Joseph Goebbels' secretary at 105: "We really didn't know anything."

Harp said:

Of course. However his remarks were germane and offered in context of the conversation.

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I understand. You can't change what the man said. And how many movements that we know of are starting right now using terms and behavior that we would privately question yet not choose to speak about or act against? We feel it's their problem and that we don't yet know where it's all going or that maybe it'll blow over before we could possibly need to get involved. We look around the world today and it looks a lot like the 1930s with chaos that WILL break out in terrible ways yet, just like then, we cannot yet predict those ways, who will end up on what side or who the heroes or villains will be when people look back from the vantage point of the next century. The "right side of history" is always the side of the victors when they look back in time.

It raises legitimate questions about when you choose to be loyal to your country and how you deal with that. I don't have any answers, as every person needs to decide for themselves in each different situation, but I find it easy to place myself in the difficult position of a German with a pre 1933 loyalties and love of Germany, who's family is all over Germany, confronting the morality of fighting the people who are attacking their home. I doubt this was all that common but you COULD have the lowest opinion of your leaders and the actions of your government yet still realize that the fight had become about the survival of everyone you care about ... especially when it was not so easy to leave a country that was becoming more despotic all through the 1930s and the world was in the height of a terrible depression. Choosing an alternative, even for relatively well off people, was not so easy at that time.

Of course, in Japan, the idea of leaving was vastly harder to conceive of. People were SO much more tied to their culture, and there were fewer peaceful and accepting places to go. Oddly, it seems to me that the US was one of the very few possibilities and, again, there was that depression thing.

It makes me wonder what the practical exchange rates were like, not yen to dollars (I can look that up) but how easy was it to make that many yen and then what they would have bought in the USA.

MikeKardec said:

Of course, in Japan, the idea of leaving was vastly harder to conceive of. People were SO much more tied to their culture, and there were fewer peaceful and accepting places to go. Oddly, it seems to me that the US was one of the very few possibilities and, again, there was that depression thing.

It makes me wonder what the practical exchange rates were like, not yen to dollars (I can look that up) but how easy was it to make that many yen and then what they would have bought in the USA.

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It's important to remember that under the Immigration Act of 1924 it was nearly impossible for Japanese immigrants, as well as other Asians, to enter the United States -- under the quota system adopted under that law, Japanese immigration to the US was specfically banned. Although a few got in here and there under various manipulations of the law, Japanese immigrants as a class were barred from entering the United States from 1924 until 1952 -- and those who had entered the US before the 1924 law (the Issei generation) were not eligible to become citizens. The exclusionary aspect of the Immigration Act was the result of twenty years of agitation by a well-funded, well-organized anti-Japanese movement in California, which drew both from angry white laborers afraid of losing their jobs to cheap Asian competition, and from "intellectual" eugenicists screaming in the Hearst and Chandler press that the coming Asian hordes would "mongrelize" the white race.

Interestingly, the quota for German immigrants was the highest set for any country in the world -- the US would accept up to 52,000 Germans a year under the terms of the 1924 law, nearly one-third of the total annual quota of all immigrants from all nations. Judge that as you will.

LizzieMaine said:

It's important to remember that under the Immigration Act of 1924 it was nearly impossible for Japanese immigrants, as well as other Asians, to enter the United States -- under the quota system adopted under that law, Japanese emigration to the US was specfically banned. Although a few got in here and there under various manipulations of the law, Japanese immigrants as a class were barred from entering the United States from 1924 until 1952 -- and those who had entered the US before the 1924 law (the Issei generation) were not eligible to become citizens.

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Well that makes it clear that Japanese were even less welcomed here than even some other places where they weren't all that welcome!

However, I had a cousin by marriage (who'd be in his 90s if still alive) from Japan. His father came in the 1890s but I believe they had family members somehow joining them during that later, restricted, period. We also had Japanese friends who had come to study in the US prior to WWII, their stories seemed to suggest that staying well beyond their time as students wasn't a paranoia inducing adventure, meaning that those seemed to be happy times. I was a kid so I never got to grill them about it. They (the California group of "students," not my cousin's family) did go back to Japan before the war, only to return in the 1960s. They obviously had money because they could travel from Japan and study at USC and Berkley ... I'm guessing that might have helped.

I find myself interested in illegal immigrants of all sorts back in the Era. You've got to figure that if we can lose track of thousands of Latinos in this day and age (or did back when INS actually had the wherewithal to investigate) a Japanese national in a Japanese community in LA or Frisco in the 1920s or '30s could probably pull it off pretty easily, possibly sharing some sort of ID with others. I sure don't know how my family in the mid west did it or if there was some aspect of the story that I don't understand. But my father walked off merchant ships all over the world and it seems no one ever questioned him. He did have a set of seaman's papers but they weren't actually his, and the physical description on them on them was four or five inches short of his actual height. Whatever immigration authorities there were never seemed to have a problem with him.

I've been under the impression that with the right language skills and a halfway descent story you could get in just about anywhere without documentation in those days (maybe not so easily for Europe or Japan where authorities were pretty buttoned up) as long as you didn't try a "formal" entry point like Ellis Island. My Dad, born 1908, never had any formal ID except his birth certificate (not all of his extended family even had one of those and he never carried his with him) until he registered for the draft in the 1940s. Even after that he never had anything (he didn't drive) except credit cards starting in the late 1960s. He and his father both profoundly changed the spelling of the family name over the years ... a situation that, today, would have computers melting down all over the country.

He DID have two sets of seaman's papers, and a Second's Card (a picture ID for boxing seconds) but they were under pseudonyms. In those days you just told the testing or certifying body for the Lifeboat and Navigation or the Boxing credential what your name was and ... well, that's what it was. I assume that many other forms of ID were the same. I have to assume that if a Japanese man chose disembark a ship in San Pedro and wander over to Furusato, on Terminal Island, as long as he was the right age or had the right story, he could vanish into the thousands of fishermen or cannery workers. It might have been a bigger risk of being blackmailed into working for the Yakuza than it was being picked out of a kaleidoscope of Japanese faces with varying forms of "papers" by some ignorant Caucasian cop.

Just musing about all that ... If anyone has any thoughts or information about any of this I'd love to know whatever it is. I know about certain things that happened but that doesn't mean I have a clue as to exactly why or how!

One set of my great-grandparents just walked across the border from Canada in the early 1890s. They never had any kind of permanent-resident papers that anybody knows of, and they never took citizenship in the US. They remained "Aliens" on the census until they died, but there was never any indication that anybody came after them about it. Of course, nobody was concerned about Scotch-Irish Canadians "mongrelizing the white race," either.

It was a very common thing for foreign seamen to jump ship when in port, especially in New York, and swim ashore, mingling into the various ethnic communities in the city. Some were looking for a better life, some were on the run from the law. As long as they didn't make trouble, they'd usually be all right. Occasionally, though, one would find their way into the news -- Richard Hauptmann, convicted kidnaper of the Lindbergh baby, was the most famous example. As a convicted felon in Germany, he couldn't enter the US legally, so he did so illegally by stowing away on a ship from Germany, jumping overboard, and swimming ashore. The first time he tried this, he got caught and sent home, but the second time he was more careful, mingled into the German community of the Bronx, and would never have been noticed by anyone had he not been stupid about passing ransom money.

Or stupid about pulling the kidnapping to begin with!

My great and great great grandparents were back and forth over the Canadian border for a couple of generations prior to that period. They never admitted that they were or weren't citizens of either country that I know of. They just sort of "were." Though they later became rather prissy about the family history and spelling of the name, they did accept that Japanese American son in law with minimal disturbance sometime soon after WWII ... I'm always surprised and proud of that. There seem to have been ("shh!" Horror of horrors) both Gypsies (often called "Syrians" in the local news papers) and Jews but now we're counting both sides of the family. I'm guessing the Gypsies rarely stopped at any border and the Jews were pretty good at leaving their pasts, and names and heritage, behind also. There was a time, not so very long ago, when you simply were who you said you were. The end of that era was the end of a certain kind of America that we'll never see again.

You can pinpoint the precise date to June 29, 1940 -- the date that the Smith Act was enacted by Congress. Rep. Howard Smith of Virginia, the sponsor of the legislation, was a xenophobic racist Red-baiter who lived long enough to see much of his law declared unconstitutional.

Interestingly, Smith had a specific purpose in framing the law as he did -- he was out to drive his arch-enemy, labor leader Harry Bridges, a native of Australia, out of the US. Bridges got the last laugh -- he outlived Smith by over a decade, and remained in the US until the day he died. But the Smith Act's "alien registration" provisions remain in effect to this day, the legacy of one man's forgotten political vendetta.

Her account seems plausible to me. She was working in the Ministry of Propaganda, their job was to create public opinion and whitewash the regime. No wonder they specialized in publishing only the good news.

We know from other sources that the worst atrocities were hushed up. This seems incredible to us, after a lifetime of hearing about Nazi atrocities day and night at 100 decibels but is proven by those who have done original research into the period in Germany as well as those who lived it.

There's a great expression I remember my mom telling me once.

"Time has a way of putting green leaves on a dead tree."

LizzieMaine said:

The thing is, the early years of the Nazi regime *were* cheery, romantic times for a great many people. Germany was on the move, the flags were waving, patriotism was running high, the economy was booming. The price they paid for that feeling of success and prosperity was not seeing what they didn't want to see -- or seeing and saying "well, that's not my problem, is it?"

Nazi Germany couldn't have happened without the support, whether active or tacit, of ordinary people, regular everyday folks who loved their kids, patted their dogs, went to church, were kind to random strangers, and thought of themselves as good, honest, noble citizens. And that's what makes it terrifying.

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Good point. Keep in mind, there are plenty of Americans who lived on the West coast when the Japanese and Japanese Americans were rounded up and put into camps who say to this day they never saw it and had no idea until after the war was over.
How many Germans really would have had daily interactions with Jews to know something was going on? Or the ones way out in the country or in the mountains, and never knew anyone affected by this?
It's simply a matter of knowing someone this affected or being there when it actually happened. Now, the people living near the camps? Yeah, it was far more likely they did know as many couldn't have missed the signs. But I fully believe that many Germans had no clue this was going on as they were focused on the war itself.
If you didn't have friends of neighbors being rounded up and you were worried that the Russians would eventually overrun your country, would you have known what was going on in those concentration camps?
Though it doesn't absolve the nation's collective responsibility for the holocaust, it's silly to think every German knew it was going on.

My father was a prisoner-of-war for a year in Germany, having been captured in Italy. He was given work on a local farm somewhere near the prison camp in Moosberg, north of Munich (I was stationed in Augsburg). Yet he never had a bad word to say about the Germans he met; many good ones, in fact. As it happened, our family originated in Germany but that was about 400 years ago. But my late father-in-law, who was in the AAF in WWII and flew bomber missions over Germany (contributing to the urban renewal, he liked to say). He later made many business trips to Germany and came away believing the same things about Jews that the Germans did. I don't even think my father knew Jews still existed but my father-in-law actually seemed to wish they didn't.

In all honesty, these things are always more complicated than they seem on the surface and things like the Holocaust do not happen overnight. They are decades in the making, even longer, perhaps. There are always surprises when you begin to dig into the facts. It is true that the Nazis, Hitler in particular, wanted to get rid of the Jews and make Germany great again but it developed that hardly any other country would actually accept them. It would seem that the Jewish Problem was worldwide. The initiative to purify the Aryan race, meaning Nordic, was also decades in the making, probably going back to the 1890s. It had its parallels here in this country, too, that lasted well into the 1950s.

I don't think the racial problems in this country are comparable, in spite of the movement to send blacks back to Africa. It's complicated, though, and I can't do it justice. Racists today have a fantasy view of the past, though, somehow imagining that once upon a time, America was white. Pure white. It is almost shocking to learn that before the Civil War, a few states had majority black populations and they were slaves. Just think about that for a minute. There were states in America in which a majority of the population were slaves.

The scary thing was when I went to Europe the first time, I heard Dutch and German people who were alive during WW2 saying that if Hitler had confined the Holocaust to just the Gypsies, there'd be a statue of the man in most towns across Europe.
That was downright frightening to hear!