Persecution of Germans

The organised persecution of ethnic Germans refers to systematic activity against groups of ethnic Germans based largely on their ethnicity. Historically, this has been due to two causes: in some cases, the German populations were identified with German nationalist regimes such as those of the Nazis or Kaiser Wilhelm. This was the case in the World War I era persecution of Germans in the United States, and also in Eastern and Central Europe following the end of World War II. Many victims of these persecutions did not in fact have any connection to those regimes. In other cases, German populations have been persecuted because they were perceived as lacking proper ties to the country in which they lived. This includes the persecution of ethnic German Mennonite, Amish and Hutterite communities in the United States, and of Tyrolean Germans in Italy's South Tyrol. In the case of South Tyrol, these hostilities hit the historically German population of a territory which had got annexed by Italy after World War I.

Some of these incidents have been used to try to impose some sort of rationality upon the sufferings of the widely dispersed and historically divergent populations formerly found in Eastern and Central Europe.

Background

Historically, the persecution of German-speaking communities in Central and Eastern Europe was due to many causes. In most cases as in the Sudetenland and Poland, such German-speaking communities had to face a hostile environment after annexion of their formerly German or Austro-Hungarian territories by newly created states such as Czechoslovakia or Poland as a sanction of the Treaty of Versailles.

After World War II, many such Volksdeutsche were killed or driven from their homes in acts of vengeance, more often in order to conquer and to ethnically cleanse those territories prior to repopulating them with citizens of the annexing country.

In other cases (e.g. in the case of the formerly large German-speaking populations of Russia, Estonia, or the "Saxons" of Bulgaria and the Balkans) such persecution was a crime committed against innocent communities who had played no part in the outrages of the Third Reich. However, these communities of Volksdeutsche are rarely cited in the persecution of ethnic Germans debate which is dominated by the representatives of the Volksdeutsche of Poland and the Sudetenland.

The debate sometimes encompasses the persecution of citizens of German descent in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, and Australia during the 1914-1918 and the Second World Wars.

Specific Locales

Australia

Persecution of ethnic Germans was much the same in Australia as it was in the United States during World War I. Many were interned for the duration of the war and others faced hostility from their fellow citizens. To avoid persecution, many Germans changed their names into anglicised or Francophone variants.

Germany

The book Other Losses by James Bacque (ISBN 1551681919) alleges that General Dwight Eisenhower (himself a US Citizen of German extraction) ordered the mistreatment of up to one million German Prisoners of War who were detained in American-run POW camps after World War II. Bacque's credibility has been attacked, however, since he has no historical training and because he has allegedly misread some documents while overlooking others that contradict his thesis. [1] Furthermore, he has been criticised because his research was sponsored by far right-wing organizations with links to neo-Nazis. See also Eisenhower and German POWs Other US and German sources estimate the number of German POWs who died in captivity at between 56,000 or 78,000 or about one percent of all German prisoners, which is roughly the same as the percentage of American POWs who died in German captivity and far less than the 64% of Soviet POWs who died while detained by the Third Reich.

Soviet Union

Hundreds of thousands of German Prisoners of War were kept in Soviet custody for several years after World War II. These were not repatriated until eleven years after the war, after Konrad Adenauer went to Moscow in 1955 and urged their release. They and alleged German collaborators and other ethnic Germans were imprisoned in Gulag concentration camps. The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was abolished and Volga Germans were banished from their settlements on the Volga River with many being deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan.

In the dying days of the Second World War and during the occupation of Germany, Soviet forces invaded German villages and raped German women en masse. It is believed by historian Antony Beevor that 2,000,000 German women were raped by Soviet soldiers, with 130,000 in Berlin alone. Several thousand women committed suicide. On the final day of hostilities, 900 women in one village just east of Berlin took their children and drowned them in the river (followed by their own suicides) as soon as they heard the Russian guns coming. Although all militaries have histories of rape, the gang-raping of German prisoners of war and ordinary women occurred with the approval of many district commanders. In all only about 4000 Soviet soldiers were ever punished for atrocities.

Poland

In the Eighteenth Century the German States of Prussia and Austria participated in the Partition of Poland, in which the historical Kingdom of Poland was erased from the map.

The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 attempted to punish Germany and, among other things, recreated the Polish state. However, important minorities of Ethnic Germans were present in formerly German territories as West Prussia.

In the 1920s and 1930s areas of Poland were thus a mosaic of German-speaking and Polish-speaking communities. In 1939 the Nazis exploited the fact that Poland contained ethnically German populations as a casus belli in order to justify their actions against the Second Polish Republic. In this they were aided by a number of ethnic German Polish citizens who sympathised with the goal.

In Poland during the Nazi occupation in World War II the status of Volksdeutsche had many privileges but one big disadvantage: Volksdeutsche were conscripted into the German army. The Volksliste (a list of peoples categorised according to Nazi philosophies of "racial purity") had 4 categories. No. 1 and No. 2 were considered ethnic Germans, while No. 3 and No. 4 were ethnic Poles that signed the Volksliste. No. 1 and No. 2 in the Polish areas annexed by Germany numbered ~1,000,000 and No. 3 and No. 4 ~1,700,000. In the General Government territory there were about 120,000 Volksdeutsche.

Volksdeutsche of Polish origins were treated by Poles with special contempt, and the fact of their having signed the Volksliste constituted high treason according to Polish law.

German citizens that remained in the territory of Poland after World War II became as a group personae non gratae. They had the choice of either applying for Polish citizenship or being expelled to Germany. The property that belonged to Germans, German companies and the German state, was confiscated by the Polish state, along with many other properties in communist Poland. German owners, as explicitly stated by the law, were not eligible for any compensation. Those who decided to apply for compensation were subjected to a verification process. There were many acts of violence against Volksdeutsche.

Norway

The children of Norwegian mothers and German soldiers were persecuted after the war, see Children of the Nazi era

Italy

See also: History of South Tyrol

After the end of World War I, the German-speaking South Tyrol was included in the new boundaries of Italy. Following the rise of the Fascist movement of Mussolini, the ethnic Germans of this enclave faced growing persecution. Their names, and the names of the towns and places in the area, were forcibly changed to Italian. In addition, Mussolini engaged in a vigorous campaign to resettle ethnic Italians in the region. Many Tyroleans fled to Germany during this time, and the matter of South Tyrol became a source of friction between Hitler and Mussolini.

After the end of World War II, the organised persecution of Germans in the South Tyrol largely came to an end, although ethnic strife continued for decades.

United States

During the 18th and 19th centuries, German-Americans were the most visible non-Anglophone group in the United States. German-language schools and German-language media were common throughout the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. Numerous incidents of hostility against these groups took place during the 19th century, but were largely non-systematic. The perceived anti-slavery position of Germans in the South did bring about violent clashes in slave states such as Texas during the American Civil War [2].

A source of particular tension was the presence of pacifist Mennonite and Amish communities, which spoke (and speak) a dialect of German called Pennsylvania Dutch. These 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. Although most Germans were not Mennonites, this reinforced the popular view that Germans did not consider themselves part of America.

Upon the outbreak of World War I, anti-German sentiment quickly reached a fever pitch. Many Germans supported their homeland's side in the war, in which America long remained officially neutral. The portrayal of Germany as "The Hun" in pro-war propaganda inflamed existing tensions. The situation came to a crisis with America's entry into the war in 1917. The period from 1917 to 1919 is regarded as the time when German-American ethnic identity came to an end. Anti-German rioting was widespread. Most German-language periodicals, which had numbered in the hundreds, ceased operation (many were destroyed). However, there are cases of towns where the residents spoke German on a daily basis and the local newspaper was in German at least as late as the 1950s. These towns were primarily in the Midwestern region of the United States. Many German-Americans changed their names to resemble English names (a trend which had begun in the 19th century). By the time the troops returned from Europe, the German community had ceased to be a major force in American culture. Today, many argue that the Germans are the one ethnic group that has been assimilated into American society.

Largely for this reason, although some persecution of ethnic Germans did occur during World War II, it was not widespread. Most of the German-American population no longer identified themselves as German, nor were they identified with the Nazis in the popular mind. During World War II, the US government interned thousands of resident Germans and Italians who were non-US citizens in the same camps as the Japanese-Americans. The difference is that in the case of the Japanese-Americans, it was wholesale and included those who were US citizens.

Canada

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.

Britain

Germans were demonized in the press, 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 the Alsatian, which is the name under which this breed is still commonly known in Britain. The waters that had been known as the 'German Ocean' were also renamed the North Sea.

By 1919 sentiment had changed. Robert Graves wrote in "Goodbye to All That" on page 240 that during his time at Oxford University as an undergraduate that "The eighteenth century owed its unpopularity largely to its Frenchness. Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund, shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: 'No more wars for me at any price! Except against the French. If ever there is a war against them, I'll go like a shot.' Pro-German feeling had been increasing. With the war over and the German armies beaten, we could give the German soldier credit for being the most efficient fighting man in Europe... Some undergraduates even insisted that we had been fighting on the wrong side: our natural enemies were the French."

See also

• Pursuit of Nazi collaborators
• German exodus from Eastern Europe
• Expulsion of Germans after World War II
• Regained Territories
• Federation of Expellees
• Eisenhower and German POWs
• World War II evacuation and expulsion
• Volksdeutsche
• Germans
• Evacuation of East Prussia

External links

• NY Times book review of Other Losses by historian Stephen Ambrose