonte and ask if you would
    comment on that?
        Ms. Ebel. Well, I just want to say that my father was
    willing to go to the Pacific, but he had objected to going to
    Germany. And I also want to add that there were many internees
    who had family members fighting in Europe and in the Pacific
    while they were sitting in internment camps.
        Mr. King. I agree. Thank you.
        Mr. Fonte?
        Mr. Fonte. Well, in fact, my uncle was involved--and fought
    against the Italians and Sicilians during a war, too, so as
    many Italian Americans did.
        Mr. King. I thank you.
        Madam Chair, I yield back.
        Ms. Lofgren. The gentleman yields back.
        I would ask Ms. Sanchez if she has a question.
        Ms. Sanchez. I just very briefly wanted to follow up on
    something that Ms. Ebel said regarding the fact that many
    aliens who were interned during this period had grown children
    that were fighting for the U.S. military effort, and I wanted
    to ask--our first witness, were there--how often that happened
    that they had family that was fighting for the United States
    while their parents while their parents were sitting in
    interment camps.
        Mr. Christgau. It happened frequently.
        Ms. Sanchez. And that was never taken into consideration
    when they were deciding who would be interned.
        Mr. Christgau. No, it was not.
        Ms. Sanchez. Ms. Ebel, you stated that your father, while
    he was being interned, was called up to be drafted by the Army.
    Don't you find it kind of ironic that they would be drafting a
    so-called dangerous person to serve in the military for the
    United States?
        Ms. Ebel. Well, I thought it was a great irony that he was
    so dangerous that he couldn't be free in the United States, but
    he could go and fight on behalf of the United States. And then
    when he flunked his physical, he went right back into the
    internment camp again.
        I just want to add one interesting anecdote in response to
    your earlier question, was that during the Jimmy Doolittle
    Raid, one of the navigators for Jimmy Doolittle was a German
    American-born man, and his father was an alien internee in
    Washington State.
        Ms. Sanchez. A wonderful way to treat patriots.
        Last question for you: Those who were allowed to go home
    after the end of the war in 1945 had to sign an oath of silence
    not to talk about their internment. Do you know what the
    penalty was for speaking out against what had happened?
        Ms. Ebel. My understanding is that the penalty was possible
    deportation and possible internment, and that was the precise
    reason why many who signed the oath never spoke. I have heard
    of several stories where there were deathbed confessions of
    internment, and the family was just around, they couldn't even
    believe what they were hearing. So the devastation to the
    individuals who were interned continued long after the
    internment.
        Ms. Sanchez. Thank you all for your testimony, and I yield
    back.
        Ms. Lofgren. The gentlelady yields back.
        The gentleman from California wishes to ask a question.
        Mr. Lungren. Yes, thank you, Madam Chair.
        As you may know, during my prior service in Congress I was
    selected to serve on the Commission on Wartime Relocation, and
    the civilians always know me, sitting Member of Congress who
    served on that panel. I did that because I grew up in southern
    California and was completely unaware of the treatment of
    Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals.
        My home area, I lived not too far--I grew up not too far
    away from Federal Island, unaware that prior to World War II
    there was--Japanese American village there--fishing village--
    that was never returned after the war. And I grew up with the
    Japanese Americans in my community that had never heard about
    that. So when this was brought to my attention in the first
    Congress--the first time I was in Congress--I supported the
    effort to establish a commission.
        I did so by getting sufficient Republican votes to make
    sure that we could pass it, but I did so at that time by
    promising Members that it was not a simple excuse for granting
    reparations; rather, it was a commission--study the record and
    establish what the history was. But I do recall at the very
    first meeting that we had of the commission, one of the
    commissioners turned to us assembled and said, ``Okay, how much
    money are we talking about?'' which, frankly, put off alarm
    bells in my head because I had promised Members that was not
    the purpose of it. Rather, I had thought it was important for
    us to investigate that period of time, since it was fairly well
    unknown about the treatment of fellow citizens and people who
    were here legally at that time.
        I still think it is important for us to have historical
    records so that we know. I don't think we know enough about how
    we--what the decisions were with respect to the Japanese Latin
    Americans here, and there is a lot of lack of knowledge with
    respect to Germans and Italians.
        But I would say that--and I am a co-sponsor of legislation
    to look at the question of Japanese Latin American treatment,
    but I would say this: I think we ought to be careful about how
    we handle this.
        I hear about members of your family who were reluctant to
    talk about their experiences. My dad was drafted into World War
    II as a doctor. He was a battle--he was a physician who was
    within one block, as I was told by someone who called me just a
    year ago, within one block of the front lines in Normandy. He
    received a Purple Heart there.
        He never spoke in any detail about his experiences in World
    War II. It wasn't because he signed some oath. Because that
    experience was so horrendous. He told me he did not--he tried
    not to make friends, because he lost them so fast. He described
    to me one time one friend he did make who was blown up in front
    of his eyes, and there were just pieces of flesh and that was
    all that was left.
        So there are many who suffered, and many who, in that
    generation, sacrificed. I would hope that if we move on these
    bills, and the bill in which I have cosponsored, that we would,
    I hope, look at establishing a proper historical record as
    being the prime reason we are doing this, not that we are
    looking at making amends by reparations or something like that.
        Let me just say this: It is awfully easy for a generation
    60 years later to say, ``God, you were terrible, and we
    wouldn't have done this.'' My hope is that if you have a
    historical record established, we learn from those experiences,
    try and adopt some perspective and some policies which prevent
    us from making some mistakes that were made.
        But just to set a little record, because there was some
    talk about the FBI. There was one person in the higher
    positions of the Federal Government who disagreed with Franklin
    Delano Roosevelt's decision to round up Japanese Americans and
    nationals from the east and west coast. You know who that
    person was? J. Edgar Hoover, who said that based on the best
    information he had he thought he could limit the number of
    people we are talking about to the ones that he thought were
    suspicious. Now, in retrospect, we probably know that he was
    wrong on some of the people they would have rounded up.
    Wouldn't that have been a better process than what we did do?
        And in fact, if you want to look at the historical record,
    it was in Hawaii that we did not impose that same order because
    the military commander in Hawaii said if we had that same order
    that was imposed in Hawaii we wouldn't have enough workers, and
    we wouldn't have an opportunity to be able to maintain the
    economy there. And so there we used J. Edgar Hoover's approach,
    and we only rounded up a few people of Japanese American
    ancestry.
        The only point I am trying to make is as one who has been
    through this, who has been through the commission, sat on it,
    the only sitting Member of Congress who was willing to sit on
    that commission, I know the emotion that goes into it, and I
    know the possibilities of utilizing language. For anybody to
    say that we had concentration camps, and therefore equate what
    we did with what the Germans did, it is historically incorrect
    and casts a dispersion upon that generation.
        And to suggest that we engaged in war crimes or crimes
    against humanity, frankly, I think, is more than exaggeration.
    It upsets the historical record and frankly, it is not the way
    to gain support in the Congress of the United States and for a
    commission to look at any of this. I hope we would understand
    that----
        Ms. Lofgren. The gentleman's time has expired, and we have
    given extra time because of your service on the first
    commission. And we would thank this panel for your testimony.
        Ms. Ebel, I was particularly touched by your commitment to
    your father. As someone who has lost her father, I know that
    those obligations are important ones indeed, and I think you
    are living up to your promise.
        Ms. Ebel. Thank you.
        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you very much, and we will ask our next
    panel to come forward.
        I will introduce them as they step forward. First, Valery
    Bazarov. Mr. Bazarov was born in Russia in 1942, immigrated to
    the United States in 1988. He holds two graduate degrees from
    Odessa State University and Hunter College. He joined the
    Hebrew Immigrant Society in 1988 and currently is committed to
    finding and honoring the heroes of Jewish and non-Jewish
    descent who rescued European Jews during the Holocaust.
        Our next witness is David Harris. Mr. Harris has been the
    executive director of the American Jewish Committee since 1990.
    He travels the globe meeting with world leaders to advance the
    wellbeing of Israel, combat anti-Semitism, monitor the
    condition of Jewish communities, and promote intergroup and
    inter-religious understanding. He is a prolific author and
    commentator, and his insightful weekly AJC radio broadcasts are
    heard by an estimated 35 billion listeners nationwide on the
    CBS radio network.
        Next, I am pleased as Mr. Leo Bretholz is here. Mr.
    Bretholz was in France in 1940, and by the summer of 1941, HIAS
    had assisted his aunt and uncle in the U.S. to apply for a visa
    for their nephew. However, in July 1941, just a day after the
    bombing of Pearl Harbor, his visa was delayed. Mr. Bretholz
    spent the next 6 years running from city to city around Europe
    barely escaping death several times. Finally, in 1947, he
    obtained a visa to the United States. He has published a book,
    ``Leap Into Darkness,'' that describes his life between 1941 to
    1947.
        And the final witness is Michael Horowitz. Mr. Horowitz is
    the director of the Hudson Institute's project for civil
    justice reform and project for international religious liberty.
    He served as general council for the Office of Management and
    Budget under the Reagan administration and has taught law at
    the University of Mississippi and at Georgetown. He has also
    practiced law as a partner at several national firms.
        Now, before I ask you to testify, I would like to note the
    presence in our audience today of Ira Crispen, who is a pretty
    famous immigration lawyer and author of immigration text that
    is used as a sourcebook throughout the United States.
        So Ira, we are very happy to have you here today, and
    honored, actually, by your presence.
        Ms. Waters. And he is my friend.
        Ms. Lofgren. And also, Ms. Waters' friend, so also to your
    credit.
        We would ask, as you have heard before, your full
    statements will be made part of the official record. We would
    ask your testimony to consume about 5 minutes, and then we will
    have an opportunity to ask questions.
        So if we could begin with you, Mr. Bazarov?
        Mr. Bazarov. Madam Chair, may I ask your permission to
    testify after Leo Bretholz, and you will understand why----
        Ms. Lofgren. That would be fine.
        Mr. Bazarov. Thank you.
        Ms. Lofgren. Then we will go to Mr. Harris.

      TESTIMONY OF DAVID A. HARRIS, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AMERICAN
                         JEWISH COMMITTEE (AJC)

        Mr. Harris. Do I get his 5 minutes too? [Laughter.]
        Madam Chairwoman, distinguished Members of the
    Subcommittee, my name is David Harris. I am the executive
    director of the American Jewish Committee. Thank you for
    holding this hearing on the topic of immense historical
    importance that resonates to the present day.
        Time does not permit more than a brief discussion of U.S.
    immigration policy during the years of the Third Reich.
    Fortunately, there are many scholarly works and personal
    testimonies to fill out the picture. They make clear that as a
    Nation we did far less to rescue Jews who were targeted for
    extinction by the Nazi juggernaut than we could and should
    have.
        Allow me to cite just three examples that I believe
    encapsulate the larger story. In May 1939, a passenger liner,
    the ``St. Louis,'' set sail from Hamburg with over 900 Jewish
    refugees. It was destined for Cuba, but on arrival Cuban
    officials canceled the passengers' transit visas and refused to
    let all but a handful disembark.
        The ship then headed for the coast of Florida, coming so
    close that the refugees could see the lights of Miami, but U.S.
    officials refused to let it enter a port. The ship was sent
    back to Europe, and more than a quarter of the passengers, we
    know, were killed by the Nazis. Imagine, Madam Chairwoman, our
    country could find neither the compassion nor the legal basis
    to admit 900 Jews fleeing Hitler who were within sight of our
    shores.
        The next year, 1940, Assistant Secretary of State
    Breckenridge Long wrote his now legendary words, ``We can delay
    and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite
    length the number of immigrants into the United States. We
    could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every
    obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to
    resort to various administrative devices which would postpone
    and postpone and postpone the granting of the visas.''
        Imagine key State Department officials, when they were not
    suppressing information coming from Europe about the fate of
    the Jews--and that is its own story--were seeking ways to block
    entry into the United States. In so doing, they failed even to
    meet the strict immigration quotas operative at the time. From
    1933 onward, and I would wish to stress this point, the annual
    country quota for immigrants from Germany was only filled
    once--exactly once--even though, as you can well imagine, there
    was no shortage of applicants. The obstacle was a lack of
    compassion.
        And the refugees had few other places to turn: Britain,
    which itself took in 70,000 European Jews, succumbed to Arab
    pressure and tightened still further entry into Mandatory
    Palestine when, tragically, there was no sovereign Israel to
    offer safe haven. The vast majority of Europe's Jews, feeling
    the Nazi noose tightening around their necks, were trapped--
    literally trapped--even when they could still leave countries
    like Germany and Austria. Too many had nowhere to go; they were
    the unwanted flotsam of the Second World War.
        And third, on January 16, 1944, Henry Morgenthau, the
    secretary of the treasury, wrote his now famous cri de coeur to
    President Roosevelt. He quoted a Senate Foreign Relations
    Committee report recommending a commission to formulate plans
    to save Europe's Jews. The Committee report said, ``We have
    talked; we have sympathized; we have expressed our horror; the
    time to act is long past due.''
        At the conclusion of Morgenthau's admirable letter, with
    anger and anguish he wrote to the President, his friend,
    referring to the State Department--our State Department--``The
    matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust too
    great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent,
    callous, and perhaps even hostile.'' Morgenthau's intervention
    resulted in the creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board, which
    protected an estimated 200,000 Jews from otherwise certain
    death.
        It was a stark reminder of what this country was capable of
    when it resolved to act. If only we had acted sooner. But alas,
    the government spent little time considering ways to rescue
    Jews, slow down the transport trains to the camps, bomb the
    machinery of death, or warn the Nazis of sever retribution for
    their genocidal policy.
        Madam Chairwoman, ladies and gentlemen, I cannot end this
    testimony without a personal word. Even with the falures of
    omission and commission in American policy, an estimate 200,000
    Jews were able to enter the United States from 1933 to 1945.
    That number may have been a mere pittance compared to those who
    sought and were eligible for entry, but nonetheless, those
    200,000 Jews were saved.
        I would not be here today were it not for that group of
    200,000. My mother and maternal grandparents were among them,
    arriving in New York in November 1941. Their entry into the
    United States, though, was not easy, I assure you. But in the
    end, having crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Lisbon, the
    boarded the ``SS Exeter'' and found a safe haven and new start
    in this country.
        If only more leaders had had the capacity not only to grasp
    the genocide at had, but also to identify with the anguish of
    the victims who, until the very end, wanted to believe that
    their plight would not, could not, go neglected. Then there
    would have been no need at least for my part of the panel. And
    yes, there would be many more people like myself, today proud
    to call America home.
        Thank you, Madam Chairwoman.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Harris follows:]
                     Prepared Statement of David A. Harris
        Madame Chairwoman, Distinguished Members of the Subcommittee,
        My name is David Harris. I am the executive director of the
    American Jewish Committee.
        Permit me to thank you for holding this hearing on a topic of
    immense historical importance that continues to resonate--and haunt
    us--to the present day.
        Time does not permit more than a brief review of U.S. immigration
    policy from 1933 to 1945, the years that coincide with the rule of the
    Third Reich. Fortunately, there are many scholarly works on the
    subject, as well as personal testimonies, which fill out the picture.
        Upon assuming office in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was
    immediately confronted with two daunting challenges--one domestic, the
    other foreign.
        At home, President Roosevelt faced the devastating impact of the
    Great Depression and the pressing need to rebuild the economy and
    restore confidence in the nation.
        Abroad, President Roosevelt took office just weeks after Adolf
    Hitler ascended to power in Berlin.
        From the start, the President showed courage and sagacity in
    dealing with the domestic challenge, while, over time, recognizing, to
    his everlasting credit, that a country unenthusiastic about the
    prospect of once again rescuing Europe from its own demons, as it had
    in the First World War, needed to be prepared for that eventuality.
        But the Roosevelt era included one great failing. As a nation, we
    did far less to rescue Jews, who were targeted for extinction by the
    Nazi juggernaut, than we could and should have.
        Who was to blame? Frankly, it would be easier, and much shorter, to
    list who was not to blame.
        The reasons, excuses, and defenses for those who failed to act
    could fill volumes.
        However sensitive President Roosevelt might have been to the Jews'
    plight, and there is reason to believe that he was, domestic politics
    at the time made it difficult for him to act.
        He was fearful of inciting the fertile ground of domestic anti-
    Semitism and facing the wrath of widespread nativist sentiment, both
    attested to by public opinion polls at the time. Moreover, he was
    convinced, once the U.S. entered the war, that the best way to help
    Europe's Jews was to vanquish the Nazis as quickly as possible, without
    any so-called distraction or diversion of resources.
        The Congress, while including some Members who desperately wanted
    to help beleaguered Jews, could not overcome the resistance of
    restrictionist colleagues, who, reflecting the popular mood, were
    unwilling to revisit strict immigration laws adopted in 1924, leaving
    those laws intact throughout the period under discussion here.
        The State Department, plagued by the bureaucratic instinct for
    inertia and legalism at its worst, not to mention a tissue-thin facade
    that barely concealed the anti-Semitism of some of its key decision-
    makers, was the last place in Washington to look for help.
        The general public was certainly not clamoring for the gates to be
    opened. Fearful of more newcomers, who were seen as threats to scarce
    jobs, and influenced the hysteria wrought by demagogues like Father
    Charles Coughlin, who railed against the Jews in his popular radio
    broadcasts, the American people exerted little pressure on elected
    officials to do something dramatic to help Europe's embattled Jews.
        In fact, a 1942 survey, cited by Leonard Dinnerstein in
    Antisemitism in America, found that Americans rated Jews as the third
    greatest ``menace'' to the country, behind only Germans and Japanese,
    the country's sworn wartime enemies. By 1944, Jews had moved to the top
    of the list, with 24 percent of Americans believing that Jews posed the
    greatest danger.
        With notably few exceptions, the media did not experience its
    proudest moment, either. In such leading newspapers and opinion-molders
    as the New York Times, stories about the plight of Hitler's victims
    were often brief and buried, and editorials were few and far between.
    They hardly contributed to an understanding of, much less a popular
    outrage against, what was taking place in Europe, even as the grisly
    facts of the Nazi eliminationist plans emerged.
        Jewish agencies, including my own, were alarmed by the trajectory
    of developments and sought in their various ways to raise consciousness
    and reach decision-makers, though, it must be said, their clout was
    severely limited. Indeed, as historian Henry Feingold despairingly
    notes in The Politics of Rescue:

            Much of their formidable organizational resources were
            dissipated in internal bickering until it seemed as if Jews
            were more anxious to tear each other apart than to rescue their
            coreligionists.

        I could go on. Suffice it to say that this was not our country's
    finest hour.
        In the interests of time, let me cite just three examples that, I
    believe, encapsulate the larger story.
        In May 1939, a passenger liner, the St. Louis, set sail from
    Hamburg with over 900 Jewish refugees. It was destined for Cuba, but,
    on arrival, Cuban officials cancelled the transit visas that had been
    issued to the passengers and refused to let all but a tiny handful
    disembark. The ship then headed for the coast of Florida, coming so
    close that the refugees could see the lights of Miami, but U.S.
    officials callously refused to let it enter a port and discharge its
    passengers. Rather, the ship was sent back to Europe. More than a
    quarter of the passengers, it is known, were subsequently killed by the
    Nazis.
        Imagine, our country could find neither the compassion nor the
    legal basis to admit 900 Jews fleeing Hitler who were within sight of
    our shores.
        The next year, Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, no
    friend of Europe's Jews, to say the least, wrote his now legendary
    words: ``We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of
    indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We
    could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in
    the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various
    administrative devices which would postpone and postpone and postpone
    the granting of the visas.''
        Imagine, key officials in the State Department, when they were not
    trying to suppress information coming from Europe about the fate of the
    Jews, were actively seeking ways to block entry to the United States.
    In so doing, they failed even to meet the strict immigration quotas
    operative at the time. Shockingly, from 1933 onward, for example, the
    annual country quota for immigrants from Germany was only filled once.
        In 1939, for example, there were over 300,000 applicants for the
    27,000 German slots alone. The failure to do so was not for any
    shortage of applicants, cumbersome though the process was--including,
    hard as it may be to believe, a Certificate of Good Conduct from German
    police officials and, as of September 30, 1939, proof of permission to
    leave Germany. Rather, the problem was a total lack of compassion.
        Nor were the refugees excluded in the knowledge that, if the United
    States did not resettle them, other nations would. Indeed, few other
    countries did.
        Apropos, Britain, which itself took in 70,000 European Jews,
    succumbed to Arab pressure and tightened still further entry into
    Mandatory Palestine, another theoretical escape route, when,
    tragically, there was no sovereign Israel to offer safe haven to Jews
    in desperate need.
        Two major intergovernmental conferences, Evian in 1938 and Bermuda
    in 1943, were touted as venues for discussion of the refugee crisis,
    but the U.S. and other participants seemed more far interested in the
    politics of symbolism than in substance.
        In other words, the vast majority of Europe's Jews, feeling the
    Nazi noose tightening around their necks, were literally trapped, even
    when they still had the chance to leave countries like Germany and
    Austria. Too many had nowhere to go. They were the unwanted flotsam of
    the Second World War.
        And on January 16, 1944, Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the
    Treasury, wrote his cri de Coeur to his friend, President Roosevelt.
        In it, he said:

            The best summary of the whole situation is contained in one
            sentence of a report submitted on December 20, 1943, by the
            Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, recommending the
            passage of a Resolution (S.R. 203), favoring the appointment of
            a commission to formulate plans to save the Jews of Europe from
            extinction by Nazi Germany. . . . The committee stated: `We
            have talked; we have sympathized; we have expressed our horror;
            the time to act is long past due.'

        Concluding his admirable letter to the President, Morgenthau wrote,
    referring to the State Department:

            The matter of rescuing the Jews from extermination is a trust
            too great to remain in the hands of men who are indifferent,
            callous, and perhaps even hostile.

        Imagine, the Secretary of the Treasury felt compelled to resort to
    such language about governmental colleagues in a letter to the
    President, so angry and anguished was he about U.S. refugee policy.
        Importantly, the result of Morgenthau's intervention was the
    creation of the U.S. War Refugee Board, which, through sheer ingenuity
    and audacity, was successful in rescuing an estimated 200,000 Jews from
    otherwise certain death.
        It was a stark reminder of what this country was capable of when it
    resolved to act. If only we had done so sooner--but, alas, the
    government spent little time considering ways to rescue Jews, slow down
    the transport trains to the extermination camps, bomb the machinery of
    death, or warn the Nazi regime of severe retribution for its genocidal
    policy.
        Madame Chairwoman, I cannot end this testimony without a personal
    word.
        Even with the grievous failures of omission and commission in
    American policy, an estimated 200,000 Jews were able to enter the
    United States in the 12-year period from 1933 to 1945.
        That number may have been a mere pittance compared to those who
    sought entry and, indeed, were eligible for admission under the
    existing quota system, but nonetheless those 200,000 Jews were saved.
        I would not be here today, Madame Chairwoman, were it not for that
    group of 200,000. My mother and maternal grandparents were among them,
    arriving in New York in November 1941.
        Their entry into the United States was not made easy, I assure you,
    but in the end, having crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Lisbon, they
    were able to board the SS Exeter and find a safe haven, and new start,
    in this country.
        But if only more leaders had had the capacity not only to grasp the
    genocide at hand, but also to identify with the anguish of the
    victims--the victims who till the very end wanted to believe that their
    plight as human beings would not, could not, go neglected--then there
    would have been no need for this hearing. And, yes, there would be many
    more people like myself today proud to call America home.
        Thank you, Madame Chairwoman.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Harris.
        Mr. Bretholz, we will be pleased to hear from you.
        Could we get a microphone?

                      TESTIMONY OF LEO BRETHOLZ,
                    AUTHOR OF ``LEAP INTO DARKNESS''

        Mr. Bretholz. Madam Chairwoman, it is a pleasure to be here
    and a privilege to have been invited to share my story with
    you.
        I am not an angry man. I am a disappointed man. I am sad
    because what Mr. Harris just said spells it all out. In
    addition to Breckenridge Long, there was a man at the State
    Department by the name of Robert Borden Reams, and Robert
    Borden Reams was informed by a man in Geneva by the name of Dr.
    Guerhard Reidner--he was the representative in Geneva of the
    America Jewish Congress--that he had just learned that the
    Final Solution has been decided on the the Wannsee Conference.
        Robert Borden Reams notified the American consulates
    overseas not to pay attention to Dr. Reidner's report, because
    for your information, Reidner is Jewish. And Robert Borden
    Reams was in charge of the Nazi Jewish desk at the time at
    State Department.
        My story is one very personal of survival during the
    Holocaust. I was living in Vienna in Austria in March 1938 when
    Hitler and the German army entered the city and--the annexation
    of Austria, and at the encouragement of my mother, I fled
    Austria. In April 1941, I had an aunt and uncle in Baltimore
    who prepared affidavits hoping to obtain a visa of immigration
    to the United States. That autumn, deportations from Vienna
    began.
        During this time, I was in France dreaming of immigrating
    to the United States, and every day I went to the post office
    hoping to find good news somewhere beyond so much awfulness.
    One day my eyes fell on a red, white, and blue bordered envelop
    from America. The postal clerk knew.
        For weeks I had been sighing disappointedly when no mail
    arrived from the United States, and now my aunt in Baltimore
    was writing to me. And with the help of the HIAS Hebrew
    Immigration Aid Society, my affidavit was accepted by the U.S.
    Immigration and Naturalization Service. In the near future, my
    aunt wrote I should receive notification from a U.S. consulate
    to appear at its office for my visa.
        In November, I received notification that stated, ``Present
    yourself at the U.S. consulate in Marseilles on December 8,
    1941.'' Early in the morning December 8, I stopped at the
    newspaper kiosk on my way to the U.S. consulate in Marseilles.
    I saw a headline. For those who know French, ``Le Japon Attaque
    La Flotille Americaine A Pearl Harbor''--Japan has attacked the
    American fleet in Pearl Harbor.
        Now, I didn't know who this Pearl, was, you know, an
    unknown person to me, of course. I stood transfixed. Never had
    I heard of Pearl Harbor, and now it was the fulcrum of my
    entire life. At 9 o'clock I presented myself at the
    receptionist--to a receptionist at the consulate and saw more
    than a dozen visa applicants.
        We waited at the consulate for someone in authority to
    enter the room to tell us our pleas would be answered, that an
    exception would be made for us. No one came. As I left, the
    consulate seemed a descent into doom, because the consulate had
    notified, no visa applications are going to be examined.
        After being denied a visa to the United States, I spent the
    next 6 years on the run, barely escaping death--as I like to
    say, trying to be one step ahead of those who wanted me dead.
    And that was in Vichy, France. I escaped Germany by swimming
    across the River Sauer into Luxembourg; I escaped the French
    camp at St. Cyprien near the Pyrenees Mountains; I crossed the
    Alps by foot into Switzerland, hid into attics; I was sent back
    to Vichy, France from Switzerland--by the way, I was arrested;
    I escaped and leapt from a train at night that was bound for
    Auschwitz--that was on the 6th of November, 1942, and were it
    not for this night of November 6, 1942, I would not be sitting
    here talking, because in that train, 20 cattle cars, 50 each,
    1,000 people, only five survived, and I am one of them. I had
    escaped from the train with a friend on the night of November
    6, 1942.
        I wanted to find myself in the United States, and from
    Baltimore I received a letter from my aunt telling me to be
    patient. She had prepared another affidavit of support with the
    help of the HIAS Hebrew Immigration Aid Society. But at the
    time, there were thousands like me trying to immigrate to the
    United States. The process was slow.
        Almost a year later, on March 18, 1946, I received a letter
    from the American consulate in Bordeaux saying that I had been
    given a low case number, number 531. Receiving the low case
    number made me feel very important.
        In December 1946 I received my French exit visa. A week
    later I was booked passage on the steamer ``John Ericsson.'' I
    departed for the United States in January 1947; I arrived here
    62 years ago.
        I reached America in 1947 and hid my story for the next 14
    years. Why had my life been spared when so many had been taken?
    Would some miracle arrive in the mail telling me that my mother
    and sisters were still alive somewhere in the wreckage of
    Europe? However, I do know that if I and many others had
    received visas to immigrate to the United States in 1941, many
    of us would have been spared the horrific experiences we
    endured, and many more people would have survived.
        My mother and sisters were murdered in a death camp, and 20
    more family members. In addition to the story of the ``St.
    Louis,'' there is also one other story that has to be
    mentioned, that while 10,000 children were admitted to England
    in 1938 and 1939, at that time there was a bill introduced in
    the United States Congress to admit several hundred children
    and it was voted down in the United States.
        I want to end, Mrs. Chairwoman, with a quote from George
    Fantayana, and this is all the exercise here, but this is not
    recrimination because we are changing the past. That is the
    past. That cannot be changed. But George Fantayana said, ``If
    we do not remember the lessons of history, we are condemned to
    repeat them.'' And this exercise here is to make sure that that
    will never get repeated.
        Thank you very much.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Bretholz follows:]
                       Prepared Statement of Leo Bretholz
        I was living in Vienna, Austria in March 1938 when Hitler and the
    German army entered the city. At the encouragement of my mother, I fled
    Austria.
        In April 1941, I had an Aunt and Uncle in Baltimore who prepared
    affidavits, hoping to obtain a visa of immigration for me to the United
    States. That autumn, deportations from Vienna began. An Aunt and cousin
    of mine were shipped to a Lodz ghetto en route to Auschwitz. An Uncle
    of mine was already there. During this time, I was in France, dreaming
    of immigrating to the United States. Every day, I went to the post
    office, hoping to find good news somewhere beyond so much awfulness.
    One day, my eyes fell on a red-white-and-blue bordered envelope from
    America.
        ``Enfin, ca y est,'' the postal clerk said. At last, it's here.
        The postal clerk knew. For weeks, I'd been sighing disappointingly
    when no mail arrived from the United States. Now, my Aunt in Baltimore
    was writing to me. With the help of the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society,
    my affidavit was accepted by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
    Service. In the near future, my Aunt wrote, I should receive
    notification from a U.S. Consulate to appear at its office for my visa.
        In November, I received the notification that stated: ``Present
    yourself at the U.S. Consulate in Marseilles on December 8, 1941.''
        Early in the morning of December 8th, I stopped at a newspaper
    kiosk on my way to the U.S. Consulate. I saw a headline: Le Japon
    Attaque La Flotille Americaine A Pearl Harbor.''
        I stood transfixed. Never had I heard of Pearl Harbor, and now it
    was the fulcrum of my entire life. At nine o'clock, I presented myself
    to a receptionist at the consulate, and saw more than a dozen other
    visa applicants.
        We were told by the consulate that, ``In view of the hostilities,
    the consulate has been instructed to cease all visa-processing
    formalities until further notice.''
        A woman standing with her small children began to cry, so the
    children also cried. A dreadful wailing commenced. A mistake, we
    proclaimed. People are waiting for us, we moaned. Yes, yes, we were
    told by the consulate, but this is war and we all must make sacrifices.
        We waited at the consulate for someone in authority to enter the
    room, to tell us our pleas would be answered, that an exception would
    be made for us. No one came. As I left the consulate it seemed like a
    descent into doom.
        After being denied a visa to the United States, I spent the next
    six years on the run, barely escaping death. I had escaped Germany by
    swimming across the River Sauer; I escaped a French camp at St.
    Cyprien; I crossed the Alps by foot into Switzerland; hid in attics and
    ceiling crawlspaces; I escaped and leapt from a train at night that was
    bound for Auschwitz; I was arrested by French gendarmes, beaten by
    prison guards, and escaped again; and I joined the French resistance
    until the War in Europe was over.
        The end of the War in Europe in 1945 was not like the end of a
    winning ballgame or the beginning of a new year. Instead, it felt like
    the winding down of an endless era of exhaustion, and the beginning of
    a great unknown.
        I wanted to find myself in the United States. From Baltimore, I
    received a letter from my Aunt telling me to be patient. She had
    prepared another affidavit of support with help from the Hebrew
    Immigration Aid Society. But, at the time, there were thousands like
    me, trying to immigrate to the United States. The process was slow.
        Almost a year later, on March 18, 1946, I received a letter from
    the American Consulate in Bordeaux, saying that I had been given a low
    case number, 531. Receiving the low case number made me feel important.
        In December of 1946, I received my French exit visa. A week later,
    I was booked passage on the steamer John Ericsson. I departed for the
    United States in January of 1947.
        Early on the morning of January 29, 1947, I saw seagulls gliding
    through the air. An airborne welcoming committee, I thought. Our
    steamer was approaching the coastal waters of the United States. In the
    afternoon, the steamer entered New York harbor, moving past a fog-
    enshrouded Statue of Liberty. Many of us stood on the deck of the
    steamer and gaped, not quite believing we had finally arrived.
    Spontaneously, we applauded her welcoming figure.
        I reached America in 1947 and hid my story for the next fourteen
    years. Why had my life been spared when so many had been taken? Would
    some miracle arrive in the mail, telling me that my mother and my
    sisters were still alive somewhere in the wreckage of Europe? However,
    I do know that if I and many others had received visas to immigrate to
    the United States in 1941, many of us would have been spared the
    horrific experiences we endured and many, many more people would have
    survived.
                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Bretholz.
        Mr. Bazarov, you have reserved the time for after, and then
    we will go to Mr. Horowitz.

     TESTIMONY OF VALERY BAZAROV, DIRECTOR OF LOCATION AND FAMILY
          HISTORY SERVICE, HEBREW IMMIGRANT AID SOCIETY (HIAS)

        Mr. Bazarov. Thank you.
        Madam Chairwoman, Ranking Member King, Members of the
    Subcommittee, thank you for inviting me to testify before this
    Committee which addresses the issue long time overdue.
        If somebody asks, ``Why address the matters which lost
    urgency a long time ago and with not many witnesses left who
    can testify their own experience?'' the answer is, we must
    address the matters which happened in the past just not to
    allow them to happen again. It could be argued that nobody
    learns from history. That is true. But there is always hope
    that the next time it will be different. I hope that this time
    it will be different.
        I have the honor to represent here, at this hearing, the
    Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, HIAS, which opened its doors in
    1881, and since then until this day, assists Jews and other
    people whose lives and freedom are in danger. The objective of
    this statement is to show that the numbers of Holocaust
    survivors would have been far greater were it not for the
    policies of the U.S. State Department toward the immigration of
    European Jews.
        From 1933 through 1941, Germany permitted immigration. The
    problem was finding safe haven for the desperate refugees. It
    was only in the end of 1941 that the Nazis instituted the
    infamous Final Solution and the fate of millions of Jews was
    sealed.
        Immigration in the time of peace was not an easy
    assignment. During the war, with the rules set by the State
    Department, it became almost mission impossible. To leave
    France, for example, a refugee needed an exit visa, a transit
    visa, an entry visa for the country of destination, affidavits
    of support--laural and political affidavits, certificates of
    good behavior, and paid tickets for the ship destined for the
    United States or other country of immigration. Documents with
    expiration dates had to be valid on the day of departure. Just
    one document had expired and the refugees needed to start all
    over again.
        In addition, visas were valid only for up to 4 months, and
    the tickets overseas were sold out for many months ahead.
    Moreover, the tickets would be not sold without issued entry
    visas, and of course the United States consulate would not
    issue a visa without a ticket. It is not surprising that the
    majority of the refugees could not make it.
        Sometime ago, I interviewed Hellen Katel, who worked for
    HIAS in France in 1940 and 1941. She remembered that she and
    her colleagues wept when they were obliged to choose from among
    the thousands of applicants only a few who met the requirements
    of the State Department.
        In 1941, FBI, through the State Department, reviewed
    allegations against HIAS, which allegedly was bringing the
    Gestapo agents under power of the refugee status. The answer of
    the consulate was straight and left no doubt that HIAS's
    integrity was intact.
        However, 3 weeks after the positive reports, State
    Department addressed the consulate with the following document:
    The Department received information from reliable confidential
    sources indicating that the Gestapo is using the Jewish refugee
    organization, HICEM--it is another name of HIAS in Europe--in
    getting their agents into the United States and other western
    hemisphere countries. It is suggested that any application for
    visas of persons to whom this information applies be examined
    in the light thereof. The only plausible reason for the State
    Department to issue such decree was an attempt to restrain
    lifesaving Jewish immigration.
        Now, I asked for permission to testify after Mr. Bretholz
    because his testimony is not complete. He doesn't have in his
    documents, and I was able to procure them from our archives. He
    was denied the entry to the United States for the first time in
    June 1941, long before Pearl Harbor happened. That is when he
    received the letter from the consulate that the rules of the--
    again, and his visa was canceled. Now remember, David Harris
    quoted this quotation from Breckenridge Long, ``Postpone, and
    postpone, and postpone.''
        According to the Jewish tradition, to save a life is to
    save the world. We will never know the exact number of those
    who might be saved were it not for the U.S. State Department
    policies in effect at that time. What we do know is that the
    loss is incalculable as millions of universes were extinguished
    forever.
        Thank you.
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Bazarov follows:]
                      Prepared Statement of Valery Bazarov

                                   __________
        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you.
        And finally, Mr. Horowitz.

     TESTIMONY OF MICHAEL HOROWITZ, SENIOR FELLOW, HUDSON INSTITUTE

        Mr. Horowitz. I am Michael Horowitz. I am a fellow at the
    Hudson Institute. I have spent my career fighting racism,
    dealing with human rights. I was a professor of civil rights
    law at the University of Mississippi teaching the first
    integrated classes and had my share of run-ins with the Ku Klux
    Klan. I have been deeply involved over the last 10 years with
    right-left coalitions that have passed laws like the
    International Religious Freedom Act, the Trafficking Victims
    Protection Act, the Sudan Peace Act, the North Korea Human
    Rights Act, the Prison Rape Elimination Act, and other such
    laws.
        I deeply believe that American interests are only strong
    when American values are honored, and so I am pleased and
    honored to be here today. I have got a wife who is a doctor; I
    have been a little under the weather, but I am here. If it were
    my deathbed I would be here, because I think that importance of
    this hearing is so critical.
        How can it be said to be critical? I mean, you are dealing
    with billion, trillion dollar bailouts and collapses of
    economies. My judgment is, how a nation defines itself, how it
    sees its own history--if it gets it right, if we get it right--
    it will do more to solve the toxic mortgage problem than all of
    the bailouts. History is how we understand ourselves and how we
    move on in the future.
        And so let me say that I am on this panel with men that I
    am just so honored to be with, and I agree with everything they
    have had to say, because a great nation needs to learn from its
    mistakes. If we are blind to our mistakes, we will not remain a
    great nation. And I would say as a Republican, my last
    appearance before a Judiciary Committee came when I opposed
    with all I had in me Bush administration policies that defined
    material support in ways that would require--that treated as
    terrorists women who were forced to wash the clothes of
    terrorist rapists.
        I come here in context of H.R. 1425, and I think it is
    very, very important to indicate that we learn from history
    only if there is balance, not prejudgment; if there is
    scholarship, not anecdotal work. And that is why I am here to
    talk about Section 101 of the bill, the one that deals with the
    German, Italian, European Commission.
        I would get off my sacred deathbed to ask this Committee to
    delete or oppose that provision, and here is why: That
    provision profoundly ignores context. You read the findings, it
    is as if we never fought World War II; it is as if we were
    never vulnerable to lose World War II.
        Doctors talk about a retrospectoscope; everyone is perfect
    when they have one, but there is no balance there. And there
    are no facts as one looks at that hearing--at that provision.
    The bill ignores, it blurs the treatment between enemy alien
    citizens of Germany and Italy and the United States citizens.
        Its numbers are wildly skewed. One looks at numbers like
    300,000. We don't know what the numbers are but we can, I
    think, fairly be confident that the numbers in the findings
    section are not accurate.
        The bill also ignores the fact that in context, we were
    looking at, as I am sure John Fonte has indicated, brownshirt
    and blackshirt and Bund organizations that were rampant
    throughout the United States. I grew up in the Bronx, and I
    have got to tell you that my Italian friends--and most of them
    were Italian--would not have given hearings, however imperfect
    they may have been, and appeals to many of the people who were
    interned; they would have had them executed. And I note that
    the bill talks about that they love this blessed land, and they
    hated the kinds of people who were actively intimidating in
    support of the Fascists and Nazis who had taken over their own
    home country.
        And so I think that that bill ignores that. It ignores the
    hearing rights that were present. It ignores the spy networks.
    And frankly, having sat on this panel and been moved by it, it
    just offends me so deeply that this bill, inadvertently or
    otherwise, ties America's treatment, imperfect as it was, of
    the enemy aliens with what we did to immigrants seeking to come
    into the United States. Every one of those immigrants would
    have given anything to have been treated twice as badly as we
    treated those enemy aliens.
        Now, the main point I want to make about that commission
    is, its--I will wrap it up--not only its lack of balance, but
    its call for membership. It calls for four members who are
    involved in, who are active in the Italian American and German
    American affairs.
        What we need if we are going to do it right is scholarship,
    and we have talked about Professor Abzug. Let me just close.
    There are two things I want to say.
        One, I don't have the chance to talk about its impact on
    the crisis we now confront with terrorism, but Professor Abzug,
    just before this hearing, asked me--authorized me to say
    something about the scholarship, and Mr. Christgau who--he
    cares--but here is what he had to say, this Regents professor:
    ``As my review stated, the Christgau book is lightly
    researched, anecdotal, and in no way delivers compelling
    evidence of widespread abuse that can be compared to the
    situation of Japanese Americans during the war. In fact, I came
    away from reading the book with the distinct impression that
    abuses were present, but not widespread, on the basis of the
    author's lack of evidence, lack of research and rigor,
    especially when one considers the security context of the
    time.''
        So if you are going to do it, insist that scholars like the
    kinds of scholars who research what Abraham Lincoln did during
    the Civil War, who can provide balance----
        [The prepared statement of Mr. Horowitz follows:]
                     Prepared Statement of Michael Horowitz

                                   __________

        Ms. Lofgren. Mr. Horowitz, your time is expired. We do
    appreciate your testimony, and we appreciate the testimony of
    all of the witnesses.
        At this point we have time for questions, and I would turn
    first to the Ranking Member, Mr. King, to see if he has
    questions for the panel.
        Mr. King. Thank you, Madam Chair, and as I listen to the
    testimony, something occurs to me, was a statement made in the
    Judiciary Committee 2 years ago by one of our Members, who
    said, ``Nazis predominantly were Christians and the Holocaust
    was a Christian tragedy.''
        I would ask first Mr. Harris, would you agree with that?
        Mr. Harris [continuing]. That is going to require a
    separate hearing. I would put it this way, sir: I would say
    that European soil for centuries was tilled by Christian anti-
    Semitism. And when the pagan philosophy of the Nazis, however
    they were born, whatever their baptismal certificate said,
    came, and they pursued the notion of a final solution, they
    found very fertile ground largely because of the result of
    centuries of the teaching of contempt and the imposition of
    everything from forced conversions to inquisitions, and so
    forth. So I would be a little more careful in the wording than
    the question presented, but nonetheless there is a connection.
        Mr. King. And it is a cultural connection rather than
    religiously based. Would you agree with that?
        Mr. Harris. I would agree that the Third Reich did not act
    in the name of Christian faith. To the contrary, there were
    many Christian clergy in countries like Poland who themselves
    were targeted, who were incarcerated in concentration camps,
    and in many cases killed as Christian zealots and others.
        Mr. King. And you had described it as a pagan philosophy.
    Is Nazism a pagan philosophy?
        Mr. Harris. That is the way they themselves would describe
    it.
        Mr. King. As I would too, and I think that point of clarity
    needed to be brought, Mr. Harris. And then, have you in your
    studies--first, I have got great sympathy for this argument
    that here, and I can't put myself into the context of the
    history back in that time, but, you know, I would think that
    bringing the ``St. Louis'' into the United States would be
    something I would like to think I would have approved in a
    heartbeat. This one really is stark, and it stands out to me.
        But I don't think I am hearing the other side of this--the
    balance, the historical balance in this. And that is, the end
    that was put to Nazism by the free world, would you say that--I
    don't want to put words in your mouth, I just wondered, do you
    have a speculation on how many Christians gave their lives to
    end the Nazi Holocaust?
        Mr. Harris. First of all, in my full written testimony,
    Congressman King, I speak about the dramatic issues that
    Franklin Roosevelt faced as President of the United States,
    including a country that itself was largely unwilling to go to
    war after rescuing Europe in the First World War. I give him
    credit for leading this Nation to the realization we would have
    to fight again, and you men particularly--young women as well,
    but primarily young men on the battlefield, and I would add not
    just Christians, but people of all faiths including many Jews--
    500,000 American Jews served in the military--and yes, we
    should never lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day
    the Allies, lead by the United States together with Great
    Britain, and I have to add the Soviet Union, vanquished the
    Nazi dream of a 1,000-year reign; there is no question about
    it.
        Mr. King. I thank you, Mr. Harris, and I think it does take
    another hearing to flesh this out. Myself, I feel the urge to
    go way deep into that history and lay out a lot more of the
    foundation of it.
        I wanted to ask Mr. Bretholz that--I would think there
    would be a bond there, but have you read Victor Frankl's
    writings?
        Mr. Bretholz. Yes.
        Mr. King. And I just, as I listened to your testimony,
    his----
        Mr. Bretholz. He was Viennese, by the way. He was Viennese,
    just like I.
        Mr. King. Yes.
        Mr. Bretholz. I like to say, I am from Vienna, but nothing
    is perfect in life, you know.
        Mr. King. The delivery and the tone in your testimony
    brought that to mind as I listened to you today, and I wanted
    to reference that and ask if you learned anything from his
    search for meaning.
        Mr. Bretholz. If I had what?
        Victor Frankl's search for meaning. Well, it is a text in
    schools now, just like my book has been taken and also is a
    text recently, but it has confirmed everything that I had
    experienced myself. And of course, Victor Frankl had a
    different reaction and he made something positive out of his
    life, while--from Italy, what is the fellow that came--Primo
    Levi was a destroyed man after the camp. Frankl did something
    positive and Primo Levi could not exist after that.
        Mr. King. Thanks, Mr. Bretholz.
        I thank you all for the witness. Mr. Horowitz, if I could--
    --
        Mr. Bretholz. One more thing about Christians.
        Mr. King. Yes.
        Mr. Bretholz. Do you know the late historian, Professor
    Halebrook, said that Hitler's plan to annihilate the Jews was
    the culmination--this comes back to the point of Christians--
    was the culmination of what had happened for centuries. There
    is a book written by a Jesuit priest, Edward H. Flannery, he
    called it ``The Anguish of the Jews''--23 centuries of anti-
    Semitism. But the early missionary said you may not live among
    us as Jews, so the Jews converted. They may be allowed to live.
        Then came the secular Christians, and they said later on in
    the Middle Ages, they said, ``You may not live among us.'' So,
    you may not live among us, so they went into shtetles, in the
    first shtetle in Venice, is an Italian town, and then came
    Hitler and he made it a very simple, short--, ``You may not
    live,'' you know? And this was the culmination of it all.
        Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Bretholz. The gentleman's time
    has expired, and we are about to be called for votes, so I am
    going to ask Ms. Sanchez if she has a question before hearing
    from Mr. Lungren.
        Ms. Sanchez. Well, in the interest of time, because we are
    going to be summoned for votes shortly, I will submit written
    questions for our panelists and some of our previous panelists.
    I just really want to commend all of you for your testimony and
    your bravery in coming forth and sharing your stories, and I
    think that absolutely those that don't study history are doomed
    to repeat it, and I think your stories show that, you know, and
    idealized version of history does nobody any good. We really
    need to examine the good and the bad in the hopes that in the
    future the bad won't be repeated.
        And with that I am going to yield back my time.
        Ms. Lofgren. The gentlelady yields back.
        I would turn to Mr. Lungren to see if he has a question.
        Mr. Lungren. If I could just make a comment, and some may
    think this is a little off, but one person that we don't
    recognize for his greatness during this time is a fellow,
    Dwight D. Eisenhower, for the great contributions he made to
    make sure that we knew that there was a Holocaust and that
    there were concentration camps. He was a Midwestern raw-boned
    American who--justice did his job as he thought he should, and
    we don't give him enough credit for the enormous job he did.
        But secondly, it was his innate goodness and his--horror
    that he found with the concentration camps that lead him to
    make sure that we documented that so that the non-believers and
    the disclaimers would be put to a lie. I know that is not the
    subject of this hearing, but he happens to be one of my heroes,
    and we just don't mention it often enough.
        Thank you.
        Ms. Lofgren. At this point, the bells are going to ring any
    moment. So I would just like to not ask questions but really
    thank, once again, the witnesses, from Mr. Masterson and Ms.
    Shimizu and Ms. Yamamoto, especially those of you who came all
    the way from California to talk about your stories and to
    inform us, this is on the Web. So not only are we looking at
    your testimony here in this room; I think people all over the
    world have had the benefit of what you have said. And hopefully
    this will inform us as we move forward. I am enormously
    grateful for your presence and also the extra efforts that you
    have made over the years.
        For our second panel, I know Mr. Christgau and Ms. Ebel and
    Ms. Donald and, of course, Dr. Fonte, we appreciate your
    approach on the bill, but the personal stories are hard to
    tell. I know that. And that you would share them with us to
    inform us as we proceed means a lot to me and, I think, to all
    of the panel.
        And finally this last panel. Mr. Bretholz, as you were
    speaking I leaned over to Mr. King and said, what a tremendous
    feat of survival and bravery that you were able to share with
    us. And really the history that we have learned, you are right,
    is to inform our future.
        And that is really what we are talking about with all of
    this. We can't undo the past, but we can try to understand our
    history, to acknowledge when mistakes were made--only a big
    country can do that--and to learn so that we can be a better
    country going forward.
        So I want to thank each of you for being here today and for
    your tremendous efforts. We will keep the hearing record open.
    If Members have additional questions we would ask that they
    would be submitted to you and that you respond to them within
    the--saved by the bell, yes, those bells there are to let us
    know that our presence is required on the House floor, so we
    will adjourn this meeting asking Members to submit additional
    questions within 5 days. And thanks to all of you.
        This hearing is adjourned.
        [Whereupon, at 2:15 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
                                A P P E N D I X

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                   Material Submitted for the Hearing Record

     Prepared Statement of the Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Representative in
    Congress from the State of California, and Chairwoman, Subcommittee on
    Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International
                                      Law
        I would like to welcome the Subcommittee Members, the public, and
    especially our witnesses, many of whom have come from all over the
    country to share a part of U.S. history that many of us are unfamiliar
    with. Some of our witnesses will tell us deeply personal stories that
    are very difficult to share and I would like thank them for being here
    today to provide this important part of history for us.
        Much is known about the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans
    during World War II, partly due to the enactment of the Commission on
    Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians Act in 1980, the
    Commission's report in 1983, and the subsequent Civil Liberties Act of
    1988 that provided an official apology for the internment of Japanese
    Americans. What is not as well known today is the mistreatment of
    thousands of Japanese and European Latin Americans, European Americans,
    and Jewish refugees prior to and during WWII.
        The 1980 Commission did detail the mistreatment of Japanese,
    German, and Italian Latin Americans, but only in the appendix of their
    report. It also included just one chapter of thirteen on mistreatment
    of German and Italian Americans in the U.S. Furthermore, no
    recommendations were made on these populations and there was no
    official apology, as was done for Japanese internment, pursuant to the
    Civil Liberties Act of 1988.
        It is time for this history to be fully heard and considered.
        I would like to note that although there are two bills that have
    been referred to this subcommittee concerning the issues we are
    examining today, this is NOT a legislative hearing. Before we consider
    specific legislation on an issue that many are very unfamiliar with,
    indeed, our general history books are sparse in this area, it is
    important that we learn the facts and listen to the history to
    determine whether legislation is the appropriate response. If it is, we
    will then turn to the bills referred to this subcommittee and examine
    whether the specific language in the bills is appropriate or whether
    amendments are needed. I welcome comments on the bills and will
    consider them if we decide to move legislation in this area. Today,
    however, I am particularly interested in learning about the issue and
    whether another commission is indeed necessary to review history that
    has not been told in an adequate way.

    Prepared Statement of the Honorable John Conyers, Jr., a Representative
    in Congress from the State of Michigan, and Chairman, Committee on the
                                   Judiciary
        Reconciliation and justice can only come after the truth is known,
    and as commissions of inquiry have played important roles in the United
    States and abroad. Today, we are going to look at how the US Government
    undertook broad sweeps against perceived ``enemy aliens'' after an
    attack on our country. But unlike hearings we've held on rendition,
    detention, and mass round-ups in the wake of the September 11 attacks,
    today we're going to look at the government's actions during World War
    II. Let me lay the playing field as I see it:
        First, there is a consensus that the Commission on Wartime
    Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s was particularly
    effective in confronting the historical record of the arrest and
    internment without due process of Japanese Americans during the Second
    World War. The work of that commission which led to an official apology
    and some measure of restitution for the victims of internment.
        Second, despite the good work of that commission, there is
    additional history involving other populations that were also
    mistreated during World War II that have not been sufficiently
    examined. This history involves the rendition of thousands of Japanese
    and European Latin Americans to the United States for incarceration,
    the internment of at least 1,500 German and Italian-Americans, and the
    callous rejection by consular and immigration officials of Jewish
    asylum seekers seeking to flee Nazi oppression.
        There are several bills being circulated in Congress for
    commissions of inquiry into these matters, and today's hearing will
    help us weigh those proposals.
        Third, what we do today will not substitute for sustained study
    that grapples with the hard questions of what America does with
    minority communities in a time of war. While we can shine a little bit
    of light today on these unfortunate chapters in our history, one
    hearing is just part of the historical conversation.
        We have seen this in other areas--the Committee's oversight
    hearings on rendition, torture, surveillance, and racial profiling of
    Arab communities have had an impact on American policy, but they are no
    substitute for a truth and reconciliation inquiry into abuses in the
    name of the war on terror.
        So too, legislation that we passed in the 110th Congress
    commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Slave Trade Act and to
    provide new tools to enforce the 13th amendment's guarantee of freedom
    do not take the place of a commission that would help us confront the
    ongoing effect of chattel slavery on this nation.
        So I am looking forward to hearing from our witnesses today, and
    participating in the ongoing conversation about how we can preserve the
    rights of ethnic minorities and refugees in wartime, so that these
    tragic episodes are not repeated.

           Prepared Statement of the Honorable Sheila Jackson Lee, a
        Representative in Congress from the State of Texas, and Member,
     Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security,
                             and International Law
        Thank you Madam Chairwoman for convening today's very important
    hearing where we will consider, ``The Treatment of Latin Americans of
    Japanese Descent, European Americans, and Jewish Refugees During World
    War II.'' This hearing explores the treatment of Latin Americans of
    Japanese descent. In addition, there are other populations mistreated
    during WWII whose histories have not been fully examined by the Federal
    Government in a similar manners as the histories of the Japanese and
    Italian Americans mistreated during WWII.
        The Japanese, German, and Italian American communities have
    advocated for an official government study of the mistreatment of their
    communities in Latin America by the U.S. government in a similar manner
    as was completed for Japanese Americans interned during WWII.
        The mistreatment of Japanese Latin Americans is the subject of H.R.
    42, a bill that has been referred to this subcommittee. H.R. 42
    establishes a fact-finding Commission to extend the study of the
    Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians to
    investigate and determine facts and circumstances surrounding
    relocation, internment, and deportation to Axis countries of Latin
    Americans of Japanese descent from 1941 to 1948, and the impact of
    those actions by the U.S., and to recommend appropriate remedies. The
    mistreatment of German and Italian Latin Americans is the subject of
    H.R. 1425. In addition, the mistreatment of Jewish refugees during WWII
    is the subject of H.R. 1425.
        Today we have distinguished panelists on three separate panels. I
    look forward to hearing today's testimony and hearing from each of the
    witnesses on this topic.
        Chairwoman, thank you, again. I yield the balance of my time.

                  Additional Material submitted for the Record

    --------
    Note: Due to the voluminous amount of material submitted, only a
    portion is being published in this hearing. All material submitted is
    on file with the Subcommittee.

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