He wanted to erase Japanese Americans and his own Jewish heritage.
June 29, 1989: Karl Bendetsen, the self-proclaimed chief architect of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, died.
Few Americans recognize Karl Bendetsen’s name. Often, the most dangerous people are the ones working behind the scenes.
Yet few individuals played a larger role in the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.
As Assistant Chief of Staff for the Western Defense Command, Bendetsen became one of the driving forces behind Executive Order 9066. In a 1942 military qualification form, he claimed that he had “conceived, drafted and processed Executive Order 9066,” authorizing the forced removal of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast.
For the next two years, he helped administer one of the largest racially motivated forced removals in American history. Even General John DeWitt initially questioned whether removing every Japanese American from the West Coast was necessary. Bendetsen pushed him toward mass exclusion and helped turn the idea into policy.
120,000 Wasn’t Enough
Before the incarceration of Japanese Americans on the mainland, Bendetsen was going for more.
He was advocating the mass incarceration of approximately 134,000 Japanese Americans living in Hawaii.
Bendetsen ordered that anyone with “one drop of Japanese blood,” regardless of age, was subject to removal. That meant infants in orphanages were taken. Hospital patients were transported, some dying after their medical care was interrupted.
One worry he had, was that “good Americans” might “give Japs the benefit of the doubt” for economic reasons, and he was right:
Military and civilian officials rejected the proposal, not because they believed it was unjust, but because incarcerating so much of Hawaii’s population would cripple the territory’s economy and undermine the war effort.
Erasing His Own Identity
Bendetsen’s public life contained another remarkable contradiction.
Born Karl Bendetson into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Aberdeen, Washington, he later changed the spelling of his surname to Bendetsen. He also fabricated a Danish family history, presenting himself as being of Danish rather than Jewish ancestry.
He even later described how his first Danish ancestor “came over here in 1670, decided he didn’t want to be a sailor, he wanted to be a farmer … my family has been in timber ever since.”
Friends, colleagues, and official biographies repeated the story for years.
While advocating policies that targeted Americans based solely on ancestry, Bendetsen spent much of his own life attempting to obscure his own.
Return to Justify the Incarceration
Bendetsen joined others who had been involved in the exclusion and incarceration of the Japanese Americans during the CWRIC (Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians)hearings in 1983.
He even made unsupported assertions that “there were hundreds of espionage nets among persons of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast…[and were] the basis finally of General DeWitt’s recommendations.”
Bendetsen also claimed that the incarceration was absolutely necessary. But the people there weren’t actually imprisoned. “When they were in the centers, they were free to leave.”
He adamantly opposed to calls for reparations to be paid to former camp survivors and their relatives.
At the same time, he claimed that he had nothing to do with the decision making, denying the claim he made years earlier.
Life of Lies
For decades, Bendetsen proudly claimed he had conceived and drafted Executive Order 9066.
When questioned under oath years later, he denied responsibility.
He denied responsibility for the decision to remove Japanese Americans from the West Coast, despite his earlier claims that he had conceived and drafted the order.
Former Justice Arthur J. Goldberg reminded Bendetsen of his first “Who’s Who” statement; Bendetsen would not admit to what he conceived, and argued at length that he did his conceiving only after “voluntary evacuation” was shown to be a failure.
On top of all this, he even took the time during the testimony to explain his fake family history about his Danish ancestor.
Ruthless Legacy
Bendetsen was described as “ruthless” by his lifelong friends, who also were critical of his betrayal of his Jewish heritage.
Karl Bendetsen died on June 29, 1989.
By then, the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians had already concluded that the incarceration of Japanese Americans had been caused not by military necessity, but by race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.
Congress followed with the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, formally apologizing for the incarceration and providing redress to surviving victims.
Karl Bendetsen tried to erase both his role in the mass removal of Japanese Americans and his own Jewish identity. But he failed.
We kept the receipts.