History of the Germans in the United States
The history of the Germans in the United States begins in the 17th century with the establishment of the first European colony on what later became the United States . Germans were involved in the European colonization of the North American mainland from the beginning, and up to the 20th century they even formed the largest group of immigrants - even before the British, Irish, Italians and Jews. Most of the German-speaking immigrants came during the time of the German Revolution and the end of the First World War between 1848 and 1918. Migration reached its peak in 1882 when around 250,000 Germans immigrated.
The German immigrants have had a major impact on the social, intellectual and cultural life of the United States , for example in the press and religion. Up until the 20th century, the Germans were one of the best-organized and most highly respected immigrant groups in the country, and some of their members made great economic and social careers. In the course of the 20th century, however, their cultural independence fell almost completely. The background to this sudden assimilation was the participation of the USA in the First and Second World War . Apart from a few minorities such as the Texas Germans and the Amish , who have preserved parts of their culture to the present day, the cultivation of the cultural heritage of most German-Americans today is limited to folkloric elements. The pressure to assimilate, however, has never affected German-American migration, and it continues to the present day as a labor migration of academics.
Colonial period (1607–1776)
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A few Germans were already among the pioneers who co-founded and settled the British colonies in North America . However, German immigrants did not come to America in large numbers until the 1680s. Their destination was sometimes Upstate New York (including the Mohawk Valley ) or New Jersey , but more often Pennsylvania , whose founder William Penn , who is known for his liberalism , came to Germany twice in the 1670s to promote the settlement of the colony there . Travel reports such as the book Gottlieb Mittelberger's Journey to Pennsylvania in 1750 published in 1756 and his return journey to Germany in 1754 also stimulated migration.
The German emigrants left their homeland for various reasons. Many came for economic reasons, because agriculture no longer gave them a livelihood. Mennonites , Amish , Moravian Brothers and Tunkers were persecuted for their beliefs; still others were threatened with drafting for military service . The North American colonies promised better economic conditions than Central Europe, in particular they offered the prospect of land ownership. To finance the overseas passage, which corresponded to about an annual income, almost 60% of German emigrants signed up as debt servants . These were often settled in the Hudson Valley , where they had to make tar or grow hemp for the British crown until they had paid their debt .
Jamestown
The first German to settle in what would later become the United States, the Wroclaw doctor, Dr. Johannes Fleischer , who arrived in 1607 with the first generation of settlers in the later British colony of Jamestown , but died the following year. In September 1608 three German glaziers followed, who were also soon killed.
German settlements in Pennsylvania
Germantown
The first permanent German settlement, Germantown , was in the Province of Pennsylvania . The place was founded by the scholar Franz Daniel Pastorius , who arrived here in 1683 together with 13 families - Quakers and Mennonites - from the Krefeld area, the so-called " Original 13 ". Many of these settlers were weavers. In 1688, four Germantown residents - Franz Daniel Pastorius, Abraham Isacks op den Graeff , Herman Isacks op den Graeff and Gerrit Henderich - wrote the first protest against slavery in America . Two years later, the German William Rittenhouse set up the first paper mill on the outskirts of the town on what would later become the US territory. In 1743 Johann Christoph Sauer printed the first Bibles of the colonies in Germantown - in German.
Immigration from the Palatinate
One of the most important German emigration regions was the Palatinate , which was particularly afflicted by wars and religious tensions . The first people from the Palatinate to go overseas were religiously persecuted. As early as 1675, a group of French Huguenots , who had found temporary refuge in the Palatinate , settled on the Hudson River and founded the town of New Paltz there in 1677, in memory of their hospitable home . Many people from the Palatinate also settled in Germantown in the 17th century. A mass emigration but began only after the very harsh winter of 1708/09; most of the people affected were farmers. Although the British Queen in the Palatinate advertised the settlement of her province of Carolina , the majority of the Palatinate sought Pennsylvania. The journey led via Rotterdam and London and was extremely arduous. Tens of thousands of emigrants died before they reached America; others were forcibly resettled in Ireland or had to return to Germany from England. Nevertheless, around 15,000 people from the Palatinate landed in Philadelphia by 1727; around 70,000 more followed by 1775.
While the Pennsylvanian Germans initially only inhabited the coastal region, German immigration to Pennsylvania increased significantly from 1727 and the settlement area began to expand westward beyond the Susquehanna River . It was not until the second half of the 18th century that Palatinate-American migration gradually subsided, when the Palatinate found alternative emigration destinations in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. German immigrants made up a third of the population of Pennsylvania at the time of the American War of Independence . The Pennsylvania Germans, among whom in addition to Reformed and Lutheran Christians were many Mennonites and Amish, often led a closed life, so that their dialect, the Pennsylvania Dutch , which originated from the Palatinate , has largely been preserved to this day.
Religious minorities
Pennsylvania had a particularly liberal constitution during the colonial period and thus attracted immigrants who were persecuted or harassed in their homeland for their beliefs. This not only affected the Quakers, whose gatherings had been banned in England since 1662, but also many religious minorities in German-speaking countries.
In 1731 the first Schwenkfelder came to Pennsylvania, members of free church communities who had lived in Silesia according to the teachings of Kaspar Schwenckfeld , but who had finally come under pressure from the Jesuits . The swivel fields immigrated in six batches until 1737 and settled scattered.
1732 founded the from the group of schwarzenau brethren coming Conrad Beissel in what is now Lancaster County , the Ephrata Cloister , a semi-monastic religious community, according to early Christian living ideas. The Harmony settlement (Pennsylvania) , which the radical Pietist Johann Georg Rapp, who immigrated from Württemberg, built in western Pennsylvania in the early 19th century was oriented towards early Christianity .
The Moravian Brothers founded Nazareth (1740), Bethlehem (1741) and Lititz (1756) in Pennsylvania .
The deist Benjamin Franklin just saw these German settlers as culturally dangerously backward, although he himself was temporarily working as editor of a German newspaper. He referred to them as religious zealots and " boors " (pejorative: Boers , farmers). Many Germans in Pennsylvania refused to allow their children to attend English-speaking schools. Since the mid-1750s, the administration and church in Pennsylvania have reacted more and more to this feared tendency among Germans to refuse integration . They called for forced marriages , a ban on the German-language press and the German language in public, which Franklin criticized as excessive. Even Thomas Jefferson and James Madison feared the illiberality religious German immigrants and their characterization by the undemocratic autocratic regimes in their home countries.
German settlements in the southern colonies
One of the earliest German-speaking settlements in the southern colonies is New Bern , which was founded in 1710 by a group of Swiss and Palatinate settlers in the province of Carolina . In the colony of Virginia , near the present-day city of Culpeper , 42 emigrants from the Siegerland established a settlement in 1714 that was named Germanna . In 1717 about 80 emigrants from the Palatinate and the area of Baden-Württemberg were added, and more followed. The Germanna residents were debt servants who mined for silver and iron for Governor Alexander Spotswood . Most of them left the place in the following decade and moved further south or west.
In the French colony of Louisiana , John Law settled German-speaking emigrants from Alsace , Lorraine and Switzerland for the Compagnie di Mississippi in 1721 , who became independent landowners after the company went bankrupt (1721). Contemporaries referred to this region near New Orleans as the German Coast or in French as the Côte des Allemands .
From 1734 Protestants who had been expelled from the Catholic prince-archbishopric of Salzburg landed in the province of Georgia .
In the area of today's town of Winston-Salem in North Carolina , 15 Herrnhut brothers who immigrated from Germany founded the Bethabara settlement in 1753 .
German settlements in New England
1742–1753 four ships with German-speaking immigrants landed in New England . Most of these nearly 1,000 people settled in Broad Bay, in what is now the town of Waldoboro, Maine . After attacks by Indians, many moved on to Boston , Nova Scotia or North Carolina. Others stayed and turned to fishing or shipbuilding.
Agriculture
The German migrants who came to colonial North America performed a variety of professions. Many were artisans or merchants, but most of them were farmers. For them, settling in the British colonies primarily meant clearing forests. After the Homestead Act of 1862 created an incentive to colonize the agriculturally undeveloped Great Plains , many immigrants went to the Midwest , where they grew corn , which was not very common in Germany at that time. Most of the farmers who immigrated from Germany operated dairy farming and preferred to settle in the vicinity of larger cities where they could sell their products.
War of Independence (1775–1783)
In the American War of Independence - at that time an estimated 225,000 to 250,000 Germans lived in the colonies - German soldiers were involved on both sides. The greater part of them fought on the side of the British. These were subsidiary regiments that the British had rented from various German principalities. Hessen-Kassel alone sent more than 12,000 soldiers; in total, the German principalities provided the British crown with almost 30,000 soldiers. A small number of German professional soldiers, including the Prussian Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben , traveled to the theater of war to support George Washington's army against the British. Since 1777, the Giessen-born baker Christoph Ludwig had been the supply master of the Independence Army. In the following year the former Prussian major Bartholomäus von Heer took over the independent mounted troop and bodyguard of George Washington.
The German settlers sympathized partly with the American rebels and partly with the British. The 8th Virginia Regiment , established in January 1776 and known as the "German Regiment", was recruited from German immigrants from Pennsylvania and Maryland . The " Royal Deux-Ponts ", a French foreign regiment that worked alongside the Americans and others, consisted predominantly of German soldiers . a. fought in the Battle of Yorktown (1781).
After the creation of the United States
The Muhlenberg legend
On January 9, 1794 a group of German immigrants during handed US House of Representatives a petition one in which they called for the publication of legal texts in German translation. The application was rejected with a narrow majority. Almost half a century later, around 1840, this incident became the starting point of a legend that is still widespread today, which says that the House of Representatives voted at that time to introduce German as the official language in the USA .
Jewish immigration
In the period from 1830 to 1870 there was a wave of German Jews who emigrated . Most of these reached the United States in the 1840s and 1850s. In Prussia and Bavaria , for example , where Jews did not have full civil rights, emigration even began around 1830. Württemberg followed in the 1840s , and after the failed German Revolution of 1848/49, educated Jews also left other German states where they were due discriminatory laws could not obtain positions of responsibility. Among the Jewish German emigrants were personalities such as Abraham Jacobi , who opened the first children's hospital in the USA in 1860 , Emil Berliner , the inventor of the record and the gramophone , Levi Strauss , the inventor of jeans, and Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz , the founder of the Berlitz School.
The Forty-Eighters
After the suppression of the March Revolution of 1848/49, many intellectuals and civil rights campaigners had to leave Germany. Most of these exiles found permanent refuge in the United States, where they were known as the Forty-Eighters . Many of them continued their political and social engagement in their new homeland, supported Abraham Lincoln's election as President in 1860 and, like Franz Sigel and Friedrich Hecker , volunteered for the Northern Army during the Civil War .
The midwest
In the 19th century, an increasing number of German immigrants settled in the economically thriving Midwest. As early as 1834, the Giessen Emigration Society had led hundreds of German emigrants to Missouri , where the planned establishment of a German colony failed. Many of them were so-called thirties - students and intellectuals who were involved in the freedom struggles of the 1830s ( Hambacher Fest , Frankfurter Wachensturm ) and who had to flee after their failure. Gustav Körner , one of these "thirties", became a member of the US House of Representatives in 1842 and in 1853 Vice Governor of Illinois . The emigration movement to the Midwest was inspired by Gottfried Duden , among others , whose report published in 1829 about a trip to the western states of North America and a stay of several years on the Missouri in Germany from 1824 to 1827 was very popular. The region between Cincinnati , Milwaukee and St. Louis was soon referred to as the German Triangle ("German triangle") or German Belt ("German belt"). In Milwaukee, the ethnic German population in 1890 was 69%; Cincinnati had a German population of 60% in the early 20th century.
As in Pennsylvania, many German immigrants in the Midwest belonged to religious groups that were not tolerated in Europe. An example of this are the Inspired , members of a free church movement that emerged from radical Pietism . 800 of them emigrated to the USA and founded a community based on early Christian principles near Buffalo , New York, in 1843 ; In 1854 they moved to Iowa and founded the Amana Colonies there . Some German settler communities in the Midwest - especially Catholic - have maintained their cultural identity to this day, for example in Stearns County (Minnesota), Dubois County (Indiana) and Effingham County (Illinois).
In 1847, representatives of the Lutheran denomination who emigrated after suffering reprisals in their home country of Saxony founded the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod , which is now the second largest Lutheran church in the United States.
Texas Germans
The first German settler in Texas is Friedrich Ernst , who left his home in Oldenburg because he was prosecuted there. In 1831 he settled in Texas, which was then still part of Mexico and was undeveloped wilderness. Several thousand Germans came to Texas between 1844 and 1847 when the Mainz Adelsverein , an emigration company run by members of the nobility, tried to establish a German colony there. This led u. a. to found the towns of New Braunfels (1845) and Fredericksburg (1846). Only very short inventory had one by writer Bettina von Arnim named settlement Bettina , a group of intellectuals from Giessen in 1847 in what is now Llano County to where he established their ideas of Communism to realize. The farmer and poet Johannes Romberg founded the first literary association in Texas in 1857, the "Prairie Flower". In 1870, a third of the population of San Antonio spoke German. Some descendants of the German-Texan immigrants still speak a dialect known as Texas German.
In 1875/1876 tensions arose in Mason County between English and German-born settlers, which culminated in violence and lynching , which killed 11 people. One background to these incidents, which have come to be known as the Mason County War or the Hoodoo War , was the Germans' notorious loyalty to the Union.
Civil War
When the American Civil War began in 1861 , there were more than 1.3 million Germans in the United States. More than 80% of them lived in the northern states and sided with the Union. It played a role in the fact that many of these Germans, including the Forty-Eighters in particular, as staunch democrats were close to abolitionism and had campaigned for the abolition of slavery early on. Others joined the Union Army as soldiers and officers, such as B. Franz Sigel , who, as a colonel, commanded the 3rd Missouri Infantry Regiment , a volunteer regiment consisting almost entirely of Germans. Carl Schurz also joined the Union Army and became major general and division commander. The proportion of German-Americans in the Union Army was 23.4% or 516,000 men; 210,000 of them were born in Germany.
The German immigrants in Kentucky played a special role, some of whom formed a First German Kentucky Regiment on October 10, 1861 , which fought on the side of the Confederation .
The great immigration movements
Mass migration as a result of industrialization
In the 19th century, German-American migration became a mass movement. The most important push factor was the transformation of the previously agricultural German states into industrial societies , a process that led to massive population growth, urbanization and the impoverishment of large sections of the population. To a pauperization occurred particularly in the southwest, where the tradition of the changed circumstances Realteilung proved devastating as livelihoods. Between 1820 and 1920, almost 6 million people emigrated from the German states. A small part of this went to Brazil , Canada or Australia , but more than 5.5 million chose the United States. Emigration was promoted by chain migration, lower crossing costs - steam ships have been replacing sailing ships since the middle of the 19th century - and improved communication, e.g. B. Advertising by shipping companies. Important pull factors were the booming US economy and the ability to purchase land for free.
Migration routes
A regular line service from Germany to the United States came about late. Robert Miles Sloman was the first shipowner to set up a regular shipping connection between Hamburg and New York City in 1836. In the 1840s, more than three quarters of German emigrants from the USA did not embark in a German port, but in Le Havre , Antwerp , Rotterdam or London . In the second half of the 19th century, the port of Bremen ( Bremerhaven ) became the most important stopover for German emigrants. In Bremen, the rights of emigrants had been expressly protected since 1832, while in the Port of Hamburg , the largest German port, restrictions existed that often kept people willing to emigrate at a distance. After these restrictions were lifted in 1837, Hamburg was no longer able to catch up with Bremen's lead.
The contact between emigrants and shipping companies took place long before they arrived at the port of departure. The shipping companies worked together with travel agents and brokers, who in turn sent agents to the emigration areas to sell ship passages there. The emigrants covered the mostly long way to the embarkation port on foot and later by train. Hamburg had been connected to the railway network since 1842, Bremen since 1847 and Bremerhaven since 1862. After a wait of several weeks in Bremen or Hamburg, the emigrants went on board. The largest shipping companies that brought emigrants to the United States were the Ocean Steam Navigation Company (1847–1857), Norddeutsche Lloyd (since 1857) and HAPAG (since 1847).
The crossing took the sailing ship with favorable winds 35-42 days. The food and sanitary conditions on board were inhuman; 10 percent of the mostly poor and often sick emigrants did not survive the trip. This situation only improved when the shipping companies no longer left the passengers to feed themselves, and the passage could be shortened to 13-19 days by the introduction of steamers. The passage cost 120 marks on the tween deck in 1879.
Entry into the United States was initially not very formalized. From 1855 onwards, it was regularly carried out for German immigrants in the Emigrant Landing Depot of the state of New York ( Castle Clinton ) and from 1892 to 1954 in the federal immigration station on Ellis Island . However, laws restricting immigration first came into force in 1875 and initially rarely affected German migrants.
The heyday of German-American culture
At the beginning of the 20th century, Germans were one of the most highly organized, most visible, and most respected immigrant groups in the United States.
Entrepreneur
A famous German immigrant to the USA was John Jacob Astor , who came from a poor family in the Electoral Palatinate , who came to the USA as a young man in 1784, became a merchant and became the country's most important fur trader in the early 19th century. In the 1830s he withdrew from the fur business and invested in real estate in Manhattan , which was just beginning to develop into a big city. At the time of his death in 1848, Astor was the richest man in the United States. The chemist Karl Pfizer , one of the "forty-eight", founded Pfizer in Brooklyn in 1849 , which is now the world's largest pharmaceutical company. The Studebaker brothers, whose father was a blacksmith and wagon builder from Solingen , founded the automobile works of the same name in 1852 . A year later, Levi Strauss , who immigrated from Bavaria and is considered the inventor of jeans , founded the textile company named after him . At the same time, the organ builder Heinrich Steinweg from Goslar founded the later piano works Steinway & Sons in New York City . Other German immigrants who became successful entrepreneurs in the USA were the manufacturer John Jacob Bausch ( Bausch & Lomb ), the sugar manufacturer Claus Spreckels , the "copper king" Adolph Lewisohn , the merchants Isidor and Nathan Straus ( Macy’s ), Henry Villard ( Northern Pacific Railroad ) and shortly before the First World War the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Max Kade .
John D. Rockefeller , whose ancestors emigrated from the County of Wied to Germantown in the 18th century , started the oil business in the 1850s . By 1912, investing in the American stock market made him the richest person of his time.
Brewing
Immigrant German entrepreneurs had an almost monopoly primacy in the American beer industry . Many of the breweries that were founded by German immigrants in the 19th century still play a dominant role in the US today. B. Yuengling ( Pottsville , Pennsylvania, 1829), Anheuser-Busch ( St. Louis , 1852), Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company ( Milwaukee , 1858), and Coors ( Golden , Colorado, 1873).
Beer was considered a staple food in the German-American community, and the Volstead Act , which put prohibition into effect on October 28, 1919 , was viewed by many German-Americans as an anti-German measure.
Banking
Banking is one of the areas in which German emigrants from the USA were particularly successful . As early as 1816, the German-American John Jacob Astor founded the Second Bank of the United States together with other investors and was head of the bank's New York branch until 1819. In 1846 the brothers Joseph and James Seligman founded the investment bank J. & W. Seligman & Co., which still exists today, in New York City . Salomon Loeb and Abraham Kuhn founded the banking company Kuhn, Loeb & Co. in 1867, of which Jakob Heinrich Schiff took over the management in 1885 which later Otto Hermann Kahn and Paul Moritz Warburg boarded. Marcus Goldman founded the investment bank Goldman Sachs in 1869 , which in 1893 faced fierce competition from Naumburg & Co. founded by Elkan Naumburg . Jules Bache , originally from Frankfurt, took over the management of the stockbroking business Bache & Co. in 1892 , making it the second most important in the country (after Merrill Lynch ). James Warburg , a son of Paul Moritz Warburg, also became a banker and was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's financial advisor from 1932–34. All of these bankers came from educated Jewish families who in some cases had already left Germany after the failed March Revolution because they were denied social equality there. Many of them - such as Loeb, Schiff, Kahn, Naumburg and Bache - became important philanthropists and patrons in the United States .
Education
In the Midwest, public schools were populated by so many German-speaking children that the federal states passed laws from 1837 that allowed all school subjects to be taught in German if demanded. In the early 19th century German classes were given in many Catholic schools.
Individual German immigrants have also left their mark on American education. The philologist Karl Follen , whose license to teach in Jena and Gießen had been withdrawn, reformed the study regulations at Harvard University in the 1820s based on the German model. Margarethe Meyer-Schurz - student of Friedrich Fröbel and wife of Carl Schurz - established the country's first kindergarten in Watertown , Wisconsin in 1856 - an institution that has kept its German name in the USA to this day. Maria Kraus-Boelté , who was also influenced by Froebel, came to Elizabeth Peabody in New York City in 1872 , where she met her future husband, John Kraus, with whom she soon created a training program for kindergarten teachers. Maximilian Berlitz took over a language school in Providence in 1878, where he developed the teaching method that is now taught at over 540 Berlitz language schools worldwide. Fritz Karsen , who set up Germany's first comprehensive school in Berlin in 1932 , was active in teacher training in the USA from 1938 onwards.
Journalism
The first German-language newspapers appeared on the North American mainland in the colonial days. On July 5, 1776, the Pennsylvania State Messenger reported to all the English-language newspapers that the Continental Congress had decided to accept the American Declaration of Independence . The "Philadelphische Zeitung", founded in 1732, is considered to be the first German-language newspaper on what would later become the US territory; it only appeared for a short time. 1834 was the year of birth of the New York State Newspaper, which has been published to this day .
In 1848 Julius Bötticher founded the weekly Indiana Volksblatt (1848–1875) in Indianapolis . In Indiana , the German immigrants who were politically highly interested after 1848, with editors such as Karl Beyschlag, Valentine Butsch, Konradin Homburg, Hermann Lieber and EJ Metzger, led to numerous other newspaper foundations such as the Free Press (1853–1866) and the Indiana Tribune (1878–1918 ), the Daily Telegraph (1865–1907), which took over the Volksblatt in 1875 and merged with the Tribune to form the Telegraph and Tribune (1907–1918) in 1907.
The Illinois Staats-Anzeiger ( Springfield ) published by Theodor Canisius was briefly owned by Abraham Lincoln in 1859/60. In St. Louis, the Anzeiger des Westens (1835–46) and the Westliche Post (1857–1938) appeared around the middle of the 19th century . The former Russian Germans in the Great Plains read the Dakota Free Press published by Charles F. Rossteuscher from 1874 to 1954 . The heyday of the German press in the USA ended at the latest with the entry of the United States into the First World War in 1917. But even after the First and Second World Wars, newspapers and magazines were repeatedly founded in German. B. in 1997 with Hiwwe wie Driwwe, the first newspaper to appear completely in Pennsylvanian German dialect.
The Palatinate emigrant John Peter Zenger and the German-Hungarian Joseph Pulitzer made important contributions to the development of the American press . Zenger traveled to New York as a young man in 1710, became a publicist and contributed significantly to the establishment of American press freedom in the 1730s . Pulitzer wrote for German-language newspapers and also ran a newspaper for German immigrants. The Pulitzer Prize was named after him.
politics
Even in the colonial period, some immigrants from Germany held high public offices. Jakob Leisler , born in Bockenheim near Frankfurt / Main, led an uprising against the British crown in the province of New York in 1689, known as Leisler's rebellion , and seized control of the colony until the British overthrew and executed him in 1691.
Frederick Muhlenberg , whose father immigrated in 1742, became not only a member of the 1st Congress of the United States , but also speaker of the House of Representatives in 1789 . The first native Germans to be elected to the US Congress were Myer Strouse (House of Representatives, 1863–67), Gustavus A. Finkelnburg (House of Representatives, 1869–73), the "Forty-Eighter" Carl Schurz ( Senate , 1869– 75) and Eduard Degener (House of Representatives, 1870–71).
After being elected president in 1861, Abraham Lincoln appointed John George Nicolay, born in Essingen , Palatinate , to be his private secretary. In the second half of the 19th century, German emigrants were elected several times as governors of American states. B. Edward Salomon ( Wisconsin , 1862-64), George Michael Hahn ( Louisiana , 1864-65), Edward Selig Salomon ( Washington , 1870-72) and John Peter Altgeld (Illinois, 1893-97). In the 20th century u. a. Moses Alexander ( Idaho , 1915–19), Simon Bamberger ( Utah , 1917–21) and Julius P. Heil (Wisconsin, 1939–43).
The first native Germans to be appointed ministers to a US government cabinet were Carl Schurz ( Interior Minister under Rutherford B. Hayes , 1877–81) and Oscar Straus (under Theodore Roosevelt Trade Minister , 1906–09).
Labor movement
German migrants were more involved in the American labor movement than in parliament and government, and they influenced the development of this movement more than any other immigrant group. German radical democrats and early socialists had come to the USA again and again since the first half of the 19th century, because they hoped to find democratic and fair conditions there. Among them were z. B. Karl Follen (1824), Wilhelm Weitling (1846) and Forty-Eighters like Friedrich Hecker , Fritz Anneke , Lorenz Brentano , Gustav Struve and Adolph Douai . After the German Socialist Law came into force (1878), many social democrats came, such as Wilhelm Hasselmann , Julius Vahlteich and Johann Most . In 1878 the New Yorker Volkszeitung was founded, a socialist German-language daily newspaper that existed until 1932. August Spies , editor of the socialist workers newspaper (Chicago), was executed in 1887 after a bomb attack, although no connection to the crime could be proven.
A disproportionately large number of German immigrants were skilled workers. Emigrant workers were often already unionized in Germany and joined a union in the United States. The working conditions were so important to these immigrants that their involvement in the labor movement was usually greater than in other areas of politics. In the parliaments, too, she was primarily interested in work. For example, the lawyer born in the Westerwald , John Peter Altgeld , a leading figure in left-liberal progressivism , in Illinois, where he was governor from 1893-97, enforced laws for occupational safety and against child labor , which were the toughest in the country. One of the most significant achievements of Robert F. Wagner , who was a Senator from New York from 1927-49, was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, a federal law that significantly strengthened the position of the trade unions.
German immigrants played a decisive role in the emergence of the Communist Party of the USA . Many of these activists - such as Adolph Germer , LE Katterfeld and Alfred Wagenknecht - had come to the United States as children of unionized workers, while others - like Max Bedacht - had previously been active in the Socialist Party of America .
Russian Germans
A notable German minority has lived in Russia since the time of Catherine II. She was a native of Prussia and, as Tsarina, had systematically settled German farmers in Russia since 1763 in order to develop agriculture. The government-favored foreigners were unpopular with the population, and from 1871 onwards their legal privileges were withdrawn from them. In 1872 the first Russian Germans went to the Dakota Territory , where the government gave away land under the Homestead Act . In Kansas alone , around 12,000 Germans from Russia settled by 1879, mostly specializing in the cultivation of wheat . Many of them were Mennonites. With the overthrow of the Tsarist regime and the October Revolution , the pressure to emigrate to the Germans from Russia increased further, and by 1920 the total number of Germans from Russia to the USA had risen to around 116,500. In 1921, the Emergency Quota Act severely restricted their immigration .
First World War and the interwar period
assimilation
The traces that the German immigrants left on the USA are not very obvious today, especially when you look at them e.g. B. compares with those of Italian immigrants . In the Midwest they are still locally recognizable, e.g. B. at the Oktoberfest in Cincinnati; in other regions, such as the mid-Atlantic states (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania) they are, as historian Russell Kazal wrote, "remarkably unremarkable". His colleague John Higham even judged that the disintegration of the German-American community constituted the “most spectacular case of collective assimilation” of the 20th century. Responsible for this process is primarily the hesitation of German-Americans to identify with their German origins after two world wars and the Holocaust .
Recently, however, historians such as Guido André Dobbert have pointed out that the decline of German-American institutions began as early as the 1890s. In Pennsylvania, apart from minorities such as the Mennonites, the descendants of German immigrants had given up the German language as early as the early 19th century. In 1910 the German-Americans were largely assimilated in the other parts of the country. As Frederick C. Luebke has described, even before the First World War, their attachment to German culture hardly went beyond nostalgic feelings, the use of the German language in good company and reading German-language newspapers. Although first-generation migrants insisted that their children and grandchildren attend German-speaking schools until the late 19th century, these descendants mostly preferred the English language outside the home.
Even the German American National Alliance (National German-American Alliance) was created in 1901, so only at a time when there is a decline of the German-American identity have already indicated. A forerunner of the organization was founded in 1888 as an umbrella organization for a large number of individual organizations and associations which, as a whole, tried to preserve German-American culture from decline. In 1914, the National Association said it had more than two million members.
The First World War
After the German Reich declared unrestricted submarine warfare on February 1, 1917 , in the course of which many American citizens were killed, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6. In the American people, the slogans like Halt the Hun! (German: "Stop the Hun!") was exposed, an anti-German hysteria developed in the course of which Germans - including people who were mistakenly mistaken for Germans - insulted, spied on, denounced, occasionally attacked and in at least one case were also lynched . German Americans have come under significant pressure to demonstrate their patriotism by purchasing war bonds . There were also repeated book burns , in which German-language library holdings were destroyed. Such mob riots were encouraged by the politics of the 26 federal states, which passed laws against the use of the German language. As recently as 1923, 34 states had laws in place prohibiting the use of any language of instruction other than English in public or private elementary schools. This practice was only ended by a decision of the US Supreme Court ( Meyer v. Nebraska , 1923). The furthest had gone in Iowa , whose governor , William L. Harding , initiated the so-called Babel Proclamation in 1918 , a law that prohibited the public use of foreign languages; this even applied to telephone calls. Many German-Americans Anglicized their names under this pressure and gave up their newspaper subscriptions, which led to the German-language press in the USA almost completely disappearing. Under the Alien Enemies Acts , Germans who lived in the United States were occasionally arrested and interned. For example, the conductor Karl Muck , who allegedly refused to have the American national anthem played in a concert , was therefore held in a camp in Fort Oglethorpe , Georgia until the end of the war and expelled on August 21, 1919. Other camps were in Fort McPherson , Georgia, Fort Douglas , Utah, and Hot Springs , North Carolina.
1918-1933
The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration Act of 1924 , which drastically restricted immigration from many countries of origin, favored German applicants. Of these, a good 51,000 were still allowed to enter each year; that was more than were allowed to come from any other European country.
German exile during the Nazi era
After the National Socialists came to power , many academics - especially Jewish - left Germany or did not return from a stay abroad because their professional future, if not their lives, was in question there. Among these exiles were personalities such as the physicist Albert Einstein , the mathematician Emmy Noether , the medical pioneer Kurt Goldstein , the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich , the philosopher Hannah Arendt , the writer Thomas Mann , the architect Walter Gropius and the actress Marlene Dietrich . Mass entry of German asylum seekers was made more difficult by the American immigration law , which was not liberalized even after the November pogroms of 1938. Until the beginning of the Second World War , only 95,000 German and Austrian Jews found refuge in the USA; from 1941 it was no longer possible to leave Germany legally. The total number of Germans who entered the United States from 1931 to 1940 was 114,058. Many German Jews only obtained their American visas illegally; others were turned away, including B. also the writer Stefan Zweig , who then committed suicide. The American population, which was not entirely free from anti-Semitic affects, disapproved of the "excesses" of German anti-Semitism; however, even American Jews were not fully aware of the full extent of the Holocaust until 1944. An executive order , with which President Truman made the entry of European displaced persons easier, came only in December 1945, half a year after the end of the Third Reich and thus too late.
National Socialists in the United States
Conversely, National Socialism also had a wide following in the United States. Many of them were organized in the Amerikadeutschen Bund (DAB), an organization formed in 1933 and so named in 1936, whose predecessor organizations had been active since the 1920s. Since 1936, DAB has been run by Fritz Kuhn from Munich . Its membership, which peaked shortly before the war, is estimated at 25,000.
Second World War
German-Americans in the American armed forces and intelligence services
More than 13 million people served in the US armed forces during World War II ; more than 30,000 of them were native Germans. Many of them were non-US citizens. Many exiles also joined the American armed forces, such as B. the writers Klaus Mann and Jan Valtin and the Hitler nephew William Patrick Hitler . One of the best-documented cases is the story of Kurt Frank Korf , a young German with Jewish ancestry, who fled to the United States in 1937, where he was an FBI informant and monitored American Nazi leaders such as Fritz Kuhn. During the Battle of the Bulge he was used as an intelligence officer . After the end of the war, Korf worked as a lawyer for the American government in the prosecution of German war criminals. Also documented is the case of William G. Sebold , a German who spied for the Gestapo in the United States, but then defected and worked as a double agent for the FBI to uncover the Duquesne spy ring.
German-American internment
Mob riots like those that occurred in the United States during World War I did not return in World War II. Nevertheless, incidents such as the capture of the American civilian cargo ship City of Flint by the ironclad Germany (1939) aroused strong anti-German feelings even before the American entry into the war.
Under the Alien Registration Act , passed in 1940 , the 300,000 or so Germans who were living in the United States at the time but were not American citizens were required to register with the authorities and to carry an Alien Registration Receipt Card with them at all times.
On December 8, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt also signed Presidential Proclamation No. 2526, which laid the foundations for restricting "enemy" foreigners' freedom of travel and their right to own property, and possibly interning them. With reference to the Alien Enemies Act , around 10,905 Germans who lived in the USA were arrested and held in special camps during the war. Often people were only interned because the FBI or another intelligence service had heard of unconfirmed rumors about the person's reliability. In many cases, entire families were interned. American citizens were not allowed to be interned; however, the children and spouses who “voluntarily” followed their loved one into the camp were often American by law. In other cases, individuals suddenly disappeared and relatives were not informed of their whereabouts for weeks. Often the children of the deportees stayed behind and were taken to orphanages . More than 4,000 people of German origin from Latin American countries were also deported under pressure from the American authorities and held captive in American camps. At least 2,000 of the internees were brought to Europe during the war and exchanged for Americans and Latin Americans who had fallen into German hands. None of the victims was ever convicted of treason in court. The last internees were not released until August 1948.
German prisoners of war in the United States
American troops took around 3.8 million German prisoners of war during the war . 363,036 of these were taken to the United States, where they were held in 155 main and 760 sub-camps. Those affected were either captured in Tunisia in 1943 as soldiers of the Africa Corps or in 1944 on the Western Front after the invasion . The conditions of detention in the American camps were tolerable, especially when compared to the conditions in the corresponding Soviet camps, where over 30% - approximately 1 million - German prisoners of war were killed. These prisoners of war were held after the German surrender (May 1945), continued to be forced to work and were not handed over to the European allies - mostly Great Britain or France - until 1946.
After the Second World War
German-American migration as a result of the war
Following the Second World War , many women in Germany found a companion among the soldiers of the American occupation forces. “ Fraternization ” was initially forbidden for them, but the War Brides Act made it possible for them to take their German partners with them to the United States. From 1947 to 1949 13,250 German women migrated to the USA as wives of American soldiers; almost 2,000 more came as fiancés.
Some ethnic Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe during the last phase of the war or after the end of the war also ended up in the United States. B. many of the Danube Swabians or Yugoslav Germans who were deported from 1944 onwards. The legal basis for their naturalization in the USA was the Displaced Persons Act , which came into force in 1948 .
German-American careers since the end of the First World War
Politician
The first US president with German-speaking ancestors was Herbert C. Hoover in 1929 . Hoover's successor in office, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed Henry Morgenthau to his finance minister , whose father Henry Morgenthau Sr. had immigrated from Mannheim in 1868 . Morgenthau was best known for the plan named after him to de-industrialize Germany after a defeat in World War II and thus render it permanently militarily harmless.
In the 1940 presidential election , Roosevelt ran into a rival, Wendell Willkie , who was also a German-American. Willkie had many supporters in the Midwest but failed in the elections. From 1953 to 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower held the highest office in the United States. His ancestors came from Saarland in the 18th century . During the Second World War, Eisenhower - along with Chester W. Nimitz and Carl A. Spaatz - belonged to the ranks of German-Americans who President Roosevelt had placed in top military positions.
Henry Kissinger , who Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford , the Office of the US Secretary of State has held, is a native German. Nelson Rockefeller , a grandson of the German-American industrialist John D. Rockefeller , became American Vice President under Ford in 1974 . The German-born economist W. Michael Blumenthal was US Treasury Secretary under Jimmy Carter from 1977-79.
The entrepreneur and current President Donald Trump also has German roots. His grandfather Frederick Trump emigrated from the Palatinate town of Kallstadt to the USA.
Entrepreneur
Even in the 20th century, when a recognizable German-American community no longer existed, many German immigrants achieved economic success in the USA. Among them were z. B. the brothers Fred and August Duesenberg ( Duesenberg Motor Company ), the sausage manufacturer Oscar Mayer , the businessman Max Stern , the media entrepreneur John Kluge , the investor Hermann Merkin and the game developer Ralph H. Baer . Andy Bechtolsheim ( Sun Microsystems ) is a very recent example .
German-American brain drain
In the 1920s and 1930s, Rockefeller scholarships gave young Germans access to study at an American university in large numbers for the first time. B. the physicist Hertha Sponer and the later resistance fighter Arvid Harnack . A real emigration of German academics and highly qualified specialists to the United States began in the era of National Socialism (see above ).
After the end of the war this subsided somewhat, but did not tear off. Occasionally, German scientists were even recruited directly by the American authorities, for example in the case of the Paperclip project , in the context of which more than 100 German scientists and technicians were brought to the USA in the years 1945-46 to work for the military and the like. a. to work on the further development of American missile technology . The most prominent of them was Wernher von Braun , who had worked on the development of the so-called V2 rocket since 1937 . The Paperclip project is better known today under its original name " Operation Overcast ".
From 1952 onwards, many young Germans were able to study in the USA with a Fulbright scholarship . This was later made possible by the DAAD and the American Max Kade Foundation . The German scientists who have studied in the United States since the end of the Second World War or who have worked there at least temporarily include: B. the Nobel Prize winners Hans Jensen (in the USA since 1951), Hans Georg Dehmelt (1952), Herbert Kroemer (1954), Harald zur Hausen (1962), Erwin Neher (1966), Günter Blobel (1967), Reinhard Selten (1967) ), Theodor Hänsch (1969), Gerhard Ertl (1976), Horst Ludwig Störmer (1977), Johann Deisenhofer (1988), Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (1988) and Wolfgang Ketterle (1990). Research opportunities at American universities for physicists are of particular importance; Of the 8 German scientists who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics since 1988 , 5 have carried out research in the USA for a time.
For the interests of the German-American scientific community, u. a. the German Academic International Network (GAIN), founded in New York City in 2003 . The German Scholars Organization (GSO) is also committed to reconnecting German scientists abroad .
The number of German scientists currently working at American universities and research institutions is estimated at around 15,000; around 6,000 of them have doctorates . The number of German academics working in other areas, e.g. B. in industrial development laboratories.
Statistics of the German population in the United States
| year | Total population |
"Of German origin" | born in Germany | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1775 | approx. 225,000 | |||
| 1790 | 3,929,326 | approx. 375,000 | By 1790, a total of around 100,000 Germans had immigrated to the USA (or the colonies). | |
| 1800 | 5,308,483 | |||
| 1810 | 7,239,881 | |||
| 1820 | 9,638,453 | |||
| 1830 | 12.860.702 | |||
| 1840 | 17,063,353 | In 1841 15,000 Germans immigrate to the USA; In 1847 there were 74,000. | ||
| 1850 | 23,191,876 | 583,774 | German immigrants in 1852: 145,000; 1854: 220,000 | |
| 1860 | 31,443,321 | 1,276,075 | German immigrants (1850s): almost 1 million in 1854 alone, 215,000 Germans immigrated. | |
| 1870 | 38,558,371 | 1,690,533 | ||
| 1880 | 50.189.209 | 1,966,742 | ||
| 1890 | 62,979,766 | 2,784,894 | German immigrants (1880s): almost 1.5 million. In 1882 alone, around 250,000 Germans immigrated. | |
| 1900 | 76.212.168 | 2,663,418 | ||
| 1910 | 92.228.496 | 2,311,237 | ||
| 1920 | 106.021.537 | 1,686,108 | ||
| 1930 | 123.202.624 | 1,608,814 | ||
| 1940 | 132.164.569 | approx. 1.2 million | ||
| 1950 | 151.325.798 | |||
| 1960 | 179.323.175 | 989.815 | German immigrants 1951–1960: 580,000 | |
| 1970 | 203.302.031 | 832.965 | German immigrants 1961–1970: 210,000 | |
| 1980 | 226.542.199 | 849.384 | German immigrants 1971–1980: 65,000 | |
| 1990 | 248,709,873 | 58 million (at least partially) |
711.929 | |
| 2000 | 281.421.906 | |||
| 2005 | 295,560,549 | 49.178.839 | Most of the residents of "German descent" are native Americans; 702,665 (1.43%) were born abroad. 431,082 (0.88%) were born foreigners and accepted American citizenship. 271,583 (0.6%) live in the US as foreigners (with a visa or green card). | |
| 2015 | 321,418,821 | 45,526,331 |
Unless otherwise noted, the figures are from the US Census.
Research institutions and museums
A prominent institution researching the history of Germans in the United States is the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Madison .
In Germany, the topics of “German-American emigration” and “History of Germans in the United States” are currently and important issues. a. Researched at the Emigration Research Center of the University of Oldenburg and by Helmut Schmahl ( University of Mainz ).
The most important museum on the history of Germans in the United States is the German Heritage Museum in Cincinnati. Special museums for German-American emigration are the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven , which opened in 2005, and the German-American Heritage Museum in Washington, DC , which opened in March 2010
See also
- List of well-known German emigrants from the USA
- German overseas migration
- Mennonite emigration
- History of the Jews in the United States
- Internment of Japanese Americans
- German language in the United States
- Immigration to the United States
literature
German
- Christian Chmel: The accelerated assimilation of the German-American minority as a result of the image of Germany in the USA (1914–1945) shaped by world wars, National Socialism and propaganda. Grin Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-640-18958-8 .
- Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.): The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians . Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 .
- Liana von Droste : In between the ocean. Biographies, memories and letters from Germans in America after 1848 . Edition Steinlach, Glienicke, 2013, ISBN 978-3-9815658-0-5 .
- Alexander Emmerich: The History of the Germans in America. From 1680 to the present. Fackelträger Verlag, 2nd edition, 2013, ISBN 978-3-7716-4524-3 .
- Alexander Emmerich: John Jacob Astor. The most successful German emigrant. Konrad Theiss Verlag, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8062-2265-4 .
- Wolfgang J. Helbich, Walter D. Kamphoefner, Ulrike Sommer: Letters from America: German emigrants write from the New World 1830–1930. CH Beck, 1988, ISBN 3-406-33114-9 .
- Ulrich Klemke: The German political emigration to America 1815 - 1848: Biographisches Lexikon, Frankfurt am Main et al. 2007.
- Peter Maidl: "Here you can eat kardofln and black bread patties ..." The German overseas migration of the 19th century in contemporary testimonies. Wißner-Verlag, 2000, ISBN 3-89639-243-3 .
- Juliane Mikoletzky: The German emigration to America in the 19th century in contemporary fictional literature. Tübingen, Niemeyer, ISBN 3-484-35023-7 .
- Josef Raab and Jan Wirrer (eds.): The German Presence in the USA, Berlin 2008.
- Katja Wüstenbecker: German-Americans in World War I: US Politics and National Identities in the Midwest (Transatlantic Historical Studies 29), Stuttgart 2007.
- Max Heinrici: The Book of the Germans in America , Walther's Buchdruck Verlag, 1909
- Ilona Stölken: The German New York. A search for traces , Lehmstedt Verlag, Leipzig 2013, ISBN 978-3-942473-68-2 .
English
- Thomas Adam (Ed.): Germany and the Americas. Culture, Politics and History. A Multidisciplinary Encyclopedia. Vol. I-III (Transatlantic Relations Series), Santa Barbara - Denver - Oxford 2005.
- Albert Bernhard Faust: The German element in the United States. 1909, archive.org
- Albert Bernhard Faust: The Germans in the United States. 1916 ( Google Books )
- Aaron Spencer Fogleman: Hopeful journeys: German immigration, settlement, and political culture in Colonial America, 1717-1775. 1996 ( Google Books )
- John Arkas Hawgood: The tragedy of German-America. 1970 ( Google Books )
- Wolfgang Helbich: German Research on German Migration to the United States, in: Amerikastudien / American Studies 54/3 (2009), pp. 383–404.
- Kazal, Russell A .: Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity, Princeton, NJ - Oxford 2004.
- Frederick C. Luebke: Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration. 1999 ( Google Books )
- Matthew D. Tippens: Turning Germans into Texans: World War I and the Assimilation and Survival of German Culture in Texas, 1900-1930, Austin 2010.
- Christoph Strupp and Kai Dreisbach, with the Assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe and Birgit Zischke: German Americana, 1956-2005: A Comprehensive Bibliography of German, Austrian and Swiss Books and Dissertations on the United States (Reference Guide of the German Historical Institute) , Washington, DC 2007 ( PDF )
- Christoph Strupp and Birgit Zischke, with the Assistance of Kai Dreisbach: German Americana, 1800-1955. A Comprehensive Bibliography of German, Austrian and Swiss Books and Dissertations on the United States (Reference Guides of the German Historical Institute), Washington, DC 2005 ( PDF )
- Matthew D. Tippens: Turning Germans into Texans: World War I and the Assimilation and Survival of German Culture in Texas, 1900-1930, Austin 2010.
- Don Heinrich Tolzmann: The German-American Experience. Humanity Books, 2000, ISBN 1-57392-731-7 ( Google Books )
- Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang J. Helbich (Eds.): German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective, Madison, Wisc. 2004.
Fictional literature
- Taylor Caldwell : The Strong City. (1942)
- Taylor Caldwell: The Balance Wheel. (1951)
Movies
Documentaries
- Turning American: A German Immigrant's Story (Direction: Audrey Geyer, Kevin J. Lindenmuth, USA, 2003)
- Germans in America (Fritz Baumann, Germany, 2005)
Feature films
- Crimson Romance (David Howard, USA, 1934)
- Sweet Land (Ali Selim, USA, 2005)
Web links
- The Germans in North America
- Emigration from Emsland / the county of Bentheim to the USA, incl. Bibliography and Database
- GermanAmericanPioneers.org
- Three Centuries of Germans in America (German - American Tricentennial, American Studies Newsletter, No. 1 (September 1983); Embassy of the United States in Germany)
- A German American Chronology
References and comments
- ^ A b Library of Congress
- ↑ Google Books
- ^ A b c History of the Palatine Immigration to Pennsylvania
- ^ Indentured Servitude in the Colonial US ( Memento October 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ); History of the Palatine Immigration to Pennsylvania
- ↑ Jeffrey Miller: Where there's life, there's lawsuits: not altogether serious ruminations on law and life. 2003, p. 91. ( Google books ); The Romance of the Purchase of Manhattan ( Memento June 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ First German Settlers in America ; The Palatinate - a country of emigration
- ↑ a b c d A New Life ( Memento from December 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ (en) Protest against slavery
- ^ Without paper, where would we be? ( Memento of June 21, 2009 in the Internet Archive ); William Rittenhouse ( Memento from August 31, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ www.dhm.de German Language Printing in the American Colonies up to the Declaration of Independence.
- ↑ a b The Palatinate - a country of emigration ; History of the Palatine Immigration to Pennsylvania
- ^ Germans in Philadelphia ( Memento of December 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Benjamin B. Ringer: We the People and Others , New York, 1983, ISBN 0-422-78180-0 , p. 74 ( Google Books )
- ↑ The Schwenkfelders ( Memento from August 2, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Johann Georg Rapp
- ^ Simon Schama , The American Future: A History from the Founding Fathers to Barck Obama , 2nd edition. Vintage, London 2009, p. 241.
- ↑ Schama 2009, p. 242.
- ^ History of Germanna
- ^ The German Coast of Louisiana ; German-Acadian Coast ( Memento from June 15, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Salzburger's The New Georgia Encyclopedia; George Fenwick Jones: The Salzburger Saga: Religious Exiles and Other Germans along the Savannah , Athens (University of Georgia Press), 1984; HA Scomp: History of the Salzburgers , Springfield, Georgia (NV Turner) 2002
- ^ The Moravian Story ; The Moravian Church ; Adelaide Lisetta Frieze: The Moravians in Georgia. 1735–1740 , 1905 ( Google Books )
- ^ Www.progenealogists.com ( Memento July 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) New England; www.pictonpress.com Broad Bay Pioneers
- ↑ a b c The Germans during the North American Revolution
- ↑ England's hired troops; what her Hessian allies cost her
- ^ German as the official language of the USA
- ^ Thomas Adam: Germany and the Americans: culture, politics, and history. P. 752 ( Google Books )
- ^ Cincinnati: Our German History ( Memento December 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Kathleen Neils Conzen: Making their own America. Assimilation Theory and the German Peasant Pioneer. New York, Oxford, Munich (Berg), 1990 online text ( memento from June 15, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 283 kB)
- ↑ The largest is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America .
- ↑ German Immigration to Texas ( Memento from April 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ The King William Historic District ( Memento of October 14, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Mason County War
- ^ A Summary History of German Freethought in Missouri
- ↑ Ethnic groups in the Union Army ( Memento from January 22, 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
- ^ German-Americans in the Civil War ( Memento from September 1, 2009 in the Internet Archive ), German-Americans in the Civil War
- ↑ a b Migration ( Memento from May 4, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ German Immigration
- ^ Hans-Jürgen Grabbe: Before the great flight: European migration to the United States of America, 1783-1820. 2001 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Jens Blaustein: The practice of European emigration to America and the conditions for emigrants during the crossing. Term paper , University of Leipzig, 1998, ISBN 3-638-07365-3 .
- ^ Hapag Lloyd - History ( Memento from May 15, 2009 in the Internet Archive ); Bremerhaven as an emigration port ( Memento from January 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Bremerhaven as an emigration port ( Memento from January 14, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Driving People: Ocean Remembering ; Bluestone; the purchasing power of 120 marks corresponded to that of approx. 1000 €.
- ↑ Russell Andrew Kazal: Becoming old stock: the paradox of German-American identity. 2004, p. 2 ( Google books )
- ↑ a b German Americans . In: Microsoft Encarta online
- ↑ Alexander Emmerich: John Jacob Astor. The most successful German emigrant. Konrad Theiss Publisher: Stuttgart 2009, p. 93.
- ↑ Joseph Seligman ; Jules Semon Bache ; James Warburg ( Memento from October 3, 2006 in the web archive archive.today )
- ^ Vincent N. Parrillo: Diversity in America. 2008, p. 160 ( Google Books )
- ^ Maria Kraus-Boelté
- ↑ Ben Franklin and German
- ^ Germans in America> The German Language in America
- ^ David J. Bodenhamer, Robert Graham Barrows: The Encyclopedia of Indianapolis. 1994, p. 615f ( Google Books )
- ↑ Best of Abraham Lincoln (PDF)
- ↑ The West's Gazette ; Western post
- ↑ Dakota Free Press ; George Washington Kingsbury: History of Dakota Territory, Volume 5, 1915, p. 974 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Myer Strouse ; Gustavus A. Finkelnburg
- ↑ New York People's Newspaper
- ↑ Immigration
- ^ Wagner, Robert Ferdinand ; The National Labor Relations Act ( Memento of the original dated December 10, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Max Consideration
- ↑ Similar Surroundings: A Comparison of Anti-German Russia, and the Anti-German Environment of the United States During WWI and its Relation to the German-Russians Germans from Russia Heritage Society; Far Away From Russia ; The Migration of the Russian-Germans to Kansas
- ↑ Kazal, p. 1.
- ^ John Higham: Hanging together: unity and diversity in American culture. P. 87 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Kazal, p. 4; Chmel
- ^ Guido André Dobbert: The disintegration of an immigrant community: the Cincinnati Germans. 1870-1920, 1980
- ^ Charles McCool Snyder: Union County, Pennsylvania: a celebration of history. 2000, p. 247 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Chmel, p. 3.
- ^ Frederick C. Luebke: Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I. Northern Illinois University Press, 1974, ISBN 0-87580-514-0 .
- ^ The Death of Ethnic Pride ( Memento from January 7, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF); Vincent N. Parrillo: Diversity in America , 2008, p. 160 ( Google Books )
- ^ Georg von Bosse: Dr. CJ hexamer. His life and work. 1922 ( Google Books ); Thomas Adam: Germany and the Americans: culture, politics, and history , 2005, p. 805 ( Google books )
- ↑ Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity ( Memento of October 17, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) (Princeton University Press)
- ^ Library of Congress, Chicago Daily News
- ↑ Hold the Hun!
- ↑ David M. Kennedy: Over Here. The First World War and American Society. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 2004, ISBN 0-19-517400-3 , p. 68 .
- ↑ Coming of the Night, p. 12. (PDF; 2.8 MB)
- ↑ Anti-German sentiments ran high in 1918 ( Memento from December 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Colin Baker: Foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism. 2006, p. 191 ( Google Books )
- ↑ Divided by a Common Language: The Babel Proclamation and its Influence in Iowa History ( Memento of November 16, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Rodney P. Carlisle: Manifest destiny and the expansion of America. 2007, p. 28 ( Google books ); Born German, Made American ( Memento from April 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Dr. Muck bitter at sailing
- ↑ Michele Wucker: Lockout: why America keeps getting immigration wrong when our prosperity depends on getting it right. 2000, p. 42 ( Google Books )
- ↑ John Zogby: The way we'll be: the Zogby report on the transformation of the American dream , 2008, p. 149 ( Google books )
- ^ A German-American Chronology
- ^ German American Bund
- ↑ World War II ( Memento of November 3, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Patricia Kollander: "I must be a part of this war": a German American's fight against Hitler and Nazism , Fordham University Press, 2005, ISBN 0-8232-2528-3 , p. XV
- ↑ Patricia Kollander: I Must Be a Part of This War: A German American's Fight Against Hitler and Nazism: One Man's Fight Against Hitler and Nazism , Fordham University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8232-2528-3 ( Google Books )
- ^ WAR & PEACE: The World of William Sebold
- ↑ Presidential Proclamation No. 2526 (wording) ; WWII Violations of German American Civil Liberties by the US Government
- ^ German-American Internees in the United States during WWII ( Memento of February 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ); World War II - The internment of German American civilians
- ↑ World War II Violations of the Civil Liberties of German Americans and German Latin Americans by the US Government ( Memento of March 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ); Years of silence: The untold story of German-American internment ; Five years behind barbed wire
- ^ Rüdiger Overmans, Die Rheinwiesenlager 1945. In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (Hrsg.): End of the Third Reich - End of the Second World War. A perspective review . Published on behalf of the Military History Research Office, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-492-12056-3 , p. 278.
- ^ Captivity in America ( January 8, 2010 memento in the Internet Archive ); Situation of German prisoners of war in Anglo-American custody ( Memento of the original from August 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ "It started with a kiss": German-Allied Relations ; Martin K. Sorge: The other price of Hitler's war: German military and civilian losses resulting from World War II , 1986, p. Xviii ( Google books )
- ↑ Rajkumar Kanagasingam: German Memories in Asia. 2007, p. 154 ( Google books ); Immigration of ethnic Germans ( Memento from September 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Ofelia García, Joshua A. Fishman: The multilingual Apple: languages in New York City. 2007, p. 77 ( Google Books )
- ^ GAIN website
- ↑ GSO website
- ↑ Research: Home beckons again
- ↑ Faust (1909), p. 12.
- ↑ a b c Germans in America - Chronology website of the US Diplomatic Mission to Germany
- ^ A b James M. Bergquist: Daily life in immigrant America, 1820–1870. 2008, p. 116 ( Google Books )
- ↑ a b c d e f The Germans in America The Library of Congress
- ↑ Estimation by the US Census Authority
- ↑ 2005 American Community Survey ( Memento of the original from April 3, 2009) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. US Census Bureau
- ↑ factfinder.census.gov: SELECTED SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS IN THE UNITED STATES ( Memento of the original from February 13, 2020 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Region and Country or Area of Birth of the Foreign-Born Population
- ↑ Website of the institute
- ↑ Website of the Research Center
- ↑ Helmut Schmahl ( Memento from May 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive ); Personal website
- ^ German Heritage Museum
- ^ German-American Heritage Museum (official website); Everything except Lederhosen Die Zeit No. 18, April 29, 2010
- ↑ Taylor Caldwell
