Essay On Internment Camps

During World War Two in Germany there were concentration camps imprisoning thousands for not being the “perfect human being” on terms of Adolf Hitler. In the United States, mainly concentrated on the Western side, were camps holding Japanese Americans. Punishing them for something they had nothing to do with. On December 7, 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked an American naval base at Pearl Harbor near the Hawaiian island Honolulu. The attack destroyed “nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight enormous battleships, and almost 200 airplanes. More than 2,000 Americans soldiers and sailors died in the attack, and another 1,000 were wounded” (“Pearl Harbor”). President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared war the next day. The Japanese invasion
Internment, according to vocabulary.com means “putting a person in prison or other kind of detention, generally in wartime” (“Internment”). A concentration camp, on the other hand, is defined as “a guarded compound for the detention or imprisonment of aliens, members of ethnic minorities, political opponents, etc., especially any of the camps established by the Nazis prior to and during World War II for the confinement and persecution of prisoners” (dictionary.com). The residents in internment camps had work, they were given food, the children went to school, and the guards weren’t killing anyone for the sake of it. To sum it up, the prisoners were treated like humans. George Takei describes internment camps as “prison camps, with sentry towers, machine guns pointed at us-in some of the most desolate places in this country” (George Takei). The only connection I really found between concentration camps and internment camps was the way they got there, by railroad. As Takei recalls, “leaving home in a railroad car with sentries, armed soldiers at both ends of the car, sitting on wooden benches. And whenever we approached a town, we were forced to draw the curtains, the shade. We were not supposed to be seen by the people out there” (George
Three were upheld on appeal by the court, while only one case won. The first case that was upheld was Hirabayashi v. United States in 1943. Gordon Hirabayashi was born in the state of Washington. He challenged the curfew of internment, he was “arrested and convicted on two counts, one for violating General DeQitt’s curfew order, and two, for failing to register at a control center to prepare for departure to an ‘assembly’ center” (“Court Challenges”). A second case to challenge curfew orders was Minoru Yasai, another American born citizen. The Supreme Court declared the President and Congress “had appropriately used the war power provided in the Constitution” (“Court Challenges”) therefore, upholding their convictions. A California native Fred Korematsu’s case argued in court exclusion laws. In this case, “Justice Murphy declared that the exclusion orders did violate the rights of citizens to due process of law” (“Court Challenges”). However, “[i]n handing down the decision on the eviction, the Supreme Court avoided the ruling on the internment” (“Court Challenges”). In 1942, a women named Mitsuye Endo was released as the Supreme Court had ruled “Endo ‘should be given her liberty’ and released from custody, since her loyalty was clearly established” (“Court