During the World War, many people of diffeent descent were sent to internment camps. An internment camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, enemy aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, usually during a war. The term is used for facilities where inmates are selected according to some specific criteria, rather than individuals who are incarcerated after due process of law fairly applied by a judiciary. Some were sent to the Japanese Internment Camp and some were sent to the Germany Internment Camp. Although these camps differed greatly, they also shared some similarities. However, Japanese American Internment was the forced removal of approximately 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans (sixty-two percent of whom were Unite States citizens from the West Coast of the United States) during World War II. While approximately 10,000 were able to relocate to other parts of the country, the remainder – roughly 110,000 men, women and children – were sent to hastily constructed camps called "War Relocation Centers" in remote portions of the nation's interior. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment with Executive Order 9066, which allowed local military commanders to designate "military areas" as "exclusion zones", from which "any or all persons may be excluded." This power was used to declare that all people of Japanese ancestry were excluded from the entire Pacific coast, including all of California and most of Oregon and Washington, except for those in internment camps. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the exclusion, removal, and detention, arguing that it is permissible to curtail the civil rights of a racial group when there is a "pressing public necessity." Some compensation for property losses was paid in 1948, but most internees were unable to fully recover their losses. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation stated that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership",and beginning in 1990, the government paid reparations to surviving internees. Life in The Japanese Internment Camp was hard. Internees had only been allowed to bring with then a few possessions. In many cases they had been given just 48 hours to evacuate their homes. Consequently they were easy prey for fortune hunters who offered them far less than the market prices for the goods they could not take with them.
While the shameful treatment of Japanese Americans by forcing relocation and internment in "camps" during World War II has finally become better known after years of "selective amnesia," the internment of German Americans has been forgotten and ignored. The eventual internment of over 10,000 people of German ancestry seems even more surprising given the large portion of the US population that has German ancestry as well as the lack of obvious "German" characteristics of a physical or ethnic nature for the most part (assimilation into American culture was quite smooth, even with newer immigrants who retained certain cultural and language/accent traits)—at least more so than the Japanese Americans2 or those of Italian descent. On the other hand, the precedent was there. During the first World War—though the number of internees was much lower—vigilantism, harassment, property damage, and even violence (there were a few lynchings) took place. Of course, when it was reported in the press, it was almost invariably described as actions taken against "anti-Americans," "pro-Germans," (and during the second World War, "pro-nazis")—terms that were essentially synonymous in much the same way "communism" came to be used. This, of course did not reflect the reality that none of these terms were by definition or in practice necessarily mutually exclusive. Meanwhile, untold numbers of German Americans fought for freedom around the world, including their ancestral homelands; some were the immediate relatives of those subject to oppressive restrictions on the home front. Pressured by the United States, many Latin American governments arrested at least 4,050 German Latin Americans. Most were shipped in dark boat holds to the United States and interned. At least 2,000 Germans, German Americans and Latin Americans were later exchanged for Americans and Latin Americans held in Germany. Some allege that internees were captured to Use as exchange bait. As you can see there are many differences and similarities among the treament in the Japanese-American and German-American Internment camps. Both were harsh and had strict rules to abide by for each member's safety.
Sources:
www.traces.org
wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment
www.everything2.com
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