MANZANAR Historic Resource Study/Special History Study

TREATMENT OF GERMAN AND ITALIAN ALIENS

While the mass evacuation of Japanese was underway during the spring and summer of 1942, federal officials continued to deliberate the fate of German and Italian aliens. By early May, DeWitt intended to evacuate these people from all prohibited zones within the Western Defense Command. His plans for a collective evacuation of German and Italian aliens, however, faced strong opposition both within his own staff and in Washington. In DeWitt's San Francisco headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Boekel, assistant chief of the Civil Affairs Division, concluded:

So far as concerns the mission [of the Western Defense Command] of protecting against sabotage and the evacuation of German and Italian aliens, the accomplishment of the mission should be started by a different approach. In the case of the Japanese, their oriental habits of life, their and our inability to assimilate biologically, and, what is more important, our inability to distinguish the subverters and saboteurs from the rest of the mass made necessary their class evacuation on a horizontal basis. In the case of the Germans and Italians, such mass evacuation is neither necessary nor desirable. [75]

Boekel urged instead that a policy of individual exclusion for the Germans and Italians, rather than mass evacuation, be adopted. In Washington, as Colonel Bendetsen subsequently explained, "there was much opposition in the War Department to the evacuation of Italian aliens and considerable opposition, as well, to the collective evacuation of German aliens." [76]

Pursuant to further discussion, President Roosevelt, on May 15, 1942, approved a policy which the War Department had developed to deal with the question of German and Italian aliens. Instead of a collective evacuation of such aliens, the War Department would authorize the defense commander to issue individual exclusion orders against both aliens and citizens under the authority of Executive Order 9066. This rejection of DeWitt's recommendation concerning the removal of German and Italian aliens, which he explicitly justified on grounds of military necessity at a time when the Pacific outlook was more grim than it had been in February, weakens the theory later advanced by the War Department that it acted on evacuation in accordance with DeWitt's recommendations that were in turn based on the general's estimate of the military necessity of the situation. Instructions to implement the approved policy regarding German and Italian aliens, including a caution enjoining strict secrecy, went to DeWitt on May 22. [77]