Anti-German sentiment

Traces of anti-German sentiment can be found in the High Middle Ages, with Ekkehard of Aura and Odo of Deuil writing about frictions between the Germans and the French. After Germany completed its unification in 1871, anti-Germanism grew among the other great powers, fueled largely by fears of Germany's rapid industrialisation. Germanophobia reached its height in the Allied countries during World War I and World War II. Anti-German and anti-Austrian sentiments were generally held together, as Austrians worked with and were involved in the German military, especially in Nazi Germany, with most Austrians considering themselves German until the end of World War II in Europe.

Following the collapse of Nazi Germany, anti-German sentiment generally decreased as Europe entered a period of peace. In modern times, anti-German sentiment usually comes about from the major power Germany has economically over Europe, and its importance in the European Union.

History

Late 19th and early 20th centuries

During the 1700s and 1800s, many states in the United States allowed male non-citizens to vote. Anti-Irish and anti-German Catholic sentiment following the War of 1812 and intensifying again in the 1840s led many states, particularly in the Northeast, to amend their constitutions to prohibit non-citizens from voting. States that banned non-citizen voting during this time included New Hampshire in 1814, Virginia in 1818, Connecticut in 1819, New Jersey in 1820, Massachusetts in 1822, Vermont in 1828, Pennsylvania in 1838, Delaware in 1831, Tennessee in 1834, Rhode Island in 1842, Illinois in 1848, Ohio and Maryland in 1851, and North Carolina in 1856.

Negative comments in Britain about Germany were first made in the 1870s, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. British war planners believed that they needed to prevent a possible German invasion of Britain. German advances eventually led to the popularity of invasion novels, such as The Battle of Dorking, which first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in the summer of 1871.

In the 1880s and 1890s, German immigrants in the UK were the targets of "some hostility"; interviewees for the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration believed that Germans were involved in prostitution and burglary, and many people also believed that Germans who were working in Britain were threatening the livelihoods of Britons by being willing to work for longer hours. Anti-German hostility began to intensify in early 1896 when Kaiser Wilhelm II sent the Kruger telegram to President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal congratulating him for repelling the British Jameson Raid. At that time, attacks on Germans in London were reported by the German press, but contrary to the reports, no attacks occurred. The Saturday Review suggested: "be ready to fight Germany, as Germania delenda est" ("Germany is to be destroyed"), an allusion to Cato the Elder's coda in the Second Punic War.

Rising political tensions

Following the signing of the Entente Cordiale alliance in 1904 between the United Kingdom and France, official relationships cooled, as did popular attitudes towards Germany and German residents in Britain. A fear of German militarism replaced a previous admiration for German culture and literature. At the same time, journalists produced a stream of articles on the threat posed by Germany. In the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908–09, the Kaiser, in a badly misjudged attempt to show Germany's friendship towards England, said that he was among a minority of Germans friendly to Britain, that he had sent a military plan to Queen Victoria during the Boer War which the British Army had used successfully, and that Germany's fleet buildup was directed not against Britain but the "Yellow Peril" of the East.

Articles in Harmsworth's Daily Mail regularly advocated anti-German sentiments throughout the 20th century, telling their readers to refuse service at restaurants by Austrian or German waiters on the claim that they were spies and that if a German-sounding waiter claimed to be Swiss that they should demand to see the waiter's passport. At the same time, conspiracy theories which combined Germanophobia with antisemitism were concocted, they focused on the supposed foreign control of Britain, some of these conspiracy theories blamed Britain's entry into the Second Boer War on international German and Jewish financiers. Most of these ideas about German-Jewish conspiracies originated from right-wing figures such as Arnold White, Hilaire Belloc, and Leo Maxse, who used his publication the National Review to spread them.

Economic discrimination

German food such as the sausage was deprecated by Germanophobes. In the late 19th century, the label Made in Germany was introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887 (50 & 51 Vict. c. 28), to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufacturers had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry.

Anglicization in the West

In an attempt to further distance themselves from German culture, German street names in many cities were changed. German and Berlin streets in Cincinnati became English and Woodward; and Lubeck, Frankfort, and Hamburg Streets in Chicago were renamed Dickens, Charleston, and Shakespeare Streets. In New Orleans, Berlin Street was renamed in honor of General Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force. In Indianapolis, Bismarck Avenue and Germania Street were renamed Pershing Avenue and Belleview Street, respectively in 1917, and Brooklyn's Hamburg Avenue was renamed Wilson Avenue. In 1916, the city of Berlin in Canada was renamed to Kitchener, referring to Lord Kitchener, who was famously pictured on the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" recruiting posters. Several streets in Toronto that had previously been named for Liszt, Humboldt, Schiller, Bismarck, etc., were changed to names with strong British associations, such as Balmoral. Several streets in London which had been named after places in Germany or notable Germans also had their names changed; Berlin Road in Catford was renamed Canadian Avenue, and Bismarck Road in Islington was renamed Waterlow Road. In South Australia, Grunthal became Verdun and Krichauff became Beatty. In New South Wales, Germantown became Holbrook after the submarine commander Norman Douglas Holbrook.

Many businesses changed their names. In Chicago, German Hospital became Grant Hospital; likewise, the German Dispensary and the German Hospital in New York City were renamed Lenox Hill Hospital and Wyckoff Heights Hospital, respectively. In New York, the giant Germania Life Insurance Company became Guardian. Some words of German origin were changed, at least temporarily. Sauerkraut came to be called "liberty cabbage", German measles became "liberty measles", hamburgers became "liberty sandwiches" and dachshunds became "liberty pups". In Great Britain, the German Shepherd breed of dog was renamed to the euphemistic "Alsatian"; the English Kennel Club only re-authorised the use of 'German Shepherd' as an official name in 1977. The German biscuit was renamed the Empire biscuit.

Many schools stopped teaching German-language classes. The City College of New York continued to teach German courses, but reduced the number of credits that students could receive for them. Books published in German were removed from libraries or even burned. In Cincinnati, the public library was asked to withdraw all German books from its shelves. In Iowa, in the 1918 Babel Proclamation, Governor William L. Harding prohibited the use of all foreign languages in schools and public places. Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the ban was illegal in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska). In parallel with these changes, many German Americans elected to anglicize their names (e.g. Schmidt to Smith, Müller to Miller).

World War I

In 1914, when Germany invaded neutral Belgium and northern France, Imperial German Army regularly court martialed Belgian and French civilians under German military law for offenses including espionage, perfidy, or being francs-tireurs, and executed 6,500 of them. These acts, referred to as the Rape of Belgium, were both exploited and exaggerated by the governments of the Allied Powers, who produced atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Germans as gorilla-like Huns who were all racially inclined to sadism and violence.

A vocal source of criticism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson's "anti-hyphen" ideology and particularly to their demands for "100% Americanism" came from America's enormous number of White ethnic immigrants and their descendants. Criticism from these circles occasionally argued that "100% Americanism" really meant Anglophilia and a Special Relationship with the British Empire, as particularly demonstrated by demands for tolerating only the English language in the United States. In a letter published on 16 July 1916 in the Minneapolis Journal, Edward Goldbeck, a member of Minnesota's traditionally large German-American community, sarcastically announced that his people would "abandon the hyphen", as soon as English-Americans did so. Meanwhile, he argued, "Let the exodus of Anglo-Americans start at once! Let all those people go who think that America is a new England!" A much smaller minority of German Americans came out openly for Germany. Similarly, Harvard psychology professor Hugo Münsterberg dropped his efforts to mediate between America and Germany, and threw his efforts behind the German war effort.

The Justice Department attempted to prepare a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them. The Committee of Internment of Alien Enemies recommended sending them to internment camps, though the idea was opposed by the War Department and the Attorney General. More than 4,000 German aliens were imprisoned in 1917–1918; the allegations included spying for Germany and endorsing the German war effort.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, some German Americans were looked upon with suspicion and attacked regarding their loyalty. Propaganda posters and newspaper commentary fed the growing fear. In Wisconsin, a Lutheran minister faced suspicion for hosting Germans in his home, while a language professor was tarred and feathered for having a German name and teaching the language. In Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched. The Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. Some aliens were convicted and imprisoned on charges of sedition for refusing to swear allegiance to the United States war effort. Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty.

In Nashville, Tennessee, Luke Lea, the publisher of The Tennessean, together with "political associates", attempted to declare German-born Edward Bushrod Stahlman an "alien enemy" during World War I. Stahlman was the publisher of a competing newspaper, the Nashville Banner. The offices of a pro-German socialist newspaper, the Philadelphia Tageblatt, were visited by federal agents after war broke out to investigate the citizenship status of its staff and would later be raided by federal agents under the powers of the Espionage Act of 1917, and six members of its organization would eventually be arrested for violations of the Espionage Act among other charges after publishing a number of pieces of pro-German propaganda.

In Great Britain, anti-German feeling led to infrequent rioting, assaults on suspected Germans and the looting of businesses owned by people with German-sounding names, which occasionally took an antisemitic tone. Increasing anti-German hysteria threw suspicion upon the British royal family; King George V was persuaded to change his German name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and relinquish all German titles and styles on behalf of his relatives who were British subjects. Prince Louis of Battenberg was not only forced to change his name to Mountbatten, he was forced to resign as First Sea Lord, the most senior position in the Royal Navy.

Attitudes to Germany were not entirely negative among British troops fighting on the Western Front; Robert Graves, who, like the King, also had German relatives, wrote shortly after the war during his time at Oxford University as an undergraduate that "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." British writer Nicholas Shakespeare quoted a statement from a letter written by his grandfather during the First World War in which he says he would rather fight the French and describes German bravery.

Pre-World War II

On 25 July 1937, NKVD Order No. 00439 led to the arrest of 55,005 German citizens and former citizens in the Soviet Union, of whom 41,898 were sentenced to death. The Soviets were not successful in expelling all ethnic Germans living in Western and Southern Ukraine due to the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. The secret police, the NKVD, was able to deport only 35% of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine. Thus in 1943, the Nazi German census registered 313,000 ethnic Germans living in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet advance, the Wehrmacht evacuated about 300,000 Russian Germans to the Reich. Under the Yalta Agreement, the Allies mandated the repatriation of Soviet citizens living in Germany at the war's end. More than 200,000 Russian Germans were deported, mostly by force, by the Western Allies and sent to special settlements (exile). Thus, shortly after the end of the war, more than one million ethnic Germans from Russia were in special settlements and labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. It is estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 died of starvation, lack of shelter, overwork and disease during the 1940s. Later during the war, Germans were suggested to be used for forced labour. The Soviet Union began deporting ethnic Germans in their territories and using them for forced labour. Although by the end of 1955, they had been acquitted of criminal accusations, no rights to return to their former home regions were granted, nor were the former self-determination rights returned to them. Near the end of World War II 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 "a 'high proportion' of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled from Germany's eastern provinces were raped."

World War II

Between 1931 and 1940, 114,000 Germans and thousands of Austrians moved to the United States, many of whom – including Nobel-prize winner Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertold Brecht, Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler and Thomas Mann – were either Jewish Germans or anti-Nazis fleeing Nazi oppression. About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund during the years before the war. The October 1939 seizure by the German pocket battleship Deutschland of the US freighter SS City of Flint, as it had 4000 tons of oil for Britain on board, provoked much anti-German sentiment in the US.

The so-called "Vansittartism" of Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart in Great Britain portrayed Germans as inherently militaristic and violent. In the U.S., works such as John Boylan's Sequel to the Apocalypse: The Uncensored Story: How Your Dimes and Quarters Helped Pay for Hitler's War (1942) promoted opposition to German commercial practices and to Germans in general.

Germans murdered millions of people in state-sponsored genocides during World War II, turning many families and friends of the victims anti-German. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship to register with the U.S. Federal government, and restricted their travel and property-ownership rights. In 1941, the American writer Theodore N. Kaufman published Germany Must Perish!, a book in which he advocated genocide through the compulsory sterilization of all Germans and the territorial dismemberment of Germany, which he argued would achieve world peace.

Refusal to hire German-Americans

With the war ongoing in Europe but the United States remaining neutral until late 1941, a massive defense buildup took place in the U.S., requiring many new employees. Private companies sometimes refused to hire any non-citizen, or American citizens of German or Italian ancestry — this would allegedly have threatened the morale of loyal Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt considered this "stupid" and "unjust". In June 1941, he issued Executive Order 8802 and set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee, which also protected Black Americans. President Roosevelt sought out Americans of German ancestry for top war-jobs, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and General Carl Andrew Spaatz. He appointed Republican Wendell Willkie as a personal representative. German Americans who had fluent German-language skills became an important asset to wartime intelligence, serving as translators and as spies for the United States. The war evoked strong pro-American patriotic sentiments among German Americans, few of whom by then had contacts with distant relatives in the old country.

Internment of Germans

Under the still-active Alien Enemy Act of 1798, the United States government interned 11,507 German citizens between 1940 and 1948. An unknown number of "voluntary internees" joined their families in the camps and were not permitted to leave. After the United States entered the war against Nazi Germany on 11 December 1941, the US Government interned a number of German and Italian citizens as enemy aliens. The exact number of German and Italian internees is a subject of debate. In some cases, American-born family members volunteered to accompany internees into internment camps in order to keep family units together. The last to be released remained in custody until 1948.

Anti-German sentiment also flourished in Canada during World War II; under the War Measures Act of 1914, some 26 POW camps opened and were filled with those who had been born in Germany, in Italy, and particularly in Japan, if they were deemed to be "enemy aliens". For Germans, this applied especially to single males who had some association with the National Unity Party of Canada. No compensation was paid to them after the war. In Ontario, the largest internment centre for German Canadians, Camp Petawawa, housed 750 persons born in Germany and Austria. Although some residents of internment camps were Germans who had already immigrated to Canada, the majority of Germans in such camps came from Europe; most were prisoners of war. 711 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in Europe were interned at Camp B70 in Ripples, New Brunswick, at the request of Winston Churchill, who worried that there could be German spies among their number. The prisoners were subjected to forced labor, including felling lumber and chopping wood to heat the camp. After a year of internment, the refugees — now seen as valuable to the war effort — received the option to participate in the war or to find sponsorship in Canada. The camp closed temporarily in 1941, then became a prisoner-of-war camp for the remainder of the war.

British anti-German sentiment

In 1940, the U.K. Ministry of Information launched an "Anger Campaign" to instill "personal anger ... against the German people and Germany", because the British were "harbouring little sense of real personal animus against the average German". This was done to strengthen British resolve against the Germans. Sir Robert Vansittart, the Foreign Office's chief diplomatic advisor until 1941, gave a series of radio broadcasts in which he said that Germany was a nation raised on "envy, self-pity and cruelty" whose historical development had "prepared the ground for Nazism" and that it was Nazism that had "finally given expression to the blackness of the German soul".

The British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO) tracked the development of anti-German/anti-Nazi feeling in Britain, asking the public, via a series of opinion polls conducted from 1939 to 1943, whether "the chief enemy of Britain was the German people or the Nazi government". In 1939, only 6% of respondents held the German people responsible, but following the Blitz of 1940 to 1941 and the "Anger Campaign" in 1940, this increased to 50%. The figure subsequently declined to 41% by 1943. Home Intelligence reported in 1942 that there was some criticism of the official attitude of hatred towards Germany on the grounds that such hatred might hinder the possibility of a reasonable settlement following the war.

J.R.R. Tolkien expressed a measured attitude: in 1944 he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:

[I]t is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. ... There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.

In the same year Mass Observation asked its observers to analyse the British people's private opinions of the German people: it found that 54% of the British population was "pro-German", in that it expressed sympathy for the German people and stated that the war was "not their fault". This tolerance of the German people (as opposed to the Nazi régime) increased as the war progressed. In 1943, Mass Observation established that up to 60% of the British people maintained a distinction between Germans and Nazis, with only 20% or so expressing any "hatred, vindictiveness, or need for retribution". British film-propaganda of the period similarly maintained the distinction between Nazi supporters and the German people.

Post-World War II

American General George S. Patton complained that the US policy of denazification following Germany's surrender harmed American interests and was motivated simply by hatred of the defeated German people. Even the speed of West German recovery following the war was seen as ominous by some, who suspected the Germans of planning for World War III. In reality, most Nazi criminals were unpunished, such as Heinz Reinefarth, who was responsible for the Wola massacre. Many Nazis, such as Wernher von Braun and Reinhard Gehlen, worked for the Americans as scientists or intelligence officers During the Allied occupation of Germany, Germans were used as forced laborers. Some of the laborers, depending on the country occupying, were prisoners of war or ethnic German civilians. Additionally, German POWs in Norway were forced to clear their own minefields and then walk over them, leading to the death and mutilation of hundreds of prisoners.

Flight and expulsion of Germans

After WWII ended, about 11 million to 12 million Germans fled, were expelled from Germany's former eastern provinces, or migrated from other countries to what remained of Germany, the largest transfer of a single European population in modern history. Estimates of the total number of dead range from 500,000 to 2,000,000, and the higher figures include "unsolved cases" of persons reported missing and presumed dead. Many German civilians were sent to internment and labor camps, where they died. Salomon Morel and Czesław Gęborski were the commanders of several camps for Germans, Poles and Ukrainians. The German-Czech Historians Commission, on the other hand, established a death toll for Czechoslovakia of 15,000–30,000. The events are usually classified as population transfer, or ethnic cleansing. Felix Ermacora was one of a minority of legal scholars to equate ethnic cleansing with genocide, and stated that the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans was therefore genocide.

Massacres in Czechoslovakia

A few days after the end of World War II, 2,000 Germans were massacred in Postoloprty and Žatec by the Czechoslovak army. In the summer of 1945, there were a number of incidents and localized massacres of the German population.

The following examples are described in a study done by the European University Institute in Florence. In the Přerov incident, 71 men, 120 women, and 74 children were killed, and on 30 May 1945, 30,000 Germans were forced to leave their homes in Brno for labour camps near Austria. It is estimated that several hundred died in the march.Estimates of killed in the Ústí massacre range from 30 to 700 civilians. Some women and children were thrown off the bridge into the Elbe River and shot.

Law No. 115 of 1946 (see Beneš decrees) provides: "Any act committed between September 30, 1938, and October 28, 1945, the object of which was to aid the struggle for liberty of the Czechs and Slovaks or which represented just reprisals for actions of the occupation forces and their accomplices, is not illegal, even when such acts may otherwise be punishable by law." As a consequence, atrocities committed during the expulsion of Germans were made legal.