The Train to Crystal City: FDR's Secret Prisoner Exchange

by Jan Jarboe Russell

  At home in Strongsville, Ingrid had been aware of her German heritage. She enjoyed the oompah-pah bands at the community beer garden, German food, and German operas. But she didn’t identify herself as a German because she was born in the United States. In the German School, she felt pressured to think, write, and speak in German.

  • • •

  The reality of day-to-day life behind the fence was ineluctable, as sure as night follows day: nothing about it was normal. The political considerations that the Eiserlohs and other families had to take into account in their choice of schools highlighted the continuing tensions on the German side of camp. All that autumn of 1943, conflicts continued.

  By October, the tedium of Crystal City was such that Kuhn decided to pass himself off as an informer to the FBI. The Department of Justice was still investigating the Bund, and one of the investigators in Philadelphia wanted Kuhn as a witness. Kuhn agreed.

  On October 10, Kuhn left camp under heavy guard and was driven to the Gunter Hotel, an eight-story luxury hotel in downtown San Antonio founded in the 1800s by two wealthy German immigrants. A deputy US marshal and an FBI agent from San Antonio were under orders to entertain Kuhn and “create a friendly frame of mind” for his upcoming testimony in Philadelphia. They took him to dinner and to a rodeo, then went back to the hotel to question Kuhn.

  During the interview, Kuhn drank whiskey and regaled them with stories. He described one night in Los Angeles when he addressed a crowd of forty thousand. He grew wistful when he remembered that after his speech, most of the crowd stood and gave the Heil Hitler. He told them that Hitler’s government sent the Bund $1 million a year for their activities. It was an improbable claim—the FBI had no evidence that Germany funded the Bund. In fact, it was the other way around: the Bund sent small amounts of money to Germany.

  Soon the wires were whistling between San Antonio and FBI headquarters in Washington. “Can this be true?” scrawled one of the agents in Washington at the bottom of the report filed in San Antonio. “If it was in fact Kuhn send memo to A.G. at once.” The FBI agent on the ground and the deputy US marshal convinced their superiors that Kuhn’s wild claim had to be a “joke.”

  But Kuhn was not finished toying with the FBI. He next told investigators that, on his orders as president of the Bund, monthly reports were submitted about membership and finances to national headquarters in New York. Kuhn claimed that the reports were not destroyed. On October 18, 1943, Hoover himself sent out an urgent wire from Washington to agents in New York. “Department of Justice anxious to procure copies of these reports if possible,” wrote Hoover. “Desire these inquires to be conducted immediately.” The goose chase was on. Nothing substantial was turned up, and Kuhn returned to Crystal City.

  By December, Heinrich Johann Hasenburger, considered a troublemaker by O’Rourke, had followed Kolb as the official spokesman for the camp’s German population, despite Hasenburger’s not having been duly elected. A few brave German and German American internees tried to contest his appointment. According to their count, Hasenburger received 149 votes out of 631 cast—a clear indication that the majority of Germans in camp did not want Hasenburger as spokesman. In the January 15, 1944, issue of Das Lager, a mimeographed newsletter published by the Germans, Hasenburger demanded a referendum on his leadership. A recount of the election was not held, but Hasenburger assumed the position. One female internee wrote a feverish letter to Washington about Hasenburger’s techniques, calling him an “Imitation Dictator.” She appears to have been right. Hasenburger kept his position and set out to punish his enemies. Families that opposed his election were, on Hasenburger’s orders, “excluded from the community.” They could not purchase food at the German store or the mess hall, or frequent the barber and beauty shops, or participate in community activities. One entire family whose father refused an order from Hasenburger was deprived of food for four days. When O’Rourke discovered it, the family was admitted to the camp hospital, which offered protection from Hasenburger.

  That fall, Harrison set out his expectations for the kind of conflicts that O’Rourke confronted with Hasenburger and other Germans. Under the heading “Be Patient” in the manual of conduct for INS employees, Harrison wrote, “It is often difficult to be patient and exercise an unruffled self-restraint in the face of scathing verbal criticism, or when threatened with physical violence, but it always enlists sympathetic support and pays dividends. No matter how exasperated the circumstances become, officers must bear in mind they are representatives of our government and must conduct themselves in a worthy manner. To become impatient, sarcastic, hostile or personal in remarks is an admission of weakness and defeat and, needless to say, should never occur.”

  In February 1944, Washington and Berlin completed negotiations for a prisoner exchange. As part of the deal, 634 Germans and German Americans interned in Crystal City would be repatriated to Germany on the MS Gripsholm. To O’Rourke’s great relief, Hasenburger’s name was among the 634. The problematic German spokesman’s loyalty to Germany was such that he volunteered himself and his family for the first repatriation from Crystal City. Kuhn was number 68 on a list of 131 German nationals requested by the German government. However, the Military Intelligence Service, one of four US security agencies that had to clear the list, scratched Kuhn’s name. His probable value to the Germans was too great for the MIS to risk. Kuhn’s wife, Elsa, and his son, Walter, were on the approved list for the first repatriation. When it came time for them to leave Crystal City, Elsa and Walter gathered at the front entrance with the crowd of repatriates, including the Hasenburger family. A band played and the remaining internees marched around in ceremonial fashion. Slowly, the repatriates, carrying their luggage and footlockers, boarded buses that would take them to a waiting train. The February 19 issue of Das Lager reported the departure of the Germans and described the atmosphere within the German section as that of a “ghost town.”

  Shortly after the last bus pulled out of camp, O’Rourke segregated Kuhn from the remaining Germans and German Americans in a heavily guarded detention center inside the internment camp—in effect, a jail. Months later, Kuhn was transferred to Fort Stanton in New Mexico, a high-security prison for problem internees. According to Eb Fuhr, who remained in Crystal City, Kuhn carried the aura of being the man who knew too much about America to trade to the Germans. For a little while more, Kuhn stayed in America, but he was no longer a factor in Crystal City.

  With two of O’Rourke’s most difficult German internees gone from Crystal City, he wasted no time in taking decisive action against a third: Karl Kolb, the first German spokesman. Three months after the departure of the repatriates, O’Rourke wrote a letter to Kolb: “It is the honest opinion of this office that for the welfare of the entire German group, you should be removed from this camp.” Shortly thereafter, Kolb, his wife, and his daughter were transferred to an internment camp in Algiers, Louisiana. In a telegram to INS headquarters in Philadelphia, Kolb protested his transfer as “unacceptable” because of the “racially mixed couples,” a reference to the German Jews, in Algiers. His telegram was ignored, and he and his family waited in Algiers to be repatriated to Germany.

  Even after three major agitators had left the Crystal City camp, O’Rourke struggled to maintain order in the German section. Most of the disputes were trivial. A few German internees were caught cheating on their hourly wage. The Japanese complained that German children raced through their carefully tended gardens. The May 6, 1944, issue of Das Lager pleaded for parents to control their children. “Children have thrown balls and pieces of wood into the movie operator’s cabin while playing in the big hall of the auditorium,” wrote the editor. “Instruct your children at once to cease this careless or even mischievous habit.”

  Unfortunately, even the pettiest of these disagreements could escalate into violence. For instance, in August 1944, George Kreuzner accused his anti-Nazi neighbor Anna Vogl of eavesdropping at the window of his bungalow. Mrs. Vogl told him
that she was looking for her cat. Kreuzner threatened her and Mrs. Vogl immediately filed a report with Larry R. Elwood, assistant chief internal security officer of the camp. At the beginning of the interview, Officer Elwood asked Mrs. Vogl to tell him in her words exactly what had happened when Kreuzner arrived at her house.

  “He told me, ‘Mrs. Vogl,’ he said, ‘if I catch you once more listening at my window, then I am going to throw hydrochlorine acid in your eyes.”

  “What has your observation been of Mr. Kreuzner’s general activities in the camp?” asked Elwood.

  “I just know that he is a drinker,” said Mrs. Vogl. “Everybody knows that.”

  Almost every day brought some kind of flare-up. Mathias once went to the German camp store a little before noon and picked up a ration of meat that he thought was too fatty and not fresh. On the way home, he encountered one of the German leaders, and the two got into an argument. In frustration, Mathias threw the package of meat into the street and stalked off. The spokesman reported him to security officers, who stored the meat in the butcher shop as evidence. Mathias was called in for questioning and asked to explain himself. He had no explanation, other than that the confinement and long hours of boredom in the camp had left him jumpy.

  Even as O’Rourke had to contain and parry the aggressive behavior of the first three German spokesman as well as cranks such as Kreuzner, he also listened and attended to the seemingly minute concerns of quieter inmates, whose misery or relative contentedness was nonetheless important to him.

  On most mornings, O’Rourke, divorced and estranged from his wife, awoke in his small house adjacent to the internment camp with a hangover and a full day’s work ahead of him. At night, he cruised the streets of Crystal City in his 1942 Studebaker sedan and took his comfort in cantinas—the small, smoky bars common in South Texas.

  Only forty-nine years old, O’Rourke had been a Border Patrol agent for twenty-two years. His job as officer in charge of Crystal City paid a good salary of $5,500, the equivalent of roughly $70,000 today. He was responsible for approximately 3,000 internees and oversaw 160 employees assigned to key divisions: Administrative Service, Surveillance, Internal Security, Internal Relations, Maintenance, Construction and Repair, Education, and Medical. The responsibilities of the job made him more deliberate in his speech and actions than he had been in his younger years. Since his arrival in Crystal City, he had become increasingly exacting in his decisions, even the most casual ones. Many men would have become embittered by the job, but O’Rourke found that it suited him.

  Most of O’Rourke’s concerns were for the overall functioning of the camp, but as with the problems of Kolb, Hasenburger, and Kuhn, some centered on explicitly German or Japanese issues. O’Rourke would not forget the day that the Reverend Ryuchi Fujii, a Buddhist priest from Clovis, California, who was the elected spokesman for the Japanese in camp, brought up the subject of tofu. O’Rourke liked Fujii, a calm, reasonable man who had been elected several times by the Japanese group as their spokesman. A sharp contrast to the German spokesmen, Fujii was not uncooperative or difficult. His strategy seemed to be to ask for many more things than he truly expected to receive, but on the subject of tofu, Fujii was unbendable.

  Upon the arrival of the first Japanese in camp, O’Rourke had ordered that the camp grocery store include items consistent with both the Japanese and the German diets. By the summer of 1943, twenty-two German and thirty-six Japanese clerical workers staffed the warehouse, meat market, and grocery store. Most days, the German and the Japanese workers cooperated with one another. However, a blowup occurred one day when the Japanese butchers, who were cutting fish, saved the meatiest portions for Japanese customers and distributed the tails to Germans. In retaliation, the Germans complained about the vast amount of space occupied in the warehouse by Japanese food: miso paste, soy sauce, rice, noodles, seaweed, and dried shrimp.

  No matter how much tofu was on the shelves, there was never enough for the Japanese housewives. Fujii’s complaint to O’Rourke was twofold: the quality of the store-bought tofu was inferior, and the quantity was insufficient. At first, Fujii suggested to O’Rourke that the store stock enough tofu for each Japanese household to have it, in lieu of leafy vegetables, once a week. O’Rourke agreed, but the weekly share of tofu only increased the demand for more. “If only you would allow us to produce our own tofu,” Fujii told O’Rourke, “it would take the place of all other demands.”

  O’Rourke assumed a bemused and thoughtful approach to the request. In his research, O’Rourke learned that tofu is soft, made from soy milk treated with nigari. Nigari is related to the Japanese word for “bitter,” nigai. Bitterness gives tofu its particular flavor. In Japan, nigari is created by evaporating seawater. In the absence of seawater in Crystal City, Fujii explained that the soy milk could be treated with calcium chloride to achieve the desired level of bitterness.

  O’Rourke assigned one of the Victory Huts in the Japanese section of camp as an experimental laboratory for the making of tofu. Crowds of Japanese women filled the space, which they cheerfully christened the Tofu Factory.

  A problem immediately surfaced that threatened to fell the venture. Bags of soybeans were carried into the hut in preparation for the making of soy milk. The beans were covered in water, then had to be ground to a mushy consistency. In Japan, soy grinders are efficient, as ubiquitous in households as stoves and sinks. But most of the Japanese housewives had left behind their soy grinders—along with most of their other possessions—when they were interned. Now, with the war on, soy grinders could not be requisitioned from the enemy.

  As O’Rourke pondered the problem, one day he went into town to a local Mexican restaurant that he frequented. While having lunch, he saw a woman with a stone pestle in her hand grinding lime-treated corn in a chiseled-stone bowl called a molino. The ground corn, called masa, was used for making tortillas. Perhaps, O’Rourke thought, molinos could also be used to make tofu.

  Back at the Tofu Factory, the women, pestles in hand, experimented with grinding the soybeans in the stone bowls. Much to everyone’s delight, the molinos worked, and the rest of the process went smoothly. Once ground, the beans were cooked in steam kettles, then placed in cloth bags and strained to remove any solids. Calcium chloride was added. The liquid mass was poured into wooden forms, allowed to set until solidified, and then cut into one-pound squares of tofu. Each day, long lines of Japanese woman formed outside the Tofu Factory to purchase it with the camp token money.

  With the tofu problem solved, Fujii met with O’Rourke and complained that German internees had better housing and more pleasant facilities for schools than the Japanese. O’Rourke was ready with his reply: “We gave you tofu. You said it would take the place of everything.” The two men shared a laugh.

  Unfortunately, other problems beyond tofu in the Japanese section would not be so easily smoothed over.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  To Be or Not to Be an American

  While fifteen-year-old Sumi Utsushigawa stood with her mother, Nobu, on the pier in Jersey City, New Jersey, on September 2, 1943, members of the crew of the MS Gripsholm scurried like ants to load supplies. The enormous sign hanging from the side of the Swedish liner read DIPLOMAT. The pier was crowded with more than a thousand Japanese and Japanese Americans, all in line to board. Sumi and Nobu were near the back of the line and strained to take in the confusion.

  Three days before, Sumi and her mother had been in the hot, dry desert, behind the barbed-wire fence of Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Camp. On the train trip from Heart Mountain, Nobu had explained that Sumi’s father, Tokiji, an enemy alien incarcerated at the Santa Fe Internment Camp, had signed an agreement to voluntarily repatriate to Japan. Nobu made it clear that she and Sumi would return with him. When war broke out, Sumi’s two older sisters, Yoshiko and Haruko, were in Sendai, Japan, visiting their grandparents; they were still there. Tokiji was sixty-six years old, ill with kidney disease, and had suffered as a prisoner in A
merican internment camps for the past eighteen months. In Japan, he would at least be free from prison and accepted by his own kin. The family would be reunited. Other than her two sisters, Sumi had no solid ties to Japan. She knew her own mind but understood she had no choice. American or not, she could not defy her Japanese father. She had nowhere to go except with her parents.

  “Shikata ga nai,” Nobu told her, a phrase Sumi had heard her mother repeat often. It meant “Grit your teeth and bear it.”

  At the New Jersey harbor, the air was cool and the sky was gray. Tokiji was nowhere in sight. Sumi and Nobu waited as families in front of them filed onto the Gripsholm. They were there because the Special War Problems Division had at long last successfully negotiated with the Japanese government for an exchange of approximately 1,330 Japanese civilians for the same number of American diplomats, missionaries, journalists, and businessmen held prisoner by Japan. Soon, the Gripsholm, chartered by the US government as an International Red Cross exchange ship, would slip out of the harbor. It would travel for six weeks on an unsecured sea route across the Pacific Ocean, where American surface ships and submarines actively trolled to sink Japanese vessels, until it arrived in the port of Mormugao in the Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of India. Mormugao was a neutral location, selected in advance by diplomats from both the United States and Japan. There, a Japanese ship, the Teia Maru, would arrive from Tokyo, carrying 1,330 American citizens. An exchange would take place. Reciprocity was key. For every American who disembarked from the Teia Maru—and took their first steps into freedom—a Japanese repatriate had to transfer from the Gripsholm and pass to Japanese authority. Sumi, Nobu, and Tokiji were to be exchanged.