Arthur Jacobs photograph collection

Arthur Jacobs is the son of Lambert and Sophie Paulina (née Knissel) Jacobs. Both of his parents were born in Germany and immigrated to New York in the 1920s. Arthur was born in New York on February 4, 1933. He had one brother Lambert Jr who was two years older. The family lived in Brooklyn. In June 1943 when Arthur was 10 years the FBI came to their apartment and searched it looking for contraband. They returned twice more on suspicions that Lambert was a supporter of the Nazi party. Despite no evidence and Lambert's continued denial of any involvement with the Nazi party, he was arrested in November 1944 and taken to an internment facility on Ellis Island. By the end of February 1945, Paulina did not want to remain separated from her husband any longer and voluntarily requested that she and her two sons be sent to the internment camp as well. The family remained there for two months, and on April 26, 1945 they were sent to the Crystal City Internment Camp in Crystal City, Texas. The camp housed both German and Japanese-American families. They remained there after the end of the war in Europe, and Lambert, having learned that he would be deported, requested that the family be repatriated to Germany. In December 1945 they returned by train to Ellis Island and in January 1946 sailed back to Germany. Though Arthur and his brother were both American citizens and knew almost no German, they were sent to a high security internment facility in Hohenasperg. The boys remained there for over a year before being sent to a minimum security internment camp in February 1947. After their parents were also released, the family moved to the British zone to live with Lambert’s parents. Food was extremely scarce so Arthur sought work at American Army bases. There he met an American teacher who was living with her husband, a CIC officer. She arranged for the boys to obtain papers to return to America to live with her friends, Arthur and Mildred Dreyer. Arthur later joined the Air Force and saw his parents again for the first time in 1958 while stationed in Europe.