Both sides in the battle over postwar German policy shared the same ultimate objective: to reduce the likelihood of another world war. The question was how to achieve it. Both sides could make compelling cases. In Treasury Secretary Morgenthau’s view, future peace required the dismantling of Germany’s capacity to wage war. It was that simple. Remove their means of manufacturing the weapons of modern war, and the Germans could not threaten the peace. By contrast, War Secretary Stimson believed that peace required prosperity, and by forcing Germany to subsist at artificially low living standards, the Allies would breed resentments that would undermine stability. Morgenthau’s view was a negative conception of world order: disintegrate Germany from the calculus of great power politics, and the result would equal peace. Stimson’s view was more positive: reintegrate Germany into European recovery, and the Germans would become stakeholders in an interdependent world. Roosevelt’s advisors split down this divide. Their position depended in large part on what each believed about the German people, themselves.

We have longed believe that after Pearl Harbor, Americans demanded the removal of Japanese Americans from the west coast and into concentration camps. This views stems largely from the racist sentiments expressed by some prominent politicians and media figures along with one oft-cited poll showing fifty-nine percent of Americans supporting internment. But a closer look at public opinion polls conducted in the months after Pearl Harbor but before the President’s interment order reveal remarkably low support for the policy. The letters that supposedly flooded into the White House calling for mass evacuations only swelled after the order on February 19, 1942. In other words, it was only after Japanese Americans were framed as dangerous that the general public approved of internment.Unfortunately for the roughly 112,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast, they were about to become the victims of one of America’s worst cases of misplaced revenge. Tragically, this would be only the first of many vengeful acts America inflicted upon the innocent during and shortly after the war. And with each destructive deed, a majority of Americans insisted that this is not who we are. Why, then, did the politics of vengeance prevail?

Mr. Chief Justice STONE1 delivered the opinion of the Court.

The petitioner, Fred Korematsu, was born in Alameda County, California, and is of Japanese ancestry. He is an American citizen by birth. United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1889). That his parents were born in Japan and, with the commencement of war, became formally classified as enemy aliens is of no moment in this case.2 No question has been raised as to petitioner’s loyalty to the United States.

Petitioner was convicted in a federal district court for remaining in San Leandro, California, a “military area,” contrary to Civilian Exclusion Order No. 34 of the Commanding General of the Western Command, U.S. Army, which directed that after May 9, 1942, all persons of Japanese ancestry should be excluded from that area.