Inside America's Concentration Camps

This is a book that primarily deals with the various internments during World War II. This one covers the full spectrum, though, covering persons of Japanese ancestry, Germans and Italians. Most of what reads about the internment concerns the Japanese Americans so the addition of learning about what happened to the Germans and the Italians is good.

This is also a book that deals with factual details but at the same time ties them in to specific examples of what happened to certain people and that alone is quite enough to get one quite angry that America threw civil rights totally to the wind and ignored it's so-called justice system just to get some people they felt were potentially dangerous out of the way.

Which, of course, is not a whole lot different from what is happening in today's world.

The book starts off examining the way the Native Americans were treated, rounded up and forced onto reservations. The reservations, like the internments, were often on land that was not basically very good. The Native Americans, like the Japanese Americans, were rounded up, not charged with any specific crime, given no defense attorney, subjected to no trial and just forced to move away from their homes under gunpoint. The only major difference is that the reservations were not surrounded by barbed wire, guard towers and Army soldiers and, in some cases, tanks.

One thing not pointed out in the book, though, is that the Native Americans were also subjected to biological warfare on the parts of the whites and some of the Native Americans were given blankets which contained smallpox spores.

The last part of the book goes into the possibility that such a thing like internment/concentration camps could very well again happen in this country with people's rights totally trampled into the ground. Now, what I will do is to just list some highlights of the book as there is so much information in the book that the review could end up being way too long.

Some of the emphasis on the camps or similar things were really the result of big-business, even back to the earliest colonies in the U.S.

Some of the things that FDR did in relation to Hawaii that do not appear in other books on this subject.

What led up to Executive Order 9066.

Life in the various camps and comparisons between the desert camps and the camps built in swamp areas.

How the Germans and Italians were treated and how this differed from the way Japanese Americans were treated.

How the U.S. turned its back on Jews seeking safety from the Nazis.

This is without doubt one of the most valuable informative books on the entire internment process.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page