The Foreign Service Journal, May 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | MAY 2020 81 Axis Diplomats Held in Style Such Splendid Prisons: Diplomatic Detainment in America during World War II Harvey Solomon, Potomac Books/ University of Nebraska Press, 2020, $34.95/hardcover, eBook available, 360 pages. Reviewed by Peter F. Spalding It is not every day that a significant piece of neglected World War II diplomacy comes to light, but it has done so in Such Splendid Prisons. Through prodigious research, engag- ing, at times humorous, prose, and unique photographs, Harvey Solomon brings to life the fascinating—but largely forgotten—history of the detainment of hundreds of Axis diplomats in the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of Pearl Harbor. Scores of Japanese, German, Italian and other Axis country diplomats, along with their wives, children, mission staff and personal servants, were rounded up and summarily dispatched under guard on trains fromUnion Station inWashington, D.C., to the poshest of resorts, including the Greenbrier Hotel inWest Virginia, the Homestead Hotel in Virginia and the Grove Park Inn in North Carolina. Later in the war, there would be two more stages. After Operation Torch in November 1942, the Vichy French would be sent to Hotel Hershey; and Japanese diplomats captured in Germany inMay 1945 would be brought to the Bedford Springs Hotel in Pennsylvania, safely ensconced when the atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Not surprisingly, most Americans couldn’t comprehend why detainment in exclusive resorts was favored over incarcera- tion inmilitary prisons for the “Japs and Nazi thugs” who became hated enemies over- night. This detain- ment, however, represented a brave, brazen attempt by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to improve the lot of our own diplomats and their families suddenly stranded in countries with whom we were at war. While managing this detainment, federal officials were also undertaking delicate negotiations with neutral countries such as Switzerland, Spain and Sweden to repatriate U.S. diplomats trapped abroad. Another reason for the president’s quick decision: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was on his way across the U-boat infested North Atlantic aboard the HMS Duke of York for an unannounced White House parley, and FDR wanted the Axis diplomats out of their embassies before he arrived. One particular by-product of this undertaking was a new practice that’s still in effect today. On the night of Dec. 7, 1941, shortly after the bombing, a State Department official requested that a security agent be assigned to accompany Secretary Cordell Hull to the emergency Cabinet meeting at the White House. “The agent meets him at his resi- dence, the Wardman Park Hotel, and Hull acquiesces,” writes Solomon. “The next morning the agent again accom- panies Hull to his office, marking the beginning of the Secretary of State’s protective detail that exists to this day.” The final act of the first stage of this drama saw the American diplomats detained in Germany, Japan and Italy descend the gangplanks of Swedish ocean liners onto neutral wharves in Lisbon and LourençoMarques. Then their Axis coun- terparts boarded the same ships, trading luxurious living in America for uncertainty in their war-ravaged countries. As with many fine histories, Such Splendid Prisons often reads like a good novel with unexpected twists and turns, and a diverse cast of characters to highlight the collective experience of hundreds of Axis detainees. There is, for instance, the suave, movie- star-handsome acting German Ambas- sador HansThomsen (his father was born in Norway, which accounts for his Scandinavian last name) and his beautiful, eccentric wife, Bébé, whose love of pets went so far as importing fromGermany a squirrel that she’d have perched on her shoulder during social functions. Others were sophisticated Japanese journalist Masuo Kato, a graduate of the University of Chicago and suspected spy, and an interracial couple who had been longtime targets of the FBI: the Tennessean Gwen Terasaki and Japanese diplomat Hidenari Terasaki who, unbeknownst to his wife, was the head of Japanese intel- ligence in the United States. The youngest detainee profiled is lively college coed Hildegard “Hildy” von Boetticher, daughter of German Mil- itary Attaché Friedrich von Boetticher. A graduate of the Sidwell Friends School, Hildy was a college senior in Virginia at the time of Pearl Harbor. Her older brother, institutionalized near Baltimore for treatment of schizophrenia, could have been shot or hanged in accor- dance with Nazi purity laws had he been forced to return to Germany. His father asked Attorney General Francis Biddle to intervene, and in the end, FDR allowed the boy to remain in the United States under the proviso that all costs for his treatment BOOKS