December 11, 2006
Letter to George W. Bush
December 11, 2006
The Honorable George W. Bush
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Via Fax: 202-456-2461
RE: H.R. 1492/S.1719. Title: To provide for the preservation of the historic confinement sites where Japanese Americans were detained during World War II, and for other purposes.
Dear Mr. President,
Today the 109th Congress presented H.R. 1492/S.1719, for presidential signing.
The German World Alliance (GWA), the world's largest human rights organization for Germans, with over one million members in the United States, Canada, Austria, Argentina, Columbia, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Serbia and Poland, strongly urges you to refuse to sign this bill into law. The focus of our opposition is that the bill, as written, does not preserve a single site where 11,000 German Americans were incarcerated in the United States during WWII.
US Congressional leaders have failed to create a bill that meets the constitutional requirement of “equal justice” for all. Instead, the legislation identifies for preservation a list of 10 Japanese American relocation camps. By preserving only Japanese internment sites, Congress is reinforcing a false reality - that only those of Japanese ethnicity were interned during WWII. The fact is that approximately 15,000 Germans Americans and Italian Americans were the victims of "selective" internment policy. This reality is lost to the public when all historical references are omitted from public discourse and government policy.
To emphasize the inequality of treatment that German American and Italian American Internees are subjected to, please note that three previously enacted bills were designed to memorialize and/or to preserve camps that were used for the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II—none of these include any site in which European Americans were interned. Furthermore, the following laws have been enacted which solely apply to former Japanese American internees: 1948: P.L. 80-886; 1951: P.L.
82-116; 1952: P.L. 82-545; 1956: P.L. 84-673; 1960: P.L. 86-782; 1972: P.L.
92-603; 1978: P.L. 95-382; 1988: P.L. 100-383; and 1992: P.L. 102-371. Each of these laws, by definition, excludes former German American and Italian American internees.
The National Park Service testified against H.R. 1492/S.1719 during hearings because of funding problems, not on the merits of the bill. Our objection is not centered around the funding per se, but on the “biased” and discriminatory expenditure of tight Park Service Funds for internment preservation sites that excludes German and Italian Americans who were similarly interned during WWII.
In conclusion, we support the preservation of historic internment sites. We support keeping the memory of the historic wrong done in those camps alive.
This bill, however, is deficient in that it fails to preserve sites that were “inclusive to all ethnicities of internment” and in reality extends preferential treatment to victims of a single ethnicity. The bill as written should not be signed.
Sincerely,
Dr. Kearn C. Schemm, Jr.
Pres. German World Alliance/
Deutsche Weltallianz