<Begin Segment 19>

EO: Tell us about some of the guys that you met in prison who were court-martialed and sentenced to death.

FE: Well, while we were at Leavenworth, we met some very interesting people. There was one group of Japanese American soldiers that were court-martialed and sent there and there was seven of 'em. In their case, they had their guns taken away and they were made to do latrine duty and all the menial tasks, so they petitioned the commanding officer to either treat them like American soldiers or let 'em out, honorably discharge 'em. And they didn't get any response so after many repeated requests they finally... what they did was they wrote out a petition and they all cut their finger a little bit and with blood, they signed it with blood and they went on a hunger strike. And for that they were court-martialed and they were... the first sentence, they were sentenced to be executed. And then it was commuted to thirty years and then it was later commuted to fifteen years. And then later I understand it was commuted to five years and then after the war ended they were let out. But that's one group.

And then we met another group of American soldiers who were members of a German American bund. And because they were members of the bund, they would... they refused to let them into the regular soldier thing. They took their guns away and they just made them patrol the outskirts of the prisoner-of-war camp where they held the German prisoners of war, you know, the soldiers. And the reason they were put in prison is because they helped the German prisoners of war escape and they said, "Well, we're German ancestry, and they made us guard the German prisoners of war, what do they expect us to do? Sure, we helped them escape." [Laughs] For that they also were sentenced to be executed, which was later commuted to thirty years. I don't know if it was commuted anymore than that, because their charge was pretty serious, you know, because they were actually helping them escape.

And then there was another group we met in the penitentiary there, that were the German soldiers who were spies, they were landed on the East Coast and they were caught and they ended up there. And there was always one following, and there were seven or eight of them, and then there's one always walking about five or six feet behind all the others. And we asked the leader of the group, "How come that's so, how come he's not with your other group?" He says, "Oh, we, he's a, we call him a dog because he ratted on us, that's how we all got caught." He got caught first and he ratted on 'em so they all got caught, so he was being ostracized by his fellow...

EO: These are the saboteurs?

FE: These are the German saboteurs. So there was quite a few interesting characters we met there besides all the murderers and the bank robbers and the crooked attorneys and the drug-dealing doctors. [Laughs]

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.