May 24, 2007
PRESS RELEASE
Think only Japanese Americans were interned during World War II? If so, think again!
Some of Germany and France's biggest television stations and an award-winning documentary producer are headed to the Twin Cities Metro area in early June to film an unknown sub-chapter of U.S. World War II history. Guest speakers from across the nation will meet them in St. Paul, to speak about their families' dramatic wartime experiences.
The French-German collaborative cultural-TV network ARTE, Munich's Bayrischer Rundfunk and Cologne's Westdeutscher Rundfunk are partnering with TANGRAM production company to record the story of 15,000 German-American internees imprisoned by the U.S. Government. Their tale is similar to Japanese and Italian Americans' who also were suspected "national security threats" and kept in 60 camps and detention centers--including two in Saint Paul. Some of the internees included German-Jewish refugees erroneously put in camps here.
TRACES Center for History and Culture is hosting the film project, which will follow former internees on June 7th and 8th to showings of TRACES' mobile BUS-eum exhibit about WWII internment in Spooner, Frederic and Milltown, in northwest Wisconsin, before a public program at 11AM Saturday, June 9th, in St. Paul's historic Landmark Center. Co-sponsored by the Ramsey County Historical Society and the Germanic-American Institute, the program will feature Eberhard Fuhr, Anneliese Wiegand Krauter and Lothar Eiserloh, who will speak while being filmed by a German camera crew. The crew will be stateside to cover the end of a three-month, eight-state Midwest BUS-eum tour, as well as to film interviews with former internees in one-time camps at Crystal City in Texas and even at New York's Ellis Island.
Fuhr will speak about having been interned, at the age of 17, while a high school student in Cincinnati, Ohio, with his German-immigrant parents and two brothers. Fuhr later studied and lived in Minnesota for many years. Like him, New York-born Krauter was held at Camp Crystal City in Texas, but then repatriated to war-time Germany during some of the fiercest bombings.
Her recently published book "From the Heart's Closet" also tells how after the war she married a U.S. airman from Indiana and, later joined by her parents and older brother, returned to the U.S. Raised in rural Ohio, Lothar Eiserloh also spent time behind barbed wire at the so-called family camp at Crystal City, and later was repatriated, too. In Germany, however, six SS men beat his father in front of the family and imprisoned him in a camp, accused of being a spy for the advancing U.S. Army--which later liberated him.
During appearances with the BUS-eum and at TRACES permanent museum, the guest speakers will answer audience questions about their childhood imprisonment; the related exhibit "VANISHED" provides further documentation.
Ironically, the stationary exhibit is located in rooms once occupied by the FBI, during the period when Federal agents (in what was then the Federal Courts Building) interrogated suspected German Americans.
The full-length documentary made from the filming will air nationwide in both Germany and France, as well as via satellite in other countries, especially across Central Europe, via the ARTE channel system. TANGRAM's critically acclaimed documentary "The Ritchie Boys" tells the story of German-Jewish refugees who later returned to Europe with the U.S. Army to wage psychological warfare against the Nazi regime, and then "clean up" at the famous Nuernberg Trials. This project shifts TANGRAM's U.S./WWII focus and forges a new scope.
For information about the project contact Program Director Eric Brandt at 651.292.8700 or admin@TRACES.org. For museum hours and other details see www.TRACES.org; also see www.tangramfilm.de.
To arrange pre-event interviews with the former internees contact Eb Fuhr at 847.991.3424 or eefuhr@aol.com, Anneliese Wiegand Krauter at 317.335.2335 or annelie235@aol.com, and Lothar Eiserloh at eiserloh@pacbell.net.
For the Wisconsin librarians' contact information go to the bottom of http://traces.org/buseum_2_tour/tour-schedules/Midwest_spring_tour_2007.html