Ethnic Germans' Sufferings After World War I in the United States and Europe

German-Americans were the most visible non-Anglophone group in the US during the 18th and 19th centuries. But the hostility against these groups took place during the nineteenth century, but were largely non-systematic. The Germans' stance of anti-slavery position in the Southern United States brought about violent clashes in slave states such as Texas during the American Civil War.

The pacifist Mennonite and Amish communities attracted considerable hatred, particularly during the American Revolution and the US Civil War, when many Mennonites and possibly Amish were imprisoned or forcibly conscripted. There was a popular view that Germans did not consider themselves part of America.

Upon the outbreak of World War I, anti-German sentiment quickly reached fever pitch. Many Germans supported their (former) homeland's side in the war, in which America long remained officially neutral. The situation came to a crisis with America's entry into the war in 1917. By the time the troops returned from Europe, the German community had ceased to be a major force in American culture, or was no more perceived as German.

When in France during World War I, members of the Yale University had learned about the German song Die Wacht am Rhein and were apparently shocked to discover the fact that Yale's traditional song "Bright College Years" had been written to the "splendid tune" of Carl Wilhelm. Suddenly hating this melody, Yale Alumni sang "Bright College Years" to the tune of the Marseillaise instead, and after the war the German melody was banned for some time until it was reinstated in 1920.

In Canada, thousands of German born Canadians were interned in detention camps during World War I and World War II and subjected to forced labour. Many Ukrainians and other Eastern Europeans were also detained during the First World War as were Japanese and Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.

In Britain, Germans were demonized in the press well before the First World War, when the Kaiserliche Marine started to challenge the Royal Navy, but particularly around 1912 and during the First World War. Anti-German sentiment was so intense that the British Royal Family (which was, in fact, of German origin) was advised by the government to change its name, resulting in the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha becoming the House of Windsor. The German Shepherd dog was renamed as Alsatian. The waters that had been known as the 'German Ocean' were also renamed; the North Sea (as in German Nordsee) despite being east of the British Isles.

Pennsylvania's Amish County & Mennonite Communities in Mexico

Pennsylvania's Amish county in Lancaster has turned into a wonder land after the Harrison Ford movie "Witness" filmed in 1985. Thereafter each year, a large number of visitors journey to Amish land to experience the excitement.

The Amish Experience, the largest and complete interpretive touring center is located in the heart of the oldest Amish settlement in the world, the county's only designated "Heritage Site" surrounded by Amish farmlands. The customs and life-styles of simpler times still lasting with homes without electricity, and transportation limited to the horse and buggy.

Community celebrations and special events with shopping by roadside stands and quilts to furniture and hex signs, add to the area's unique allure. The Amish Experience in the area's original family-style restaurant and Plain & Fancy Farm will excite the visitors with a la carte dining and the legendary all-you-can-eat dinner of local Pennsylvania Deutsch specialties.

Aaron and Jessica's Buggy Rides and the luxurious Amish View Inn & Suites will add further excitement to visitors.

Today, Amish farming communities are generally prosperous and stable.

Agricultural exchange, a unique exchange program with an Amish order in Pennsylvania made it possible for some Low German Mennonites to survive in Mexico.
Many Low German Mennonites in Mexico are second and third generation immigrants, trying to make their living as farmers in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Their life has become difficult by the poor returns for their wheat and dairy products due to drought.

In 1994, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) helped by organizing a group of eight Amish men from US to visit Mennonite businesses, schools and churches in Chihuahua. Since then, the Amish have worked with MCC to raise a dairy herd, build a modern cheese factory and initiate a teacher training exchange in Chihuahua.
Amish in Pennsylvania along with two other groups in Ohio and Indiana enabled to reduce the poverty in the Mexican Mennonite colonies.

A large number of Mennonites have left to Canada in search of a better economic future. But there are Germans originally settled from then USSR who are very rich and influential in Mexico.

Amish and Mennonite communities are having a common Anabaptist history.
The Amish are conservative descendants of Anabaptists who fled to escape from religious persecution in southern Germany and Switzerland in the 1700s. They settled in Pennsylvania and the U.S. Midwest.

During the Reformation era in Europe the Anabaptist Christians rejected infant baptism and chose believer's baptism. Since many of them had been baptized in their infancy, they chose to be rebaptized as believing adults. So their enemies called them Anabaptists -- "re-baptizers." Mennonites are also descendants of Anabaptists.

Both the Amish and Mennonites speak German dialects, but they still require translators to communicate. As the two groups learned during an evening of singing, they share similar chant-style songs as well.

The establishment of a dialogue has helped to foster discussion. They have established enough trust to discuss painful issues such as divisions within the church. The recent introduction of electricity and rubber tires in some communities has prompted church leaders and many other residents to leave for more conservative colonies in southern Mexico and Bolivia.

German - Americans

At the student meeting, I was amazed by many of the new faces. Dietmar Doering enumerated the various activities in which students would be involved.

He turned his topic and was proudly telling about some of the German historical and notable personalities. Some of the Germans and their achievements are forgotten by the majority of German people.

Doering was continuing on Germans and German origin names around the world. Ethnic German minorities live in many countries in all six continents including the former Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy, the United States, Latin America, Namibia, and Australia. These German minorities, through their ethno-cultural vitality, exhibit an exceptional level of variations.

Amongst them are small groups (such as those in Namibia) and many very large groups (such as the almost 1 million non-evacuated Germans in Russia and Kazakhstan or the near 500,000 Germans in Brazil), groups that have been greatly "folklorised" and almost completely linguistically assimilated (such as the Germans in the USA or Australia), and others, such as the true linguistic minorities (like the German minorities in Argentina and Brazil, in western Siberia or in Romania and Hungary); other groups, which are classified as religio-cultural groups rather than ethnic minorities, (such as the Eastern-Low German speaking Mennonites in Paraguay, Mexico, Belize or in the Altay region of Siberia) and the groups who maintain their status thanks to strong identification with their ethnicity and their religious sentiment (such as the groups in Upper Silesia, Poland or in South Jutland in Denmark).

Dietmar Doering was telling enthusiastically that Frankfurter, Hamburger and other famous fast food names were derived from German places and cities.

He was proud to speak of the well-to-do Americans of German ancestry. While he was telling, the students' faces took on a lively expression. They were talking to each other and nodding and exchanging notes silently among themselves.

Americans of German ancestry are the major European ethnic group in modern America.
As of a 2000 census, more than 45 million Americans claimed they had German ancestry but only 1.5 million of them spoke the language at that time.

German is the second most spoken language in the US states of North Dakota and South Dakota and the third in popular foreign language after Spanish and French in the US.

There are varieties of German dialects in the US. Texas German based in the Texas Hill Country in the vicinity of the town of Fredricksburg is a dying dialect. Hutterite communities speak Hutterite German, an Austro-Bavarian dialect in the US States of Washington, Montana, North and South Dakota and Minnesota and in the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

In Canada there are people of German ancestry throughout the country and especially in the west as well as in Ontario. There is a large and vibrant community in the city of Kitchener, Ontario.

The US state Kansas is having more Mennonites and Volga German communities.
There are German commnuities in Wisconsin and Indiana.

In the early twentieth century immigrants mainly settled in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Cincinnati.

The German immigrants after World War II came primarily to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago urban areas and to Florida.

Generally, German immigrant communities in the USA have lost their mother tongue more quickly than those who moved to South America, possibly for the German speakers the Germanic based English was easier to learn than the Latin based Portuguese or Spanish. The strong anti-German sentiment and attacks on German-speakers in the US before and after the major World Wars also contributed to change their mother tongue into English.

The teaching of the German language to latter-age students has given rise to a pidgin variant which combines the German language with the grammar and spelling rules of the English language in the US. This variant is often understandable by the English and the German speakers and is called American German and often referred to as Amerikanisch or Amerikanischdeutsch. However this is a pidgin and not a dialect.

German Americans in the Amana Colonies in the state of Iowa speak Amana German.

The Amish and other Pennsylvania Germans including Mennonites speak a dialect of German known as Pennsylvania Dutch also known Pennsylvania Deutsch (a West Central German variety). The eastern Pennsylvania is a remnant of what was once a much larger German-speaking area.

German Memory - US President Gen Dwight D Eisenhower & The "Other Losses" of German Prisoners

According to Canadian Author James Bacque, Eisenhower personally, secretly, and with sinister intent changed the status of surrendered German soldiers from prisoners of war to Disarmed Enemy Forces.

But the historians argued that the change in designation was a policy matter. The decision was made not by Eisenhower but by his superiors, specifically by the European Advisory Commission. Nor was any attempt made to keep it secret. All those involved acted with the authority of the British, Russian and American Governments, and they were perfectly straightforward about the reason for the change in status. The Allies could not afford to feed the millions of German prisoners at the same level at which they were able to feed German civilians, the civilians of the liberated countries of Western Europe and the displaced persons. But the United States and other Allied nations had signed the Geneva Convention, which had the force of a treaty. They did not wish to violate it, so they used the new designation of "Disarmed Enemy Forces."

The greatest number of "other losses" revealed in the August 1945 Report of the Military Governor. (These monthly reports are in the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kan., in the National Archives in Washington and elsewhere; they are a basic source on every aspect of the occupation, including food shortages and prisoners). Historians accused Bacque that he did not cite them and there was no evidence that he examined them even.

The August report lists the numbers of disarmed enemy forces discharged by American forces and those transferred to the British and French for forced labor.

The report states: "An additional group of 663,576 are listed as 'other losses,' consisting largely of members of the Volksturm [Peoples' Militia], released without formal discharge."

The People's Militia consisted of older men (up to 80 years of age, mainly World War I veterans) and boys of 16 or sometimes less. American guards and camp authorities told the old men to go home and take care of their grandchildren, the boys to go home and return to school along with the transfers to other zones. Historians criticized James Bacque that he ignored all these facts for his 'missing million'.

They further criticized Bacque was wrong on every major charge and nearly all his minor ones. Eisenhower was not a Hitler, he did not run death camps, German prisoners did not die by the hundreds of thousands, there was a severe food shortage in 1945, there was nothing sinister or secret about the "disarmed enemy forces" designation.

Nevertheless, Historians agreed with Bacque on one point, that some US Army soldiers and their officers were capable of acting in almost as brutal a manner as the Nazis.

But number of historians has commented in their reviews in Britain, France, Germany and Canada, "they cannot believe what Mr. Bacque says about Eisenhower is true, but they cannot also disprove it."

Eisenhower, the German descendant American who showed his statesmanship and greater humanity by ending the Korean War and avoiding military intervention in Vietnam finally left a controversial legacy in his ancestral Germany; once said, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."