American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [195]
This internment of enemy aliens was distinct from the relocation and internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, which began in February 1942. Under FDR’s Executive Order 9066, certain zones in the United States could be designated as military areas, off limits to any or all unauthorized personnel. Later that spring, military officials ordered everyone of Japanese ancestry who resided on the West Coast moved to camps in the nation’s interior. This was accomplished by a new agency called the War Relocation Authority. Unlike the military relocation and internment of Japanese-Americans, enemy aliens were rounded up under the auspices of the INS.
A large number of enemy aliens were initially detained at Ellis Island. Four days after Pearl Harbor, 413 German enemy aliens found themselves in detention at Ellis Island. “For the time being,” the New York Times wrote of Ellis Island’s new role, “New York has a concentration camp of its own.”
The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the nation’s newly formed wartime intelligence agency, took an interest in the detainees at Ellis Island. In the summer of 1942, it placed an undercover agent there for three weeks. When the unnamed agent filed his report, he told his superiors of a large chink in America’s security. “Ellis Island is undoubtedly a major information spot for the Axis, both for getting it and sending it,” the agent wrote. “There is every reason to suppose that they regard Ellis Island as an important transmission center.”
The OSS report described a tightly organized and disciplined “Nazi clique” among some detainees at Ellis Island. Their informal headquarters was Room 206. They sang the “Horst Wessel Lied” and other Nazi songs and plastered their rooms with drawings and articles mocking the American war effort. “They act as though it were inevitable that Germany win this war,” the report noted. The Nazi sympathizers who congregated around Room 206 “can carry on effective propaganda and intimidate the weak.”
Were these few hundred Germans, Italians, and Japanese held at Ellis Island in the summer of 1942 a major threat to the American war effort? The OSS agent certainly thought so, believing that it “would be strange, indeed, if such well-organized and fanatical Hitlerites only carry on harmless activities. The chances for conspiracy are practically limitless.” He argued that German detainees kept watch on the shipping activity on the docks of New Jersey and reported this information back to Germany. Yet even the OSS agent had to admit that this was largely speculation and that in his three weeks among the detainees, he had found “no actual instance of this happening.”
By the fall of 1942, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was hearing gossip about this OSS report and demanded that an underling get a copy immediately. What angered Hoover was not the far-fetched claims that Nazis were operating an intelligence gathering operation for the Third Reich from Ellis Island. What really concerned him was that the report criticized, in Hoover’s words, “the incompetent and venal custodial practices at Ellis Island.” He wanted all such talk of lax security immediately “scotched.”
Hoover was right. The OSS report was absolutely blistering in its depiction of the guards. “The system of supervision and control is inadequate to cope with experienced conspirators,” the report concluded. The guards were “unpolitical and unobservant.” Most were only interested in their weekly paychecks, sports, food, and drink. “Race prejudice, especially anti-Semitism among the guards, is conspicuous,” the report noted.
The report painted many of the guards as easily corruptible by the petty payoffs and gifts of the detainees. Some of the