At work, Mathias felt humiliated by his pretense of being Swiss. “To get a job in America, without which my family would starve, I had to be something other than German. I could not help it. For me it was work or perish.” The more he saw Germans scorned as enemies in America, the more he felt like a traitor to himself and the angrier he became.
Finally, he left his job at Columbia for a lower-paying job at Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. At the new job, he didn’t hide his German citizenship. He joined the German Technical Society and began visiting the library at the German consulate in Cleveland to read German technical periodicals. In contrast to its post–World War I financial depression, Germany’s economy was now booming. For two years, Mathias had worked in Germany on a hydroelectric power project that channelized the Isar River. Now he idly looked through technical journals and explored the idea of pursuing better paying jobs in Germany. “I wanted to learn more about a country where my labor was highly in demand and where a man fifty years old was not classified as too old,” he told Biddle.
Like many of his German friends in Strongsville, Mathias bore the immigrant’s burden. He had one foot on one side of the ocean in Germany and the other in America, which made him an outsider in both places. By nature, identity, and personal history, he was fully German, but in his aspirations and ambition he was fully American. He would live with this dilemma all his life.
After his children were born in America, Eiserloh felt as if he, too, had a stake in America. He paid taxes and invested in his own home, but he stayed connected to his German culture. He ate German food and spoke German, as well as English. On most Tuesday and Thursday nights he drank beer with friends at the Schwarzwald Restaurant in Cleveland. He bought books in German on sale at the embassy in Cleveland. He belonged to two different German clubs—the German Technical Society, a group of engineers and scientists, and the German Nationals Club. “The clubs were purely social,” Eiserloh told Biddle.
In a peaceful world, Eiserloh’s assimilation into American life would have been smooth. With the outbreak of World War II, his close German ties aroused suspicion. In 1941, agents in Cleveland followed orders and took the next step. They interviewed Eiserloh’s former and current employers, his neighbors, acquaintances, and local businessmen in Strongsville.
In addition to Ernie and Helen Hoelscher, Mrs. McGovern, the kind neighbor whom Ingrid had sought out after her mother’s altercation with the home invader, was also an informer. When asked whether the Eiserlohs ever had loud parties or strange-looking visitors, Mrs. McGovern said, according to the FBI report, that she noticed “meetings being held at the subjects’ home on several occasions. She stated that 20 to 25 people would attend such meetings.” When asked about these “meetings” by FBI agents, Eiserloh explained that he often recruited German friends to help work on his house or listen to music on the Victrola and didn’t consider such activities disloyal.
While Mrs. McGovern was suspicious of Mathias, she defended Ingrid. “Ingrid is a very nice girl,” Mrs. McGovern told FBI agents. “She never talked about Germany or wanted to go there. The trouble on the school bus was started solely by the other children.”
One of the troublemakers was Mrs. McGovern’s own son, Pat, who when interviewed by the FBI agents accused Ingrid of always “taking Hitler’s side.” That, according to Pat, was what prompted the taunts on the bus. Ingrid was slightly older than Pat, and she sensed that he wanted to be accepted as a part of the pack but meant her no real harm. Perhaps the boy thought he was doing his civic duty. At any other time, his harassment would have been mild annoyances, but these manufactured charges against Ingrid became part of Mathias’s FBI files.
So did her father’s anti-Semitic views. As a teenager, Ingrid knew that he shared the extremist view in Germany that Jews, especially Jewish bankers and merchants, were to blame for the country’s many economic woes. During the FBI’s investigation, Marguerite Dassel, a neighbor who owned a lunch stand in Strongsville, reported that Mathias complained to her about Roosevelt’s Jewish advisers, such as the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter. Mathias claimed that “the president’s true name is Rosenfeld, not Roosevelt, and he’s Jewish,” a remark that led Dassel to believe that Eiserloh was not only anti-Semitic but a Nazi spy.
Mathias’s German military service hadn’t landed him on the FBI’s official list of security risks, but during the FBI investigation of 1941 it was another mark against him. It didn’t help his case that in 1935 a German official in the Cleveland consulate had taken the time to discover that although Eiserloh had earned the Iron Cross for his service in World War I, he’d never received it. The official came to the Eiserloh home in Strongsville and gave him the medal. Mathias hadn’t claimed the medal because he didn’t want to be reminded of World War I. His children said the Iron Cross was meaningless to him, but he accepted it. Ensi remembered, “My father hated war. He never picked up the Iron Cross when he lived in Germany and didn’t want it. But he felt it rude to reject the representative of the consulate.”
On January 14, 1942, only six days after his arrest, Eisleroh was taken from his jail cell in Cleveland and appeared before a local board, administered by Edward Ennis, director of the Alien Enemy Control Unit within the Department of Justice. All over the country, thousands of enemy aliens like Eisleroh were summoned before these boards, made up of citizens. All of the proceedings were in secret, and most lasted less than fifteen minutes. None of those arrested were allowed lawyers. They were not informed of the charges against them and had no opportunity to challenge evidence or confront their accusers. The verdict of the alien hearing boards could not be appealed.
At the hearing, Eislerloh was asked if he’d told his neighbors that he objected to his children taking the oath of allegiance to the American flag in their school. “I merely said that I did not think that children of so young an age could understand what the oath of allegiance would mean,” he replied.
Most of the case against him came from a fellow employee at work, who was not present at the hearing, but told FBI agents that Eiserloh was pro-Nazi. The anonymous accuser described Eiserloh as “hotheaded” and said he boasted at work that Germany would win the war. “He said that United States armaments would be obsolete by the time they got to the front and that Germany would have new and better armaments,” the source told the agents. Confronted with the charge, Eiserloh said that a “good deal of ill feeling” existed between himself and his accuser. He admitted that he might in anger have made inimical comments about the United States but that he had meant no harm. “I am completely loyal to the United States,” he told the board. “My children are citizens of the United States. I only want to make a good and decent life for them.”
Eiserloh was not asked about the other accusations made to FBI agents by his neighbors in Strongsville, and he never learned of them. They were a part of his FBI file, but he did not know of their existence and could not refute evidence that was never revealed to him. His brother-in-law John Weiland was present at the hearing and spoke on his behalf. Weiland’s own loyalty to the United States was not in question. Weiland had fought with the American Army of Occupation in Germany during World War I. Weiland said that he’d never heard Mathias make an un-American statement and urged the board to parole him. Initially, the board agreed with Weiland and recommended that Eiserloh be paroled and released on a $1,000 bond under the condition that he not be employed by any company that had anything to do with national defense.
But neither Ennis nor Hoover’s FBI gave up. Agents filed two more reports against Eiserloh, one on January 23 and another on January 31. After those reports, the board reconsidered, without Eiserloh present, and recommended his internment. On February 11, 1942, Hoover wrote to Ennis, stating that Eiserloh was “pro-Nazi” and should be interned.
The following day, Biddle issued orders from Washington that made Eiserloh an official enemy alien. His official documents were stamped PRISONER OF WAR. Under a provision modeled on the Alien
and Sedition Act of 1798, Roosevelt’s three proclamations—Number 2525 on December 7, 1941, and Numbers 2526 and 2527—allowed for the arrest and internment of enemy aliens during war. The proclamations stated, “All natives, citizens, denizens or subjects of [Japan, Germany, and Italy], being of the age of fourteen and upward, who shall be in the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured and removed as alien enemies.” Eiserloh was an enemy by virtue of his German citizenship, and the FBI viewed him as a security threat. He was not alone. During the war, Roosevelt interned 31,275 enemy aliens: 10,905 Germans, 16,849 Japanese, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 5 Bulgarians, 25 Romanians, and 161 more listed as “others.”
On March 4, 1942, Eiserloh was transferred to Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, a sixty-thousand-acre Army base, which had been converted to a prisoner-of-war camp. Johanna had received no word from him for two months and did not know that he had been classified as a prisoner of war. After he arrived at Camp McCoy, she received a copy of a letter Mathias had written to Biddle, asking for a rehearing on his case. “I write this to you on behalf of my wife and three little children for whom I have been the sole support,” Mathias told Biddle. “My family has been totally deprived of any means of a livelihood and left alone and isolated. I feel not in the slightest degree guilty of ever having done, or having had any thoughts of doing, anything against the interests or safety of the United States.”
Johanna wrote to Ennis herself and asked why her husband was at Camp McCoy and on what charges he was being held. “If you believe in justice and fair play to three American children, such as you may have yourself, you will have your men check our circumstances and my husband’s case and send him back where he belongs—to his family and to his job, where they will be glad to have him back and where all of us will be an asset, not a liability, to America,” Johanna pleaded.
In response, Ennis explained to Johanna her husband’s legal status—prisoner of war—and that the order of internment signed by Biddle would not be reheard. “We realize that the internment of your husband, or any other alien enemy, is a hardship on the entire family,” wrote Ennis, “but this is not to be considered as important a feature as the protection of the peace and protection of the United States. If we were to consider these hardships in times such as these, the security of our country would be greatly imperiled.”
Ennis justified the arrest and internment, without trial, of internees such as Eiserloh by means of a ruthless but necessary cost-benefit analysis. It was America vs. the Axis powers. Mathias and, by extension, Johanna and his three American-born children were collateral damage. What Ennis did not disclose was that domestic security wasn’t the only motivation for the incarceration of foreign-born immigrants from Axis countries. Ennis was also charged with gathering a pool of enemy aliens for the Special War Problems Division to use as leverage in negotiations with Berlin and Tokyo for American prisoners of war. Neither Mathias nor Johanna realized it yet, but they were already hostages in the much larger scheme of prisoner exchange.
By the time Ingrid turned twelve in May 1942, Johanna had sold the house in Strongsville and moved with the children to Cleveland to live with Klara and Frank and their children. They settled in the basement of the two-story house.
Unable to make sense of her husband’s arrest, Johanna blamed Mathias. “He must have done something to bring all of this down on us,” she told Klara.
Ingrid overheard the conversation and confronted her mother. “How can you doubt him?” Ingrid demanded. “We need to stand by him.”
Despite her anger, Johanna did stand by Mathias. She continued writing letters to Biddle and Ennis. “I think my husband should be allowed to take his share of responsibility and help raise the children, get us all back to health,” she wrote in one letter. She was indignant with the government for incarcerating her husband and resented her husband for abandoning her with the three children.
Summer turned to fall and winter. Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi despised living in Aunt Klara’s basement. Ingrid felt claustrophobic. Nothing seemed to make sense. One night while the family slept, a fire broke out in the basement. The room filled with smoke. The children’s coughing woke Johanna. Ingrid picked up Ensi, then two years old, from her crib and followed Johanna and Lothar upstairs. It was the first vivid memory of Ensi’s life. “I remember the fire and then I remember being upstairs, and Uncle Frank picked me up and tossed me in the air, perhaps he was being playful. What I remember most was being afraid. It is my first memory of fear.”
While his wife and children struggled with the loss of safety in their own home and the difficulty of life in Klara’s house, Mathias also grappled with displacement. That winter of 1943 Mathias was incarcerated at an internment camp near Stringtown, Oklahoma, that was operated by the US Army. When Mathias arrived in a group of 110 Germans, J. T. Carroll, a first lieutenant in the Army and the camp commander, read the list of rules to the prisoners. They would live behind bars in cells with no conversing with the guards. In the stockade, surrounded by barbed wire, the internees were not allowed to congregate in large groups. No one was allowed to speak after 9:00 p.m. If inmates violated the rules, they would be placed in solitary confinement. Under certain circumstances, such as attempts to escape, Carroll told them, “Internees will be shot.”
The atmosphere was bleak, and Mathias suffered his first bout of what internees during World War II called “the fence sickness” or, in German, Gitterkrankheit. After a time of living behind barbed wire and under heavy guard, many inmates, including Mathias, became depressed. As prisoners of war, they had lost control over the major and minor details of their lives. Camp commanders and guards controlled when they went to sleep, when they woke up, what they did for work, and when they showed their faces for the daily count. Every inmate was regularly graded on his or her behavior. Reports were sent to Ennis at the INS. The report on Mathias at Stringtown gave him favorable ratings on his “general attitude” and his physical condition. Yet he walked around in a daze and was described as “despondent.”
During Mathias’s internment, Stringtown held about 530 German internees. Most prisoners were like Eiserloh—immigrants who had hoped to become US citizens. In his book Nazis and Good Neighbors, the historian Max Paul Friedman wrote that when camp officials refused to allow 531 German internees to salute the Heil Hitler, 15 of that number defied the order. Friedman estimated that about 3 percent of the internees were vocal Nazis, most of them from Latin America. Their German spokesman, Ingo Kalinowsky, was one of the earliest members of the Nazi Party in Costa Rica. In Stringtown, Kalinowsky used his position to hoard Red Cross packages from Germany and distribute them to fellow Nazis.
Friedman reported that eighteen of the internees in Stringtown were German Jews who had fled persecution in Nazi Germany and moved to Latin America, where some were inadvertently seized in the roundup of enemy aliens. Others were arrested because they refused to supply information on suspected Nazis in Latin America to American military officers stationed there. Upon their arrival in Stringtown, the eighteen Jewish refugees were confined to a room in a basement of one of the buildings in camp, apparently in a misguided effort to protect them from Nazi prisoners. The irony of German Jews having to be protected from German Nazis in an American internment camp was not lost on the Jews at Stringtown. A few offered testimony to their experience. Wilhelm Heinemann, arrested in Panama, described the particularly tense atmosphere among Jews in Stringtown: “We were told by a certain rabid element that the Jews would be exterminated.” Heinemann said that he and others suffered “extreme mental anguish” that they might be traded for American prisoners of war and sent to death camps in Germany.
Inevitably, the Kafkaesque clash between the Nazis and the Jews had an unsettling effect on other prisoners in the camp, including Mathias. According to his conduct report, Mathias stayed neutral in clashes between different groups. He continued to profess his loyalty to the United States. As months pas
sed, to steady his nerves and pass the time, he made wooden toys for Ingrid, Lothar, and Ensi. He imagined designs for future bridges and drew them in a notebook. He continued to press the government for a rehearing of his case.
On April 8, 1943, Mathias wrote to Ennis again, asking why he had not been granted a rehearing. He did not know that internees had no right to appeal. “If possible,” Mathias pleaded, “will you please explain to me the basic facts for my detention so I will be able to defend myself, as I am not aware that I ever in my life have been disloyal to the United States?” This was the riddle that faced the internees. Mathias did not know what his neighbors and coworkers had told the FBI and could not defend himself. It drove him deeper into darkness. “Will you please advise me how I can prove my loyalty to this country? Isn’t my hard work enough?”
Ennis answered that there was nothing Mathias could do to prove his loyalty. “It is not the policy of this Department to disclose the evidence by which an alien enemy was interned,” replied Ennis on April 17, 1943. “An individual need not have been guilty of subversive activities to warrant his internment if all the facts appear that he may be potentially dangerous to the internal security of our country during the war period.”
Mathias lost his will. He had heard from fellow prisoners that in one camp families of prisoners of war could be reunited in exchange for agreeing to repatriate to Germany. It was a difficult choice. He would be offering not only himself and his wife but also his three American-born children as ransom for American soldiers and civilians in Germany. He would be relinquishing his commitment to making a life for all of them in America. Who knew what the conditions would be inside Germany? The Nazis were likely to view the Eiserloh family as enemy Americans, while the Americans already saw them as German enemies. He worried about Johanna’s health and knew he had no way to provide for his family. He questioned his own mental stamina. The fence sickness worsened. “By the law of all humanity and the sake of my family,” he asked Ennis, “please have my wife and children sent into a family camp to be interned together with me at the earliest possible date.” That camp was located in Crystal City, Texas.
The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange Page 9