American Passage (47 page)

Ezio Pinza’s story was just one of thousands. By September 1942, some 6,800 aliens of German, Japanese, and Italian ancestry had been arrested by the Justice Department. Of those, half were quickly released or paroled, like Pinza. The other half remained in detention, including the Neupert family. In the summer of 1942, Emma Neupert was taken to Ellis Island as an enemy alien. Her husband, George, was a naturalized U.S. citizen and her nine-year-old daughter, Rose Marie, was a U.S. citizen by birth. By December, Rose Marie was taken to Ellis Island to be with her mother. A few months later George had his citizenship revoked, and he too found himself in detention with his wife and child.

Young Rose Marie remembers that the internees spent most of their days in the Great Hall of the main building, which by 1942 had become “dingy, dirty, and grey with age.” To make matters worse, “every time anything would be moved, the roaches would scurry about.” The food was “almost inedible.” At night, Rose Marie shared a small dormitory room crowded with eight women and two children. During the daytime, the female detainees crocheted, knitted, and sewed to pass the time.

Most of the detainees would be transferred from Ellis Island to other internment camps throughout the country. Many would be joined by their spouses and children—some of whom were American citizens like Rose Marie—who voluntarily agreed to be detained with their family. The Neuperts were sent to a camp in Crystal City, Texas. Other Ellis Island detainees, including William Gerald Bishop, were taken to Fort Lincoln in Bismarck, North Dakota.

The end of the war in the summer of 1945 should have meant the release of the remaining enemy aliens. However, that was not to be. In July 1945, President Harry S. Truman issued Presidential Proclamation 2655, which ordered that all enemy aliens presently detained and found “to be dangerous to the public peace and safety of the United States” be deported. Most of these so-called enemy aliens challenged their deportation orders.

By March 1946, Ellis Island was again filled with enemy aliens, as the government closed down other internment camps around the country and shipped the remaining detainees back to New York, where they waited for the resolution of their cases. Officials from the Red Cross and the State Department inspected the facilities at Ellis Island and found them wanting. The old inspection station was inadequate to hold so many people for such an indefinite period. Morale among detainees was low, their futures uncertain, and a growing number were in need of psychiatric help.

One of those not holding up well under the strain was Helene Hackenberg. She had arrived in the United States from Germany in 1926 and married a fellow immigrant named Rudolf in 1937. Both were accused of belonging to pro-Nazi organizations. Rudolf was arrested in January 1943 and Helene in November of that year, and both taken to Ellis Island. From there they were sent to the Crystal City camp and then transferred back to Ellis Island in early 1946. They would remain there for two and a half years while they fought their deportation orders. Although that time was punctuated by a number of paroles to arrange personal affairs, as well shopping trips for female detainees to Fifth Avenue stores, Helene’s depression deepened and she began talking of suicide.

Hundreds of these enemy aliens remained at Ellis Island while they petitioned the courts to cancel their deportation back to war-ravaged Germany. As months went by, their cases lingered in the courts. At the beginning of 1947, almost a year and a half after the cessation of all military conflict, over three hundred still remained at Ellis Island, including William Gerald Bishop, who had been transferred back to New York from North Dakota after the war. For some of them, repatriation would have meant living in Soviet-occupied Germany where, one detained couple feared, they would “be placed in a concentration camp where we will be held indefinitely.”

The Fuhr family arrived at Ellis Island from Crystal City in 1947. Carl and Anna Fuhr had come to America from Germany in the 1920s, bringing their sons, Julius and Eberhard. They settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the family added a third son, Gerhard. The Fuhrs never became U.S. citizens. Like a number of nonnaturalized Germans, they came to the attention of the FBI in 1940, when informants, many of them anonymous, accused Carl of being a member of the GermanAmerican Bund and the Friends of New Germany, of being a strong critic of the United States and supporter of Hitler, and, of saying that his oldest son would return to Germany to “fight for Hitler.”

The Fuhrs remained free until the summer of 1942, but more reports had filtered into the FBI by that time. Carl and Anna were arrested in August 1942 and sent to an internment camp in Texas along with their youngest son, the American-born Gerhard. Julius and Eberhard joined the family at the camp in March 1943.

While in custody, the family continued to make statements that reinforced the government’s decision to hold them. Julius and Eberhard told authorities they would refuse to serve in the U.S. military. The senior Fuhr, according to officials, possessed “the mind of a man who continues to believe in the Nazis,” while Julius was found to be “completely Nazi.” In keeping with Truman’s postwar orders on German detainees, the family was ordered repatriated back to Germany in the spring of 1946.

However, the family had changed its mind about America and decided to fight the deportation order. They argued that their recalcitrance while in custody was due in part to their anger at the internment. They slowly came to discover that they were more American than German and wanted to remain in the country. The uncertainty of returning to war-devastated Germany no doubt also played into the family’s desire to remain in the United States.

By 1947, the family was transferred to Ellis Island to await deportation. Eberhard Fuhr remembers the facility as “cramped, dirty and stultifying.” Despite the poor conditions, the Fuhrs made a favorable impression on authorities. “A definite reformation has taken place,” according to one report. By now, it was more than two years after the end of hostilities in Europe and more than two hundred individuals, including the Fuhrs, were still being held in custody.

These men and women found a champion in the form of Senator William Langer of North Dakota, who convinced Justice Department officials to form a committee to hear the cases of those still stuck in political and legal limbo at Ellis Island. Throughout the summer of 1947, Langer made several trips to Ellis Island with the committee and held hearings for every single German detainee.

Langer introduced a bill in Congress to cancel the deportation orders of 207 German detainees, including Rudolf and Helene Hackenberg, George Neupert, and the Fuhr family. The bill stalled in Congress, but at the end of the summer of 1947 the Fuhrs managed to secure their release from Ellis Island and headed back to Cincinnati to rebuild their lives. They were the exception. Despite Langer’s efforts, by the fall of 1947, some two hundred German enemy alien detainees were still stuck at Ellis Island.

One of those not on Langer’s list was William Gerald Bishop. In fact, Langer had already introduced a separate bill in April 1947 calling for the cancellation of Bishop’s deportation. Not only did Langer believe that Bishop had been deprived of his rights during five years of detention, but he argued that sending enemy aliens like Bishop “to Communist controlled territory would subject them to the purge, enslavement or liquidation, which according to reports being received daily from Europe affect all persons disliked by Communists.” Langer’s efforts failed and Bishop was finally deported back to Austria in October 1947.

As for the remaining German detainees at Ellis Island, in June 1948 the Supreme Court rejected their petitions for release from custody. Defense attorneys had argued that Truman’s proclamation was invalid since the United States was no longer at war with Germany. The Court’s majority was not interested in that issue, but instead decided the case on much narrower grounds, concluding that the habeas corpus petitions were invalid since they were filed in Washington, while the detainees were held in New York.

At the end of June 1948, three years after the end of the war, 182 Germans were still held at Ellis Island, including 9 “voluntary detainees,” American citizens who had joined family members in detention. One couple, Marie and Eugen Zimmerman had actually conceived a child, George, while in detention at Ellis Island.

In the following weeks, government officials would work to settle the cases of these unfortunate individuals. On July 8, fifty-seven detainees lost their fight and were sent back to Germany. A few, including Helene and Rudolf Hackenberg, avoided repatriation by voluntarily leaving for a new life in Argentina. (They would finally receive visas to reenter the United States in 1960.) Most of the remaining detainees were released or paroled from Ellis Island and allowed to restart their lives in America, including the Zimmerman family and George Neupert, who was now able to rejoin his wife and daughter. By August 1948, the government had disposed of all the cases of detained German enemy aliens at Ellis Island with the exception of Frederick Bauer, a former U.S. Army sergeant arrested in late 1945 and charged with being a German spy.

Although exact numbers vary, the FBI arrested over thirty thousand German, Japanese, and Italian enemy aliens during the war. Roughly one-third were interned in government camps for some period of time, including a few thousand German and Japanese nationals deported from Latin America to the United States for detention.

By 1948, German enemy aliens had become an anachronism. The enemies of the previous war—Germans—were evolving into new allies, while the allies of the last war—Communists—had become the new enemies. Those last few German detainees at Ellis Island in June 1948 found themselves sharing quarters with men like Gerhard Eisler, Irving Potash, and John Williamson, Communists who were detained and ordered deported for their politics. The Cold War had begun, but the intersection of national security and immigration would continue to run through Ellis Island.

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at war in the fall of 1950, this time on the peninsula of Korea, Congress passed the Internal Security Act. Spearheaded by Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, the law would force Communists and other subversives in the United States to register with the federal government.

The bill also granted government greater powers to exclude aliens from the United States. Going beyond already existing laws banning anarchists and Communists, the new law would bar all those who not only advocated totalitarianism but were affiliated with any organization that advocated any form of totalitarianism.

President Truman came out strongly against the bill. On September 22, he gave a lengthy explanation of his reasons for vetoing it. He said there was no need for changes regarding the admission of aliens since the present law was already strong enough to keep out suspected subversives and Communists. He also warned that the bill would require the government to bar foreigners from “friendly, non-Communist countries” such as Spain. Refusing to heed Truman’s warnings, both the House and Senate overrode his veto by overwhelming majorities.

Embarrassed at having his veto soundly overridden, Truman decided to get even with his congressional opponents. In a fit of pique, the president declared that if Congress wanted such a law, his administration would strictly enforce it. Attorney General J. Howard McGrath ordered that the Internal Security Act be applied not just to members of the Nazi, Communist, or Fascist Parties, but to anyone who had ever been forced to join such organizations, “regardless of whether or not he may now be harmless, anti-totalitarian, pro-American, or the circumstances under which he was a member.” Five years after the end of the war, Germans, Austrians, Italians, and other Europeans who may have been forced to join Nazi or fascist organizations were now barred from entry.

Ellis Island once again found itself in the firing line. Twenty-yearold Viennese pianist Friedrich Gulda, who would later become a renowned avant-garde musician, was one of the first detained under the new law because he had belonged to the Nazi Youth as a preteen during the war. He was in New York for his Carnegie Hall debut.

Gulda arrived at Idlewild Airport in Queens shortly before midnight on October 6. After being detained at the airport and questioned, he was taken to Ellis Island in the early morning hours. It was unclear whether Gulda would ever make it to Carnegie Hall. At Ellis Island, he practiced on an old piano until Steinway & Sons received permission to send a concert grand piano to the island. After three days in detention, Gulda was released and was able to perform at his concert. He was given until the end of the month to stay in the country, but left shortly after his concert.

The Metropolitan Opera was concerned that eight of its singers for the fall season would be barred from the country. One of them was Fedora Barbieri, a twenty-five-year-old Italian mezzo-soprano heading for her debut in Verdi’s
Don Carlo.
She was briefly held at Ellis Island because as a young girl she had attended Fascist schools in Italy. Of course every Italian schoolchild in the 1930s and early 1940s had gone to Fascist-controlled schools. Victor de Sabata, the conductor at Milan’s La Scala, was also temporarily detained at Ellis Island. Even the great conductor Arturo Toscanini was questioned, though he escaped detention and was allowed to land.

The law also affected average Americans recently married to Europeans. For seven months, Arthur Sweberg, an American serviceman living in New York, had to live apart from his new bride, a German national who had been a member of the Nazi Youth as a child. Josephine Mazzeo, of Evanston, Illinois, married an Italian national in October 1949. Because of the new law, her Italian husband could not enter the country because he had belonged to a Fascist youth organization during the war.

George Voskovec watched this whole scene unfold before him. The forty-five-year-old Czech playwright and actor had been held at Ellis Island since May 1950, before the passage of the new law. Voskovec had lived in the United States from the late 1930s until the end of the war and was married to an American. He had been a vocal anti-Nazi and worked for the Office of War Information during the war. Upon returning to America in May 1950 to apply for citizenship, he was detained at Ellis Island. Authorities were concerned that Voskovec had been allowed to leave Communist Czechoslovakia legally, setting off alarm bells as to his political sympathies. Now he was joined on Ellis Island by hundreds of other suspected subversives.