A few days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, FBI agents went to Matthias Borniger’s Wichita home and took him away.

He didn’t return until two years later.

“The FBI came and said they wanted to talk to me,” Borniger, 91, said recently as he recalled that day. “I didn’t know this at the time, but they had the block surrounded, machine guns and everything else, because I was supposed to be this big spy.”

The federal government saw Borniger, then 25, as a problem because he was born in Germany, was living in the United States and had seen Hitler from a distance, he said. He spent much of the next two years in a German-American detention camp in Stringtown, Okla., although he never was charged with a crime.

Borniger had left Germany in 1935 to live in the U.S. with an uncle and get away from the Nazi Party’s rise to power.

He was only a few weeks from getting his American citizenship when he was sent to the detention camp in Oklahoma.

In November 1944, 12-year-old Art Jacobs’ German-born father was taken from his workplace and locked up at a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization camp on Ellis Island. In February 1945, Jacobs’ mother, also German-born, packed suitcases for him and his brother. They left their Brooklyn, N.Y., home and went to the camp and confronted authorities.

“My mother had all she could take,” said Jacobs, 73, in a phone interview from his Tempe, Ariz., home. “She said, ‘Here we are. What are you guys going to do with us?’ They decided to lock us up with my dad.'”

Seen as enemies

During World War II, the U.S. government registered about 300,000 Germans in America as enemy agents. About 15,000 German-Americans were interned. They were not allowed to have legal representation. None was tried or convicted of war-related crimes.

On Saturday, a traveling exhibit that tells the story of German-American civilian internment will open at the Lawrence Public Library, 707 Vt.

The exhibit is visiting 11 Kansas towns under sponsorship by the Kansas Humanities Council, a nonprofit organization that conducts and supports community-based cultural programs.

The exhibit, “Vanished: German-American Civilian Internment, 1941-1948,” is housed on a retrofitted school bus with a 21-seat theater. The mobile museum belongs to the TRACES Center for History and Culture, a nonprofit organization that has a museum in St. Paul, Minn.

The exhibit has been traveling through Kansas and other Midwestern sites since Labor Day. It had been seen by more than 7,000 people by late last week, organizers said.

“The comments we most commonly hear is, ‘Oh, we never knew,’ said Michael Luick-Thrams, the exhibit’s executive director. “I’m thrilled we’re getting this story out there for people who didn’t know.”

‘You little Nazi’

Both Borniger and Jacobs’ father did have hearings before government officials after they were detained. Borniger, who had opened a photography business in Wichita, remembers some “jealous photographers” speaking against him.

A hearing board recommended releasing Jacobs’ father, but he was held anyway. Jacobs and his family were transferred from Ellis Island to a camp in Crystal City, Texas.

“I knew why my father was there: Somebody didn’t like him,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs’ father was able to leave the U.S. internment camps after agreeing to be repatriated back to Germany in late 1945 when the war was over. He took his family with him.

Repatriates were taken by ship to Germany, where Jacobs remembers them being put aboard boxcars and taken to a detention camp guarded by the U.S. military.

“I kept telling the guards I was an American, and they kept telling me to ‘Shut up, you little Nazi,'” Jacobs said.

Jacobs’ family eventually was freed. Thanks to the help of an American woman from Kansas, Jacobs was able to make his way back to the U.S. and was taken in by a family on a ranch near Elkhart.

He went on to a career in the Air Force, retiring as a major. He has done extensive research on the history of the detentions and has written a book about his experiences. He has a Web site at www.foitimes.com.

‘A bad thing’

Borniger remembers the detention as being tough emotionally and mentally. He recalls wearing fatigues with the letters “PW” on the back and front. He already had one son, and his wife was pregnant with twins when he was detained. She later divorced him because she couldn’t get a job while being married to an incarcerated “enemy alien,” Borniger said.

“I did anything I could to keep my spirits up,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep. I had insomnia. It was a bad thing for a long time.”

At Stringtown, Borniger made a name for himself with the camp administration because “I was the only one who could keep the typewriters going.” He worked on the camp newspaper.

After a serious traffic wreck injured several soldiers near the camp, Borniger volunteered to donate blood. His blood was transfused into two victims from each of his arms at the same time, he said. Afterward he collapsed and was taken to an Army hospital. A few weeks later, in 1943, he was granted another hearing and subsequently was freed.

Borniger returned to Wichita, reopened to his photography business and remarried.

No animosity

Borniger and Jacobs are not interested in government reparations, they said. Borniger said he thought the federal government had apologized for detaining German-Americans, and that is good enough for him. But according to TRACES, the government “has never confessed” to interning German-Americans.

Jacobs wants to hear that confession, but he says he doesn’t need an apology.

“It’s done,” he said. “What good would an apology do?”

Borniger worries that detention camps could happen again in light of terrorism concerns since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

“I hope not,” he said. “I have the confidence that we have a damn good country here, but I don’t think it has been managed very successfully the last couple of years.”

But he says he has no animosity toward anyone for his detention.

“I don’t owe them anything, either,” he said of the federal government. “They owe me more than I owe them.”

Jacobs thinks the return of civilian detentions already may be happening because of the war on terror.

“I think there are people being arrested and detained that we probably never hear about,” he said. “I don’t wish this on anybody, but I think it is necessary for the peace and security of this nation.”

Other than the fact the government hasn’t acknowledged the German-American detentions, Jacobs said he doesn’t have a problem with what was done during World War II.

“‘This sort of thing happens during war,'” Jacobs said he recalled being told by teachers. “It doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong. Along with that you take a lot of innocent victims, like my father. I don’t know how you avoid that.”

According to TRACES, there was a German-American detention center in Kansas. It was at Selma in Anderson County, southeast of Garnett.

But local historians and longtime residents do not know of such a center.

According to Dorothy Lickteig, president of the Anderson County Historical Society, Selma has always been “just a wide space in the road” and no records can be found of a detention center.