This article appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel of Milwaukee/Wisconsin on April 9, 2006.

Editorial: Atoning for an ugly chapter

Many Americans realize that thousands of Japanese-Americans were rounded up and interned as potential subversives during World War II. What is not so widely understood - or acknowledged by our government - is that hundreds of thousands of German-Americans and others of European descent also were victimized.

This historic but obscure injustice was recently documented in Milwaukee in an exhibit assembled by TRACES, a non-profit education organization based in St. Paul, Minn. The organization collects the stories of what happened to people from the Midwest, Germany and Austria during World War II. Since 2001, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) has sought U.S. government recognition of the injustice meted out to these people. After more than a half-century, such recognition is long overdue.

Guenther Greis of Mequon is one of the dwindling number of Americans who remembers. Now 82, Greis can recall the night in December 1941 when FBI agents burst into his family's home at 27th and Ruby streets in Milwaukee and took his father away to an internment camp. It was not until 1947, two years after World War II ended, that his father was released.

The Greis family was not alone. At Camp McCoy, near Sparta, as many as 300 German-Americans and others were interned during the war, reports Karen Ebel, a founder of the German-American Internee Coalition. Nationally, some 11,000 ethnic Germans, plus other Americans of European descent, were interned. Thousands of others lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom to travel and other rights.

A bill introduced by Feingold would establish two commissions, one to "assess fully and acknowledge" the injustices perpetrated against these European-Americans, the other to document discrimination against Jewish refugees in this country.
The bill was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee in November, but passage in the full Senate has been put on hold by an anonymous senator. A similar bill awaits action in the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.).

We urge Congress to quickly enact this legislation, lest the passage of time deprive more Americans of the justice they deserve. Greis supplies another reason to act. "All Americans must know the dreadful consequences of liberty lost," he says, "so they can ensure that it does not happen again."

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