[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today ...

ROBERT: What we're gonna tell you is an old story. It's about 70 years old, but it's not really as old as that at all because you'll notice that it hasn't ended.

JAD: And it comes to us from reporter Karen Duffin.

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah.

JAD: Okay, so where to start? Do you have a sense of where to start?

KAREN DUFFIN: I feel like I could blame—well, I can. I can blame this on my dad.

DAD: And that's the house I grew up in, just so you know.

KAREN DUFFIN: Oh, right.

DAD: So that was my bedroom window.

JAD: This is Karen and her dad looking at pictures of his childhood home.

KAREN DUFFIN: He grew up in this tiny town in Idaho called Aberdeen.

KAREN DUFFIN: Good old Aberdeen, I forgot how much ...

JAD: On a potato farm.

KAREN DUFFIN: He loves to talk about the farm. Like, he thinks we should all live on a farm.

DAD: It's pretty cool.

KAREN DUFFIN: So we were talking one day, and he mentions very casually as if it's like something we all know, he says, "Yeah, back when we had Nazi prisoners of war working on our farm." And I was like, "Time out. What?"

ROBERT: [laughs] Really? That's what he—this was his parenthetical?

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah, it was totally like, "Yeah, we're picking potatoes and then yeah, the Nazi prisoners of war were helping us."

DAD: Sort of remember how old I was just by how tall the guards were. They were very tall. [laughs]

KAREN DUFFIN: He was only three or four at the time.

DAD: Very, very tall.

KAREN DUFFIN: Do you know if there were, like, dozens of prisoners or just like a handful?

DAD: Oh, there was a bunch.

JAD: I didn't even know there were prisoners of war, Nazi prisoners of war in America ever.

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah, me neither.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: So okay, yeah so that was the first time ...

KAREN DUFFIN: So after I talked to my dad, I ended up calling this historian.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Kathy Kirkpatrick.

KAREN DUFFIN: Because I wanted to know was this just an Aberdeen thing?

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: No. Like, you were talking about Idaho.

KAREN DUFFIN: She told me that in Idaho alone ...

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: There's branch camps in Aberdeen and Blackfoot and Emmett and Holly Lake, Idaho Falls.

KAREN DUFFIN: There were 23 different camps. Generally, you had prisoners that were in churches ...

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Tent cities. And Paul.

KAREN DUFFIN: ... rodeo grounds ...

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Dormitories.

KAREN DUFFIN: ... high school gyms.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: Sugar City.

KAREN DUFFIN: And this was the case all across the country.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: The only state that did not have prisoners of war was Vermont.

JAD: Wow!

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: At the maximum, we had over 371,000 Germans, 51,000 Italians and 5,000 Japanese.

KAREN DUFFIN: Almost half a million people.

JAD: Oh my God!

KAREN DUFFIN: Why does nobody know this? I don't even—it doesn't even, like, strike a little chord that maybe I once learned about in junior high school.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: No. This was not talked about. We just don't talk about it. We just don't—I think we don't—I don't know.

JAD: But today we are gonna talk about it. And not just because it's a cool historical thing, but because it raises a question.

[NEWS CLIP: Breaking news this noon, a stunning report looking into how the CIA interrogated detainees.]

JAD: A question that ...

[NEWS CLIP: On top secret interrogation tactics.]

JAD: ... you know, with the torture reports ...

[NEWS CLIP: Bizarre, even sadistic treatments.]

JAD: ... and Abu Ghraib ...

[NEWS CLIP: Prisoners being abused by American soldiers.]

JAD: ... and Guantanamo Bay that we are still trying to answer today, which is, you know, when you capture an enemy soldier, take them out of the battle, out of the fight, how should you treat that person?

ROBERT: And if both sides have agreed to follow certain rules and one side doesn't, what do you do?

JAD: And the interesting thing was that 70 years ago this question was playing out in this really dramatic way in all of these towns across America.

KAREN DUFFIN: There were about 200 basecamps that were huge. They were like up to 8,000 people.

JAD: And by the way that's like 70 times the size of Guantanamo Bay currently. In any case, as she was researching, Karen started to zoom in to one camp in particular.

KAREN DUFFIN: So this is really illustrative of what happened. There's this one camp in Aliceville, Alabama. It's this tiny town of, like, 1,500 people, but the camp has 6,000 people.

JAD: Wow, that's like four times the size of the town!

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah. So I went and interviewed a bunch of people—guards, prisoners, locals, from Aliceville, and ...

THOMAS SWEET: It was quite a day.

KAREN DUFFIN: That's Thomas Sweet. He worked in Aliceville. And he told me that the day that the prisoners came, so a thousand of them came at first, and the police were like, "Nobody is allowed on the street," but of course ...

THOMAS SWEET: When word got out that the first train load was coming, everybody rushed out on the street.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The day the train come in there wasn't supposed to be any townspeople. But of course there was.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Everybody was out.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The road was lined with kids from three years old up to people 70 years old.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So these voices are from an oral history project that was recorded in 1994 about the prison camp in Aliceville.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: So we all climbed the lumber pile so that we could see them when we got off the train.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So everybody's super nervous because they have these images in their head.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: In my mind, just like a lot of people in Aliceville, they didn't know what kind of devils was gonna get off of that train. Guys with horns on their heads.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So these prisoners that were sent to Aliceville were actually part of Rommel's Afrika Korps, and these guys were the most feared of Hitler's fighters.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They were supposed to be the elite.]

[NEWS CLIP: So-called Nazi supermen.]

KAREN DUFFIN: The Nazi supermen, right? So the train pulls up.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They stopped right on the main highway.]

KAREN DUFFIN: Doors open, and then hundreds and hundreds of German soldiers get out.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: And they were marching with that German march.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And they're singing their military songs in German.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: [German singing]]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Tell us about what it was like, what you thought when they got off the train. What did they look like? Did they have on uniforms?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Oh, yes.]

KAREN DUFFIN: When you listen to the oral histories, it's really clear that this was a really complicated moment for the people in Aliceville.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: The people of Aliceville were scared to death.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: I didn't know whether I was gonna be mad at them when they first come in or what, but when I seen they were just a bunch of whipped kids ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: There was a feeling of—of concern in our hearts for them.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: When I seen them they was nothing but a bunch of young kids.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: How young they were.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: Haggard looking and washed up and beat.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Wounded. And some of them had maggots—oh, just gruesome!]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: You could tell they'd been through a rough time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: It was awful for us.]

KAREN DUFFIN: That's Hans Copera. He was one of the prisoners stepping out of the train that day. He'd been drafted into the army against his will, captured in North Africa, and then he was sent to America in the bottom of this big cargo ship.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: And in one room they crowded 700 people. You couldn't even sit. There was no toilet, of course. We had only tin boxes. We all were wet, all soaked with urine. It was awful. It was an awful trip.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: And you kind of had to feel sorry for them.]

KAREN DUFFIN: But on the other hand—and you hear this too in the oral histories—the people in Aliceville are thinking, "These are Nazis. These are the men who are killing our sons."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: You know, I had three brothers overseas at the same time. So we didn't like them. That's just the way we felt.]

KAREN DUFFIN: Okay, so there's that question in people's mind—and this is playing out all across the country—here's the enemy at your mercy. What do you do? How do you treat them? They're in your hands. Nobody's watching. You can do whatever you want with them at that point, in theory.

JAD: But in practice?

KAREN DUFFIN: Well actually, this was a significant moment for the world. I mean, 14 years before, a bunch of countries had gotten together and they'd made up rules for exactly this kind of moment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: In 1929 at Geneva, long before Hitler and his partners began to eye the real estate of the world, there was an international conference. Here, nations solemnly promised to uphold the rules covering the treatment of prisoners of war.]

ARNOLD KRAMER: Oh, it was a series of dos and don'ts.

KAREN DUFFIN: That's historian Arnold Kramer. He's a professor at Texas A&M. Some of the rules, he says, are pretty basic.

ARNOLD KRAMER: That women and children should be protected.

KAREN DUFFIN: So you had to give prisoners a certain amount of food.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Prisoners are entitled to the same quality of rations, clothing and living quarters as are afforded our own troops.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And then there's rules about medical attention, labor.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: While the Geneva Convention says yes, you can use people for labor ...

KAREN DUFFIN: Kathy Kirkpatrick again.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: ... you also should be paying people for labor. The rate of payment was 80 cents a day.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So the Geneva Conventions are this attempt to kind of civilize the most uncivilized thing, which is war.

ARNOLD KRAMER: You see, the First World War was so horrific.

KAREN DUFFIN: Hundreds of thousands of prisoners died in POW camps.

ARNOLD KRAMER: There were no real regulations with regard to prisoners. Sides did almost anything they wanted.

KAREN DUFFIN: So the Geneva Conventions of 1929 was an attempt to kind of set things right.

ARNOLD KRAMER: Because people just couldn't fathom another war to end wars.

THOMAS SWEET: We were well-trained in the Geneva Convention.

KAREN DUFFIN: That's Thomas Sweet again. He was actually one of the guards at Camp Aliceville. And what he said is that, even before the POWs arrived, the Geneva Conventions were drilled into their heads. They had lectures, the rules were posted in the rec hall and in the officers' club.

THOMAS SWEET: We had to—the prisoners had to be treated the same as you would your own fellow soldiers.

KAREN DUFFIN: Which sounds kind of basic. But for somebody like Hans, who's stepping off this train and wondering how is he gonna be treated ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: It was—I should say it was really a sort of heaven.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: When they got into—the barracks had all been laid out.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, woman: Barracks were fresh and clean.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: They had towels and shaving equipment for each one of them on each one's bunk.]

KAREN DUFFIN: The prisoners washed up, and then the guards opened up the cafeteria.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Fetholter: Then we got to eat good things.]

KAREN DUFFIN: This is Walter Fetholter, he was another prisoner at Aliceville.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Fetholter: We got a piece of white bread, of your American white bread. And we got peanut butter. I didn't know what a peanut was. And it tasted wonderful, wonderful. It was the best dinner I ever had. And I always when I think on the good times, then I think on peanut butter. [laughs]]

KAREN DUFFIN: And here's the funny thing. Like, as you look into this, you start to realize that we're not just following the Geneva Conventions, the letter of the law, we're going above and beyond. And according to Hans, what started out as a great thing, getting all this food, ended up to be kind of a problem.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: The boys came to me every day. "Please tell them we don't want to have so much ham." And the sergeant came to me who heard that and said, "Don't tell the captain that you are going to throw it away. No, no, no, no, no. Take it and make a hole in the sand and put it in the sand."]

KAREN DUFFIN: So they buried the ham.

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Hans Copera: And a lot of it. We buried a lot of the ham because we didn't know what to do with it.]

ROBERT: Wow!

KAREN DUFFIN: And they also didn't like corn, but they kept getting corn, and so they buried corn. And then they'd get caught because corn starts growing.

JAD: [laughs]

KAREN DUFFIN: So everyone's like, "Wait a minute!"

ROBERT: Very bad corn hiding!

KAREN: Within two months, they have an orchestra. Within a year, they have three orchestras.

JAD: This is POW-led orchestras?

KAREN DUFFIN: Yes. Yes.

JAD: And so they're being given instruments?

KAREN DUFFIN: They're making instruments, the locals are donating instruments, the YMCA is giving them instruments.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]

KAREN DUFFIN: They open a school.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]

KAREN DUFFIN: You can learn anything from pottery to, like, mathematics, almost any language you want to learn.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]

KAREN DUFFIN: And they set up correspondence programs with the local universities. You could get credit.

ROBERT: Wow!

THOMAS SWEET: They had soccer games just about every day. They drew big crowds.

KAREN DUFFIN: They had a newspaper. Their newspaper was called The Fenced Guest, and it had, like, poetry.

JAD: The Fenced Guest!

KAREN DUFFIN: Right? They also did a lot of theatrical productions.

KATHY KIRKPATRICK: And sometimes there were regular art shows.

KAREN DUFFIN: So this is where things get a little bit strange.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ellen Wanders: On December 18, there was another art exhibition.]

KAREN DUFFIN: This is a woman named Ellen Wanders, whose father was a POW at the camp. And here she's reading from his diary.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ellen Wanders: December 12. Der Führer—that means Hitler—had sent $12,572 to open the art exhibition in Camp V.]

JAD: Okay, wait. She's saying that, wait, Hitler sent money to the camp for an art thing?

KAREN DUFFIN: Yep.

JAD: While—during—while we're fighting Hitler, he's sending money?

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah.

JAD: While we're fighting Hitler.

KAREN DUFFIN: While we're fighting Hitler.

JAD: That's really strange.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [German singing]]

JAD: Coming up, the fenced guests are unfenced, the buried ham is unburied and the Nazis next door begin an argument that we're still having to this day.

[LISTENER: I'm Tammy Pate from Spencer, Indiana. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Okay, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And to get back to our story ...

ROBERT: Here's Karen Duffin.

KAREN DUFFIN: Um, okay. So ...

JAD: So okay, with Hitler's Christmas gift to the art show, and the ham and the bands and all that stuff, did people in the—outside the camp know what was going on inside?

KAREN DUFFIN: You know, once they start, so—I think it was in 1943 was the point at which we started realizing we're running out of American men to do labor. And we look around and we're like, "Well actually, we have quite a few men who might be able to do some work here."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: A lot of them prisoners worked on farms down there, picking cotton, peanuts.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So some of the farmers would bring them in the house for lunch. They would drink with them.

THOMAS SWEET: They were drunk. [laughs]

KAREN DUFFIN: There's some really funny stories of, like ...

THOMAS SWEET: It was probably moonshine.

KAREN DUFFIN: ... the prisoners getting drunk with the farmers, and then they get in trouble because they come home late.

THOMAS SWEET: [laughs]

KAREN DUFFIN: One of the biggest things that the War Department says when they start sending the men out is, like, if you make friends with these POWs, it's against the rules. But they do it all the time.

ROBERT: Did anybody fall in love with anybody?

KAREN DUFFIN: Oh yeah. I mean, not a lot but it definitely happened. So as these prisoners are out in the community and they're forming friendships, a few of them are falling in love, word starts to get out about how they're being treated. And meanwhile, across America there's rationing. And so when they learn that the POWs are getting food that they might not be getting, a lot of the American public, they get pissed.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Now to the editorial room of the American Journal and Walter Winchell.]

KAREN DUFFIN: Especially this radio guy, Walter Winchell, who sort of made this his cause. They call him the Rush Limbaugh of World War II.

JAD: Was he that well-known?

ROBERT: Walter Winchell was one of the most famous reporters in America. He spoke like he was on a telegram. "In Washington, a reporter—" and he spoke in this funny nasal voice.

KAREN DUFFIN: Oh my God, that's exactly what it sounds like! [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: A radio dispatch from France, dated ...]

KAREN DUFFIN: So in any case, when he finds out about the Nazi POW program, Walter Winchell just starts to rant about it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: The United States Army caters to the Nazis as though they were kings. They get more food than our soldiers get. Ponies, radios, luxuries, and all sorts of leniency beyond imagination.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And he would do this week after week.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: We coddlers over here won't have any Nazis to capture and fatten up on steaks, butter, ham and bacon or chopped chicken liver.]

KAREN DUFFIN: People start writing articles in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe. Citizens start flooding the War Department with letters.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: I know sir, that your YMCA war prisoners' aid does all it can to make Nazi war prisoners over here comfortable.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And in the meantime, according to Thomas Sweet, inside the camp, some of these prisoners are starting to get kind of bold.

THOMAS SWEET: For a couple of nights, they cut out swastikas and took a kite, and was flying the kite and had these swastikas in a box underneath the kite with a string that—down to the ground. And they handed the string to one of the—one of the guards and said, "Pull this string." And when they pulled the string, the trapdoor opened on the gadget they had made, and all these swastikas started falling all over, all over the camp and in Aliceville too. And the townspeople started calling the base mad about that.

KAREN DUFFIN: Add to that, we don't have enough men to guard a lot of these camps. So the prisoners are starting to get more and more control of the camp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, man: The prisoners had the run of the camp.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And in some cases, the Nazi hardliners would start to torment the non-Nazis. They would threaten them, they might beat them up. There were even a couple of murders.

ROBERT: Who was not a Nazi inside of these camps?

KAREN DUFFIN: If you had been drafted but you didn't—you weren't ideologically ...

ROBERT: I see.

KAREN DUFFIN: So the perception that's coming out of these camps is that we've created these hotels on American soil where Nazis could start radicalizing. And people get so mad that there's actually a Congressional investigation into the "coddling" of prisoners of war. So I spent a lot of time at the National Archives trying to get to, like, all right, what are the arguments? And here's kind of how it went. You have this Congressman on one side, Richard Harless, and he's saying, "You're coddling them."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Congressman Harless of Arizona called the Nazi prisoners in the United States pampered and privileged.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And on the other side, you have the guy who's now running the prisoner of war program, Archer Lerch, and he's basically saying, no.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Archer Lerch: We do not coddle them.]

KAREN DUFFIN: He says, "We're just following the Geneva Conventions." And the reasons that he gave was the same reason that Joe Biden would give almost 60 years later.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Biden: There's a reason why we sign these treaties, to protect my son in the military.]

ROBERT: We torture them, they'll torture us.

KAREN DUFFIN: Reciprocity

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Biden: That's why we have these treaties, so when Americans are captured they are not tortured. That's the reason. In case anybody forgets it, that's the reason.]

KAREN DUFFIN: One problem, though. Just one month after that hearing in 1944 ...

[NEWS CLIP: Unarmed and defenseless American prisoners fell to the machine guns of our enemies.]

KAREN DUFFIN: ... news breaks that 84 American soldiers, prisoners of war now in Germany, are gunned down—after they surrendered.

[NEWS CLIP: Four weeks later their frozen bodies, hands and ankles bound, were found where they fell.]

KAREN DUFFIN: We then go on to liberate American soldiers from POW camps in Germany. And we find misery. Nothing like Aliceville.

[NEWS CLIP: American prisoners of war report inhuman hospital conditions.]

KAREN DUFFIN: Walter Winchell gets back on the airwaves.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Attention, citizens of the United States ...]

KAREN DUFFIN: He says look, reciprocity hasn't worked. Our generosity ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Has not been reciprocated, and our boys were not treated the same.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Walter Winchell: Prisoners of war have been protected as much by our dictate as by the one-sided Geneva Convention rules.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And a few months later, things get even worse.

[NEWS CLIP: It was impossible to fully realize the horror of the Nazi concentration camps.]

KAREN DUFFIN: We start going into concentration camps.

[NEWS CLIP: Here's the incredible truth that man had indeed sunk below the level of animal bestiality.]

KAREN DUFFIN: And we start seeing what the Germans have done, what the Nazis have done.

[NEWS CLIP: Thousands of dead bodies were piled everywhere, most never having received the dignity of burial. But what was even more frightening were the living dead left behind.]

KAREN DUFFIN: So Congress decides to hold a second investigation into the treatment of prisoners. But this time it's real soul searching. I mean, we had just seen the full horrors of the Holocaust, so we're thinking, you know, anything we do to these guys at this point they deserve. And we've also realized we're not really getting reciprocity, so we don't really have a practical reason to treat them well anymore. So at this point, the question has really become: do we continue to be good even when we're not getting anything in return? And the kind of amazing thing to me is that we decide yeah, we're gonna stick to the Geneva Conventions. Archer Lerch, who runs the POW program at this point, he gets up and he says, "We are not going to lower ourselves to Nazi standards. We are not gonna let the enemy decide who we are as a country."

JAD: And that argument stuck?

KAREN DUFFIN: Yeah.

ARNOLD KRAMER: I think that most people associated with the prison camp experience ...

KAREN DUFFIN: That's historian Arnold Kramer again.

ARNOLD KRAMER: ... felt that we treated them well, not because they treated ours well, but that we are decent people and we probably would have done this anyway.

[NEWS CLIP: But what makes an American is not any special precious sort of blood, but the tradition we have inherited. It's tradition—not blood—that patterns the way we think and act and feel.]

DAVID GOLDFIELD: There's a great belief that we have a special mission and we have a special history.

KAREN DUFFIN: This is David Goldfield. He's a historian at UNC-Charlotte.

DAVID GOLDFIELD: Now that's the ideal. But no. I mean, you only have to look at the treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

KAREN DUFFIN: He says, don't forget, right as we're giving the Nazis massive amounts of ham, we're also rounding up tens of thousands of Japanese-American citizens. Citizens. And we're throwing them into these cramped camps that are way worse than Aliceville. And if you ask David why are we treating the Germans so much better?

DAVID GOLDFIELD: They look like us.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: These people look all right. The mailman, the farmer, they all look pretty much like the folks back home.]

DAVID GOLDFIELD: The major reason? Race.

KAREN DUFFIN: The Germans were white. They seemed familiar.

DAVID GOLDFIELD: There was a connection between the German POWs and the folks in the American South, not only because of the ethnicity of the Germans, not only because of their economic benefit to the region ...

JAD: David told us that he's looked at the historical documents and he thinks that German laws against the Jews were essentially ...

DAVID GOLDFIELD: ... copied from the Mississippi Black codes.

JAD: We couldn't confirm that they were literally copied, but there are similarities. And a bunch of official Nazi documents from that time praised Southern race laws.

DAVID GOLDFIELD: So there was already a connection between the American South and Nazi Germany.

JAD: This is the most horrifying thing I've heard in a long time. I mean, is it really true that, like, all the niceness was just a perverse form of racism?

PAUL SPRINGER: Well, I would say racism plays an enormous role in why Japanese citizens were interned in the first place. I don't think there's any question about that.

KAREN DUFFIN: That's Paul Springer. He's a military historian.

PAUL SPRINGER: Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama.

KAREN DUFFIN: He's not quite sure that race explains all of this. He says, you know what? You've got to be careful because you're comparing treatment of citizens to treatment of prisoners of war. And that's different.

PAUL SPRINGER: It's not a fair comparison. For the case of why you treat the German POWs better, well, because they're prisoners of war. The Japanese POWs were also exceedingly well-treated. They were treated much better than the Japanese citizens of the United States, and I think that's the comparison that's probably more interesting is why did you treat enemy soldiers from Japan better than you treated citizens of the United States of Japanese heritage?

KAREN DUFFIN: And he says very simply that with prisoners of war, it's because we had a rule.

PAUL SPRINGER: Governing international law.

KAREN DUFFIN: Like the Geneva Conventions.

PAUL SPRINGER: There's no similar law at that time that says what you can and can't do towards your civilian populations.

JAD: That's interesting. So it's like maybe we're not racist or noble, but both. And it's the rules that allow us to be our better selves.

KAREN DUFFIN: I mean, here's what I take from this. I think that in a time of war, it's incredibly difficult to be good to your enemy. It's not just about aspiring to be good, this American ideal, it's about having 97 really nit-picky, tiny, tedious rules to tell you exactly what you can do and what you can't do. Because it would just be so easy to not be the person that you want to be in that moment.

JAD: It does kind of make you think back to February of 2002.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: Good afternoon. I have an announcement to make. President Bush today has decided that the Geneva Convention will apply to the Taliban detainees, but not to the Al-Qaeda international terrorists. The President has maintained the United States's commitment to the principles of the Geneva Convention, while recognizing that the Convention simply does not cover every situation in which people may be captured or detained by military forces, as we see in Afghanistan today. Yes, John?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: So Ari, what you're telling us is that the Taliban prisoners, detainees at Guantanamo, will not get any more protections than they already are given under the Geneva Convention. What you seem to be telling us is that the Al-Qaeda detainees will get fewer.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: No. There's no change in the protections they will be provided. They're—they have always been treated consistent with the principles of the Geneva Convention, which means they'll be treated well. If you're looking for anything that will not happen as a result of this announcement is that they will not receive stipends from the American taxpayers. They will not receive musical instruments courtesy of the United States military. They would have received those had they been declared POWs. They will continue to be treated well because they're in the custody of America.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: But the concern—the debate here was about if you don't do it here, then US soldiers could be mistreated abroad, isn't that correct? And isn't that a big—a big motivation here, to make sure that US soldiers get the same kind of treatment?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: It's important for all nations throughout the world to treat any prisoners well. And that is something the United States always expects, and the United States always does. We have time for one more question and then there's a—hold it. David—David will get one more and then we'll go around. Go ahead.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: Wasn't this an important concern? I understand what the expectations are, but it was important for this administration to be able to say, look, we want to be able to protect our soldiers in similar situations down the line. And if we don't afford privileges under the Geneva Convention, then our soldiers could be in peril?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: David, I was not in the NSC deliberations where various issues were raised. And so I really—there's no way I can accurately answer that question. Go ahead. David?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, reporter: What about US special forces? They don't—they often do not wear uniforms, they often do not carry their weapons outwardly. If they are captured, they wouldn't be prisoners of war?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Ari Fleischer: The terms of the Geneva Convention apply to all. And those terms speak for themselves. Okay, thank you everybody.]

JAD: Thank you to reporter Karen Duffin and also producer Kelsey Padgett. This was such a long and involved reporting process. Big props to them. Special thanks to Sam Love, the filmmaker who collected all those Aliceville oral histories.

ROBERT: And to John Gillum and Mary Bess Paluzzi, current and former Aliceville Museum directors.

JAD: Ruth Beaumont Cook, who wrote a great book about the Aliceville camp.

ROBERT: And Nancy Weymack for research help.

JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Message 11.]

[KATHY KIRKPATRICK: This is Kathy Kirkpatrick.]

[GRANT DUFFIN: Hello, this is Grant Duffin.]

[KAREN DUFFIN: Hey, it's Karen Duffin. I'm calling in to read the credits. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad. Our staff includes Brenna Farrell ...]

[GRANT DUFFIN: ... Ellen Horne, Dylan Keefe, Matt Kielty ... ]

[KATHY KIRKPATRICK: ... Lynn Levy, Andy Mills, Latif Nasser, Malissa O'Donnell ...]

[KAREN DUFFIN: ... Kelsey Padgett, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster ... ]

[KATHY KIRKPATRICK: ... Soren Wheeler and Jamie York.]

[GRANT DUFFIN: With help from Danny Lewis, Kelly Prime and Damiano Marchetti.]

[KAREN DUFFIN: Marchetti. Our fact-checkers are Eva Dasher and Michelle Harris. Thank you. Bye bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: To hear the message again, press—end of message.]

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