This is a post I found at World War II Days. I'm not sure of the source for this format, but the text is exact. The author,
Francis Biddle, went on to be the American judge in the
Nuremberg trials against members of the Nazi leadership. This man's record reads like
Wilhelm Stuckart, the man who helped author the
Nuremberg Laws that deprived Jewish people of their rights under the law. What happened to
Japanese Americans during WWII is only mentioned in passing. Less talked about was the use of the
Espionage Act of 1917 to gag dissident press, and the creation of lists of subversives. We like to think of our country as the polar opposite of Germany in the 1940s, but there are far more similarities than anyone likes to admit. Most people look at what the Nazis did and wonder how anyone could have done that. But ideas like the Nazi eugenics programs were learned
from the U.S., and we had our own concentration camps (generally called internment camps) under the
Alien and Sedition Acts for Japanese,
Germans, and
Italians. Before wondering why they did it, the appropriate question might be to ask why we did it.
