Sigrid Toye woke in the middle of the night to the wail of a siren.
It was Dec. 7, 1941 – the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.
Sitting upright on her bed in her second-floor room at the family’s house in Los Feliz, the 4-year-old Toye looked down the hallway and saw nothing but darkness.
What she also didn’t see – but would soon learn – was that her German-born father, Eugen Banzhaf, was under arrest.
“It was frightening,” recalls Toye, now 79.
And unexpected. While FBI agents were rounding up some Japanese American men in the hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, they also launched a sweep of German-born men. Her father would be one of about 11,000 people of German ancestry, joined by a few thousand Italian nationals, who eventually were interned.
Toye ran downstairs and found her mother sitting quietly on the couch. Her eyes were swollen from crying. Then she told Toye how men had come to the door and taken her father away.
“I didn’t understand,” Toye recalls. She knew her parents were German citizens and that Germany was involved in the war in Europe.
But what did that have to do with her family?
‘ALIEN ENEMIES’
The story of Executive Order 9066 – signed 75 years ago today – and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans is well-known, but few remember the order also applied to some German and Italian families.
Though they were not held in camps like the Japanese Americans, several hundred German and Italian Americans were forced to move away from coastal areas as a result of individual exclusion orders.
“They weren’t put in camps, but they had to leave the West Coast and get away from the coastline by 150 miles,” says Stephen Fox, a professor emeritus at Humboldt State University and author of “The Unknown Internment: An Oral History of the Relocation of Italian Americans during World War II” and “Against All Enemies: The United States v. German Americans in World War II.”
Fox said Germans and Italians were not incarcerated en masse like the Japanese for the same reason the Japanese in Hawaii were not held – they were a big and growing part of the economy.
“The Italians and Germans were a hugely greater number of the population and they were in occupations that were part of the larger economy.”
Conversely, most Japanese nationals were ineligible for citizenship and were prohibited from owning land, whereas Germans and Italians could still be naturalized.
“On the West Coast, the Japanese were completely isolated and vulnerable,” Fox added. “There was no avenue for them to assimilate into a greater America.”
Still, as with the its push against the Japanese, the government’s actions against Germans and Italians began with presidential proclamations issued immediately after Pearl Harbor.
Pursuant to the Alien Enemy Act of 1798, which remains in effect today, the government may apprehend and deport “alien enemies” upon declaration of war, an invasion or the threat of an attack.
On Dec. 7 and 8, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed identical proclamations formally designating natives and citizens of Japan, Germany and Italy as “alien enemies,” restricting their movements and authorizing their arrest.
More than 6,600 Japanese, Germans and Italians from Latin America also were deported and interned in the United States on the basis of “hemispheric security,” according to the National Archives and Records Administration website.
By the end of the war, more than 31,000 suspected enemy aliens and their families had been interned at detention stations and military facilities across the country.
“Not a single person was ever charged with a crime,” Fox said, adding that their only “crime” was their nationality.
‘WHO SHE WAS’
Most of the people held were men. But due to economic concerns, some wives and children voluntarily joined them.
Toye says she always wondered if she and her mother would have been better off at the family detention center in Crystal City, Texas.
After her father was taken, the government confiscated his steel import business and took over his personal finances. They had to sell the house in Los Feliz and move to Echo Park.
“We didn’t have a whole lot of food and nobody wanted to hire my mom. She did get a couple of jobs, but she always got fired. She had a very heavy accent.”
Eugen Banzhaf was released after three years. But he was on parole and, as a parolee, he had a tough time finding work in post-war America.
Like the Japanese, Toye and other German Americans faced raw discrimination. Kids at school called Toye a Nazi. People spat on her mom when they were in public.
“There was nothing she could do and she wasn’t at fault. She couldn’t help herself for being who she was.”
Contact the writer: sbaer@scng.com
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