This article appeared in the htrnews.com of Manitowoc/Wisconsin on April 2, 2006.

World War II museum bus will make a stop at library

From staff reports

MANITOWOC — Using 10 narrative panels, an NBC "Dateline" documentary and a 1945 U.S. government color film, TRACES' BUS-eum 2 is touring Wisconsin to provide information about the United States government interning 15,000 German-American civilians during World War II.

Barring unforeseen difficulties, the traveling exhibit will be in Manitowoc from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 18. It will be parked in the Manitowoc Public Library parking lot at 707 Quay St.

The Manitowoc Public Library Foundation is sponsoring the exhibit locally, and the public is invited to tour it free of charge. The mobile exhibit travels throughout the upper Midwest, often stopping twice each day so people can experience the multi-media presentation that includes artifacts and narrative text, along with knowledgeable historians to fill in the blanks.

TRACES is a non-profit educational organization created to gather, preserve and present stories of people from the Midwest and Germany or Austria who encountered each other during World War II.

Wisconsin had a disproportionate number of German-American civilian residents interned, according to a press release from the library.

The press release encourages visitors to consider the following questions as they tour the exhibit:

1. Are ethnic background or ideology justifiable grounds for internment (in other words, imprisoning suspects for who they are or what they believe, as opposed to their actions)?

2. Does a given society "owe" due process only to its citizens, or also to legal non-citizen residents?

3. During WWII the U.S. government forcibly removed 4,058 Latin American Germans from South America to camps in Texas, at Ellis Island and elsewhere (just as it also interned 2,200 Peruvian Japanese people alongside indigenous Japanese Americans). What are some of this action's legal and moral implications? Was this action effective?

4. "Enemy-alien" internment was a multi-million-dollar, seven-year U.S. government project. Was it effective (i.e., did it reach its intended aims) or not? What other actions might have been taken, rather than to intern some 150,000 Japanese, Italian and German Americans?

5. Both camp staff and many of those interned were sworn to secrecy. In 1988, the U.S. government acknowledged that it had interned Japanese Americans during WWII, and in 2000 it admitted that it also had imprisoned Italian Americans. As of this writing, however, it never has confessed to having interned German-Americans. To what extent, and for how long, is a government accountable for its actions? Does it "owe" reparations to those wrongfully harmed? If so, in what form?

Anyone who requires accommodation for disabilities should call 920-683-4863, ext. 336 (voice) or 920-683-4872 (TTY). Reasonable accommodations will be made as quickly as possible.

For more information about the program, call the library's public relations department at 920-683-4863, ext. 340, or log on to www.manitowoc.lib.wi.us and click on Library Events.

To learn more about TRACES, visit www.traces.org.

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