Welcome to InternmentArchives.com
This site was created to give researchers access to primary and other hard to find documentation concerning the evacuation, relocation, and internment of individuals of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Much of the information you will find on this site cannot be found anywhere else, except through laborious Freedom of Information Requests or personal visits to various archives around the country.
Conventional wisdom concerning this controversial event in American history is that individuals of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and put into American concentration camps in violation of their constitutional rights because the country was overcome with "racism, hysteria and a lack of political will" after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The determined researcher will find that the truth is quite different. A careful review of the documentation in this archive reveals that many Japanese along the West Coast of the U.S. did, in fact, pose a grave security risk to the country.
Please feel free to explore this archive and provide feedback via the links on the contact page. This site is a work in progress. If you find any errors or have suggestions to improve the site, we would appreciate knowing about them.
Thanks for your interest and we hope you find this site useful in your research.
Sponsorship Notice
The development of this archive was sponsored by Athena Press, a publishing company that recently released a book by David Lowman, a former National Security Agency official, that contains an insightful analysis of the Japanese-American redress movement and the first comprehensive review of the intelligence that led to the Japanese evacuation. Reproduced documents from the appendices of this book are included in this archive.