Germans were treated as enemies both in Canada and the UK.
Yes, lots of unfair stereotyping going on. On the other side, my mother's family (Austrian) were considered "German" in Yugoslavia and had to flee to Austria to save their lives because the partisans were lynching whole "German" families and stringing them up on the light poles each night. When they got to the Austrian border, the Nazis considered them "Slavs" (only half-human) because they were coming from Yugoslavia and sent the whole family in cattle cars to a forced work camp in Poland. A few years later, the camp was liberated by the front line troops of the Red Army (professional and disciplined soldiers who were decent people). The people in the camp were told by the Red Army commanders that the Red Army troops that would follow them would consider them "German" and their lives would not be safe. (The Red Army raped and murdered Germans as they passed through as revenge for what the Germans had done on the Eastern Front.) So my mother's family had to travel across Poland toward Austria, through the front lines of the war (sometimes on the retreating German side, sometimes on the front line Red Army side) until they made it to a relative's home in Linz, Austria (nearly in Germany). While in Linz, the endured devastating Allied bombing until nearly the end of the war.
After the war, the U.S. government and other Allied powers wanted to send them back to Yugoslavia (which was now communist under Tito) where they would likely have been executed immediately (and sometimes the women and girls were raped immediately before their deaths) for "leaving their country in the time of need". Fortunately, through a providential series of events, they were able to immigrate to the U.S. even though the U.S. had made it nearly impossible for refugees to immigrate because they were considered undesirable "foreigners."
Looking through some of my grandmother's papers after her death about 20 years ago, I found the old "Ex Enemy Identification Cards" for my mother's entire family. I was a strange feeling to see a picture of your mother as an emaciated 10-year-old girl listed on an official government document as an "Ex Enemy." Especially since my mother's family was so anti-Nazi from the very beginning. Like millions of other people, they were caught up in a whirlwind of suffering and death which they didn't create and couldn't stop. The only thing they could do was try to survive.
I guess you had to be there at the time to understand what was done. It is easy to look back and make a judgement on what was right and wrong.
Yes. There were also political considerations to consider. I'm not sure FDR could have led the war effort without supporting the internment of the Japanese.
My father wrote a letter to FDR protesting the internment of Japanese Americans, but he was part of a small minority of Americans who protested at the time. It didn't help that there were a few Japanese spies in Hawaii who fed intelligence to Japan regarding the movement of ships in and out of Pearl Harbor.
