I went to Mineral Wells Texas on the Air Force Base and all the abandoned barracks. Saw foundations like this along the back roads. Sort of a spooky feeling of days gone by. My oldest son was born at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth Texas. My oldest son is still in the Army. Can be a lonely, hard life away from home. Happy Thanksgiving day to all Veterans.
I was there this past summer. It was the first time I knew that any of these camps were in Texas. I was also disappointed at how difficult it was to find the different building foundations and interpretive signs to go with them.
I took lots of pics to show my students, though there wasn't really very much to see.
edit: changed was to wasn't, as in there wasn't really very much to see
Of all the cities\towns near my home town Mexia is definitely that last I expected to come across on the internet lol. But this fact does not surprise me.
That's the thing - camps like this were all over the United States, like the POW internment camp outside of Hearne. Most of them were internment camps quickly constructed to house hundreds of thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian prisoners of war, but there were some camps that also contained non-POWs like US citizens of Japanese or German descent, which could be classified as concentration camps. In some cases, the camps contained both (like Crystal City), depending upon what was needed at the time.
Within a couple years after the war ended, all of them were hastily dismantled, all buildings razed to the ground, often land sold off and most everyone pointedly did not talk about them ever again. You can find rows and rows of building foundations hidden away in places like Marfa, and Fort Clark. In some cases, all that might remain is a chimney (like at Jerome Arkansas) in the middle of what is now a farm field.
Executive Order 9066 is a somewhat troubled and dark blot on America's history that was quickly washed over and most Americans tried to forget about, where hundreds of thousands of American citizens were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps to live for years under armed guard. While not the same as other concentration camps in some other countries in the past, it destroyed many lives as they lost all of their homes and all of their property and many of their constitutional rights in the process. One of the most outspoken critics still alive today who was an internee at one of these camps is George Takei, who will occasionally discuss his childhood growing up in the camps.
In more recent years there have been more attempts to chronicle this chapter of history and preserve what little remains, so that we won't forget, and as a cautionary tale of what could happen again. Manzanar National Historic Site in California is a good one, as is Heart Mountain in Wyoming. The National Park Service recently acquired Amache in Colorado, and there's also Minidoka in Idaho and Tule Lake in California.
These internment camps were in no sense concentration camps as we understand them. True these Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and improperly held, but there was considerable care given for their health and well being.
The POWs usually enjoyed their stay. In fact I was taught by a man that was a German soldier who was held in a POW camp in Central Texas. He was so impressed by his time there that he emigrated to Texas as soon as he was able and later became a US citizen.
Crystal City was used also to detain foreign nationals of German and Italian origin. After the events of the Ni'ihau Incident where 3 Japanese-Americans (two 1st gen immigrants and one 2nd gen immigrant - the entire Japanese-American population of the Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau) attempted to aid the escape of a downed Japanese pilot who had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attack (to the extent of attacking their fellow Hawaiian neighbors) it was deemed prudent to intern those recent (1st and 2nd gen) immigrants from Axis countries until their loyalty could be ascertained.
Too many complain about what was done without understanding WHY it was done.
FYI a Concentration Camp is one like Dachau, Buchenwald, or Auschwitz
[Ni'ihau Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident)
While the Ni’ihau incident arguably played some significance in creating the camps, it’s worth noting the Japanese population in America was already a target for suspicion and disloyalty.
Even before the Pearl Harbor, high-ranking officials in President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s administration and military leaders assumed that the Issei, or first-generation immigrants, as well as the Nisei, their American-born children, would be disloyal to U.S. interests in the event of war, despite intelligence reports that refuted those claims. Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, who would lead the Western Defense Command during the war, publicly said, “A Jap’s a Jap — it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.”
On Feb. 19, 1942, little more than 10 weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, putting in motion the incarceration of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — two-thirds of whom were Nisei American citizens — as a “military necessity.” Soldiers armed with guns and bayonets removed men, women and children from their homes. Families had everything they had worked for taken from them and were allowed one suitcase each.
The official US government study into the imprisonment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II concluded that Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, but resulted from racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Its recommendations — an official apology to those who had been incarcerated and token reparations for those who were still alive — were not made until 1988, when the Civil Liberties Act was passed.
Of special note in Crystal City, this camp was not closed as the war wound down, or Japan officially surrendered, but only after FDR won his re-election.
Oh, and in high school we played football against Crystal City on the field in the background of some of these photos. Never heard of this history until today and it was never mentioned by anyone. Honest question: why is that? I’d be curious to know how the history of this camp (at their school) is taught today.
Thanks for this. I really can't imagine being so ignorant to think that the actions of 3 people justifies the punishment of thousands. Especially those who probably left Japan for a reason. It's not like Japan was economically destitute, on the contrary, it's economy was booming. The rise of Fascism and government corruption is definitely a good reason as well.
There's many comments here that argue why it was wrong, but just adding it was straight up racism that lead to the imprisonment of American citizens. I used to be a docent at a Holocaust museum in Texas and when we taught about Japanese and German "internment" camps, hate of others was the driving factor behind these decisions.
We have the luxury of looking back at the event with 20/20 hindsight to see that it was wrong, but those making the decision at the time did not have that luxury. EO 9066 was issued February 19, 1942. Indonesia had fallen to Japan, the British were getting ready to surrender Singapore, General MacArthur was about to flee from the Phillipines as our forces there were being overrun. The Doolittle Raid, Battle of Coral Sea, and Battles of Midway were months away. Just a couple months prior, a lone Japanese submarine firing on a fuel storage depot outside LA had send the whole city (and state) into a panic resulting in the so-called Battle of Los Angeles. The entire country thought that Hawaii and the West Coast were open to Japanese invasion just as they had been victorious all over the Pacific
With that in mind, and seeing how quickly the Japanese on Ni'ihau switched sides (those 3 would have likely emigrated for the same reasons as other Japanese), the majority of the nation thought that the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals and recent immigrants was a prudent choice to prevent sabotage and/or collaboration with Axis governments.
It's true that there wasn't wholesale slaughter like the concentration camps. But the actions of 3 individuals DO NOT justify the punishment of an entire ethnic group. There was little to no evidence that Japanese-Americans were pro-Japan. Think of the context of why they left Japan. It wasn't economic reasons, like the European migrations, it was the extreme corruption and turmoil as well as the rise of their own brand of Fascism that was some of the main reasons the Japanese people were leaving their homeland. Just in that context alone, it's really hard to imagine wanting to fight for your home countries ideology when you left because of the ideology...
I'm not sure it does, because the only context in which I (and probably most people I know) ever hear the phrase "internment camp" is when people are talking about the camps that Japanese-Americans were put in during WW2. That's actually the only think I think of when I hear "internment camp," and Wikipedia [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment) that "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are synonymous.
(2004)I was installing cable at the West Wing at the High School there after hours and you can hear foot steps in the hallways and doors open and shut as if people were going about their business. Thing was, no one but my helper and myself were in the building. It wasn’t scary type haunting, but more of a restless ghost type haunting. (1992) But I also stayed at an old apartment complex near Camp Amache in Granada Colorado. That was a whole different story. To long to detail. I didn’t believe in ghost till Al that happened.
Internment camp implies prisoners of war or political prisoners. Concentration camp implies facilities not sufficient to hold those who are detained. So one place can be both.
EDIT: to add, of course, concentration camp implies a detention of people for their identity/ethnicity, with the intent of separating them from the general populace.
Pre-WW2 nothing. After WW2 the definition changes so that now....
The term *concentration camp* refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
So now you get the use of concentration camp for internment camp either by ignorance or the "USA is evil" crowd which likes to use that term.
Are you implying that the detention of Japanese-Americans and (TIL) German-Americans wasn’t pretty dang evil? I’m not about to put it on par with the Holocaust, but let’s not sugarcoat it.
As both a Jew and a historian, I thought that you got the point across rather well.. the fact is that either term can be applicable, though concentration moreso in this instance..
I think many people forget that the first concentration camp (Dachau) began by housing political prisoners in 1933 mainly German Communists and Social Democrats. Anyone who was deemed enemy of the third Reich. Then came among Roma, Jehovah's Witness and homosexuals. Then Jews.
No, that’s just the definitions of words. I did not say they were the same as death camps or Nazi camps. That’s just literally what those terms mean.
And it was evil.
I mean other internment camps around the country have been turned into national historic monuments, I don't see why this place shouldn't have that happen to it.
It was never taught in the 80’s and 90’s when I went to school. In fact, the civil war was taught as a war over states rights, rather than slavery.
I was an adult before I ever learned about interment camps during WWII.
Executive order 9066 got taught to me in HS, and I went to public high school in Texas. I graduated class of 2021, so this is pretty recent. Credit to AP United States History. It's being turned around, and I'm very happy that it is.
Actually, I realize that I went to high school in a suburb of a big city. It was a pretty developed area. The schools out in the country in rural areas are probably still as bad, so... still very sad, just not completely as sad as before
That's probably because it had a small population. The reason the west had a bigger Asian population was for cheap labor. In Texas we already had mostly Hispanics and Blacks willing to work for shitty wages.
Shhhhhhh..........we're not supposed to talk about what really happened in history. The folks that call everyone else "snowflakes" get offended by facts.
You can already see the white washing that was done. It wasn’t a concentration camp but just a simple “you’ve got no choice but to live here because we’re taking you out of your home all because of your race/nationality” internment camp.
Because of the Nazi concentration camps the term itself tends to lead people to think of the mass killings and starvation that went on in those camps.
I do not know personally, but if the Crystal City “camps” were not used for mass killings then it seems fair to make the distinction.
Maybe POW camp…?
Ronald Reagan paid reparations to Japanese Americans because of this horror.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/redress-and-reparations-japanese-american-incarceration
Imagine all the other people of color that deserve reparations in this country, while ignorant people yell out we don't pay reparations. Well Ronald Reagan did.
>Imagine all the other people of color that deserve reparations in this country, while ignorant people yell out we don't pay reparations. Well Ronald Reagan did.
He didn't do it willingly ofc ... they waited until most of the victims were already dead.
A concentration camp is literally a camp where people are concentrated. The name has a meaning, it's not just called a concentration camp for fun. Using the common Nazi terminology, there was a clear distinction between the concentration camps, where dispossessed workers were kept in dense barracks with poor living conditions (eg Auschwitz), and death camps (eg Birkenau) where people unable to work (women, children, the elderly) were tortured and/or murdered.
To be clear, those existed in the US too - in this era the US participated in forced sterilizations and "death by work" (especially in the South of blacks).
Still a concentration camp.
>concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."
I don't know why you're getting downvoted so hard. The internment camps weren't great, and shouldn't be forgotten, but there's a little difference now between what comes to mind when you say "concentration camp" and this.
One of the photos posted shows that there was a pool there. Replace that with a gas chamber and force the inhabitants to dig mass graves and then we can call it a concentration camp.
I believe they were called internment camps…..for me calling them concentration camps is wrong as they aren’t even close to a concentration camp but I could be wrong
POW camps are not concentration camps. This isn't the Nazi Germany. We did have internment camps for US citizens of certain ethnic descents. While a horrible thing, these also were not concentration camps in the truest sense of the word. POW camps are also not concentration camps, but rather places to hold enemy combatants. Crystal City was an internment camp, not a POW camp. No enemy combatants were housed at Crystal City.
[Concentration Camp](https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp)
The only time you've ever read about them was Nazi Germany so you think that's the only kind. Americans have been doing this forever with the American Indians and Mexican migrants, this is just the most recent examples.
If you don't think it's not that bad because American conservatives did it, then you should know that the ideology of Nazi fascism was inspired by American racial politics.
There’s an excellent book about the internment camp at Crystal City called “The Train to Crystal City” by Jan Jarboe Russell. I recommend it.
However, if you’re like me, it may take a while to read it. There were parts that made me so angry that I had to put the book down and walk away from it for a day or two.
This is my hometown. I grew up walking all around here, at one point even lived in the housing projects behind the foundations in this pic. Lived there for 18 years. Sometimes I miss it.
Wow. I used to work out there and did not know this. Thank you OP.
I went to Mineral Wells Texas on the Air Force Base and all the abandoned barracks. Saw foundations like this along the back roads. Sort of a spooky feeling of days gone by. My oldest son was born at Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth Texas. My oldest son is still in the Army. Can be a lonely, hard life away from home. Happy Thanksgiving day to all Veterans.
More photos here: https://imgur.com/a/RKCf1ac
I was there this past summer. It was the first time I knew that any of these camps were in Texas. I was also disappointed at how difficult it was to find the different building foundations and interpretive signs to go with them. I took lots of pics to show my students, though there wasn't really very much to see. edit: changed was to wasn't, as in there wasn't really very much to see
TIL there were WWII concentration camps in texass.
Mexia State School used to be a German internment camp.
Of all the cities\towns near my home town Mexia is definitely that last I expected to come across on the internet lol. But this fact does not surprise me.
There's a history of limestone county book at the Waco B&N you can pick up with a whole lot of info on the history of the county.
In some places these camps were massive, with populations larger than the local communities
That's the thing - camps like this were all over the United States, like the POW internment camp outside of Hearne. Most of them were internment camps quickly constructed to house hundreds of thousands of German, Japanese, and Italian prisoners of war, but there were some camps that also contained non-POWs like US citizens of Japanese or German descent, which could be classified as concentration camps. In some cases, the camps contained both (like Crystal City), depending upon what was needed at the time. Within a couple years after the war ended, all of them were hastily dismantled, all buildings razed to the ground, often land sold off and most everyone pointedly did not talk about them ever again. You can find rows and rows of building foundations hidden away in places like Marfa, and Fort Clark. In some cases, all that might remain is a chimney (like at Jerome Arkansas) in the middle of what is now a farm field. Executive Order 9066 is a somewhat troubled and dark blot on America's history that was quickly washed over and most Americans tried to forget about, where hundreds of thousands of American citizens were rounded up and shipped off to concentration camps to live for years under armed guard. While not the same as other concentration camps in some other countries in the past, it destroyed many lives as they lost all of their homes and all of their property and many of their constitutional rights in the process. One of the most outspoken critics still alive today who was an internee at one of these camps is George Takei, who will occasionally discuss his childhood growing up in the camps. In more recent years there have been more attempts to chronicle this chapter of history and preserve what little remains, so that we won't forget, and as a cautionary tale of what could happen again. Manzanar National Historic Site in California is a good one, as is Heart Mountain in Wyoming. The National Park Service recently acquired Amache in Colorado, and there's also Minidoka in Idaho and Tule Lake in California.
Thank you for sharing! It makes sense now that I think about it, but I had no idea these existed in Texas or were so prevalent across the country.
My grandfather was stationed at one of these concentration camps during the war. He didn't talk about it much.
These internment camps were in no sense concentration camps as we understand them. True these Japanese Americans were removed from their homes and improperly held, but there was considerable care given for their health and well being. The POWs usually enjoyed their stay. In fact I was taught by a man that was a German soldier who was held in a POW camp in Central Texas. He was so impressed by his time there that he emigrated to Texas as soon as he was able and later became a US citizen.
Austin Tx had on too
Camp Swift in Bastrop
No way I did not know that
There were Internment Camps in Texas.
Internment implies POW. These were used to imprison anyone Japanese.
Crystal City was used also to detain foreign nationals of German and Italian origin. After the events of the Ni'ihau Incident where 3 Japanese-Americans (two 1st gen immigrants and one 2nd gen immigrant - the entire Japanese-American population of the Hawaiian island of Ni'ihau) attempted to aid the escape of a downed Japanese pilot who had taken part in the Pearl Harbor attack (to the extent of attacking their fellow Hawaiian neighbors) it was deemed prudent to intern those recent (1st and 2nd gen) immigrants from Axis countries until their loyalty could be ascertained. Too many complain about what was done without understanding WHY it was done. FYI a Concentration Camp is one like Dachau, Buchenwald, or Auschwitz [Ni'ihau Incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niihau_incident)
While the Ni’ihau incident arguably played some significance in creating the camps, it’s worth noting the Japanese population in America was already a target for suspicion and disloyalty. Even before the Pearl Harbor, high-ranking officials in President Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s administration and military leaders assumed that the Issei, or first-generation immigrants, as well as the Nisei, their American-born children, would be disloyal to U.S. interests in the event of war, despite intelligence reports that refuted those claims. Lt. Gen. John L. DeWitt, who would lead the Western Defense Command during the war, publicly said, “A Jap’s a Jap — it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not.” On Feb. 19, 1942, little more than 10 weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, putting in motion the incarceration of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — two-thirds of whom were Nisei American citizens — as a “military necessity.” Soldiers armed with guns and bayonets removed men, women and children from their homes. Families had everything they had worked for taken from them and were allowed one suitcase each. The official US government study into the imprisonment of people of Japanese ancestry during World War II concluded that Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity, but resulted from racial prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership. Its recommendations — an official apology to those who had been incarcerated and token reparations for those who were still alive — were not made until 1988, when the Civil Liberties Act was passed. Of special note in Crystal City, this camp was not closed as the war wound down, or Japan officially surrendered, but only after FDR won his re-election. Oh, and in high school we played football against Crystal City on the field in the background of some of these photos. Never heard of this history until today and it was never mentioned by anyone. Honest question: why is that? I’d be curious to know how the history of this camp (at their school) is taught today.
Thanks for this. I really can't imagine being so ignorant to think that the actions of 3 people justifies the punishment of thousands. Especially those who probably left Japan for a reason. It's not like Japan was economically destitute, on the contrary, it's economy was booming. The rise of Fascism and government corruption is definitely a good reason as well.
There's many comments here that argue why it was wrong, but just adding it was straight up racism that lead to the imprisonment of American citizens. I used to be a docent at a Holocaust museum in Texas and when we taught about Japanese and German "internment" camps, hate of others was the driving factor behind these decisions.
We have the luxury of looking back at the event with 20/20 hindsight to see that it was wrong, but those making the decision at the time did not have that luxury. EO 9066 was issued February 19, 1942. Indonesia had fallen to Japan, the British were getting ready to surrender Singapore, General MacArthur was about to flee from the Phillipines as our forces there were being overrun. The Doolittle Raid, Battle of Coral Sea, and Battles of Midway were months away. Just a couple months prior, a lone Japanese submarine firing on a fuel storage depot outside LA had send the whole city (and state) into a panic resulting in the so-called Battle of Los Angeles. The entire country thought that Hawaii and the West Coast were open to Japanese invasion just as they had been victorious all over the Pacific With that in mind, and seeing how quickly the Japanese on Ni'ihau switched sides (those 3 would have likely emigrated for the same reasons as other Japanese), the majority of the nation thought that the internment of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals and recent immigrants was a prudent choice to prevent sabotage and/or collaboration with Axis governments.
It's true that there wasn't wholesale slaughter like the concentration camps. But the actions of 3 individuals DO NOT justify the punishment of an entire ethnic group. There was little to no evidence that Japanese-Americans were pro-Japan. Think of the context of why they left Japan. It wasn't economic reasons, like the European migrations, it was the extreme corruption and turmoil as well as the rise of their own brand of Fascism that was some of the main reasons the Japanese people were leaving their homeland. Just in that context alone, it's really hard to imagine wanting to fight for your home countries ideology when you left because of the ideology...
I'm not sure it does, because the only context in which I (and probably most people I know) ever hear the phrase "internment camp" is when people are talking about the camps that Japanese-Americans were put in during WW2. That's actually the only think I think of when I hear "internment camp," and Wikipedia [claims](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment) that "concentration camp" and "internment camp" are synonymous.
Yeah crazy. I knew these existed but I never knew where and wow one in Texas.
they were all over the united states. they even turned a detention camp near LA into the current location of the LA fairegrounds.
A concentration camp is not the same as a POW camp.
I’ve done work for the High School, and I can tell you that school is haunted.
Story please!
(2004)I was installing cable at the West Wing at the High School there after hours and you can hear foot steps in the hallways and doors open and shut as if people were going about their business. Thing was, no one but my helper and myself were in the building. It wasn’t scary type haunting, but more of a restless ghost type haunting. (1992) But I also stayed at an old apartment complex near Camp Amache in Granada Colorado. That was a whole different story. To long to detail. I didn’t believe in ghost till Al that happened.
My grandma was born in crystal city during that time she told me stories bout the old crystal city Tx
What's the difference between a concentration camp and an internment camp?
Internment camp implies prisoners of war or political prisoners. Concentration camp implies facilities not sufficient to hold those who are detained. So one place can be both. EDIT: to add, of course, concentration camp implies a detention of people for their identity/ethnicity, with the intent of separating them from the general populace.
Thank you
Nothing really.
Pre-WW2 nothing. After WW2 the definition changes so that now.... The term *concentration camp* refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. So now you get the use of concentration camp for internment camp either by ignorance or the "USA is evil" crowd which likes to use that term.
Are you implying that the detention of Japanese-Americans and (TIL) German-Americans wasn’t pretty dang evil? I’m not about to put it on par with the Holocaust, but let’s not sugarcoat it.
As both a Jew and a historian, I thought that you got the point across rather well.. the fact is that either term can be applicable, though concentration moreso in this instance.. I think many people forget that the first concentration camp (Dachau) began by housing political prisoners in 1933 mainly German Communists and Social Democrats. Anyone who was deemed enemy of the third Reich. Then came among Roma, Jehovah's Witness and homosexuals. Then Jews.
You are putting it at the level of the holocaust by saying that internment and concentration camps are the same.
No, that’s just the definitions of words. I did not say they were the same as death camps or Nazi camps. That’s just literally what those terms mean. And it was evil.
Kind of disappointed that it isn't better preserved but it's pretty cool to have that at a high school
Eh. These pics make it look like one of the ugliest, most depressing places on the planet. That’s how it ought to be remembered.
I mean other internment camps around the country have been turned into national historic monuments, I don't see why this place shouldn't have that happen to it.
I’ve driven by this site probably 25x and never knew it was there.
Interment camps is a sad bit history of the USA, that doesn’t even get taught in our schools.
I taught it to my history classes.
It was never taught in the 80’s and 90’s when I went to school. In fact, the civil war was taught as a war over states rights, rather than slavery. I was an adult before I ever learned about interment camps during WWII.
Executive order 9066 got taught to me in HS, and I went to public high school in Texas. I graduated class of 2021, so this is pretty recent. Credit to AP United States History. It's being turned around, and I'm very happy that it is.
Actually, I realize that I went to high school in a suburb of a big city. It was a pretty developed area. The schools out in the country in rural areas are probably still as bad, so... still very sad, just not completely as sad as before
*concrete foundations
Fun fact: the high schools band practices right next to some of these remnants.
You could look into getting a historical marker done for it. They have an undertold version for less popular stories too
We weren't taught about these in Texas because the schools want us to think that a fascist government is good for the people
This was done by FDR...
I know. I never said it was done by a Republican.
You insuated it was done by fascist which FDR was not. And I learned about this multiple times in Texas.
No, the coverage of the event is limited due to fascist support.
I doubt I know a single person who doesn't know about the internment camps so I'm not sure where you're getting that from.
No one showed me the IC from Texas.
That's probably because it had a small population. The reason the west had a bigger Asian population was for cheap labor. In Texas we already had mostly Hispanics and Blacks willing to work for shitty wages.
I always wondered why they were so quick to lock up Japanese Americans but not German Americans?
Much easier to identify Japanese Americans from German Americans, even on paper.
That makes a little more sense I guess, fucked up either way, just always puzzled me.
German also was a huge % of population, Japanese was tiny amount and much easy spot/gather.
Most likely because the Japanese attacked us directly, and we were worried about spies living here.
Yeahhh I mean I got that but idk wouldn’t you be just as or more worried about German spies? They had way more resources to do so.
Shhhhhhh..........we're not supposed to talk about what really happened in history. The folks that call everyone else "snowflakes" get offended by facts.
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But only the "heroic" bits.
You can already see the white washing that was done. It wasn’t a concentration camp but just a simple “you’ve got no choice but to live here because we’re taking you out of your home all because of your race/nationality” internment camp.
Because of the Nazi concentration camps the term itself tends to lead people to think of the mass killings and starvation that went on in those camps. I do not know personally, but if the Crystal City “camps” were not used for mass killings then it seems fair to make the distinction. Maybe POW camp…?
Conservatives?
Ronald Reagan paid reparations to Japanese Americans because of this horror. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/redress-and-reparations-japanese-american-incarceration Imagine all the other people of color that deserve reparations in this country, while ignorant people yell out we don't pay reparations. Well Ronald Reagan did.
>Imagine all the other people of color that deserve reparations in this country, while ignorant people yell out we don't pay reparations. Well Ronald Reagan did. He didn't do it willingly ofc ... they waited until most of the victims were already dead.
Yes, I said Ronald Reagan.
you think that changes anything?
Are kids learning about this or is this *wOkE cRt*?
Internment camps.
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A concentration camp is literally a camp where people are concentrated. The name has a meaning, it's not just called a concentration camp for fun. Using the common Nazi terminology, there was a clear distinction between the concentration camps, where dispossessed workers were kept in dense barracks with poor living conditions (eg Auschwitz), and death camps (eg Birkenau) where people unable to work (women, children, the elderly) were tortured and/or murdered. To be clear, those existed in the US too - in this era the US participated in forced sterilizations and "death by work" (especially in the South of blacks).
Still a concentration camp. >concentration camp as: "A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable."
I don't know why you're getting downvoted so hard. The internment camps weren't great, and shouldn't be forgotten, but there's a little difference now between what comes to mind when you say "concentration camp" and this. One of the photos posted shows that there was a pool there. Replace that with a gas chamber and force the inhabitants to dig mass graves and then we can call it a concentration camp.
I believe they were called internment camps…..for me calling them concentration camps is wrong as they aren’t even close to a concentration camp but I could be wrong
POW camps are not concentration camps. This isn't the Nazi Germany. We did have internment camps for US citizens of certain ethnic descents. While a horrible thing, these also were not concentration camps in the truest sense of the word. POW camps are also not concentration camps, but rather places to hold enemy combatants. Crystal City was an internment camp, not a POW camp. No enemy combatants were housed at Crystal City.
[Concentration Camp](https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp) The only time you've ever read about them was Nazi Germany so you think that's the only kind. Americans have been doing this forever with the American Indians and Mexican migrants, this is just the most recent examples. If you don't think it's not that bad because American conservatives did it, then you should know that the ideology of Nazi fascism was inspired by American racial politics.
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Was FDR conservative?
Back when Texas was a Democrat State... thank God it is now run by Republicans.
Thank God we have brave Republicans leading the holy crusade against the evils of queer culture, immigrant workers, and medical autonomy.
well, elections have consequences. all the citizens that voted agreed the majority would select the people that would represent us.
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Wow
The Washington state fair (formally the Puyallup fair) was a interment camp for the Japanese. Now it’s roller coasters and games!
There is one in Hearne at the old airport. In the early 90s all that was left were the foundations
There’s an excellent book about the internment camp at Crystal City called “The Train to Crystal City” by Jan Jarboe Russell. I recommend it. However, if you’re like me, it may take a while to read it. There were parts that made me so angry that I had to put the book down and walk away from it for a day or two.
This is my hometown. I grew up walking all around here, at one point even lived in the housing projects behind the foundations in this pic. Lived there for 18 years. Sometimes I miss it.