>> Part 1

At first, the photographs seemed little more than a curiosity to the state and federal law enforcement officers who were interrogating Haider and Loescher. The police chief of Las Vegas, New Mexico, decided to keep them as souvenirs, and he showed them around to his friends. One of his friends, however, showed them to the editor of the local newspaper, and he, in turn, gave them to the Denver Post. On Sunday, October 24, 1943, the Post ran three of the photographs on the front page under the headline “German Prisoners Spooned with Jap Girls in Trinidad.” The Associated Press then picked up the photos, and within days the story of the “Japanazi Romances” was in newspapers across the country. The military’s embarrassment mounted.

The publication of the photographs led the FBI to send an agent from its Denver office to question the Germans further. After extensive questioning, Heinrich Haider finally admitted that a few weeks earlier he had met several Japanese American women on a farm where he and other war prisoners had been harvesting onions, that he had gone into the house where the Japanese American women lived, that he had asked them for civilian clothes, and that one of them had responded, “We will see.” Three days later, Haider said, several of the women passed by on the farm, and one of them—he could not say which—had said, “there is something for you…in the bushes.” Haider checked and found a package with civilian clothing in it.

The women to whom Haider referred were sisters, all of them with the maiden name Shitara. As was fairly common among the children of early twentieth-century Japanese immigrants, the Shitara sisters had Japanese surnames, but they went by Anglo nicknames—Toots, Flo, and Billie. The Shitara sisters had grown up on a farm in Inglewood, California, but had never lived among other Japanese Americans, and as a result, even their earliest memories were tinged with prejudice and discrimination. They were ostracized and had few friends. Neighborhood children called them “slant-eye” and “skibby.” In 1922, they huddled together praying in the fields behind their home while hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan raided their neighborhood. Even law enforcement victimized the family: a police officer found one of the sisters home alone when she was ten and tried to rape her.

Their experiences as adults were no less bitter. Each of them married, but, flaunting the conventions of the times, two married across racial lines, which subjected them to scorn. At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the two older sisters, Toots and Flo, lived on Terminal Island near Los Angeles, which was the first location along the West Coast from which Japanese Americans were evicted in February of 1942. They were given just days to clear out. In the spring of 1942, the entire Shitara family was ordered to report to the assembly center at the Santa Anita racetrack, and many of them spent that summer living in the horse stables. In the fall of 1942, they were all put on a train with darkened windows and transported for indefinite incarceration in the custody of the federal War Relocation Authority at the Amache Relocation Center on the wind-swept prairie of southeastern Colorado. Less than a year later, in the late spring of 1943, the sisters were granted leave from Amache to live as laborers on an onion farm. All three of the sisters, however, went to the farm without their husbands: Toots’s husband, who was white, remained on Terminal Island, working in a cannery; Flo’s husband had left Amache to serve in the army; and Billie’s husband had left camp for a job in Cleveland in order to support her and their young daughter.

Following up on Heinrich Haider’s story, FBI agents questioned the Shitara sisters about the German war prisoners’ escape, but each of them denied knowing anything about it. They admitted that Flo had taken the photographs on the farm early in October and that they had given the photographs to the Germans as souvenirs, but claimed—falsely—that they had given the Germans no clothing and had never talked with them about an escape.

While the FBI and the local United States Attorney tried to figure out what to do with the Shitara sisters, the War Relocation Authority weighed in with a report on the Shitara family. James Lindley, the director of the Amache Relocation Center, knew the Shitara family from the months the family had spent at the camp, and while he conceded that the sisters were “a bit on the wild side,” he stated confidently that there was “[no]thing subversive or disloyal about this family.” “I believe,” Lindley reported, “that the girls were having a bit of fun and taking their pleasure where they found it.” He pointed the finger of blame directly at the military: “As it is my understanding that these prisoners work under guard, I should think the guards would be able to give an explanation as to how and why this apparently loose conduct was countenanced.”

C. The Stool Pigeon and the Tunnel

On November 5, 1943, almost three weeks after the Germans were captured and almost two weeks after the photographs appeared in the nation’s newspapers, Attorney General Francis Biddle reviewed the file on the Shitara sisters and did not see much that concerned him. A note to Tom C. Clark, the Chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, explained that although Biddle was prepared to defer to Clark’s judgment, he felt, “at first blush, that there is probably no violation here.” Biddle preferred that the case be closed with a simple deal: the sisters “would be returned to the relocation center on the agreement that no action be taken—or the like.” Clark, however, was suspicious. On the back of the Attorney General’s memo he scribbled his own note to James McInerney, the lawyer who headed the Criminal Division’s National Defense Section: “I bet 30¢ these Jap gals did get the clothes and help these boys escape. I think a thorough investigation should be made.”

As it happened, the investigation in Colorado was ongoing even as Clark was writing his comment about the “Jap gals.” And it was turning up something extraordinary: another of the six escapees from Camp Trinidad, Julio E. Hofmann, had begun cooperating with military and law enforcement authorities. On November 3, two days before the Attorney General recommended against prosecuting the Shitara sisters, Hofmann approached officials at Camp Trinidad and dangled before them some valuable information both about the escape of Haider and Loescher and about security at Camp Trinidad. He said, however, that he would share his information only for a price. He wanted, first, for the military to move him to a different prison camp. Second, he wanted the FBI to intercede on his behalf to prevent him from being sent back to Germany at the war’s end. He explained that he was a Chilean national of German parentage who had gotten caught in Germany at the start of the war and forced by the Gestapo into the German Air Corps over his bitter objection. The FBI and the military promised to meet the first of his demands and promised to try to help with the second. With that, Hofmann started to talk.

Hofmann first revealed to the authorities that as early as mid-August of 1943, the prisoners at Camp Trinidad had managed to dig a one-hundred-fifty-foot-long, five-foot-deep, thirty-inch-wide tunnel from beneath the officers’ compound all the way to a point sixty-five feet beyond the perimeter fence. Even more astonishing, the tunnel was braced with lumber and fitted with electric lighting. Hofmann said that he had told guards at Camp Trinidad about the tunnel months earlier, but that they had done nothing about it. A search of the grounds at Camp Trinidad revealed a tunnel exactly where Hofmann said it would be. This was yet another major embarrassment for the military. The FBI instructed Camp Trinidad’s commander not to say a word in public about the tunnel, so as not to compromise either the camp’s security or the FBI’s investigation. The commander, grasping at the chance to deflect some criticism for the thirteen escapes that had happened on his watch, defied the FBI’s instructions and immediately gave an extensive interview to the press in which he took credit for discovering the tunnel after “an investigation [that] ha[d] been in progress for some time.” The commander boasted that his supposed “discovery” of the tunnel had “frustrated the escape of a large number of Germans.”

This bogus “discovery” undoubtedly went a small way toward polishing the military’s severely tarnished security record at its POW camps. But Hofmann offered the government an even more tempting target for this purpose—the three Shitara sisters. He told the FBI that once he got back to Camp Trinidad after being recaptured, he struck up a friendship with Heinrich Haider and asked Haider about his escape. Haider tried to maintain that he and Loescher had hopped a freight train into New Mexico, but Hofmann insisted that that was not possible. The next day, Hofmann said, Haider softened and opened up to him about “the Jap girls.” Hofmann’s statement is worth quoting at length:

I ask him if he f____ with the Jap girls and he said “In the car it was very warm with the Jap girls”…. Haider was sitting in front with the Jap girl Toots and he said Loescher was in back with a girl I think he said Billie…I do not know if Flo was there.…Also before he escaped he told me he had clothes from the Jap girls. He said these were civil [sic] clothes. After I returned to camp he told me that the Jap girls came on the street with the car with no lights and he and Loescher went in the car with them.…He said he had $14.00 from the Jap girls.

Hofmann then volunteered proof of the Shitara sisters’ intent, with a detail or two about the drive to New Mexico that no witness would later confirm or even mention, either before or during the sisters’ eventual trial:

Haider said the Jap girls told him their father had a farm in California but that their father has not given this farm to America but they took it from him. She said that American papers said German soldiers were not good but that she saw Haider and knew Germans were good. She said she thought Germans were barbarious but after she met Haider she knew this was not true.

This was the story that Julio Hofmann told so that he might be removed from Camp Trinidad and not returned to Germany at war’s end. His gambit worked. A few days after making his statement, Hofmann was transferred to Camp McCain, Mississippi. When his fellow German prisoners were sent back to Germany, Hofmann was allowed to go to Chile. After spending a number of years there as a commercial pilot, he immigrated to the United States and settled in the Miami area, where he recently died. Obviously, Julio Hofmann talked his way to a better life.

D. Turning Romance to Treason

Armed with Hofmann’s allegations, an FBI agent questioned Heinrich Haider again. Seeing that it would be impossible to conceal the sisters’ role, Haider began to talk about Toots, Flo, and Billie. He explained that he had met them on the onion farm early in October, told them of his desire to escape, and asked them to help by giving him civilian clothing. The women tried to dissuade him from escaping. They argued that it was foolish because the war would be over soon and the chances were high that he would be caught. Haider said that the women also maintained that he would never be able to make it to Germany, but he told them he just wanted to go to Los Angeles. In any event, the women said, they could not help him because they had no money.

He talked with the women over the next few days and reiterated his intent to escape. Finally, some ten days after he first asked for the women’s help, they left a package of civilian clothing for him in one of the onion fields. Emboldened by this first offer, Haider sent a note to them announcing that he and Loescher would be escaping on Saturday, October 16th. Toots responded, also by note, with an offer to pick them up on the highway outside the camp that evening and drive them south.

On the appointed evening, Haider explained to the FBI, he and Loescher cut their way through the fence at Camp Trinidad and made their way to a nearby highway. After a while, Toots, Billie, and Flo pulled up in a big Buick and dimmed their headlights. Toots was at the wheel. Haider and Loescher got in the car and they drove south into New Mexico. At around 1:30 in the morning, the car developed water pump trouble, so the women left the two Germans by the side of the road with the civilian clothing, the road maps, and, fatefully, the photographs.

Interestingly, the interrogating agent did not pursue Hofmann’s claim about the women’s dissatisfactions with the United States and their admiration for Germany. In fact, only one element in Haider’s new story even implied anything about the women’s intent in helping them, and that element pointed toward innocence, not guilt, of treason:

Haider admitted that he had had intimate relations with subject [TOOTS] in the car during this trip but asked that no mention be made of this matter in public or in any trial of the case. He stated that he would give his word he would testify to the above facts which he stated are the truth but asked that if possible no mention be made of his having had intimate relations with [TOOTS]. The interrogating agents told Haider they would bring that request to the attention of the United States Attorney.

The interrogating agent now had a story implicating Toots, Flo, and Billie in a plot to help the prisoners. So eager was he to corroborate it that he immediately did something that was either extraordinarily unprofessional or downright malicious: he brought Loescher into the interrogation room and—with Haider sitting right there—told Loescher the whole story that Haider had just told him. He then asked Loescher to confirm that the story was true, and Loescher did. Naturally this interrogation technique did nothing but let Loescher know exactly what he needed to say in order to conform his story to Haider’s—a convenient strategy for preparing a treason case, which requires proof of an overt act by two witnesses.

Loescher then sat down with the agent to tell his story and, of course, it matched Haider’s factual account precisely. Loescher repeatedly emphasized that the women were not willing participants in the episode and that he and Haider had “had to urge the girls with every argument at their command to convince them that the plan could be successful.” Loescher also admitted to “having had intimate relations with BILLIE,” and asked “that this matter not be made public and that no mention of it be made in court.” The agent assured Loescher, as he had assured Haider, that he would bring the request to the attention of the United States Attorney.

The agent did ask Loescher one question that he had not asked Haider: “whether the affair was a romantic escapade on the part of the Japanese girls.” Given the photographs, the women’s reluctance, the Germans’ efforts at persuasion, and the sex in the car, this was certainly a reasonable question. But Loescher told the agent that he was “convinced that they did it to help Germany.” How did Loescher know this? He said that “the girls are definitely Japanese and probably have not been accepted by Americans and he knows that they feel allegiance to Japan and to its ally Germany.” That is, he did not tell the agent anything that any of the women actually said or did; he simply ventured his opinion that the American citizens who helped him were “definitely Japanese” who “probably” felt like outsiders. The agent asked Loescher whether he was willing to testify to that at a trial, and Loescher said that he would, “see[ing] no reason to deny the truth.”

Loescher’s conscience, however, must have been nagging at him, because at the end of his interrogation, he asked for permission to send a letter to the judge who would try the case against the Shitara sisters. His letter is worth quoting at length because of the light it sheds on the sisters’ intent:

Sir! As you now have got my statement I profit by the opportunity to give the following to your notice: When my comrade Haider spoke to the two Japanese women (Toots and Billie) for the first time about our escape plans they both objected vividly. “There is no good in escaping for you”, they said. “Wait for the war’s end; be patient; keep your health; don’t play with your life,” was their advice. They pointed out a lot of dangers and circumstances making a flight nearly impossible. But being regardless resolved to realize the escapade we tried to persuade the women. We had to take many troubles by words and by letters to change their mind. Finally we succeeded. I think it therefore reasonable to consider us the more guilty party, not the seduced women. Without our urgent persuasions they never would have agreed.

At the time Loescher wrote this letter, the sisters were charged with nothing. Indeed, the day that Loescher wrote his letter to Judge Symes was the same day that Attorney General Francis Biddle shared his view with Tom Clark that there was probably nothing to the case. But with Haider’s and Loescher’s statements, the Justice Department now had three faces—Japanese faces—on which to pin responsibility for the embarrassing security problems at Camp Trinidad. That was the day that the treason prosecution of the Shitara sisters began in earnest.

Part 3 >>

* This article was originally presented at the “Law, Loyalty, and Treason: How Can the Law Regulate Loyalty Without Imperiling It?” Symposium at the University of North Carolina in 2003 and published in the North Carolina Law Review, June 2004 and reprinted with permission.

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Professor Eric Muller will tell the remarkable story of the now-forgotten trial of the Shitara Sisters on July 4, 2008 in Denver, CO.

EVENT: “Betrayal on Trial: Japanese American ‘Treason’ in World War II and the 1944 Trial of the Shitara Sisters”
PRESENTED BY: Eric Muller, Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina School of Law

at Whose America? Who’s American? Diversity, Civil Liberties, and Social Justice
Enduring Communities National Conference

For more information, visit the Enduring Communities Web site .

© 2008 Eric L. Muller