On March 23, 1943, the principal of Woodward High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, walked into the senior English classroom where Eberhard Fuhr was sitting. He said, “I hate to do this, Eberhard. I’m sorry, but I don’t have any options. You’ve got to come with me out into the hall.” Fuhr, who now lives with his wife, Barbara, in Palatine, says, “I stepped out in the hall and these two guys grabbed me, said, ‘Let’s go down to your locker. Get your coat.’ The minute we were out on the sidewalk they put the handcuffs on. Then we went to where my brother Julius worked and we picked him up. They took us to the police station and booked us. With fingerprints. Booked us ‘on suspicion.’”
The next morning they were given their own clothes back, handcuffed together, and driven downtown by federal marshals for a hearing. As they walked across the square one of the marshals told Fuhr to put his coat over the handcuffs so no one would see them. “I told him, ‘Just take them off and they won’t see.’”
“They’d say, ‘It’s three o’clock in the morning, and there’s some guy knocking on the door. You answer it and it’s your cousin from Germany. He just came up the Ohio River in a submarine and wants you to put him up. What are you going to tell him?’ I was kind of a smart aleck, so I said, ‘Who’s going to hide me while I’m hiding you?’ Because my parents were already interned, and I know the FBI’s watching everything I do. So I’m going to tell this guy, ‘This house is under watch. You better get the hell out of here.’ And then I said, ‘Second, a submarine can’t come up the Ohio River because it only drafts about four feet in several spots.’” He grins. “They called me a smart aleck.”
“My father was very pro-German. He really was a true German patriot, no question about that. And I was brought up that way. To love your country. ‘This is your fatherland, you were born there, this is really your roots.’ All those kinds of things.” His parents spoke German at home, though their sons answered in English–Fuhr still has trouble speaking German. When the boys were small they spent every Saturday morning in a classroom learning German and German penmanship. Fuhr also sang in a German children’s choir. At the center of their lives was the Lutheran church and the activities sponsored by the large German community in Cincinnati–films, picnics, concerts. Membership in some German organizations later became grounds for internment, but Fuhr doesn’t remember that his father belonged to any.
In September 1939 J. Edgar Hoover secretly, on no authority but his own, ordered FBI agents to prepare reports on people whose “presence in this country in time of war or national emergency would be dangerous to the public peace and the safety of the United States government,” including those with German and Italian “sympathies.” (Back when he started working for the Justice Department, in 1917, his job had been to review cases of arrested German aliens, recommending them for parole or internment for the duration of World War I.) These files on both aliens and citizens went into a “custodial detention” index; the aliens were divided into three lists, with those on the A list considered the most dangerous, recommended for immediate arrest if war broke out. A year later Hoover sought Attorney General Robert Jackson’s authorization for the list and got it.
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Neighbors, coworkers, and friends were interviewed in the search for people who should be on the list, and rumor, innuendo, even fantasy were enough to put them there. The late journalist Harrison Salisbury landed on the list after a neighbor with what he called a “vivid imagination” reported that he was doing undercover work for the German government and had microphones and recording devices hidden in his house. In 1943 Attorney General Francis Biddle ordered Hoover to stop classifying people for the list, and Hoover technically obeyed–by changing the name of the list.
