Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans by Marilyn Grace Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans by Marilyn Grace Miller Daniel Hutchinson Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans. By Marilyn Grace Miller. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 273. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7527-9.) Decades of activism and historical research have placed Japanese internment as a central element in the narrative of the American home front during World War II. Less attention has been paid to the incarceration of "enemy aliens" of German and Italian descent under the U.S. government's Enemy Alien Control Program (p. 5). Historians such as Max Paul Friedman and Arnold Krammer have written valuable studies examining this internment experience. Marilyn Grace Miller makes a substantial contribution to this scholarship in Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans. This engaging account explores the history of Camp Algiers, an internment facility in New Orleans and an important transit point in the international history of wartime detention. Miller argues that "New Orleans represented a 'port of no return,' a brink that, once crossed, could not be traversed in reverse" (p. xii). As in the Japanese American experience, presidential executive orders authorized the extrajudicial detention of potential spies and those affiliated with pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist political organizations. Yet fears of Axis infiltration throughout the Western Hemisphere prompted a wider dragnet of detention. At the request of the U.S. State Department, governments in Latin America executed their own preventive arrests. However, this process was marred by shoddy intelligence, scant evidence, racial prejudice, expropriation of property, and bribery. Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe were among those detained as potential Axis agents. These refugees were [End Page 801] transported to the United States and interned alongside ardent supporters of National Socialism in a network of detention facilities in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and other states outside the South. Camp Algiers became a place of refuge for some of those Jewish internees. After desperate efforts to communicate their plight, many Jewish internees were transferred to Camp Algiers, which gained a reputation for being friendly to "anti-Nazis" (p. 34). The facility had the capacity to hold up to 250 inmates. Miller skillfully reconstructs the biographies of the camp's internees, utilizing case files held in the National Archives, correspondence with refugee aid agencies, and sources from Europe and Latin America. While the conditions of confinement were generally humane, indefinite (and frequently unjust) detentions left enduring trauma. Suicide and the stress of internment took the lives of some internees. Yet Miller complicates the story of what is sometimes called the "Camp of the Innocents" (p. 34). The U.S. military also detained notorious figures such as exiled Nazi propagandist Kurt Ludecke at Camp Algiers. Miller explores how the shifting rationales of U.S. authorities shaped how they classified the political, religious, and racial identities of internees. Such classifications could change quickly. Ironically, the internment process opened a path for some so-called enemy aliens to claim American citizenship. For others, departure from Camp Algiers represented repatriation and an uncertain future. Port of No Return concludes with an examination of the legacies of wartime detention. While the Japanese internment experience prompted redress and reparation, the first congressional hearings on the Enemy Alien Control Program occurred only in 2009. Yet a full reckoning of this history is overdue. Miller notes that the precedent of internment continues to shape policy and law, particularly for detainees captured during the War on Terror and migrants seeking asylum. "Many aspects of that precedent––indefinite detention without hearings, family separation, the manipulation of detention policy and detainee populations for political purposes and economic gain, repatriation of aliens to hostile environments––are still with us in some form today," Miller notes (p. 207). Camp Algiers itself continued to serve various functions within the federal immigration system until 2018. While the buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019, gentrification threatens the site's future. Nonetheless, the installation's past is well chronicled in Port of No Return, a fitting tribute to the struggles of those...