This article appeared in the Green Bay Press Gazette /Wisconsin on April 12, 2006.

Exhibit tells of German-Americans' internment

By Warren Gerds
wgerds@greenbaypressgazette.com

Caught in the U.S. government's web of suspicion during World War II were 15,000 German-American civilians.

An exhibit coming to the area by bus next week tells of this virtually unknown slice of American history.

"We want to bring a history to people who don't know anything about it, which would be almost everybody," said Michael Luick-Thrams, historian and executive director of the Iowa-based Traces Center for History and Culture.

"Everyone knows about the Japanese-Americans (120,000 of whom were interned) during World War II, but almost no one knows about the German-Americans."

The exhibit includes 10 narrative panels with photos, an NBC-TV documentary and a 1945 U.S. government color film.

The detainees are unlike German prisoners of war who were brought to the United States , including to Northeastern Wisconsin .

They were German-Americans living in the United States . Of note to Wisconsinites, several dozen residing in Milwaukee were detained, Luick-Thrams said.

Camp McCoy near Sparta was one of the detention sites.

One German-American held at Camp McCoy was Mathias Borniger, a photographer who made templates for airplane parts for Boeing. He found out later that a confidential FBI informant accused him of sending photos of new planes to German dictator Adolf Hitler.

Another Camp McCoy detainee, Chile-born Sigfrid Muntz, emigrated in 1939. He worked as an engineer and was seeking U.S. citizenship. When he was arrested the day after Pearl Harbor , he was given no explanation.

Borniger and Muntz were released after two years. They returned to the work force.

The German-American saga is so little known because detainees "were sworn to secrecy when they were released," said Luick-Thrams. "So were the camp staff. None of the people had access to lawyers."

Complexities were many. Some detainees were married to Americans; their children were Americans. Some were Jews who fled the Nazis. About 4,800 detainees were Latin-American Germans.

"This story has lots of problems," Luick-Thrams said. "I'm sure there were Nazi sympathizers in the German internment camps, but that wasn't the sum of it.

"We know there were anti-Nazis, there were communists, there were Jews, there were people who apparently had apolitical stances on things. So after Pearl Harbor , the government was rather willy-nilly going around seizing up people based on nuance, rumor and hearsay."

The bus will travel to more than 50 Wisconsin museums, libraries and schools in six weeks.

"Everyone always says, 'We had no idea,' " Luick-Thrams said. "And it's important."

Luick-Thrams travels with the exhibit.

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