Port of No Return

Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans

Marilyn G. Miller

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807175361
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

While most people are aware of the World War II internment of thousands of Japanese citizens and residents of the United States, few know that Germans, Austrians, and Italians were also apprehended and held in internment camps under the terms of the Enemy Alien Control Program. Port of No Return tells the story of New Orleans's key role in this complex secret operation through the lens of Camp Algiers, located just three miles from downtown New Orleans.

Deemed to be one of two principal ports through which enemy aliens might enter the United States, New Orleans saw the arrival of thousands of Latin American detainees during the war years. Some were processed there by the Immigration and Naturalization Service before traveling on to other detention facilities, while others spent years imprisoned at Camp Algiers. In 1943, a contingent of Jewish refugees, some of them already survivors of concentration camps in Europe, were transferred to Camp Algiers in the wake of tensions at other internment sites that housed both refugees and Nazis. The presence of this group earned Camp Algiers the nickname "Camp of the Innocents."

Despite the sinister overtones of the "enemy alien" classification, most of those detained were civilians who possessed no criminal record and had escaped difficult economic or political situations in their countries of origin by finding a refuge in Latin America. While the deportees had been assured that their stay in the United States would be short, such was rarely the case. Few of those deported to the U.S. during World War II were able to return to their countries of residence, either because their businesses and properties had been confiscated or because their home governments rejected their requests for reentry. Some were even repatriated to their countries of origin, a possibility that horrified Jews and others who had suffered under the Nazis. Port of No Return tells the varied, fascinating stories of these internees and their lives in Camp Algiers.

CHAPTER 1

New Orleans’s (Mostly) Secret Internment History

Three Miles from the Foot of Canal Street

The arrest and internment in the United States of thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese nationals as dangerous “alien enemies” during World War II is also a New Orleans story, a tale with local twists that reflects the unique nature of the Crescent City and its storied port. Touted in the mid-twentieth century as a “Gateway to the Americas,” the city served as a vital conduit to inter-American internment traffic.¹ The city’s proximity to the mouth of the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as to the Canal Zone and other Latin American ports, made it a principal point of entry and departure for enemy aliens headed to or from internment in the United States, as well as for those bound for repatriation or exchange. Thousands of people were processed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New Orleans before being sent on to camps throughout the United States, particularly in the South.² The role of an alien detention station on the West Bank of the Mississippi in the Algiers neighborhood was also significant.³ The old US Quarantine Station–New Orleans (figure 1.1), rechristened as Camp Algiers, would gain (and then arguably lose) a reputation as a refuge for internees facing or fearing violence in other camps, promising—like the city itself—a unique, less stressful atmosphere than elsewhere in the country.⁴

FIGURE 1.1. US Quarantine Station–New Orleans, circa 1930s, soon after its completion. Photo courtesy The Historic New Orleans Collection, acc. no. 1995.19.

While enemy alien detention didn’t shift into full gear in the United States until after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government was already on alert and preparing for possible scenarios in anticipation of its implementation. A primary question was who would be responsible for monitoring alien enemies. On October 10, 1941, Eugene Kessler, district director of the INS in New Or-
leans, reported, “It has been tentatively decided that the temporary detention phase of the alien enemy program to be followed in the event of a declaration of war will be under the jurisdiction of this Service, and that this Service is to be responsible for providing facilities for the maintenance of alien enemies arrested, pending the decision of boards as to whether the alien is to be interned or paroled.”⁵ The INS would thus play a key role in detaining and interning these noncitizens, though the Department of Justice, Department of State, War Department, FBI, Office of Naval Intelligence, several branches of the US military, and even the US Postal Service would also collaborate in the effort. A letter directed to the special assistant to the attorney general ten days later notes, “Consideration might also be given to the Old U.S. Immigration Station on the Lower Coast, Algiers, 3 miles down the river from New Orleans.”⁶ The US Quarantine Station–New Orleans, located at 3819 Patterson Road along the Mississippi River levee, was established in 1934 with eighteen buildings, only a few of which would be used for the detention station. The site was described as “ideal as a detention headquarters if modernized,” better suited than any other location in the area for that purpose.⁷

FIGURE 1.2. Floor plan for the first floor of Building 13, used to house enemy aliens. National Archives, used with permission.

A survey showed that the buildings set aside at the quarantine station could provide detention facilities for an estimated 30 detainees, although the camp’s director, Raymond Bunker, would later reveal that more than 250 detainees at a time were held at the site at the height of the war.⁸ Surveyors described the spot as being three miles from a railroad station and four miles from a local bus route but reachable from downtown New Orleans only by ferry, as the bridge known as the Crescent City Connection had not yet been built.⁹ A memo sent to the attention of Joseph Savoretti, deputy commissioner in the attorney general’s office, also presented the quarantine station as the best available option, given its location “about three miles from the foot of Canal Street.”¹⁰ The grounds comprised a total of about eight acres. Floor plans of the first and second floor of Building 13 were provided with the memo (figure 1.2), along with an estimate from a contractor for erecting fencing and window guards around the facility. Though Building 13 was later modified to serve as offices for a Border Patrol Headquarters Station active on the site until late 2018, its exterior still looked very much as it did while serving as a detention facility (figure 1.3).

FIGURE 1.3. Building 13, US Customs and Border Patrol Headquarters, 2017. Photo by Eduardo Alvelo, used with permission.

A November 5, 1941, communiqué specified that “approximately 23,000 potential alien enemies have registered as residing in the States of Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas, and the bulk of these are in Louisiana, for which reason it is deemed necessary to establish a temporary detention facility at New Orleans, which has been determined to be most centrally located with respect to the geographic distribution of the majority of the persons concerned.”¹¹ This suggests that early on, the Algiers station was planned as a temporary holding facility for enemy aliens apprehended domestically rather than a site concentrating detainees from Latin America, as it would become later. On December 8, the day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a memo to Major Lemuel B. Schofield, special assistant to the attorney general, confirmed “the Public Health Service has now informed this office that they will permit the use of Building No 13 at the New Orleans Quarantine Station during the present National emergency.”¹²

FIGURE 1.4. Telegram dated December 19, 1941, announcing the opening of the Algiers site as a wartime detention station. National Archives, used with permission.

Kessler’s telegram to the Department of Justice, dated December 19, 1941 (figure 1.4), indicates it took less than two weeks after the US entry into the war to get the Algiers site up and running: “Alien detention station will be opened tomorrow and will transfer twenty aliens from federal detention headquarters to detention station 5:00 p.m. tomorrow. Remainder early next week when additional equipment procured.” The files do not tell us who these twenty people were or where, why, or by whom they were detained or how long they remained in detention at Algiers. Nor do we know what persons constituted the “remainder” set to follow them into detention. But for the next four and a half years, the station would intern hundreds of “dangerous” alien enemies, right in the “backyard” of the French Quarter, as it were.

Actually, it would be some time before the quarantine station would become “Camp Algiers,” that is, a full-fledged internment facility where men, women, and children resided for significant periods of time. For the first year of the war, it appears it was mostly used on an occasional basis for a variety of temporary detention needs. A memo indicates that in April 1942, Alicia Klemm and Elida Levigon, who had arrived from Panama aboard the Florida—probably as voluntary internees accompanying their deported husbands—were detained at the station with their small children en route to Texas’s Camp Seagoville, due to their advanced pregnancies. Levigon may have even delivered a child in New Orleans, as the memo claims she “gave birth on the 9th instant” and was ready for discharge, while hospital authorities confirmed Mrs. Klemm was not ready to deliver her baby and could be removed to Seagoville without danger, though they requested the services of a matron and a nurse during the transfer.¹³

Even if the part Camp Algiers would play in the internment drama was still in development, New Orleans itself was from early 1942 serving as a primary hub for transport vessels leaving for Latin America and for people arriving en route to US detention centers.¹⁴ For example, an April 1942 Department of Justice memo from Willard Kelly warned that it would not be possible for twenty patrol inspectors to satisfactorily guard the Acadia against sabotage and asked for increased security personnel on board. That ship was scheduled to leave New Orleans on May 1 and to return on May 16, after picking up four hundred Axis aliens in Colombia and two hundred in Ecuador. As noted in the introduction, with cabin space for only two hundred passengers, the Acadia ultimately boarded more than three times that number. Max Paul Friedman calculates 675 Axis nationals from Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia created a scene of “unimaginable overcrowding,” severe shortages of food and water, and insufficient bathing facilities for the New Orleans–bound detainees. The transports were staffed with inexperienced army and marine personnel who reportedly stole liquor and valuables from the detainees’ luggage.¹⁵

Whereas there was significant internment traffic through the port of New Orleans in the first half of 1942, the limited use of the Algiers facility in that period presented a red flag to administrators. Kessler noted in a May 1, 1942, letter to the deputy commissioner of the INS in Philadelphia, “the total personnel of the Alien Detention Station at Algiers as of May 1st is ten, i.e., the Officer in Charge, seven Guards, one Cook and one Janitor-Fireman,” adding, “There are in detention at the Station at this time but ten enemy aliens, all males (not counting one female at the Convent of the Good Shepherd and one male at the Marine Hospital). This makes one employee for each detainee, which naturally renders the cost of detention per alien exceedingly high to say the least.”¹⁶ Given this unfavorable cost-benefit ratio (even for government work), Kessler had a suggestion: “It occurs to me that possibly the Central Office might wish to give consideration to using the facilities of the station . . . for such aliens ordered interned who express a desire in writing to remain there rather than to be transferred to a permanent detention camp, as well as for aliens ordered paroled who are unable to secure sponsors. The station might also be utilized for aliens arriving from abroad destined to a permanent internment camp whose repatriation at an early date is contemplated.”

Apparently, these suggestions met with approval; the station’s use expanded steadily, allowing for Bunker’s later claim of servicing 250 internees at a time. However, as there is no complete set of records for the facility, it is difficult to generalize regarding its population beyond the fact that it fluctuated. For example, Italian names constituted the majority of the list of those held at the alien detention station in a September 25, 1942, memo to Savoretti. Eleven Italian citizens were awaiting transfer to a camp in Fort Missoula, Montana, and three more were detained under “internment proceedings,” along with five German citizens and one Japanese citizen.¹⁷

A letter from Kessler to the INS commissioner in mid-June 1942 alludes to yet another proposed use for the Algiers site. “The local United States Army Provost Marshal has requested permission to lodge small groups of alien enemies in the Detention Station at Algiers, Louisiana. As the Provost Marshal had explained, “Occasionally the Army transport service lands groups of alien enemies here at times when it is not convenient or practicable to remove them from the vessel and ship them out immediately by train.” The army promised not to hold the alien enemies at the detention station for more than twenty-four hours, and the provost marshal was willing to offer as many soldiers as might be needed as additional guards. This would prevent holding enemy aliens in the local (federal) jail—a fate many coming from Latin America had already experienced. A pencil-written message on the letter shows it was approved.¹⁸

Under the umbrella of the INS, much of the operation of the Algiers camp would fall to the Border Patrol itself. The Border Patrol was entrusted with this job “because of their long and successful record of work with aliens,” a local news story explained.¹⁹ Eleanor Nicholson began her article titled “What’s That Uniform You’re Wearing?” with the observation:

In a uniform conscious world w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface: A Surprising Piece of the City’s Past
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1. New Orleans’s (Mostly) Secret Internment History
• CHAPTER 2. The Quandaries of Classification
• CHAPTER 3. Incarceration or a Welcome Refuge? The Panama Jews at Camp Algiers
• CHAPTER 4. Professor, Spy, Confidant: Three Notables Interned in New Orleans
• CHAPTER 5. Royals and Nobles behind Barbed Wire
• CHAPTER 6. Aid Organizations, Diplomatic Efforts, and Community Allies
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index