Sweetheart's letters proved
German 'alien' not a Nazi

He was a newcomer to the United States - a foreigner with a new American wife. America had entered a war, and he was suspected of sympathizing with the enemy.

It could be a case happening right now as the United States grapples with a new war against terrorism. Except in this case the newcomer was German and the war was World War II.

"I have profound sympathy" with today's Muslims and Middle Easterns who may be unjustly targeted by prejudice while living in America, says Werner Von Rosenstiel, now a 90-year-old retired lawyer. He has just donated an endowment plus a collection of several hundred books and documents to the UC College of Arts and Sciences history department for a new reading room on modern European history. "I have been in precisely the same box," said the German-born Von Rosenstiel in an interview prior to the room's dedication on Sept. 24.

Some of the books now housed in McMicken Hall, Room 315, are the same ones that the FBI searched the night Von Rosenstiel came home from work and law school to find his wife waiting for him with two agents. They showed up in October 1942, 10 months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the U.S. entry into the war.

Von Rosenstiel had studied for one year as an exchange student at UC in 1935-36, prior to finishing his legal education in Germany and convincing German authorities he would like to return to the United States to bolster his English speaking skills. Once he returned to America he wed a sweetheart he had met at UC, Marion Ahrens. At first when the USA entered the war after Dec. 7, 1941, nothing seemed different.

At the time, Von Rosenstiel himself worried that perhaps American democracy was not being vigilant enough. No one ever seemed to investigate him. But when the agents finally came, they asked to search the Von Rosenstiels' apartment and the couple agreed. The agents proved to be particularly interested in why Mr. Von Rosenstiel still possessed a German-language version of Mein Kampf.

Mr. Von Rosenstiel tried to explain that he was obliged to study Hitler's writings thoroughly because his German bar examiners asked about the dictator's ideas in detail. The agents confiscated the volumes and took him in for hours of further questioning. Then within a few weeks, Von Rosenstiel received a summons to defend himself at an enemy alien hearing.

The tension of that hearing is described in another document now housed in Room 315 - a 1946 Saturday Evening Post article his late wife penned under a pseudonym. In it she details the hours and hours of questions judges and prosecutors asked her husband and seven witnesses who came to testify on his behalf.

Why had Mr. Von Rosenstiel spent more time in Japan and Manchuria on his trip around the world before he had returned to Germany after his time as a student in the United States? Did he notice the preparations for war in Japan? When he got back to Germany, why didn't he leave immediately?

"I wanted to finish my bar examination," his wife writes was his response to the last question.

Even though he had no intention of living in Germany? "Yes, sir," he responded. "My parents had financed my education. I owed it to them. And to myself. I felt a complete legal training would be valuable." Later, he would be required to go to law school again in order to practice law in America.

Mr. Von Rosenstiel also explained to the court that in Germany, he was obliged to do as his parents requested until the age of 26. He had made a deal with his father that if he passed his examinations, he could leave his homeland.

Mr. Von Rosenstiel surely seemed guilty to the judges, until Mrs. Von Rosenstiel began her testimony, a judge told them months later. The American wife read three letters her beau had written from Germany. Luckily, she had not discarded them, and they described Mr. Von Rosenstiel's dismay at what was happening in his homeland.

"It was so very, very disgusting to see all these riots, the smashed windows and the cruelty," Mr. Von Rosenstiel penned to his sweetheart after the notoriously deadly and destructive Kristallnacht in 1938. "My feeling of humanity and my belief in the human race is almost gone; at least gone as far as the people in this country are concerned....Please tell Sigmund that I am ashamed, and no matter what this country does to his people, I want him to know I am his friend."

The court's final decision was to parole Werner to the custody of one of the witnesses. His copies of Mein Kampf were returned so that they could later become part of the Von Rosentiel Reading Room. Before the formal arrangements were finished for his parole, however, Werner got drafted into the Army. Still an alien enemy, he was granted citizenship in the military service. He went overseas to fight and eventually fought on home soil in the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, Mr. Von Rosenstiel also aided the Allied cause by using his German language and legal skills to gather evidence for the Nuremberg trials. While doing so, he learned how the administration of justice had become a sham in Germany. "The Department of Justice was the absolute picture of the Department of Injustice," he now says. "They did everything Hitler told them." This sad reality made him thankful that his own experience in the American courts had been fair.

That's why he reiterates the need for fairness and justice today in these times that have been compared to Pearl Harbor. "It is very important that America remembers that it stands for justice," he cautions. "If we say all Arabs or Islamics are the enemy, we will make the same mistake as the Japanese internment, of which we are greatly ashamed."

While he was here, history professor Thomas Sakmyster and other colleagues in the history department, interviewed Mr. Von Rosenstiel for an oral history. The Von Rosenstiel endowment will aid future research in modern European history.