Enemy Aliens and Internment in World War I: Alvo von Alvensleben in Fort Douglas, Utah, a Case Study BY J O E R G A. N A G L E R
D U R I N G WORLD WAR I, ESPECIALLY AFTERTHE AMERICAN DECLARATION of
war against Germany on April 6, 1917, a wave of xenophobia engulfed everything endowed with a German name. Many individuals suffered tragic fates in the wake of this virtually hysterical atmosphere of persecution. Reports concerning pro-German activities and actions of the German GeheimdienstC'Secret Service") were already coming into the Justice Department during the neutrality period which could only alarm the Wilson administration. According to the reports of the fledgling Bureau of Investigation, where J. Edgar Hoover was already serving as a "special agent," ^ German spies and saboteurs were at work undermining the internal security of the United States, planning and carrying out bombings of strategically important bridges and munitions factories. The best known of these actions was the destruction of the Black Tom Terminal on July, 16, 1916, and the bombing of the assembly plant of the Canadian Car and Foundry Company in Kingsland, New Jersey, on January 11, 1917.^ The Wilson administration saw itself confronted with a virtually insoluble task. How could a population so large as the quarter-million persons classified as "enemy aliens"—defined as males born in Germany over fourteen years of age Dr. Nagler is a Senior Research Fellow at the German Historical Insitute, Washington, D.C. ' From the end of 191 7 H o o v e r worked in the Alien Enemy Bureau; see Richard Gid Powers, Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: T h e Free Press, 1987), pp. 36-55. ^See most recentlyjules Witcover, Sabotage at Black Tom: Imperial Germany's Secret War in America, 1914-1917 (Chapel Hill, N.C. : A l g o n q u i n Books, 1989); Reinhard R. Doerries, Imperial Challenge. Ambassador Count Bemslorffand Cierman-American Relations, 1908-191 7 (Chapel Hill: T h e University of N o r t h Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 188-89, 197, a n d idem, " T h e Politics of Irresponsibilitv: Imperial G e r m a n v ' s Defiance of United State Neutrality d u r i n g World War I," in H a n s L. Trefousse, ed., Germany and America: Essays on Problems of International Relations and Immigration (New York: Brooklvn College Press, 1980), pp.'3-20.
