The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange (12 page)

But neither Ennis nor Hoover’s FBI gave up. Agents filed two more reports against Eiserloh, one on January 23 and another on January 31. After those reports, the board reconsidered, without Eiserloh present, and recommended his internment. On February 11, 1942, Hoover wrote to Ennis, stating that Eiserloh was “pro-Nazi” and should be interned.

The following day, Biddle issued orders from Washington that made Eiserloh an official enemy alien. His official documents were stamped
PRISONER OF WAR
. Under a provision modeled on the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798, Roosevelt’s three proclamations—Number 2525 on December 7, 1941, and Numbers 2526 and 2527—allowed for the arrest and internment of enemy aliens during war. The proclamations stated, “All natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of [Japan, Germany, and Italy], being of the age of fourteen and upward, who shall be in the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed as alien enemies.” Eiserloh was an enemy by virtue of his German citizenship, and the FBI viewed him as a security threat. He was not alone.
During the war, Roosevelt interned 31,275 enemy aliens: 10,905 Germans, 16,849 Japanese, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 5 Bulgarians, 25 Romanians, and 161 more listed as “others.”

On March 4, 1942, Eiserloh was transferred to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, a sixty-thousand-acre Army base, which had been converted to a prisoner-of-war camp. Johanna had received no word from him for two months and did not know that he had been classified as a prisoner of war. After he arrived at Camp McCoy, she received a copy of a letter Mathias had written to Biddle, asking for
a rehearing on his case. “I write this to you on behalf of my wife and three little children for whom I have been the sole support,” Mathias told Biddle. “My family has been totally deprived of any means of a livelihood and left alone and isolated. I feel not in the slightest degree guilty of ever having done, or having had any thoughts of doing, anything against the interests or safety of the United States.”

Johanna wrote to Ennis herself and asked why her husband was at Camp McCoy and on what charges he was being held. “If you believe in justice and fair play to three American children, such as you may have yourself, you will have your men check our circumstances and my husband’s case and send him back where he belongs—to his family and to his job, where they will be glad to have him back and where all of us will be an asset, not a liability, to America,” Johanna pleaded.

In response, Ennis explained to Johanna her husband’s legal status—prisoner of war—and that the order of internment signed by Biddle would not be reheard. “We realize that the internment of your husband, or any other alien enemy, is a hardship on the entire family,” wrote Ennis, “but this is not to be considered as important a feature as the protection of the peace and protection of the United States. If we were to consider these hardships in times such as these, the security of our country would be greatly imperiled.”

Ennis justified the arrest and internment, without trial, of internees such as Eiserloh by means of a ruthless but necessary cost-benefit analysis. It was America vs. the Axis powers. Mathias and, by extension, Johanna and his three American-born children were collateral damage. What Ennis did not disclose was that domestic security wasn’t the only motivation for the incarceration of foreign-born immigrants from Axis countries. Ennis was also charged with gathering a pool of enemy aliens for the Special War Problems Division to use as leverage in negotiations with Berlin and Tokyo for American prisoners of war. Neither Mathias nor Johanna realized it yet, but they were already hostages in the much larger scheme of prisoner exchange.

By the time Ingrid turned twelve in May 1942, Johanna had sold the house in Strongsville and moved with the children to Cleveland to live with Klara and Frank and their children. They settled in the basement of the two-story house.

Unable to make sense of her husband’s arrest, Johanna blamed Mathias. “He must have done something to bring all of this down on us,” she told Klara.

Ingrid overheard the conversation and confronted her mother. “How can you doubt him?” Ingrid demanded. “We need to stand by him.”

Despite her anger, Johanna did stand by Mathias. She continued writing letters to Biddle and Ennis. “I think my husband should be allowed to take his share of responsibility and help raise the children, get us all back to health,” she wrote in one letter. She was indignant with the government for incarcerating her husband and resented her husband for abandoning her with the three children.

Summer turned to fall and winter. Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi despised living in Aunt Klara’s basement. Ingrid felt claustrophobic. Nothing seemed to make sense. One night while the family slept, a fire broke out in the basement. The room filled with smoke. The children’s coughing woke Johanna. Ingrid picked up Ensi, then two years old, from her crib and followed Johanna and Lothar upstairs. It was the first vivid memory of Ensi’s life. “I remember the fire and then I remember being upstairs, and Uncle Frank picked me up and tossed me in the air, perhaps he was being playful. What I remember most was being afraid. It is my first memory of fear.”

While his wife and children struggled with the loss of safety in their own home and the difficulty of life in Klara’s house, Mathias also grappled with displacement. That winter of 1943 Mathias was incarcerated at an internment camp near Stringtown, Oklahoma, that was operated by the US Army. When Mathias arrived in a group of 110 Germans, J. T. Carroll, a first lieutenant in the Army and the camp commander, read the list of rules to the prisoners. They would live behind bars in cells with no conversing with the
guards. In the stockade, surrounded by barbed wire, the internees were not allowed to congregate in large groups. No one was allowed to speak after 9:00 p.m. If inmates violated the rules, they would be placed in solitary confinement. Under certain circumstances, such as attempts to escape, Carroll told them, “Internees will be shot.”

The atmosphere was bleak, and Mathias suffered his first bout of what internees during World War II called “the fence sickness” or, in German,
Gitterkrankheit.
After a time of living behind barbed wire and under heavy guard, many inmates, including Mathias, became depressed. As prisoners of war, they had lost control over the major and minor details of their lives. Camp commanders and guards controlled when they went to sleep, when they woke up, what they did for work, and when they showed their faces for the daily count. Every inmate was regularly graded on his or her behavior. Reports were sent to Ennis at the INS.
The report on Mathias at Stringtown gave him favorable ratings on his “general attitude” and his physical condition. Yet he walked around in a daze and was described as “despondent.”

During Mathias’s internment, Stringtown held about 530 German internees. Most prisoners were like Eiserloh—immigrants who had hoped to become US citizens.
In his book
Nazis and Good Neighbors
, the historian Max Paul Friedman wrote that when camp officials refused to allow 531 German internees to salute the Heil Hitler, 15 of that number defied the order. Friedman estimated that about 3 percent of the internees were vocal Nazis, most of them from Latin America. Their German spokesman, Ingo Kalinowsky, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party in Costa Rica. In Stringtown, Kalinowsky used his position to hoard Red Cross packages from Germany and distribute them to fellow Nazis.

Friedman reported that eighteen of the internees in Stringtown were German Jews who had fled persecution in Nazi Germany and moved to Latin America, where some were inadvertently seized in the roundup of enemy aliens. Others were arrested because they refused to supply information on suspected Nazis in Latin America
to American military officers stationed there. Upon their arrival in Stringtown, the eighteen Jewish refugees were confined to a room in a basement of one of the buildings in camp, apparently in a misguided effort to protect them from Nazi prisoners. The irony of German Jews having to be protected from German Nazis in an American internment camp was not lost on the Jews at Stringtown. A few offered testimony to their experience. Wilhelm Heinemann, arrested in Panama, described the particularly tense atmosphere among Jews in Stringtown: “We were told by a certain rabid element that the Jews would be exterminated.” Heinemann said that he and others suffered “extreme mental anguish” that they might be traded for American prisoners of war and sent to death camps in Germany.

Inevitably, the Kafkaesque clash between the Nazis and the Jews had an unsettling effect on other prisoners in the camp, including Mathias. According to his conduct report, Mathias stayed neutral in clashes between different groups. He continued to profess his loyalty to the United States. As months passed, to steady his nerves and pass the time, he made wooden toys for Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi. He imagined designs for future bridges and drew them in a notebook. He continued to press the government for a rehearing of his case.

On April 8, 1943, Mathias wrote to Ennis again, asking why he had not been granted a rehearing. He did not know that internees had no right to appeal. “If possible,” Mathias pleaded, “will you please explain to me the basic facts for my detention so I will be able to defend myself, as I am not aware that I ever in my life have been disloyal to the United States?” This was the riddle that faced the internees. Mathias did not know what his neighbors and coworkers had told the FBI and could not defend himself. It drove him deeper into darkness. “Will you please advise me how I can prove my loyalty to this country? Isn’t my hard work enough?”

Ennis answered that there was nothing Mathias could do to prove his loyalty. “It is not the policy of this Department to disclose the evidence by which an alien enemy was interned,” replied Ennis on
April 17, 1943. “An individual need not have been guilty of subversive activities to warrant his internment if all the facts appear that he may be potentially dangerous to the internal security of our country during the war period.”

Mathias lost his will. He had heard from fellow prisoners that in one camp families of prisoners of war could be reunited in exchange for agreeing to repatriate to Germany. It was a difficult choice. He would be offering not only himself and his wife but also his three American-born children as ransom for American soldiers and civilians in Germany. He would be relinquishing his commitment to making a life for all of them in America. Who knew what the conditions would be inside Germany? The Nazis were likely to view the Eiserloh family as enemy Americans, while the Americans already saw them as German enemies. He worried about Johanna’s health and knew he had no way to provide for his family. He questioned his own mental stamina. The fence sickness worsened. “By the law of all humanity and the sake of my family,” he asked Ennis, “please have my wife and children sent into a family camp to be interned together with me at the earliest possible date.” That camp was located in Crystal City, Texas.

From her hard seat, thirteen-year-old Ingrid Eiserloh stared out the window as the Missouri-Pacific Railroad Company train pulled out of the station in Cleveland, Ohio. It was early morning, just past dawn. As the train snaked slowly along Lake Erie, Ingrid watched the morning sun fall along the water’s edge. She wore a cotton pinafore, a white cotton shirt, and a pair of scuffed Mary Jane shoes. Pinned to her collar was a family identification card. She closed her eyes and listened to the rocking of the train. Ingrid had last seen her father, Mathias, eighteen months before. Another two days, she told herself, and then she’d see him again. Only two more days.

She and her mother, Johanna, seven-year-old brother Lothar, and two-year-old sister Ensi, were confined with several other German mothers and their American-born children in a special passenger car bound for Texas, where they would be reunited with their husbands and fathers. In the car the guards, plainclothes agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, with long-barreled rifles and handguns on their hips, walked the aisle. They called out the family names of the passengers in the car: Eiserlohs, Gerrigans, Rotterings. One by one, the mothers, including Johanna, acknowledged they were on board.

Lothar’s eyes followed the rifles. Ingrid tried to distract him with a game of cards. But Lothar’s gaze remained fixed on the guards and
their weapons. Finally, Ingrid picked up Ensi in her arms and said to Lothar, “Let’s go to the dining car.”

During the long months of her husband’s internment, Johanna had petitioned the government many times, pleading with officials to tell her when or if Mathias would be released. Her questions went unanswered. She now believed that Mathias would be imprisoned until the end of the war, whenever that would be. Each passing month her children, especially Ingrid, missed their father more.

Finally Johanna asked the Department of Justice to allow the family to be reunited with Mathias in the family camp in Crystal City, what the Justice Department described as “voluntary internment.” As an enemy alien, Mathias’s official status was “involuntary.” Johanna understood that although she and her American-born children would enter the camp in Crystal City of their own free will, they would not be free to leave at will. Once inside the barbed-wire fence, they, too, would be prisoners, living under constant surveillance by armed guards. All of their mail would be censored, and even Lothar’s comic books would be inspected for coded messages. They would be subject to daily inspections. Still, Johanna felt she had no other choice, no other way to sustain herself and her children. It was better for the family to be together in a prison camp than separated.

Prior to the trip, Eleanor Neff, a social worker in Cleveland’s public relief agency, argued in memorandums to her supervisors that Johanna was not physically or emotionally strong enough to manage the rigors of the trip with the three children. Johanna now weighed less than a hundred pounds and was partially paralyzed on the left side due to the injuries she’d suffered when the intruder broke into her home. The months of living with her children in her sister-in-law’s basement had taken their toll.