Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,071

This is the grave of Karl Bendetsen.

Born in 1907 into a Jewish immigrant family in Aberdeen, Washington, Bendetsen would……not really take the lessons of his family fleeing anti-Semitism to heart. This is not a figure many people know, but it’s not a super story. Basically, welcome to the prototype of Stephen Miller.

Bendetsen changed his last name to hide his being Jewish. He would even claim his family was Danish and he came from lumberjacks, which makes sense in terms of how one might assimilate in the timber capital of Grays Harbor County. But that’s why that name doesn’t seem Jewish at all. Though initially, the last name was spelled Bendetson, which doesn’t exactly scream “Stein” to me. In fact, his grandparents had come over around 1860 from Lithuania and Poland. He didn’t like to admit that, but we’ll get to that later. In any case, the name change was in 1942, when he really didn’t want to be associated with any kind of oppressed minority group that might get in the way of him being actively involved in oppression of minority groups. Can’t have your loyalty to oppression questioned.

One way that Bendetsen sought to assimilate was being a massive patriot. That happened early. He enrolled in the Washington National Guard in 1921. That’s right, he was 14 years old. Yes, there were rules on how old you had to be. No, the National Guard did not care about those rules. Yes, they knew how old he was. This was the summer before he started high school. He did well, ended up at Stanford, and was in the Officer Reserve Corps.

In 1940, Bendetsen was called up to active duty. In 1941, the United States entered World War II. A major, Bendetsen was working for the Wartime Civil Control Administration on the administrative staff of a general named Allen Guillion. Basically, his job was to stop any kind of agitation that would get in the way of the war effort. There were two sides to this. The first was strikebreaking. Now, even the CIO was not going to let strikes get in the way of the war effort, despite the rank and file’s desire to keep striking, often over the continued provocations and contract violations on the shop floor by furious supervisors and foremen who could not believe their total power over workers had ended. So this is not what I am hanging my Bendetsen is the Miller prototype hat on, though the man most certainly hated unions and leftists too. Later in life, Bendetsen, who loved lying to make himself look like the most badass American out there, claimed that he faced down all the strikers while standing on an overturned car as they dared try to stop him from entering the plant. This is almost certainly total bullshit.

No, what makes Bendetsen a pure 100% scumbag is his role in not only throwing all the Japanese Americans into concentration camps based on their race, which of course was also what the Nazis were doing with Bendetsen’s own people, even if the Americans didn’t go as far toward Nazi methods as he hoped, but his lifelong celebration of his role in doing so.

First, Bendetsen was the architect of the camps. There were other options than throwing them all into concentration camps. John DeWitt, Bendetsen’s superior office, originally had supported a less restrictive plan. Bendetsen badgered DeWitt into accepting his, saying the Japanese were traitorous scum who needed locked up. It was Bendetsen who pushed the government for a one-drop rule here, locking up anyone who had that Jap blood. Second, he was uncompromising. What did this mean? It meant Bendetsen had any Japanese person in the hospital unhooked from the machines keeping them alive and shipped out to the camps. His policies murdered many aging and sick people by denying them their medical care. He did not care. His superiors didn’t care enough to do anything about it, so damn them to hell too, but this was Bendetsen’s baby. Third, even when young Japanese-American men (and a few women) got out of the camps by enrolling in the military and fighting in Europe (not Asia of course, can’t trust them), Bendetsen fought to have them banned from entering the west coast states for any reason, even while in uniform.

Later in the war, furious that he didn’t get promoted to general for all his actions in keeping America safe from the yellow peril, Bendetsen was involved in planning operations in the invasion of Europe. After the war, Bendetsen defended his actions with great pride. The Japanese could not be real Americans and they deserved their concentration camps. Truman named Bendetsen Assistant Secretary of the Army. By this time, the Japanese-American community had organized enough to protest his appointment, though they didn’t stop it. He didn’t stay long though.

Bendetsen was also a habitual liar. He made up all sorts of shit about his life. He told oral history interviewers in the 70s and 80s that he was a confident of Douglas MacArthur in 1941 and flew to the Philippines to meet with him. There’s no evidence this happened. He claimed to have been in Pearl Harbor talking to top brass just before the attacks on December 7, 1941. That didn’t happen either. He made up all sorts of claims about his supposedly Danish family that he used to tie himself to 100% Americanism in these interviews. Bendetsen claimed to have basically written Executive Order 9066, that threw them all into the camps. It’s hard to say how much if any truth there is here. His fanaticism on the point was real enough though, that’s for sure.

Then, Bendetsen was furious that in the early 80s that there would be any official apology and reparations to the survivors of the camps. This was a betrayal of all the white supremacy he stood for. He testified before Congress of the outrage of such a policy.

Later in life, Bendetsen went back to Washington and ran a lumber company, eventually rising to the CEO of Champion Paper. Evidently, and unsurprisingly, he was a complete asshole as an employer and this is reported by people who considered him a friend. Evidently, there was a lot of disgust from people he knew when they discovered he had lied about his background and hid his Jewish ancestry.

Bendetsen died in 1989. He was 81 years old. It was Alzheimer’s. Too bad, I’d like him to know of his own suffering.

Karl Bendetsen, truly an inspiration to Stephen Miller, is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other people associated with throwing the Japanese Americans into concentration camps, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. John DeWitt is also in Arlington and Allen Guillion is in New Castle, Kentucky. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.