The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (15 page)

Kuhn was convicted of all charges and sentenced to two and
a half to five years. He served forty-three months. When he was released from Dannemora Prison on June 21, 1943, his American citizenship was revoked and the attorney general’s office formally declared him a dangerous enemy alien. He was transferred first to Ellis Island and then to Crystal City.

In Crystal City, the flamboyance of Kuhn’s strut and the straightness of his six-foot-tall carriage suggested that he was making an effort to ignite the fire of his former bravado. But exhaustion was in his gray eyes, square jaw, and rounded shoulders. In June 1943, Kuhn was reunited in Crystal City with Elsa and his son, Walter Max, a fifteen-year-old with a pallid expression, both of whom had been arrested as enemy aliens. “While Mrs. Kuhn never shared much in the notoriety her husband attained as Bundesfuehrer and uniformed exponent of the Nazi ideals,” reported the
New York Times
, “she has admitted membership in the Friends of New Germany, and attendance at various social functions of the Bund, which succeeded the Friends as the outstanding pro-Nazi organization in this country.” According to the same newspaper article, Walter was apprehended because he was active in the Bund’s youth movement.

One of Elsa’s first acts in Crystal City was to ask O’Rourke if he could help her find news of her daughter, Waltraut, who had returned to Germany from America in 1938 and married a German soldier. No one in the family had heard from her since. O’Rourke made note of Elsa’s request in his file, but did not follow through. He had no incentive to help her because, since his arrival, Kuhn had acquired a small group of followers.

Within a few weeks of Kuhn’s arrival, O’Rourke had a letter of complaint on his desk from Therese Hohenreiner, one of the internees, claiming that Kuhn was in charge of the German internees at Crystal City and had bullied her. She copied the letter to the FBI agent in charge in San Antonio. The agent, R. C. Suran, wrote to O’Rourke and asked if it was true that Kuhn had “maneuvered himself into a position as unofficial spokesman for the other German internees.”

By this time, the population of the camp numbered 523 internees—378 Germans and 145 Japanese. The original idea that the camp would be mainly for Japanese had been abandoned. Given the friction among the Germans, there was safety in not buying trouble. Most of the teenagers, including Ingrid, didn’t know what to make of Kuhn.

Eberhard E. Fuhr, commonly known as Eb, was seventeen years old when he and his family arrived in Crystal City in July 1943, one month after the Kuhns were reunited there. Eb’s experience was typical of that of the other German teenagers in camp. His parents immigrated to the United States with their two sons, Eb and Julius, in the late 1920s. At the time Germany was embroiled in political and economic conflict, and Eb’s father decided to leave to escape communism. As German immigrants, legal residents of the United States but not citizens, the Fuhr family settled in Cincinnati. A third son, Gerhard, was born
in August 1942. Both of Eb’s parents—Carl, a baker, and Anna, a housewife—had been arrested and interned, along with Gerhard, a citizen of the United States. “Had my brother Gerhard not joined my parents, he would have been sent to an orphanage, a fate shared by other internee children,” Eb recalled.

After the arrest of his parents, Eb and Julius were left to fend for themselves. Eb, a senior at Woodward High School and a popular football star, supported himself with an early-morning newspaper route. His older brother, Julius, dropped out of college and went to work in a Cincinnati brewery.

“On March twenty-third, 1943, while I was in class, the principal came in and asked me to step out in the hallway,” recalled Eb. “I stepped out and two FBI guys grabbed me.” He was escorted to his locker and retrieved his football letter sweater. On the street, the FBI agents placed him in handcuffs, and then drove to the brewery where his brother worked. Julius was arrested and handcuffed as well. “I was just seventeen years old. I never returned to school and did not graduate with my class. In fact my picture was expunged from the
yearbook,” recalled Eb. “I lost many of my personal belongings that day, but also my dignity.”

Eb never understood the motive for his or his brother’s arrest. Like their parents, the brothers weren’t American citizens. Their father, Carl, had not pursued American citizenship because in the struggle to support his family he had neither the time nor the money to go through naturalization. Eb’s mother, Anna, expected to inherit property in Germany from her mother and didn’t pursue citizenship either. Their older sons followed their lead. But the FBI files show no complaints about the Fuhr brothers prior to the arrest of their parents. After their arrests, a Lutheran minister expressed concern that the boys needed assistance and supervision. Eb has two theories on why they were arrested: the government wanted to use them to expand the pool of potential repatriates in the family camp in Crystal City, and as a signal to other Germans and German Americans in Cincinnati that they, too, were in danger of internment.

The day after their arrest, Eb and Julius were taken in handcuffs to the Civilian Alien Hearing Board in the Federal Building and faced five people—the same people who’d interned their parents seven months before. Eb was asked a question he found ridiculous: “What would you say to your German cousin if he came to you for sanctuary after coming up the Ohio River in his German U-boat?”

“I’d say that a sub couldn’t come up the Ohio River,” replied Eb. “It only drafts four feet.”

After the hearing, the two brothers were taken to the Cincinnati Workhouse, which served as a jail for errant, poor children and adolescents. Guards placed Eb and Julius in small, separate cells. Each cell had a bucket for a toilet. After the doors clanged shut, other prisoners began yelling, “Nazis! Krauts! Huns!” A few days later, they were transferred to a detention center in Chicago, and then taken to Crystal City on a heavily guarded train filled with other German internees. “I was so happy to be reunited with my parents and younger brother,” said Eb. “But the conditions there were harsh. The temperature was well over a hundred degrees, and the
camp was crawling with insects and scorpions. Our living space was barely tolerable. The fences were high and there were guards every fifty feet with guns. I was at a loss to understand why I was in prison for the crime of being born to German parents.”

Kuhn was still in Crystal City when the Fuhr brothers arrived. Eb, like Ingrid, didn’t know what to make of him. Perhaps he was a Nazi, as the government said. Perhaps he wasn’t. “Anyone could be called a Nazi based on rumors,” Eb recalled. “It’s impossible to convey the intense terror I felt that spring and the hopelessness.” In Crystal City, Eb and his brother Julius played on a soccer team. Kuhn’s son, Walter, played soccer as well, on a team with younger players. Eb remembered him as a shy boy who lived in the shadow of his father.

By the summer of 1943, Kuhn had been knocked off his pedestal of power. For all his pomposity, he was little more than a caricature of his former self. After so many years in the limelight—his face a page-one fixture in New York newspapers—the stark reality of exile in Crystal City must have been a shock. The stillness and silence of the desert would constantly have reminded him that the noisy glare of fame was far behind him.

•  •  •

In his office in Philadelphia, Harrison received reports from O’Rourke about the smoldering unrest in the German section left over from the flag controversy of the previous April. By the summer of 1943, internees in America—as well as in Japan and Europe—were considered valuable assets in the prosecution of the war. Harrison understood that the treatment of German and Japanese enemy aliens and their families in Crystal City would directly affect how Americans were treated in Germany and in Japan. Reports from the State Department documented the suffering and malnourishment that Americans suffered in Axis camps. Often the abuse of Americans was meted out in “reprisal” for reports of mistreatment of Axis prisoners in the United States. If news of the flag controversy was taken out of context in Germany, Harrison understood German reprisals against American internees would be inevitable.

A confidential memo went out from Harrison’s office to all INS employees: “It is particularly important that officers and employees fully realize that our work is an important part of our national war effort, and that a grave responsibility rests upon each of us because we constantly make the case for reciprocity in securing equally fair and humane treatment of OUR civil and military personnel held in the custody of enemy nations.”

To make that case for reciprocity, in Crystal City, Harrison treated the flag controversy with caution. The guards were not punished for losing their tempers and destroying the German flag. The threat of reprisal was too great. Besides, the guards in Crystal City were not professionally trained Border Patrol agents, as it was difficult to attract career Border Patrol agents or other employees to the isolated Crystal City camp. The closest movie theater or shopping center was 120 miles away in San Antonio.

O’Rourke’s task was to build and operate a “humane” camp in a desolate part of America with employees who had little or no training for their positions. Most of those he hired—clerks, secretaries, accountants, security guards—were native to Crystal City and the surrounding area. Life in Crystal City, as in all of Texas, was highly segregated. No “Negroes,” as the employment manual referred to African Americans, were hired; the few Mexican Americans employed at the camp were maids and stoop laborers. When Mabel B. Ellis, a social worker from New York, visited Crystal City, she filed a report to Harrison that concluded, “Because of the isolated location of Crystal City, the employees of the internment camp have relatively little more freedom than the internees behind the fence.”

But at least the employees were not caged. Employees came and went through the front gates. Guards inspected their cars, a mild nuisance that gradually became routine. For internees, such as Ingrid, the reality of internment was the constant presence of the barbed wire. “The confinement was crushing,” Ingrid said. Armed guards manned six guard towers, located on each corner of the camp. An
internal security force patrolled both Japanese and German sections of the camp. The surveillance was constant. Mostly, Ingrid remembered how unimaginably hot it was that summer. At midday, temperatures regularly reached 115 degrees. She wondered how long she and her family would be there. The phrase that came to her was
for the duration
. Time felt suspended.

Daily life in Crystal City was highly regimented. Every morning the American flag was raised in ceremony, outside the fence. As the camp awakened, sleepy night guards relinquished their posts to daytime guards. Censors fluent in German and Japanese read the incoming mail of internees and cut out portions that related in any way to the war effort. Internees were allowed to write only two letters and one postcard per week, which were censored. Officials kept dossiers on each internee, and a small police force patrolled the camp. At the front gate, vehicles of visitors were searched, both upon entry and exit.

The roll calls seemed endless. Three times a day a whistle blew and all had to run back to their cottages and huts, form lines, show their faces, and stand still for the count in the presence of armed guards. Prisoners met visitors—friends or relatives—in a hut where surveillance officers stood watch. As for escape, everyone knew the penalty was death, and in the camp’s history—from December 12, 1942, until February 27, 1948—no one ever risked it.

As a productive distraction, O’Rourke had a large reservoir converted into a swimming pool that would provide irrigation water for the camp farm, as well as for the flowers and gardens that had sprung up in both the Japanese and German quadrants. According to camp records, Italian internee Elmo Zannoi, a civil engineer and one of six Italians in camp, designed the pool. German internee Hans Zerbe surveyed the site.

However, Johanna told her children that Mathias, also a civil engineer, designed the pool. “In fact,” recalled Ensi, “she told us the pool was his idea.” Mathias must have helped with the design, because he spent much of the summer and fall at work on the pool.
Ingrid, then thirteen, and seven-year-old Lothar positioned themselves near the reservoir at the back of the camp, directly opposite the front gate, and followed the progress of the work from the water’s edge.

The first step was to dredge the existing reservoir. Lavender-colored water hyacinths choked the reservoir with their long, spongy stalks. The Germans provided most of the slow, difficult labor, using shovels and wheelbarrows to remove the mud.

One afternoon, Ingrid and Lothar watched as teams of workers brought two fifty-five-gallon drums to the banks. Armed with long-handled sticks with hooks on the ends, the men waded into the muddy water and fished out snakes, many of them deadly water moccasins. The grotesque sight of the fat bodies of the snakes writhing in the air terrified Ingrid. She and Lothar watched rapt as the men dropped the snakes into the large drums. After the job was done, the men took out hunting knives, split the snakes, gathered the skins, and spread them in the hot sun to dry. Later, the men made belts out of these skins.

It took six months to complete the pool, a gleaming, giant oval 250 feet in diameter with a shallow end for young children. After concrete was poured into the space, the pool was filled with clean water, the water dark at the deep end. The internees had created an oasis in the drought-ridden landscape. If Egypt had the Nile, Crystal City had the swimming pool—something concrete, literally and metaphorically, that made life more bearable.

For Ingrid, the swimming pool presented an emotional conflict. The long hours she spent there, watching over Lothar and Ensi, were a glorious respite from the heat. Yet she remembered that Mathias had always planned to build a swimming pool on the top of the homestead in Strongsville. To him, a swimming pool was a symbol of American acceptance and affluence. But the pool he helped build for Crystal City was altogether different: a symbol of internment, as palpable as the flag.