Posted on 05/22/2014 5:06:12 AM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
My father’s family also came to the United States from Germany; Stettin, in fact, 1848. My Great-Great Grandfather was a tailor, a trade he learned in the Prussian Army. They, like so many other other Germans, settled in Wisconsin. There are no family histories of any sort of ethnic abuse, but that’s probably because their communities were ethnically German. Also, many of the German families who arrived during the great German immigration in 1848 had been here three generations. A lot of Germans served in the Civil War, including my great-great-grandfather. German was spoken in their home until sometime in the early 1900s. My grandfather was 17 when we entered WW1, and did not serve. There is some suspicion his background kept him out.
Getting back to the topic, in World War 2 Americans with strong ethnic German ties tended to be assigned to the Pacific Theater, generals Krueger and Eichelberger being prime examples.
What was done with Germans in the United States is nothing compared to what Stalin did to the Volga Germans in the USSR during World War 2. Ironically, if you look up the Volga Germans, you would find that a lot of them emigrated from Russia to the United States in the later 1800s, and settled in Harris County Nebraska. Their ethnic culture was a curious mix of primarily German, but with some Russian mixed in.
“Vocabulary changed. Sauerkraut came to be called “liberty cabbage”,[22] German measles became “liberty measles”, hamburgers became “liberty sandwiches”[22] and dachshunds became “liberty pups”.[28]”
And I thought “Freedom Fries” was stupid, but apparently there’s a past history of this kind of ridiculousness.
It’s my understanding that the smoked sausages Texas were created by German immigrants.
God bless’em.
“WAKE ISLAND is bombarded by a strong US destroyer force.”
Another 15 months of misery in store for those unfortunate and abandoned Jap soldiers.
Go to Fredricksburg, Texas, some time. They kept the German heritage, you can get some very good German/Texas food.
I suggest Opa’s Sausage at The Auslander
Also, since Chester W. Nimitz hailed from Fredricksburg, you can tour the National Museum of the Pacific War.
deSeversky’s rant on page 8 is about as absurd as I’ve seen from him.
I’m planning on ordering a Christmas dinner of brisket and sausages from Kruez Market in Lockhart this year.
You still read de Seversky? I gave up on him long ago. I’m convinced he drank heavily.
There really can't be any doubt in the minds of Times readers what the Nazis are doing in Eastern Europe.
Yes, we all know that the Jews are being killed. But it’s another thing altogether for GIs from Kenosha, Jacksonville and Sacramento to walk through Buchenwald and see for themselves exactly what that means. That hasn’t happened. Yet.
And by the way, those guys never walked through the Gulag. It’s the only reason the left has been able to keep its love of communism from being as loathed as the Nazis.
I think the missing piece of information is the industrial scale of the extermination camps. It’s clear that very large numbers of Jews are being killed, but the whole picture isn’t there.
Same point I was making. I’ve just reached the liberation of the camps in Germany in “The Guns at Last Light.”
The regiment that stumbled across Dachau originated in the Colorado National Guard. The battalion commander that found the camp was Felix Sparks of Colorado and I was fortunate enough to hear him speak about it. All of the troops were shocked by what they found, although he forcefully denied the persistent rumors that his troops lost discipline and began killing guards. Not that they didn't deserve it.
That said, the people high in the Roosevelt administration with access to the Times and even better information being supplied by Jewish groups should have done much more to get Jews out of occupied Europe. We've had several discussions in these threads about people claiming to be helpful and attending meetings and conferences who were in fact decidedly unhelpful.
Yep, their language isn't Indo-European either.
Add to that the effect on leftist Jews had Stalin not died at the outset of the Doctor's Plot.
Someone had a piece up about a book about the Gulag, “Walking Around Kolyma” or something like that, in the last few days.
I saw some video of one of the slave labor camps in the Russian Far East on Michael Palin’s “Full Circle” program. It was so far from anywhere! And “to be fair,” those camps weren’t organized for the purpose of killing people in large numbers. You weren’t going to walk into a Gulag establishment unexpectedly and find bodies stacked because the ovens couldn’t burn them fast enough.
That vaguely rings a bell.
I saw some video of one of the slave labor camps in the Russian Far East on Michael Palin’s “Full Circle” program. It was so far from anywhere! And “to be fair,” those camps weren’t organized for the purpose of killing people in large numbers. You weren’t going to walk into a Gulag establishment unexpectedly and find bodies stacked because the ovens couldn’t burn them fast enough.
The German concentration camp system basically evolved from the Gulag. The death camps were more of a German inovation.
One American who was decidedly very helpful was Herman Wells, President of Indiana University. He brought a lot of Jews out of Germany on professorships, “exchange programs” and really whatever he could to get around immigration quotas. It was not only in the hard sciences, which gave IU strong Schools of Medicine and Chemistry. Wells brought over quality people in literature and Music, and made IU one of the top schools in the country in Music and Germanic Languages.
I had the privilege the privilege of taking two courses from one of those remarkable gentlemen, Henry H. H. Remak. Every year Herr Remak and his gracious wife would host a dinner for the senior German students, and in 1981 there were about a dozen of us. It was a wonderful evening, the memory of which I will always treasure.
Stettin? Army? Ah, so, one of Uncle Otto's Pomeranian grenadiers? And young henkster escaped in 1848, after the revolution?
My most recent arriving ancestors escaped from East Frisia, aound 1860 to avoid a draft -- when Hannover was preparing for war against Prussia.
They landed near Springfield, Illinois, and two military age brothers (one my great-grandfather), neither speaking English, soon enlisted in Lincoln's Union Army.
Though captured he was released (by Nathan Bedford Forrest), though wounded he survived (at Fort Blakely, Mobile Bay), and eventually received a veteran's pension, which, iirc, was about the same as the salary my young grandmother received for teaching elementary school, in Kansas.
The point of this discussion is that "German-Americans" served loyally in every US war, and were not automatically held in suspicion during the First World War.
The fact that my Dad was sent to MacArthur's command may have less to do with his ancestry than to the mistaken assumption that he was related to another very famous MacArthur soldier, from the First World War... ;-)
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