MY VIEWS Pay attention to resurgence of Alien Enemies Act

You cannot imagine my shock when I read in the March 16 Mankato Free Press that President Trump had invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and had ignored a judge’s ruling to block its use.

In the 1940s this very act was used for the well-known national round up of people of German, Japanese and Italian heritage but it was also used for a more secret program that allowed the U.S. State Department and F.B.I. to oversee the round up “Blocked Nationals” in other countries.

Fifteen Latin American countries were persuaded by threats and/or promises to collaborate in the arrest and deportation of their own citizens that the United States had identified. These people were removed from their countries and sent to Axis countries or were interned in the U.S.

My widowed grandfather, Ernesto Contag, was a second-generation Ecuadorian citizen in his mid 30s who was born in Cuenca, Ecuador, in 1907. His parents had emigrated from Prussia (an area that now encompasses parts of Poland and Germany). My grandfather and hundreds of others in Ecuador were put on the U.S. Proclaimed List of Blocked Nationals (1942, 1943).

His import/ export business was forcibly shuttered. He and his children were rounded up by collaborating Ecuadorian agents and U.S. Special Intelligence Services agents and put on the Acadia — a ship for such displacements — as “enemy aliens” to be interned under armed guard in U.S. camps or traded as “bargain nationals” for Americans to be returned from other countries.

My widowed grandfather and his four young children (6-11 years old) were interned in a camp in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, before being sent — courtesy of the U.S. government — on the Drottningholm steamer to Nazi Germany.

When the family arrived in Germany, the children were not allowed to live with their father. At the end of the war when Berlin was occupied, my grandfather was able to find only three of his children (two in an orphanage home called Schlaborn) and one in a boarding school for foreign born Germans (Hohenelse). Russian authorities in occupied Berlin allowed Ernesto, the children and my great aunt to walk from Berlin to Paris as political refugees because he was an Ecuadorian citizen and not an enemy alien.

When they arrived in Paris the family was interned in refugee camps until 1946. The youngest child was so weak he could no longer walk on his own. My father, Carlos Contag, was an unaccompanied child in 1945 because his father had lost track of him after the bombings in Kassel and Korbach. Several people and French authorities found my dad (age 15) and helped him get to Beaune La-Rolande internment camp to reunite with his family.

My grandfather borrowed money to get his family back to Ecuador and never recovered financially or emotionally. Others were not so lucky. The Enemy Alien Act has a history of tremendous harm to innocent people and their children who have been used as international bargaining pawns. The historical record tells us that the Alien Enemies Act’s employment during World War II was a mistake.

Pay attention to its resurgence today. We must learn from history.

Kimberly Contag has retained many family documents and has accumulated 20 years of research, witness interviews, historical documents and newspaper articles from libraries and archives in Ecuador, the United States, France and Germany. She lives in St. Clair.

Kimberly Contag