Justice Department officials opted for a policy of selective internment of ethnic Germans and Italians, irrespective of citizenship status. Arrests of civilians whose names appeared on custodial detention lists—including numerous American citizens—commenced on December 8, 1941, three days before the United States had declared war against Germany and Italy. [11] Detainees received hearings following their arrests, but those arrested on the U.S. mainland were not allowed legal counsel. [12] In Hawai'i, twenty-one of the 106 ethnic German and Italian civilians arrested within forty-eight hours of the Pearl Harbor attack were U.S. citizens. [13] Confinement of German citizens in the United States had actually begun two years earlier, when more than five hundred German crew members from the ocean liner SS Columbus were rescued in the Atlantic Ocean before being transferred to Fort Stanton , New Mexico. Another group of Italian seamen was apprehended in May 1941 and confined at Fort Missoula , Montana. [14]

Justice Department officials took a variety of factors into consideration when considering whether to subject an individual to confinement, placing particular emphasis on membership in proscribed organizations. The greatest cause for alarm was the overtly pro-Nazi Amerikadeutscher Volksbund (German American Federation) or "Bund," headed by German American Fritz Kuhn. Although its actual membership probably hovered close to ten thousand, the Bund had organized a widely publicized rally at New York City's Madison Square Garden in 1939 that attracted twenty-two thousand enthusiastic spectators. [15] In addition to membership in suspect organizations, FBI officials evaluated an individual's newspaper and magazine subscriptions, foreign bank accounts and property holdings, overseas remissions, purchases of war bonds or Rueckwanderer Marks (re-emigration marks), recent visits to Axis countries, and relatives' activities in those countries. Finally, FBI agents collected extensive statements from anonymous informants, whose testimony was not always reliable. [16]

The diverse makeup of Justice Department detainees classified by as "Germans" or "Italians" reveals that other factors trumped ethnicity, residency, and citizenship as grounds for internment. On the U.S. mainland, refugees and naturalized citizens from countries annexed or occupied by Nazi Germany also came under suspicion, resulting in the confinement of Austrians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians, and Bulgarians. [17] Those apprehended in the Territory of Hawai'i included a handful of Jewish refugees and people of Danish, Finnish, Irish, and Norwegian descent. Several of Hawai'i's Caucasian detainees had even served in the U.S. Armed Forces. [18] The scope of the American confinement program also extended overseas, with FBI agents compiling lists of allegedly dangerous individuals of German, Italian, and Japanese descent residing throughout Latin America. Pressure from the U.S. State Department resulted in the apprehension and deportation of 4,058 ethnic Germans and 288 ethnic Italians (along with 2,264 people of Japanese ancestry) from nineteen different Latin American countries to the United States for the purposes of prisoner exchanges with Axis nations or continued confinement on the U.S. mainland. [19] The ranks of these detainees included large numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled Europe, with 250 Jews detained in the U.S.-administered Panama Canal Zone alone. [20]

Federal authorities concentrated this eclectic and multinational mix of enemy aliens in at least twenty-one different Justice Department and Army camps far removed from coastal areas, typically in facilities that also held Japanese detainees. [21] Population totals were extremely fluid as prisoners were transferred between camps or repatriated to their native countries. The Justice Department's Crystal City site, which served as a family camp, reached a peak population of 3,374 prisoners, including 997 ethnic Germans and six ethnic Italians–many coming from Latin America. [22] 2,150 ethnic Germans—both civilian residents and merchant seamen—passed through the Justice Department camp at Fort Lincoln, making this Bismarck, North Dakota, facility one of the chief confinement sites for German detainees. [23] Other camps featuring significant ethnic German or Italian populations included the aforementioned Ft. Stanton and Ft. Missoula sites, as well as Camp Kenedy , Texas, and Camp Forrest , Tennessee.