The Saint-Paul/MN-based TRACES Center for History and Culture will bring its multi-media exhibit “VANISHED: German-American Civilian Internment, 1941-48” to the Wings of Freedom Airshow May 26-28th, 2006. This mobile museum is aboard the BUS-eum 2. (37,500 Midwesterners in 405 communities in six states visited the BUS-eum 1’s exhibit “Behind Barbed Wire: Midwest POWs in Nazi Germany.” See www.TRACES.org for a tour schedule and information on these or other Midwest/WWII histories presented by TRACES.)

Sponsored by the Minnesota Humanities Council and the Otto Bremer Foundation, the new exhibit tells the stories of 15,000 German-American civilians imprisoned by the U.S. Government during WWII—not one of whom was permitted legal representation, or was charged with, tried for or convicted of a war-related crime. The multi-media complementing this exhibit include an NBC-TV “Dateline” documentary about 4,058 Latin-American Germans the U.S. forcibly removed from South America and brought to this country—including about 80 German Jews who previously had fled the Nazis. 2,650 of the internees were exchanged during the war for German-held U.S. citizens; some “exchangees” died after reaching the Third Reich.

This project’s main goals include presenting an unknown history to a wide audience, and then stimulating questions about internment on the part of visitors to this unique exhibit. “VANISHED” explores a virtually unknown yet significant historical event—possibly one of the U.S.’s least-known WWII sub-chapters. It is especially relevant for Upper Midwesterners, as there were not only a large number of this area’s German-American civilian residents interned, but also several internment camps located in the region. Visitors to the BUS-eum will have an opportunity—in most cases, for the first time—to discuss the legacy as well as implications of the U.S. Government’s WWII “enemy alien” internment program. For more information on the Bus-eum, click here!

Photos from TRACES - Taken by Leighton Seigel