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This article appeared in the Booser Sun-Times of Lake View, North Center, Roscoe Village and Avondale on April 2, 2007. German-Americans recall war internmentBy PATRICK BUTLER Staff Writer Eberhard Fuhr is about the last person you'd think of as a dangerous enemy alien. But the 82-year-old retired salesman and longtime pillar of DANK (German American National Congress) Haus, 4740 N. Lincoln Ave., was apparently once considered dangerous enough that he and his family were rounded up during World War II and quietly interned along with an estimated 10,000 other Germans, many of them American citizens. Fuhr, in fact, was pulled out of his Cincinnati High School classroom in 1943 and eventually brought to a commandeered Chicago mansion turned into a detention center for some 25 other men who had never been charged with a crime or allowed to see a lawyer. Even in custody he was still so law-abiding he tried to sign up for the draft, as required. "I certainly didn't want to be locked up for failure to register," he chuckled. Fuhr spoke at a DANK Hause event on March 28 held to help educate and create awareness about the internment of German and Italian-Americans in the United States and the importance of remembering and understanding history. In the days after Pearl Harbor, a handful of women were also being held incommunicado on the grounds of the House of the Good Shepherd, then a school for dependent girls at 1126 W. Grace St., according to the German American Internee Coalition and the St. Paul, Minn.-based Traces traveling museum. Incredibly, Fuhr says he didn't begrudge being interned during the war itself. "A nation has a right and obligation to protect itself in times of peril, but I resented every day they held us for two-and-a-half years after the end of the war" when he was finally released from a camp in Crystal City, Texas, long after the last Japanese- or Italian-American detainees were sent home. But unlike the surviving Japanese-American internees who eventually received $20,000 and an official apology, Fuhr says Germans like himself aren't looking for reparations at this point, "but we do want it studied to determine if this should be the policy. And if so, how to do it without violating the civil rights of those involved." Fuhr said that while his family lost everything as a result of their internment, "I'm one of the lucky guys. I didn't have a house or career to lose." Another group of often-forgotten victims, he said, are the organizations and German-language newspapers that were wiped out because their membership and subscriber lists had been confiscated by the government, to help select those who were to be arrested. Looking back, Fuhr still wonders how some were interned while others - often in the same family - were never hassled by authorities. Both Fuhr and Michael Luick Thrams, curator of the St. Paul, Minn.-based Traces traveling museum which arranged Fuhr's appearance during a recent stop at DANK Haus, agree there were undoubtedly some Nazi sympathizers among the internees -- like a Milwaukee woman who kept a picture of Hitler in her house or members of local German-American Bunds like the one that met at Haus Vaterland on Western and Byron. They added, however, that there's a difference between locking up people for what they do - like Lake View's own Herbert Hans Haupt, a would-be saboteur who was caught with seven other German agents who had slipped into the country with orders to disrupt the American war effort -- and those who merely have unpopular opinions. Fuhr's advice to the powers that be if he is ever asked for it? "I guess my only advice would be 'Don't intern Eb Fuhr."
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