- The road to Crystal City is a long, hot one. Two hours
south from San Antonio, Texas.
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- For Eric Gehrmann, behind the wheel, this is an emotional
as well as a physical trip. There is a tear in his eye as we arrive.
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- Because Crystal City - these days a small dusty town
sporting one or two petrol stations for passing motorists - was, during
World War II, the site of a vast internment camp for Germans and German
Americans alleged, by the US authorities, to be Nazi sympathisers.
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- "I was five years old and I spent a year here with
my family, six more in Germany," he says, as we climb from his car
at an empty patch of open ground, pocked with the foundations of old buildings.
This was the internment camp.
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- "It affected me a lot," he says, looking around,
his wife at his side.
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- "The whole thing didn't make any sense, why we were
here. We didn't do anything. It was just stupid politics. That your family
could be taken, to a concentration camp, that's what it was, for no reason
other than because my father was German."
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- Deported
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- Eric is not alone. A growing number of campaigning German
Americans are now asking for - at the least - recognition from the American
government for what happened to them.
-
- That has not so far been forthcoming. People of Japanese
nationality or descent held at the same camp during the war have had a
full and public apology.
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- A monument records that on the site. There is no equivalent
marker for the Germans held.
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- Mr Gehrmann's experience did not begin or end at Crystal
City. His story is made more extraordinary because he was held - under
an agreement with the US government - in Costa Rica, where the family lived.
-
- Then from Crystal City the family were taken to Ellis
Island, traditionally the welcome point for immigrants into the US, and
deported to wartime Germany, a country he had never visited.
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- Denied
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- Altogether 10,905 Germans and German Americans were interned
in the US during World War II.
-
- No one doubts that, among them, there were some Nazi
supporters and sympathisers. Indeed, there is controversy about whether
or not the swastika was flown at Crystal City.
-
- But everyone I spoke to was adamant. In their household
there were no sympathies with the regime of Adolf Hitler. Some believe
they were interned simply because there was evidence of contact, by post,
with relatives in Germany.
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- Karen Ebel's father, Max, now in his 90s, left Germany
precisely because the Nazis were coming to power. On one of his hands there
remains a scar from a fight with a member of the Hitler Youth.
-
- His daughter, a former lawyer on Capitol Hill in Washington,
is backing a bill in the US Congress to set up a study on what happened
to people like her father, Eric Gehrmann and many others.
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- "Homes were lost when people were sent back to Germany,"
says Karen Ebel. "Careers were destroyed and it seems to me this story
needs to be told, to make us all realise how sacred freedom is."
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- She looks across at her father, sitting next to her in
the sitting room of her home in New Hampshire. "You know, it's a lot
less about someone saying sorry than it is about someone saying, 'this
happened'."
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- Max Ebel nods acknowledgement. He was held at an internment
camp in the state of North Dakota.
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- In Texas, on the site of Crystal City, Eric Gehrmann
is at a loss for words as he tries to trace exactly where it was that he
played as a child, behind tall fences, patrolled by dogs and guards.
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- For these proud Americans, there is a part of their past
that they feel is denied by their own government.
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- - The Lost Voices of Crystal City was broadcast on BBC
Radio 4 on Wednesday 7 April. If you wish to hear it, please click on this
link http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml and select the
programme from the list.
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- © BBC MMIV http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3607871.stm
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