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National Socialism (German: Nationalsozialismus), more commonly known as Nazism (/ˈnɑːtsiɪzəm, ˈnæt-/),^[1] is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party—officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP)—in Nazi Germany, and of other far-right groups with similar ideas and aims.

Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism came from Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movement prominent in the German nationalism of the time, and it was strongly influenced by the Freikorpsparamilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's 'cult of violence' which was 'at the heart of the movement.'^[2]

Nazism subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordicmaster race.^[3] It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a German homogeneous society based on racial purity which represented a people's community (Volksgemeinschaft). The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in historically German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or 'inferior' races.

The term 'National Socialism' arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of 'socialism', as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitaninternationalism, and sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the 'common good', accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization.^[4]

The Nazi Party's precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party—to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Communists (KPD)—and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organization. The National Socialist Program or '25 Points' was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while also supporting land reform and the nationalization of some industries. In Mein Kampf ('My Struggle'; 1924–1925), Hitler outlined the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion.^[5]

The Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, but still short of an outright majority. Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, in 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg, and a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis had soon established a one-party state.

The Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) functioned as the paramilitary organizations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more socially and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning 'leader'. From that point, Hitler was effectively the dictator of Nazi Germany, which was also known as the 'Third Reich', under which Jews, political opponents and other 'undesirable' elements were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered. Many millions of people were eventually exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust during World War II, including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.

Following Germany's defeat in World War II and the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology became universally disgraced. It is widely regarded as immoral and evil, with only a few fringe racist groups, usually referred to as neo-Nazis, describing themselves as followers of National Socialism.

• 3Origins
  • 3.2Racial theories and antisemitism
• 4Ideology
  • 4.1Nationalism and racialism
  • 4.3Sex and gender
  • 4.5Economics

Etymology

The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (English: National-Socialist German Workers' Party) for which they officially used the acronym NSDAP.

The term 'Nazi' was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant, characterizing an awkward and clumsy person. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Ignatz (itself a variation of the name Ignatius)—Ignatz being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged.^[6][7]

In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this and—using the earlier abbreviated term 'Sozi' for Sozialist (English: Socialist) as an example^[8]—shortened NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive 'Nazi', in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the term mentioned above.^{[9][7][10][11][12][13]}

The first use of the term 'Nazi' by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi ['The Nazi-Sozi']. In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word 'Nazi' only appears when linked with the word 'Sozi' as an abbreviation of 'National Socialism'.^[14]

After the NSDAP's rise to power in the 1930s, the use of the term 'Nazi' by itself or in terms such as 'Nazi Germany', 'Nazi regime' and so on was popularised by German exiles outside the country, but not in Germany. From them, the term spread into other languages and it was eventually brought back into Germany after World War II.^[10]

The NSDAP briefly adopted the designation 'Nazi'^[when?] in an attempt to reappropriate the term, but it soon gave up this effort and generally avoided using the term while it was in power.^[10][11] For example, in Hitler's book Mein Kampf, originally published in 1925, he never refers to himself as a 'Nazi.'^[15] A compendium of conversations of Hitler from 1941 through 1944 entitled Hitler's Table Talk does not contain the word 'Nazi' either.^[16] In speeches by Hermann Göring, he never uses the term 'Nazi.'^[17] Hitler Youth leader Melita Maschmann wrote a book about her experience entitled Account Rendered.^[18] She did not refer to herself as a 'Nazi,' even though she was writing well after World War II. In 1933 581 members of the National Socialist Party answered interview questions put to them by Professor Theodore Abel from Columbia University. They similarly did not refer to themselves as 'Nazis.'^[19] In each case, the authors refer to themselves as 'National Socialists' and their movement as 'National Socialism,' but never as 'Nazis.'

Position within the political spectrum

The majority of scholars identify Nazism in both theory and practice as a form of far-right politics.^[20] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.^[21] Adolf Hitler and other proponents denied that Nazism was either left-wing or right-wing, instead they officially portrayed Nazism as a syncretic movement.^[22][23] In Mein Kampf, Hitler directly attacked both left-wing and right-wing politics in Germany, saying:

Today our left-wing politicians in particular are constantly insisting that their craven-hearted and obsequious foreign policy necessarily results from the disarmament of Germany, whereas the truth is that this is the policy of traitors .. But the politicians of the Right deserve exactly the same reproach. It was through their miserable cowardice that those ruffians of Jews who came into power in 1918 were able to rob the nation of its arms.^[24]

In a speech given in Munich on 12 April 1922, Hitler stated that:

There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction - to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power - that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago.^[25]

When asked^[when?] whether he supported the 'bourgeois right-wing', Hitler claimed that Nazism was not exclusively for any class and he indicated that it favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved 'pure' elements from both 'camps' by stating: 'From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism'.^[26]

Historians regard the equation of National Socialism as 'Hitlerism' as too simplistic since the term was used prior to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis and the different ideologies incorporated into Nazism were already well established in certain parts of German society before World War I.^[27] The Nazis were strongly influenced by the post–World War I far-right in Germany, which held common beliefs such as anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism and antisemitism, along with nationalism, contempt for the Treaty of Versailles and condemnation of the Weimar Republic for signing the armistice in November 1918 which later led it to sign the Treaty of Versailles.^[28] A major inspiration for the Nazis were the far-right nationalist Freikorps, paramilitary organizations that engaged in political violence after World War I.^[28] Initially, the post–World War I German far-right was dominated by monarchists, but the younger generation, which was associated with Völkisch nationalism, was more radical and it did not express any emphasis on the restoration of the German monarchy.^[29] This younger generation desired to dismantle the Weimar Republic and create a new radical and strong state based upon a martial ruling ethic that could revive the 'Spirit of 1914' which was associated with German national unity (Volksgemeinschaft).^[29]

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The Nazis, the far-right monarchists, the reactionaryGerman National People's Party (DNVP) and others, such as monarchist officers in the German Army and several prominent industrialists, formed an alliance in opposition to the Weimar Republic on 11 October 1931 in Bad Harzburg, officially known as the 'National Front', but commonly referred to as the Harzburg Front.^[30] The Nazis stated that the alliance was purely tactical and they continued to have differences with the DNVP. The Nazis described the DNVP as a bourgeois party and they called themselves an anti-bourgeois party.^[30] After the elections of July 1932, the alliance broke down when the DNVP lost many of its seats in the Reichstag. The Nazis denounced them as 'an insignificant heap of reactionaries'.^[31] The DNVP responded by denouncing the Nazis for their socialism, their street violence and the 'economic experiments' that would take place if the Nazis ever rose to power.^[32] But amidst an inconclusive political situation in which conservative politicians Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher were unable to form stable governments without the Nazis, Papen proposed to President Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor at the head of a government formed primarily of conservatives, with only three Nazi ministers.^[33][34] Hindenburg did so, and contrary to the expectations of Papen and the DNVP, Hitler was soon able to establish a Nazi one-party dictatorship.^[35]

KaiserWilhelm II, who was pressured to abdicate the throne and flee into exile amidst an attempted communist revolution in Germany, initially supported the Nazi Party. His four sons, including Prince Eitel Friedrich and Prince Oskar, became members of the Nazi Party in hopes that in exchange for their support, the Nazis would permit the restoration of the monarchy.^[36]

There were factions within the Nazi Party, both conservative and radical.^[37] The conservative Nazi Hermann Göring urged Hitler to conciliate with capitalists and reactionaries.^[37] Other prominent conservative Nazis included Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.^[38] Meanwhile, the radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels opposed capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core and he stressed the need for the party to emphasize both a proletarian and a national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had allegedly betrayed the party's socialist goals by endorsing capitalism.^[37]

When the Nazi Party emerged from obscurity to become a major political force after 1929, the conservative faction rapidly gained more influence, as wealthy donors took an interest in the Nazis as a potential bulwark against communism.^[39] The Nazi Party had previously been financed almost entirely from membership dues, but after 1929 its leadership began actively seeking donations from German industrialists, and Hitler began holding dozens of fundraising meetings with business leaders.^[40] In the midst of the Great Depression, facing the possibility of economic ruin on the one hand and a Communist or Social Democratic government on the other hand, German business increasingly turned to Nazism as offering a way out of the situation, by promising a state-driven economy that would support, rather than attack, existing business interests.^[41] By January 1933, the Nazi Party had secured the support of important sectors of German industry, mainly among the steel and coal producers, the insurance business and the chemical industry.^[42]

Large segments of the Nazi Party, particularly among the members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), were committed to the party's official socialist, revolutionary and anti-capitalist positions and expected both a social and an economic revolution when the party gained power in 1933.^[43] In the period immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, there were even Social Democrats and Communists who switched sides and became known as 'Beefsteak Nazis': brown on the outside and red inside.^[44] The leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, pushed for a 'second revolution' (the 'first revolution' being the Nazis' seizure of power) that would enact socialist policies. Furthermore, Röhm desired that the SA absorb the much smaller German Army into its ranks under his leadership.^[43] Once the Nazis achieved power, Röhm's SA was directed by Hitler to violently suppress the parties of the left, but they also began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.^[45] Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.^[46] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in 1934, in what came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives.^[46]

Before he joined the Bavarian Army to fight in World War I, Hitler had lived a bohemian lifestyle as a petty street watercolour artist in Vienna and Munich and he maintained elements of this lifestyle later on, going to bed very late and rising in the afternoon, even after he became Chancellor and then Führer.^[47] After the war, his battalion was absorbed by the Bavarian Soviet Republic from 1918 to 1919, where he was elected Deputy Battalion Representative. According to historian Thomas Weber, Hitler attended the funeral of communist Kurt Eisner (a German Jew), wearing a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on the other,^[48] which he took as evidence that Hitler's political beliefs had not yet solidified.^[48] In Mein Kampf, Hitler never mentioned any service with the Bavarian Soviet Republic and he stated that he became an antisemite in 1913 during his years in Vienna. This statement has been disputed by the contention that he was not an antisemite at that time,^[49] even though it is well established that he read many antisemitic tracts and journals during time and admired Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna.^[50] Hitler altered his political views in response to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919 and it was then that he became an antisemitic, German nationalist.^[49]

Hitler expressed opposition to capitalism, regarding it as having Jewish origins and accusing capitalism of holding nations ransom to the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitanrentier class.^[51] He also expressed opposition to communism and egalitarian forms of socialism, arguing that inequality and hierarchy are beneficial to the nation.^[52] He believed that communism was invented by the Jews to weaken nations by promoting class struggle.^[53] After his rise to power, Hitler took a pragmatic position on economics, accepting private property and allowing capitalist private enterprises to exist so long as they adhered to the goals of the Nazi state, but not tolerating enterprises that he saw as being opposed to the national interest.^[37]

German business leaders disliked Nazi ideology but came to support Hitler, because they saw the Nazis as a useful ally to promote their interests.^[54] Business groups made significant financial contributions to the Nazi Party both before and after the Nazi seizure of power, in the hope that a Nazi dictatorship would eliminate the organized labour movement and the left-wing parties.^[55] Hitler actively sought to gain the support of business leaders by arguing that private enterprise is incompatible with democracy.^[56]

Although he opposed communist ideology, Hitler publicly praised the Soviet Union's leader Joseph Stalin and Stalinism on numerous occasions.^[57] Hitler commended Stalin for seeking to purify the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of Jewish influences, noting Stalin's purging of Jewish communists such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Karl Radek.^[58] While Hitler had always intended to bring Germany into conflict with the Soviet Union so he could gain Lebensraum ('living space'), he supported a temporary strategic alliance between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to form a common anti-liberal front so they could defeat liberal democracies, particularly France.^[57]

Hitler admired the British Empire and its colonial system as living proof of Germanic superiority over 'inferior' races and saw United Kingdom as Germany's natural ally.^[59][60] He wrote in Mein Kampf: 'For a long time to come there will be only two Powers in Europe with which it may be possible for Germany to conclude an alliance. These Powers are Great Britain and Italy.'^[60]

Origins

Völkisch nationalism

One of the most significant ideological influences on the Nazis was the German nationalist Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose works had served as an inspiration to Hitler and other Nazi Party members, including Dietrich Eckart and Arnold Fanck.^[61] In Speeches to the German Nation (1808), written amid Napoleonic France's occupation of Berlin, Fichte called for a German national revolution against the French occupiers, making passionate public speeches, arming his students for battle against the French and stressing the need for action by the German nation so it could free itself.^[62] Fichte's nationalism was populist and opposed to traditional elites, spoke of the need for a 'People's War' (Volkskrieg) and put forth concepts similar to those which the Nazis adopted.^[62] Fichte promoted German exceptionalism and stressed the need for the German nation to purify itself (including purging the German language of French words, a policy that the Nazis undertook upon their rise to power).^[62]

Another important figure in pre-Nazi völkisch thinking was Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, whose work—Land und Leute (Land and People, written between 1857 and 1863)—collectively tied the organic German Volk to its native landscape and nature, a pairing which stood in stark opposition to the mechanical and materialistic civilization which was then developing as a result of industrialization.^[63] Geographers Friedrich Ratzel and Karl Haushofer borrowed from Riehl's work as did Nazi ideologues Alfred Rosenberg and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, both of whom employed some of Riehl's philosophy in arguing that 'each nation-state was an organism that required a particular living space in order to survive'.^[64] Riehl's influence is overtly discernible in the Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) philosophy introduced by Oswald Spengler, which the Nazi agriculturalist Walther Darré and other prominent Nazis adopted.^[65][66]

Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism and secularisedurban industrial society, while advocating a 'superior' society based on ethnic German 'folk' culture and German 'blood'.^[67] It denounced foreigners and foreign ideas and declared that Jews, Freemasons and others were 'traitors to the nation' and unworthy of inclusion.^[68]Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism and it viewed societies as organic, extolling the virtues of rural life, condemning the neglect of tradition and the decay of morals, denounced the destruction of the natural environment and condemned 'cosmopolitan' cultures such as Jews and Romani.^[69]

The first party that attempted to combine nationalism and socialism was the (Austria-Hungary) German Workers' Party, which predominantly aimed to solve the conflict between the Austrian Germans and the Czechs in the multi-ethnic Austrian Empire, then part of Austria-Hungary.^[70] In 1896 the German politician Friedrich Naumann formed the National-Social Association which aimed to combine German nationalism and a non-Marxist form of socialism together; the attempt turned out to be futile and the idea of linking nationalism with socialism quickly became equated with antisemites, extreme German nationalists and the Völkisch movement in general.^[27]

During the era of Imperial Germany, Völkisch nationalism was overshadowed by both Prussian patriotism and the federalist tradition of its various component states.^[71] The events of World War I, including the end of the Prussian monarchy in Germany, resulted in a surge of revolutionary Völkisch nationalism.^[72] The Nazis supported such revolutionary Völkisch nationalist policies^[71] and they claimed that their ideology was influenced by the leadership and policies of German ChancellorOtto von Bismarck, the founder of the German Empire.^[73] The Nazis declared that they were dedicated to continuing the process of creating a unified German nation state that Bismarck had begun and desired to achieve.^[74] While Hitler was supportive of Bismarck's creation of the German Empire, he was critical of Bismarck's moderate domestic policies.^[75] On the issue of Bismarck's support of a Kleindeutschland ('Lesser Germany', excluding Austria) versus the Pan-German Großdeutschland ('Greater Germany') which the Nazis advocated, Hitler stated that Bismarck's attainment of Kleindeutschland was the 'highest achievement' Bismarck could have achieved 'within the limits possible at that time'.^[76] In Mein Kampf (My Struggle), Hitler presented himself as a 'second Bismarck'.^[76]

During his youth in Austria, Hitler was politically influenced by Austrian Pan-Germanist proponent Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who advocated radical German nationalism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Slavic sentiment and anti-Habsburg views.^[77] From von Schönerer and his followers, Hitler adopted for the Nazi movement the Heil greeting, the Führer title and the model of absolute party leadership.^[77] Hitler was also impressed by the populist antisemitism and the anti-liberal bourgeois agitation of Karl Lueger, who as the mayor of Vienna during Hitler's time in the city used a rabble-rousing style of oratory that appealed to the wider masses.^[78] Unlike von Schönerer, Lueger was not a German nationalist and instead was a pro-Catholic Habsburg supporter and only used German nationalist notions occasionally for his own agenda.^[78] Although Hitler praised both Lueger and Schönerer, he criticized the former for not applying a racial doctrine against the Jews and Slavs.^[79]

Racial theories and antisemitism

The concept of the Aryan race, which the Nazis promoted, stems from racial theories asserting that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Iranian settlers, people of ancient India and ancient Persia.^[80] Proponents of this theory based their assertion on the fact that words in European languages and words in Indo-Iranian languages have similar pronunciations and meanings.^[80]Johann Gottfried Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections to the ancient Indians and the ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples that possessed a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science.^[80] Contemporaries of Herder used the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed to be 'high and noble' Aryan culture versus that of 'parasitic' Semitic culture.^[80]

Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining the belief that certain groups of white people were members of an Aryan 'master race' that is superior to other races and particularly superior to the Semitic race, which they associated with 'cultural sterility'.^[80]Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the purity of the Aryan race, a term which he only reserved for Germanic people.^[81][82] Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany,^[81] emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan (Germanic) and Jewish cultures.^[80]

Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious traditions, and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.^[80]Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English-born German proponent of racial theory, supported notions of Germanic supremacy and antisemitism in Germany.^[81] Chamberlain's work, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899), praised Germanic peoples for their creativity and idealism while asserting that the Germanic spirit was threatened by a 'Jewish' spirit of selfishness and materialism.^[81] Chamberlain used his thesis to promote monarchicalconservatism while denouncing democracy, liberalism and socialism.^[81] The book became popular, especially in Germany.^[81] Chamberlain stressed a nation's need to maintain its racial purity in order to prevent its degeneration and argued that racial intermingling with Jews should never be permitted.^[81] In 1923, Chamberlain met Hitler, whom he admired as a leader of the rebirth of the free spirit.^[83]Madison Grant's work The Passing of the Great Race (1916) advocated Nordicism and proposed that a eugenics program should be implemented in order to preserve the purity of the Nordic race. After reading the book, Hitler called it 'my Bible'.^[84]

In Germany, the belief that Jews were economically exploiting Germans became prominent due to the ascendancy of many wealthy Jews into prominent positions upon the unification of Germany in 1871.^[85] From 1871 to the early 20th century, German Jews were overrepresented in Germany's upper and middle classes while they were underrepresented in Germany's lower classes, particularly in the fields of agricultural and industrial labour.^[86] German Jewish financiers and bankers played a key role in fostering Germany's economic growth from 1871 to 1913 and they benefited enormously from this boom. In 1908, amongst the twenty-nine wealthiest German families with aggregate fortunes of up to 55 million marks at the time, five were Jewish and the Rothschilds were the second wealthiest German family.^[87] The predominance of Jews in Germany's banking, commerce and industry sectors during this time period was very high, even though Jews were estimated to account for only 1% of the population of Germany.^[85] The overrepresentation of Jews in these areas fueled resentment among non-Jewish Germans during periods of economic crisis.^[86] The 1873 stock market crash and the ensuing depression resulted in a spate of attacks on alleged Jewish economic dominance in Germany and antisemitism increased.^[86] During this time period, in the 1870s, German Völkisch nationalism began to adopt antisemitic and racist themes and it was also adopted by a number of radical right political movements.^[88]

Radical Antisemitism was promoted by prominent advocates of Völkisch nationalism, including Eugen Diederichs, Paul de Lagarde and Julius Langbehn.^[69] De Lagarde called the Jews a 'bacillus, the carriers of decay .. who pollute every national culture .. and destroy all faiths with their materialistic liberalism' and he called for the extermination of the Jews.^[89] Langbehn called for a war of annihilation against the Jews, and his genocidal policies were later published by the Nazis and given to soldiers on the front during World War II.^[89] One antisemitic ideologue of the period, Friedrich Lange, even used the term 'National Socialism' to describe his own anti-capitalist take on the Völkisch nationalist template.^[90]

Johann Gottlieb Fichte accused Jews in Germany of having been and inevitably of continuing to be a 'state within a state' that threatened German national unity.^[62] Fichte promoted two options in order to address this, his first one being the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine so the Jews could be impelled to leave Europe.^[91] His second option was violence against Jews and he said that the goal of the violence would be 'to cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea'.^[91]

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1912) is an antisemitic forgery created by the secret service of the Russian Empire, the Okhrana. Many antisemites believed it was real and thus it became widely popular after World War I.^[92]The Protocols claimed that there was a secret international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.^[93] Hitler had been introduced to The Protocols by Alfred Rosenberg and from 1920 onwards he focused his attacks by claiming that Judaism and Marxism were directly connected, that Jews and Bolsheviks were one and the same and that Marxism was a Jewish ideology-this became known as 'Jewish Bolshevism'.^[94] Hitler believed that The Protocols were authentic.^[95]

Prior to the Nazi ascension to power, Hitler often blamed moral degradation on Rassenschande ('racial defilement'), a way to assure his followers of his continuing antisemitism, which had been toned down for popular consumption.^[96] Prior to the induction of the Nuremberg Race Laws in 1935 by the Nazis, many German nationalists such as Roland Freisler strongly supported laws to ban Rassenschande between Aryans and Jews as racial treason.^[96] Even before the laws were officially passed, the Nazis banned sexual relations and marriages between party members and Jews.^[97] Party members found guilty of Rassenschande were severely punished; some party members were even sentenced to death.^[98]

The Nazis claimed that Bismarck was unable to complete German national unification because Jews had infiltrated the German parliament and they claimed that their abolition of parliament had ended this obstacle to unification.^[73] Using the stab-in-the-back myth, the Nazis accused Jews—and other populations who it considered non-German—of possessing extra-national loyalties, thereby exacerbating German antisemitism about the Judenfrage (the Jewish Question), the far-right political canard which was popular when the ethnic Völkisch movement and its politics of Romantic nationalism for establishing a Großdeutschland was strong.^[99][100]

Nazism's racial policy positions may have developed from the views of important biologists of the 19th century, including French biologistJean-Baptiste Lamarck, through Ernst Haeckel's idealist version of Lamarckism and the father of genetics, German botanistGregor Mendel.^[101] However, Haeckel's works were later condemned and banned from bookshops and libraries by the Nazis as inappropriate for 'National-Socialist formation and education in the Third Reich'. This may have been because of his 'monist' atheistic, materialist philosophy, which the Nazis disliked.^[102] Unlike Darwinian theory, Lamarckian theory officially ranked races in a hierarchy of evolution from apes while Darwinian theory did not grade races in a hierarchy of higher or lower evolution from apes, but simply stated that all humans as a whole had progressed in their evolution from apes.^[101] Many Lamarckians viewed 'lower' races as having been exposed to debilitating conditions for too long for any significant 'improvement' of their condition to take place in the near future.^[103] Haeckel utilised Lamarckian theory to describe the existence of interracial struggle and put races on a hierarchy of evolution, ranging from wholly human to subhuman.^[101]

Mendelian inheritance, or Mendelism, was supported by the Nazis, as well as by mainstream eugenicists of the time. The Mendelian theory of inheritance declared that genetic traits and attributes were passed from one generation to another.^[104] Eugenicists used Mendelian inheritance theory to demonstrate the transfer of biological illness and impairments from parents to children, including mental disability, whereas others also utilised Mendelian theory to demonstrate the inheritance of social traits, with racialists claiming a racial nature behind certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behaviour.^[105]

Use of the American racist model

Hitler and other Nazi legal theorists were inspired by America's institutional racism and saw it as the model to follow. In particular, they saw it as a model for the expansion of territory and the elimination of indigenous inhabitants therefrom, for laws denying full citizenship for blacks, which they wanted to implement also against Jews, and for racist immigration laws banning some races. In 'Mein Kampf' Hitler extolled America as the only contemporary example of a country with racist ('völkisch') citizenship statutes in the 1920s, and Nazi lawyers made use of the American models in crafting laws for Nazi Germany.^[106] U.S. citizenship laws and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law.^[106]

Response to World War I and Italian Fascism

During World War I, German sociologist Johann Plenge spoke of the rise of a 'National Socialism' in Germany within what he termed the 'ideas of 1914' that were a declaration of war against the 'ideas of 1789' (the French Revolution).^[107] According to Plenge, the 'ideas of 1789' which included the rights of man, democracy, individualism and liberalism were being rejected in favour of 'the ideas of 1914' which included the 'German values' of duty, discipline, law and order.^[107] Plenge believed that ethnic solidarity (Volksgemeinschaft) would replace class division and that 'racial comrades' would unite to create a socialist society in the struggle of 'proletarian' Germany against 'capitalist' Britain.^[107] He believed that the 'Spirit of 1914' manifested itself in the concept of the 'People's League of National Socialism'.^[108] This National Socialism was a form of state socialism that rejected the 'idea of boundless freedom' and promoted an economy that would serve the whole of Germany under the leadership of the state.^[108] This National Socialism was opposed to capitalism due to the components that were against 'the national interest' of Germany, but insisted that National Socialism would strive for greater efficiency in the economy.^[108] Plenge advocated an authoritarian, rational ruling elite to develop National Socialism through a hierarchical technocratic state,^[109] and his ideas were part of the basis of Nazism.^[107]

Oswald Spengler, a German cultural philosopher, was a major influence on Nazism, although after 1933 he became alienated from Nazism and was later condemned by the Nazis for criticising Adolf Hitler.^[110] Spengler's conception of national socialism and a number of his political views were shared by the Nazis and the Conservative Revolutionary movement.^[111] Spengler's views were also popular amongst Italian Fascists, including Benito Mussolini.^[112]

Spengler's book The Decline of the West (1918), written during the final months of World War I, addressed the supposed decadence of modern European civilization, which he claimed was caused by atomising and irreligious individualisation and cosmopolitanism.^[110] Spengler's major thesis was that a law of historical development of cultures existed involving a cycle of birth, maturity, ageing and death when it reaches its final form of civilisation.^[110] Upon reaching the point of civilisation, a culture will lose its creative capacity and succumb to decadence until the emergence of 'barbarians' creates a new epoch.^[110] Spengler considered the Western world as having succumbed to decadence of intellect, money, cosmopolitan urban life, irreligious life, atomisedindividualisation and believed that it was at the end of its biological and 'spiritual' fertility.^[110] He believed that the 'young' German nation as an imperial power would inherit the legacy of Ancient Rome, lead a restoration of value in 'blood' and instinct, while the ideals of rationalism would be revealed as absurd.^[110]

Spengler's notions of 'Prussian socialism' as described in his book Preussentum und Sozialismus ('Prussiandom and Socialism', 1919), influenced Nazism and the Conservative Revolutionary movement.^[111] Spengler wrote: 'The meaning of socialism is that life is controlled not by the opposition between rich and poor, but by the rank that achievement and talent bestow. That is our freedom, freedom from the economic despotism of the individual'.^[111] Spengler adopted the anti-English ideas addressed by Plenge and Sombart during World War I that condemned English liberalism and English parliamentarianism while advocating a national socialism that was free from Marxism and that would connect the individual to the state through corporatist organisation.^[110] Spengler claimed that socialistic Prussian characteristics existed across Germany, including creativity, discipline, concern for the greater good, productivity and self-sacrifice.^[113] He prescribed war as a necessity by saying: 'War is the eternal form of higher human existence and states exist for war: they are the expression of the will to war'.^[114]

Spengler's definition of socialism did not advocate a change to property relations.^[111] He denounced Marxism for seeking to train the proletariat to 'expropriate the expropriator', the capitalist and then to let them live a life of leisure on this expropriation.^[116] He claimed that 'Marxism is the capitalism of the working class' and not true socialism.^[116] According to Spengler, true socialism would be in the form of corporatism, stating that 'local corporate bodies organised according to the importance of each occupation to the people as a whole; higher representation in stages up to a supreme council of the state; mandates revocable at any time; no organised parties, no professional politicians, no periodic elections'.^[117]

Wilhelm Stapel, an antisemitic German intellectual, utilised Spengler's thesis on the cultural confrontation between Jews as whom Spengler described as a Magian people versus Europeans as a Faustian people.^[118] Stapel described Jews as a landless nomadic people in pursuit of an international culture whereby they can integrate into Western civilisation.^[118] As such, Stapel claims that Jews have been attracted to 'international' versions of socialism, pacifism or capitalism because as a landless people the Jews have transgressed various national cultural boundaries.^[118]

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck was initially the dominant figure of the Conservative Revolutionaries influenced Nazism.^[119] He rejected reactionary conservatism while proposing a new state that he coined the 'Third Reich', which would unite all classes under authoritarian rule.^[120] Van den Bruck advocated a combination of the nationalism of the right and the socialism of the left.^[121]

Fascism was a major influence on Nazism. The seizure of power by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome in 1922 drew admiration by Hitler, who less than a month later had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists.^[122] Hitler presented the Nazis as a form of German fascism.^[123][124] In November 1923, the Nazis attempted a 'March on Berlin' modelled after the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich.^[125]

Hitler spoke of Nazism being indebted to the success of Fascism's rise to power in Italy.^[126] In a private conversation in 1941, Hitler said that 'the brown shirt would probably not have existed without the black shirt', the 'brown shirt' referring to the Nazi militia and the 'black shirt' referring to the Fascist militia.^[126]Quick heal renewal code free download. He also said in regards to the 1920s: 'If Mussolini had been outdistanced by Marxism, I don't know whether we could have succeeded in holding out. At that period National Socialism was a very fragile growth'.^[126]

Other Nazis—especially those at the time associated with the party's more radical wing such as Gregor Strasser, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler—rejected Italian Fascism, accusing it of being too conservative or capitalist.^[127]Alfred Rosenberg condemned Italian Fascism for being racially confused and having influences from philosemitism.^[128] Strasser criticised the policy of Führerprinzip as being created by Mussolini and considered its presence in Nazism as a foreign imported idea.^[129] Throughout the relationship between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, a number of lower-ranking Nazis scornfully viewed fascism as a conservative movement that lacked a full revolutionary potential.^[129]

Ideology

Nationalism and racialism

Nazism emphasized German nationalism, including both irredentism and expansionism. Nazism held racial theories based upon a belief in the existence of an Aryan master race that was superior to all other races. The Nazis emphasised the existence of racial conflict between the Aryan race and others—particularly Jews, whom the Nazis viewed as a mixed race that had infiltrated multiple societies and was responsible for exploitation and repression of the Aryan race. The Nazis also categorised Slavs as Untermensch (sub-human).^[130]

Irredentism and expansionism

The German Nazi Party supported German irredentist claims to Austria, Alsace-Lorraine, the region now known as the Czech Republic and the territory known since 1919 as the Polish Corridor. A major policy of the German Nazi Party was Lebensraum ('living space') for the German nation based on claims that Germany after World War I was facing an overpopulation crisis and that expansion was needed to end the country's overpopulation within existing confined territory, and provide resources necessary to its people's well-being.^[131] Since the 1920s, the Nazi Party publicly promoted the expansion of Germany into territories held by the Soviet Union.^[132]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated that Lebensraum would be acquired in Eastern Europe, especially Russia.^[133] In his early years as the Nazi leader, Hitler had claimed that he would be willing to accept friendly relations with Russia on the tactical condition that Russia agree to return to the borders established by the German–Russian peace agreement of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed by Vladimir Lenin of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic in 1918 which gave large territories held by Russia to German control in exchange for peace.^[132] In 1921, Hitler had commended the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as opening the possibility for restoration of relations between Germany and Russia by saying:

Through the peace with Russia the sustenance of Germany as well as the provision of work were to have been secured by the acquisition of land and soil, by access to raw materials, and by friendly relations between the two lands.

From 1921 to 1922, Hitler evoked rhetoric of both the achievement of Lebensraum involving the acceptance of a territorially reduced Russia as well as supporting Russian nationals in overthrowing the Bolshevik government and establishing a new Russian government.^[132] Hitler's attitudes changed by the end of 1922, in which he then supported an alliance of Germany with Britain to destroy Russia.^[132] Hitler later declared how far he intended to expand Germany into Russia:

Asia, what a disquieting reservoir of men! The safety of Europe will not be assured until we have driven Asia back behind the Urals. No organized Russian state must be allowed to exist west of that line.

Policy for Lebensraum planned mass expansion of Germany's borders to eastwards of the Ural Mountains.^[134][135] Hitler planned for the 'surplus' Russian population living west of the Urals to be deported to the east of the Urals.^[136]

Racial theories

In its racial categorization, Nazism viewed what it called the Aryan race as the master race of the world—a race that was superior to all other races.^[137] It viewed Aryans as being in racial conflict with a mixed race people, the Jews, whom the Nazis identified as a dangerous enemy of the Aryans. It also viewed a number of other peoples as dangerous to the well-being of the Aryan race. In order to preserve the perceived racial purity of the Aryan race, a set of race laws was introduced in 1935 which came to be known as the Nuremberg Laws. At first these laws only prevented sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, but they were later extended to the 'Gypsies, Negroes, and their bastard offspring', who were described by the Nazis as people of 'alien blood'.^[138][139] Such relations between Aryans (cf. Aryan certificate) and non-Aryans were now punishable under the race laws as Rassenschande or 'race defilement'.^[138] After the war began, the race defilement law was extended to include all foreigners (non-Germans).^[140] At the bottom of the racial scale of non-Aryans were Jews, Romanis, Slavs^[141] and blacks.^[142] To maintain the 'purity and strength' of the Aryan race, the Nazis eventually sought to exterminate Jews, Romani, Slavs and the physically and mentally disabled.^[141][143] Other groups deemed 'degenerate' and 'asocial' who were not targeted for extermination, but were subjected to exclusionary treatment by the Nazi state, included homosexuals, blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.^[143] One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel or enslave most or all Slavs from Central and Eastern Europe in order to acquire living space for German settlers.^[144]

A Nazi era school textbook for German students entitled Heredity and Racial Biology for Students written by Jakob Graf described to students the Nazi conception of the Aryan race in a section titled 'The Aryan: The Creative Force in Human History'.^[137] Graf claimed that the original Aryans developed from Nordic peoples who invaded ancient India and launched the initial development of Aryan culture there that later spread to ancient Persia and he claimed that the Aryan presence in Persia was what was responsible for its development into an empire.^[137] He claimed that ancient Greek culture was developed by Nordic peoples due to paintings of the time which showed Greeks who were tall, light-skinned, light-eyed, blond-haired people.^[137] He said that the Roman Empire was developed by the Italics who were related to the Celts who were also a Nordic people.^[137] He believed that the vanishing of the Nordic component of the populations in Greece and Rome led to their downfall.^[137] The Renaissance was claimed to have developed in the Western Roman Empire because of the Germanic invasions that brought new Nordic blood to the Empire's lands, such as the presence of Nordic blood in the Lombards (referred to as Longobards in the book); that remnants of the western Goths were responsible for the creation of the Spanish Empire; and that the heritage of the Franks, Goths and Germanic peoples in France was what was responsible for its rise as a major power.^[137] He claimed that the rise of the Russian Empire was due to its leadership by people of Norman descent.^[137] He described the rise of Anglo-Saxon societies in North America, South Africa and Australia as being the result of the Nordic heritage of Anglo-Saxons.^[137] He concluded these points by saying: 'Everywhere Nordic creative power has built mighty empires with high-minded ideas, and to this very day Aryan languages and cultural values are spread over a large part of the world, though the creative Nordic blood has long since vanished in many places'.^[137]

In Nazi Germany, the idea of creating a master race resulted in efforts to 'purify' the Deutsche Volk through eugenics and its culmination was the compulsory sterilization or the involuntary euthanasia of physically or mentally disabled people. After World War II, the euthanasia programme was named Action T4.^[145] The ideological justification for euthanasia was Hitler's view of Sparta (11th century – 195 BC) as the original Völkisch state and he praised Sparta's dispassionate destruction of congenitally deformed infants in order to maintain racial purity.^[146][147] Some non-Aryans enlisted in Nazi organisations like the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht, including Germans of African descent^[148] and Jewish descent.^[149] The Nazis began to implement 'racial hygiene' policies as soon as they came to power. The July 1933 'Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring' prescribed compulsory sterilization for people with a range of conditions which were thought to be hereditary, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy, Huntington's chorea and 'imbecility'. Sterilization was also mandated for chronic alcoholism and other forms of social deviance.^[150] An estimated 360,000 people were sterilised under this law between 1933 and 1939. Although some Nazis suggested that the programme should be extended to people with physical disabilities, such ideas had to be expressed carefully, given the fact that some Nazis had physical disabilities, one example being one of the most powerful figures of the regime, Joseph Goebbels, who had a deformed right leg.^[151]

Nazi racial theorist Hans F. K. Günther argued that European peoples were divided into five races: Nordic, Mediterranean, Dinaric, Alpine and East Baltic.^[3] Günther applied a Nordicist conception in order to justify his belief that Nordics were the highest in the racial hierarchy.^[3] In his book Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (1922) ('Racial Science of the German People'), Günther recognised Germans as being composed of all five races, but emphasized the strong Nordic heritage among them.^[152] Hitler read Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, which influenced his racial policy.^[153] Gunther believed that Slavs belonged to an 'Eastern race' and he warned against Germans mixing with them.^[154] The Nazis described Jews as being a racially mixed group of primarily Near Eastern and Oriental racial types.^[155] Because such racial groups were concentrated outside Europe, the Nazis claimed that Jews were 'racially alien' to all European peoples and that they did not have deep racial roots in Europe.^[155]

Günther emphasized Jews' Near Eastern racial heritage.^[156] Günther identified the mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in the 8th century as creating the two major branches of the Jewish people, those of primarily Near Eastern racial heritage became the Ashkenazi Jews (that he called Eastern Jews) while those of primarily Oriental racial heritage became the Sephardi Jews (that he called Southern Jews).^[157] Günther claimed that the Near Eastern type was composed of commercially spirited and artful traders, that the type held strong psychological manipulation skills which aided them in trade.^[156] He claimed that the Near Eastern race had been 'bred not so much for the conquest and exploitation of nature as it had been for the conquest and exploitation of people'.^[156] Günther believed that European peoples had a racially motivated aversion to peoples of Near Eastern racial origin and their traits, and as evidence of this he showed multiple examples of depictions of satanic figures with Near Eastern physiognomies in European art.^[158]

Hitler's conception of the Aryan Herrenvolk ('Aryan master race') excluded the vast majority of Slavs from central and eastern Europe (i.e. Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, etc.). They were regarded as a race of men not inclined to a higher form of civilization, which was under an instinctive force that reverted them back to nature. The Nazis also regarded the Slavs as having dangerous Jewish and Asiatic, meaning Mongol, influences.^[159] Because of this, the Nazis declared Slavs to be Untermenschen ('subhumans').^[160] Nazi anthropologists attempted to scientifically prove the historical admixture of the Slavs who lived further East and leading Nazi racial theorist Hans Günther regarded the Slavs as being primarily Nordic centuries ago but he believed that they had mixed with non-Nordic types over time.^[161] Exceptions were made for a small percentage of Slavs who the Nazis saw as descended from German settlers and therefore fit to be Germanised and considered part of the Aryan master race.^[162] Hitler described Slavs as 'a mass of born slaves who feel the need for a master'.^[163] The Nazi notion of Slavs as inferior served as a legitimization of their desire to create Lebensraum for Germans and other Germanic people in eastern Europe, where millions of Germans and other Germanic settlers would be moved into once those territories were conquered, while the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed or enslaved.^[164] Nazi Germany's policy changed towards Slavs in response to military manpower shortages, forced it to allow Slavs to serve in its armed forces within the occupied territories in spite of the fact that they were considered 'subhuman'.^[165]

Hitler declared that racial conflict against Jews was necessary in order to save Germany from suffering under them and he dismissed concerns that the conflict with them was inhumane and unjust:

We may be inhumane, but if we rescue Germany we have achieved the greatest deed in the world. We may work injustice, but if we rescue Germany then we have removed the greatest injustice in the world. We may be immoral, but if our people is rescued we have opened the way for morality.^[166]

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels frequently employed antisemitic rhetoric to underline this view: 'The Jew is the enemy and the destroyer of the purity of blood, the conscious destroyer of our race.'^[167]

Social class

National Socialist politics was based on competition and struggle as its organizing principle, and the Nazis believed that 'human life consisted of eternal struggle and competition and derived its meaning from struggle and competition.'^[168] The Nazis saw this eternal struggle in military terms, and advocated a society organized like an army in order to achieve success. They promoted the idea of a national-racial 'people's community' (Volksgemeinschaft) in order to accomplish 'the efficient prosecution of the struggle against other peoples and states.'^[169] Like an army, the Volksgemeinschaft was meant to consist of a hierarchy of ranks or classes of people, some commanding and others obeying, all working together for a common goal.^[169] This concept was rooted in the writings of 19th century völkisch authors who glorified medieval German society, viewing it as a 'community rooted in the land and bound together by custom and tradition,' in which there was neither class conflict nor selfish individualism.^[170]

Nazism rejected the Marxist concept of class conflict, and it praised both German capitalists and German workers as essential to the Volksgemeinschaft. In the Volksgemeinschaft, social classes would continue to exist, but there would be no class conflict between them.^[171] Hitler said that 'the capitalists have worked their way to the top through their capacity, and as the basis of this selection, which again only proves their higher race, they have a right to lead.'^[172] German business leaders co-operated with the Nazis during their rise to power and received substantial benefits from the Nazi state after it was established, including high profits and state-sanctioned monopolies and cartels.^[173] Large celebrations and symbolism were used extensively to encourage those engaged in physical labour on behalf of Germany, with leading National Socialists often praising the 'honour of labour', which fostered a sense of community (Gemeinschaft) for the German people and promoted solidarity towards the Nazi cause.^[174] To win workers away from Marxism, Nazi propaganda sometimes presented its expansionist foreign policy goals as a 'class struggle between nations.'^[172] Bonfires were made of school children's differently coloured caps as symbolic of the unity of different social classes.^[175]

In 1922, Hitler discredited other nationalist and racialist political parties as disconnected from the mass populace, especially lower and working-class young people:

The racialists were not capable of drawing the practical conclusions from correct theoretical judgements, especially in the Jewish Question. In this way, the German racialist movement developed a similar pattern to that of the 1880s and 1890s. As in those days, its leadership gradually fell into the hands of highly honourable, but fantastically naïve men of learning, professors, district counsellors, schoolmasters, and lawyers—in short a bourgeois, idealistic, and refined class. It lacked the warm breath of the nation's youthful vigour.^[176]

Nevertheless, the Nazi Party's voter base consisted mainly of farmers and the middle class, including groups such as Weimar government officials, school teachers, doctors, clerks, self-employed businessmen, salesmen, retired officers, engineers, and students.^[177] Their demands included lower taxes, higher prices for food, restrictions on department stores and consumer co-operatives, and reductions in social services and wages.^[178] The need to maintain the support of these groups made it difficult for the Nazis to appeal to the working class, since the working class often had opposite demands.^[178]

From 1928 onward, the Nazi Party's growth into a large national political movement was dependent on middle class support, and on the public perception that it 'promised to side with the middle classes and to confront the economic and political power of the working class.' ^[179] The financial collapse of the white collar middle-class of the 1920s figures much in their strong support of Nazism.^[180] Although the Nazis continued to make appeals to 'the German worker,' historian Timothy Mason concludes that 'Hitler had nothing but slogans to offer the working class.'^[181]

Sex and gender

Nazi ideology advocated excluding women from political involvement and confining them to the spheres of 'Kinder, Küche, Kirche' (Children, Kitchen, Church).^[182] Many women enthusiastically supported the regime, but formed their own internal hierarchies.^[183] Hitler's own opinion on the matter of women in Nazi Germany was that while other eras of German history had experienced the development and liberation of the female mind, the National Socialist goal was essentially singular in that it wished for them to produce a child.^[184] Based on this theme, Hitler once remarked about women that 'with every child that she brings into the world, she fights her battle for the nation. The man stands up for the Volk, exactly as the woman stands up for the family'.^[185] Proto-natalist programs in Nazi Germany offered favourable loans and grants to newlyweds and encouraged them to give birth to offspring by providing them with additional incentives.^[186]Contraception was discouraged for racially valuable women in Nazi Germany and abortion was forbidden by strict legal mandates, including prison sentences for women who sought them as well as prison sentences for doctors who performed them, whereas abortion for racially 'undesirable' persons was encouraged.^[187][188]

While unmarried until the very end of the regime, Hitler often made excuses about his busy life hindering any chance for marriage.^[189] Among National Socialist ideologues, marriage was valued not for moral considerations but because it provided an optimal breeding environment. Reichsführer-SSHeinrich Himmler reportedly told a confidant that when he established the Lebensborn program, an organisation that would dramatically increase the birth rate of 'Aryan' children through extramarital relations between women classified as racially pure and their male equals, he had only the purest male 'conception assistants' in mind.^[190]

Since the Nazis extended the Rassenschande ('race defilement') law to all foreigners at the beginning of the war,^[140] pamphlets were issued to German women which ordered them to avoid sexual relations with foreign workers who were brought to Germany and the pamphlets also ordered German women to view these same foreign workers as a danger to their blood.^[191] Although the law was applicable to both genders, German women were punished more severely for having sexual relations with foreign forced labourers in Germany.^[192] The Nazis issued the Polish decrees on 8 March 1940 which contained regulations concerning the Polish forced labourers (Zivilarbeiter) who were brought to Germany during World War II. One of the regulations stated that any Pole 'who has sexual relations with a German man or woman, or approaches them in any other improper manner, will be punished by death'.^[193]

After the decrees were enacted, Himmler stated:

Fellow Germans who engage in sexual relations with male or female civil workers of the Polish nationality, commit other immoral acts or engage in love affairs shall be arrested immediately.^[194]

The Nazis later issued similar regulations against the Eastern Workers (Ost-Arbeiters), including the imposition of the death penalty if they engaged in sexual relations with German persons.^[195] Heydrich issued a decree on 20 February 1942 which declared that sexual intercourse between a German woman and a Russian worker or prisoner of war would result in the Russian man being punished with the death penalty.^[196] Another decree issued by Himmler on 7 December 1942 stated that any 'unauthorised sexual intercourse' would result in the death penalty.^[197] Because the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour did not permit capital punishment for race defilement, special courts were convened in order to allow the death penalty to be imposed in some cases.^[198] German women accused of race defilement were marched through the streets with their head shaven and placards detailing their crimes were placed around their necks^[199] and those convicted of race defilement were sent to concentration camps.^[191] When Himmler reportedly asked Hitler what the punishment should be for German girls and German women who were found guilty of race defilement with prisoners of war (POWs), he ordered that 'every POW who has relations with a German girl or a German would be shot' and the German woman should be publicly humiliated by 'having her hair shorn and being sent to a concentration camp'.^[200]

The League of German Girls was particularly regarded as instructing girls to avoid race defilement, which was treated with particular importance for young females.^[201]

Opposition to homosexuality

After the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler promoted Himmler and the SS, who then zealously suppressed homosexuality by saying: 'We must exterminate these people root and branch .. the homosexual must be eliminated'.^[202] In 1936, Himmler established the 'Reichszentrale zur Bekämpfung der Homosexualität und Abtreibung' ('Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion').^[203] The Nazi regime incarcerated some 100,000 homosexuals during the 1930s.^[204] As concentration camp prisoners, homosexual men were forced to wear pink triangle badges.^[205][206] Nazi ideology still viewed German men who were gay as a part of the Aryan master race, but the Nazi regime attempted to force them into sexual and social conformity. Homosexuals were viewed as failing in their duty to procreate and reproduce for the Aryan nation. Gay men who would not change or feign a change in their sexual orientation were sent to concentration camps under the 'Extermination Through Work' campaign.^[207]

Religion

The Nazi Party Programme of 1920 guaranteed freedom for all religious denominations which were not hostile to the State and it also endorsed Positive Christianity in order to combat 'the Jewish-materialist spirit'.^[208] Positive Christianity was a modified version of Christianity which emphasized racial purity and nationalism.^[209] The Nazis were aided by theologians such as Ernst Bergmann. In his work Die 25 Thesen der Deutschreligion (Twenty-five Points of the German Religion), Bergmann held the view that the Old Testament of the Bible was inaccurate along with portions of the New Testament, claimed that Jesus was not a Jew but was instead of Aryan origin and he also claimed that Adolf Hitler was the new messiah.^[209]

Hitler denounced the Old Testament as 'Satan's Bible' and utilising components of the New Testament he attempted to prove that Jesus was both an Aryan and an antisemite by citing passages such as John 8:44 where he noted that Jesus is yelling at 'the Jews', as well as saying to them 'your father is the devil' and the Cleansing of the Temple, which describes Jesus' whipping of the 'Children of the Devil'.^[210] Hitler claimed that the New Testament included distortions by Paul the Apostle, who Hitler described as a 'mass-murderer turned saint'.^[210] In their propaganda, the Nazis utilised the writings of Martin Luther, the ProtestantReformer. They publicly displayed an original edition of Luther's On the Jews and their Lies during the annual Nuremberg rallies.^[211][212] The Nazis endorsed the pro-Nazi Protestant German Christians organization.

The Nazis were initially very hostile to Catholics because most Catholics supported the German Centre Party. Catholics opposed the Nazis' promotion of compulsory sterilization of those whom they deemed inferior and the Catholic Church forbade its members to vote for the Nazis. In 1933, extensive Nazi violence occurred against Catholics due to their association with the Centre Party and their opposition to the Nazi regime's sterilization laws.^[213] The Nazis demanded that Catholics declare their loyalty to the German state.^[214] In their propaganda, the Nazis used elements of Germany's Catholic history, in particular the German Catholic Teutonic Knights and their campaigns in Eastern Europe. The Nazis identified them as 'sentinels' in the East against 'Slavic chaos', though beyond that symbolism, the influence of the Teutonic Knights on Nazism was limited.^[215] Hitler also admitted that the Nazis' night rallies were inspired by the Catholic rituals which he had witnessed during his Catholic upbringing.^[216] The Nazis did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church and they endorsed the creation of the pro-Nazi Catholic Kreuz und Adler, an organization which advocated a form of national Catholicism that would reconcile the Catholic Church's beliefs with Nazism.^[214] On 20 July 1933, a concordat (Reichskonkordat) was signed between Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, which in exchange for acceptance of the Catholic Church in Germany required German Catholics to be loyal to the German state. The Catholic Church then ended its ban on members supporting the Nazi Party.^[214]

Historian Michael Burleigh claims that Nazism used Christianity for political purposes, but such use required that 'fundamental tenets were stripped out, but the remaining diffuse religious emotionality had its uses'.^[216] Burleigh claims that Nazism's conception of spirituality was 'self-consciously pagan and primitive'.^[216] However, historian Roger Griffin rejects the claim that Nazism was primarily pagan, noting that although there were some influential neo-paganists in the Nazi Party, such as Heinrich Himmler and Alfred Rosenberg, they represented a minority and their views did not influence Nazi ideology beyond its use for symbolism. It is noted that Hitler denounced Germanic paganism in Mein Kampf and condemned Rosenberg's and Himmler's paganism as 'nonsense'.^[217]

Economics

Generally speaking, Nazi theorists and politicians blamed Germany's previous economic failures on political causes like the influence of Marxism on the workforce, the sinister and exploitative machinations of what they called international Jewry and the vindictiveness of the western political leaders' war reparation demands. Instead of traditional economic incentives, the Nazis offered solutions of a political nature, such as the elimination of organised trade unions, rearmament (in contravention of the Versailles Treaty) and biological politics.^[218] Various work programs designed to establish full-employment for the German population were instituted once the Nazis seized full national power. Hitler encouraged nationally supported projects like the construction of the Autobahn highway system, the introduction of an affordable people's car (Volkswagen) and later the Nazis bolstered the economy through the business and employment generated by military rearmament.^[219] The Nazis benefited early in the regime's existence from the first post–Depression economic upswing, and this combined with their public works projects, job-procurement program and subsidised home repair program reduced unemployment by as much as 40 percent in one year. This development tempered the unfavourable psychological climate caused by the earlier economic crisis and encouraged Germans to march in step with the regime.^[220]

Upon being appointed Chancellor in 1933, Hitler promised measures to increase employment, protect the German currency, and promote recovery from the Great Depression. These included an agrarian settlement program, labor service, and a guarantee to maintain health care and pensions.^[221] But above all, his priority was rearmament, and the buildup of the German military in preparation for an eventual war to conquer Lebensraum in the East.^[222] Thus, at the beginning of his rule, Hitler said that “the future of Germany depends exclusively and only on the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht. All other tasks must cede precedence to the task of rearmament.”^[222] This policy was implemented immediately, with military expenditures quickly growing far larger than the civilian work-creation programs. As early as June 1933, military spending for the year was budgeted to be three times larger than the spending on all civilian work-creation measures in 1932 and 1933 combined.^[223] Nazi Germany increased its military spending faster than any other state in peacetime, with the share of military spending rising from 1 percent to 10 percent of national income in the first two years of the regime alone.^[224] Eventually, by 1944, it reached as high as 75 percent.^[225]

In spite of their rhetoric condemning big business prior to their rise to power, the Nazis quickly entered into a partnership with German business from as early as February 1933. That month, after being appointed Chancellor but before gaining dictatorial powers, Hitler made a personal appeal to German business leaders to help fund the Nazi Party for the crucial months that were to follow. He argued that they should support him in establishing a dictatorship because 'private enterprise cannot be maintained in the age of democracy' and because democracy would allegedly lead to communism.^[56] He promised to destroy the German left and the trade unions, without any mention of anti-Jewish policies or foreign conquests.^[226] In the following weeks, the Nazi Party received contributions from seventeen different business groups, with the largest coming from IG Farben and Deutsche Bank.^[226] Historian Adam Tooze writes that the leaders of German business were therefore 'willing partners in the destruction of political pluralism in Germany.'^[54] In exchange, owners and managers of German businesses were granted unprecedented powers to control their workforce, collective bargaining was abolished and wages were frozen at a relatively low level.^[227] Business profits also rose very rapidly, as did corporate investment.^[228] In addition, the Nazis privatised public properties and public services, but at the same time they increased economic state control through regulations.^[229] Hitler believed that private ownership was useful in that it encouraged creative competition and technical innovation, but insisted that it had to conform to national interests and be 'productive' rather than 'parasitical'.^[230] Private property rights were conditional upon following the economic priorities set by the Nazi leadership, with high profits as a reward for firms who followed them and the threat of nationalization being used against those who did not.^[231] Under Nazi economics, free competition and self-regulating markets diminished, but Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him retain business competition and private property as economic engines.^[232][233]

Agrarian policies were also important to the Nazis since they corresponded not just to the economy but to their geopolitical conception of Lebensraum as well. For Hitler, the acquisition of land and soil was requisite in moulding the German economy.^[234] To tie farmers to their land, selling agricultural land was prohibited.^[235] Farm ownership remained private, but business monopoly rights were granted to marketing boards to control production and prices with a quota system.^[236] The 'Hereditary Farm Law of 1933' established a cartel structure under a government body known as the Reichsnährstand (RNST) which determined 'everything from what seeds and fertilizers were used to how land was inherited'.^[237]

The Nazis were hostile to the idea of social welfare in principle, upholding instead the social Darwinist concept that the weak and feeble should perish.^[238] They condemned the welfare system of the Weimar Republic as well as private charity, accusing them of supporting people regarded as racially inferior and weak, who should have been weeded out in the process of natural selection.^[239] Nevertheless, faced with the mass unemployment and poverty of the Great Depression, the Nazis found it necessary to set up charitable institutions to help racially-pure Germans in order to maintain popular support, while arguing that this represented 'racial self-help' and not indiscriminate charity or universal social welfare.^[240] Thus, Nazi programs such as the Winter Relief of the German People and the broader National Socialist People's Welfare (NSV) were organized as quasi-private institutions, officially relying on private donations from Germans to help others of their race - although in practice those who refused to donate could face severe consequences.^[241] Unlike the social welfare institutions of the Weimar Republic and the Christian charities, the NSV distributed assistance on explicitly racial grounds. It provided support only to those who were 'racially sound, capable of and willing to work, politically reliable, and willing and able to reproduce.' Non-Aryans were excluded, as well as the 'work-shy', 'asocials' and the 'hereditarily ill.'^[242] Successful efforts were made to get middle-class women involved in social work assisting large families,^[175] and the Winter Relief campaigns acted as a ritual to generate public sympathy.^[243]

Hitler primarily viewed the German economy as an instrument of power and believed the economy was not about creating wealth and technical progress so as to improve the quality of life for a nation's citizenry, but rather that economic success was paramount for providing the means and material foundations necessary for military conquest.^[244] While economic progress generated by National Socialist programs had its role in appeasing the German people, the Nazis and Hitler in particular did not believe that economic solutions alone were sufficient to thrust Germany onto the stage as a world power. The Nazis thus sought to secure a general economic revival accompanied by massive military spending for rearmament, especially later through the implementation of the Four Year Plan, which consolidated their rule and firmly secured a command relationship between the German arms industry and the National Socialist government.^[245] Between 1933 and 1939, military expenditures were upwards of 82 billion Reichsmarks and represented 23 percent of Germany's gross national product as the Nazis mobilised their people and economy for war.^[246]

Anti-communism

The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility towards small business and its atheism.^[247] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.^[248] Historians Ian Kershaw and Joachim Fest argue that in post–World War I Germany, the Nazis were one of many nationalist and fascist political parties contending for the leadership of Germany's anti-communist movement.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler stated his desire to 'make war upon the Marxist principle that all men are equal.'^[249] He believed that 'the notion of equality was a sin against nature.'^[250] Nazism upheld the 'natural inequality of men,' including inequality between races and also within each race.^[52] The National Socialist state aimed to advance those individuals with special talents or intelligence, so they could rule over the masses.^[52] Nazi ideology relied on elitism and the Führerprinzip (leadership principle), arguing that elite minorities should assume leadership roles over the majority, and that the elite minority should itself be organized according to a 'hierarchy of talent,' with a single leader—the Führer—at the top.^[251] The Führerprinzip held that each member of the hierarchy owed absolute obedience to those above him and should hold absolute power over those below him.^[53]

During the 1920s, Hitler urged disparate Nazi factions to unite in opposition to Jewish Bolshevism.^[252] Hitler asserted that the 'three vices' of 'Jewish Marxism' were democracy, pacifism and internationalism.^[253] The Communist movement, the trade unions, the Social Democratic Party and the left-wing press were all considered to be Jewish-controlled and part of the 'international Jewish conspiracy' to weaken the German nation by promoting internal disunity through class struggle.^[53] The Nazis also believed that the Jews had instigated the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and that Communists had stabbed Germany in the back and caused it to lose the First World War.^[254] They further argued that modern cultural trends of the 1920s (such as jazz music and cubist art) represented 'cultural Bolshevism' and were part of a political assault aimed at the spiritual degeneration of the German Volk.^[254] Joseph Goebbels published a pamphlet titled The Nazi-Sozi which gave brief points of how National Socialism differed from Marxism.^[255] In 1930, Hitler said: 'Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not'.^[256]

The Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was the largest Communist Party in the world outside of the Soviet Union, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933.^[257] In the 1920s and early 30s, Communists and Nazis often fought each other directly in street violence, with the Nazi paramilitary organizations being opposed by the Communist Red Front and Anti-Fascist Action. After the beginning of the Great Depression, both Communists and Nazis saw their share of the vote increase. However, while the Nazis were willing to form alliances with other parties of the right, the Communists refused to form an alliance with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the largest party of the left.^[258] After the Nazis came to power, they quickly banned the Communist Party under the allegation that it was preparing for revolution and that it had caused the Reichstag fire.^[259] Four thousand KPD officials were arrested in February 1933, and by the end of the year 130,000 communists had been sent to concentration camps.^[260]

During the late 1930s and the 1940s, anti-communist regimes and groups that supported Nazism included the Falange in Spain, the Vichy regime and the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne (1st French) in France and the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley.^[261]

Anti-capitalism

The Nazis argued that free marketcapitalism damages nations due to international finance and the worldwide economic dominance of disloyal big business, which they considered to be the product of Jewish influences.^[247] Nazi propaganda posters in working class districts emphasised anti-capitalism, such as one that said: 'The maintenance of a rotten industrial system has nothing to do with nationalism. I can love Germany and hate capitalism'.^[262]

Both in public and in private, Hitler expressed disdain for capitalism, arguing that it holds nations ransom in the interests of a parasitic cosmopolitanrentier class.^[263] He opposed free market capitalism because it 'could not be trusted to put national interests first,' and he desired an economy that would direct resources 'in ways that matched the many national goals of the regime,' such as the buildup of the military, building programs for cities and roads, and economic self-sufficiency.^[230] Hitler also distrusted capitalism for being unreliable due to its egotism and he preferred a state-directed economy that maintains private property and competition but subordinates them to the interests of the Volk.^[263]

Hitler told a party leader in 1934: 'The economic system of our day is the creation of the Jews'.^[263] Hitler said to Benito Mussolini that capitalism had 'run its course'.^[263] Hitler also said that the business bourgeoisie 'know nothing except their profit. 'Fatherland' is only a word for them.'^[264] Hitler was personally disgusted with the ruling bourgeois elites of Germany during the period of the Weimar Republic, whom he referred to as 'cowardly shits'.^[265]

In Mein Kampf, Hitler effectively supported mercantilism in the belief that economic resources from their respective territories should be seized by force, as he believed that the policy of Lebensraum would provide Germany with such economically valuable territories.^[266] Hitler argued that the only means to maintain economic security was to have direct control over resources rather than being forced to rely on world trade.^[266] He claimed that war to gain such resources was the only means to surpass the failing capitalist economic system.^[266]

Joseph Goebbels, who would later go on to become the Nazi Propaganda Minister, was strongly opposed to both capitalism and communism, viewing them as the 'two great pillars of materialism' that were 'part of the international Jewish conspiracy for world domination.'^[267] Nevertheless, he wrote in his diary in 1925 that if he were forced to choose between them, 'in the final analysis', 'it would be better for us to go down with Bolshevism than live in eternal slavery under capitalism'.^[268] He also linked his anti-Semitism to his anti-capitalism, stating in a 1929 pamphlet that 'we see, in the Hebrews, the incarnation of capitalism, the misuse of the nation's goods.'^[167]

Within the Nazi Party, the faction associated with anti-capitalist beliefs was the Sturmabteilung (SA), a paramilitary wing led by Ernst Röhm. The SA had a complicated relationship with the rest of the party, giving both Röhm himself and local SA leaders significant autonomy.^[269] Different local leaders would even promote different political ideas in their units, including 'nationalistic, socialistic, anti-Semitic, racist, völkisch, or conservative ideas.'^[270] There was tension between the SA and Hitler, especially from 1930 onward, as Hitler's 'increasingly close association with big industrial interests and traditional rightist forces' caused many in the SA to distrust him.^[271] The SA regarded Hitler's seizure of power in 1933 as a 'first revolution' against the left, and some voices within the ranks began arguing for a 'second revolution' against the right.^[272] After engaging in violence against the left in 1933, Röhm's SA also began attacks against individuals deemed to be associated with conservative reaction.^[273] Hitler saw Röhm's independent actions as violating and possibly threatening his leadership, as well as jeopardising the regime by alienating the conservative President Paul von Hindenburg and the conservative-oriented German Army.^[46] This resulted in Hitler purging Röhm and other radical members of the SA in 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives.^[46]

Totalitarianism

Under Nazism, with its emphasis on the nation, individualism was denounced and instead importance was placed upon Germans belonging to the German Volk and 'people's community' (Volksgemeinschaft).^[274] Hitler declared that 'every activity and every need of every individual will be regulated by the collectivity represented by the party' and that 'there are no longer any free realms in which the individual belongs to himself'.^[275]Himmler justified the establishment of a repressive police state, in which the security forces could exercise power arbitrarily, by claiming that national security and order should take precedence over the needs of the individual.^[276]

According to the famous philosopher and political theorist, Hannah Arendt, the allure of Nazism as a totalitarian ideology (with its attendant mobilisation of the German population) resided within the construct of helping that society deal with the cognitive dissonance resultant from the tragic interruption of the First World War and the economic and material suffering consequent to the Depression and brought to order the revolutionary unrest occurring all around them. Instead of the plurality that existed in democratic or parliamentary states, Nazism as a totalitarian system promulgated 'clear' solutions to the historical problems faced by Germany, levied support by de-legitimizing the former government of Weimar and provided a politico-biological pathway to a better future, one free from the uncertainty of the past. It was the atomised and disaffected masses that Hitler and the party elite pointed in a particular direction and using clever propaganda to make them into ideological adherents, exploited in bringing Nazism to life.^[277]

While the ideologues of Nazism, much like those of Stalinism, abhorred democratic or parliamentary governance as practiced in the United States or Britain, their differences are substantial. An epistemic crisis occurs when one tries to synthesize and contrast Nazism and Stalinism as two-sides of the same coin with their similarly tyrannical leaders, state-controlled economies and repressive police structures. Namely, while they share a common thematic political construction, they are entirely inimical to one another in their worldviews and when more carefully analysed against one another on a one-to-one level, an 'irreconcilable asymmetry' results.^[278]

Reactionary or revolutionary?

Although Nazism is often seen as a reactionary movement, it did not seek a return of Germany to the pre-Weimar monarchy, but instead looked much further back to a mythic halcyon Germany which never existed. It has also been seen—as it was by the German-American scholar Franz Leopold Neumann—as the result of a crisis of capitalism which manifested as a 'totalitarian monopoly capitalism'. In this view Nazism is a mass movement of the middle class which was in opposition to a mass movement of workers in socialism and its extreme form, Communism.^[279] Historian Karl Dietrich Bracher, however, argues that,

Such an interpretation runs the risk of misjudging the revolutionary component of National Socialism, which cannot be dismissed as being simply reactionary. Rather, from the very outset, and particularly as it developed into the SS state, National Socialism aimed at a transformation of state and society.^[279]

and that, Hitler's and the Nazi Party's political positions

were of a revolutionary nature: destruction of existing political and social structures and their supporting elites; profound dispain for civic order, for human and moral values, for Habsburg and Hohenzollern, for liberal and Marxist ideas. The middle class and middle-class values, bourgeois nationalism and capitalism, the professionals, the intelligentsia and the upper class were dealt the sharpest rebuff. These were the groups which had to be uprooted..^[280]

After the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and his subsequent trial and imprisonment, Hitler decided that the way for the Nazi Party to achieve power was not through insurrection, but through legal and quasi-legal means. This did not sit well with the brown-shirted stormtroopers of the SA, especially those in Berlin, who chafed under the restrictions that Hitler placed on them, and their subordination to the party. This resulted in the Stennes Revolt of 1930-31, after which Hitler made himself the Supreme Commander of the SA, and brought Ernst Röhm back to be their Chief of Staff and keep them in line. The quashing of the SA's revolutionary fervor convinced many businessmen and military leaders that the Nazis had put aside their insurrectionist past, and that Hitler could be a reliable partner ^[281][282]

However, after the Nazis' 'Seizure of Power' in 1933, Röhm and the Brown Shirts were not content for the party to simply carry the reigns of power. Instead, they pressed for a continuation of the 'National Socialist revolution' to bring about sweeping social changes, which Hitler, primarily for tactical reasons, was not willing to do at that time. He was instead focused on rebuilding the military and reorienting the economy to provide the rearmament necessary for invasion of the countries to the east of Germany, especially Poland and Russia, to get the Lebensraum ('living space') he believed was necessary to the survival of the Aryan race. For this, he needed the co-operation of not only the military, but also the vital organs of capitalism, the banks and big businesses, which he would be unlikely to get if Germany's social and economic structure was being radically overhauled. Röhm's public proclamation that the SA would not allow the 'German Revolution' to be halted or undermined caused Hitler to announce that 'The revolution is not a permanent condition.' The unwillingness of Röhm and the SA to cease their agitation for a 'Second Revolution', and the unwarranted fear of a 'Röhm putsch' to accomplish it, were factors behind Hitler's purging of the SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934.^[283][284]

Despite such tactical breaks necessitated by pragmatic concerns, which were typical for Hitler during his rise to power and in the early years of his regime, Hitler never ceased being a revolutionary dedicated to the radical transformation of Germany, especially when it concerned racial matters. In his monograph, Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary?, Martyn Housden concludes:

[Hitler] compiled a most extensive set of revolutionary goals (calling for radical social and political change); he mobilized a revolutionary following so extensive and powerful that many of his aims were achieved; he established and ran a dictatorial revolutionary state; and he disseminated his ideas abroad through a revolutionary foreign policy and war. In short, he defined and controlled the National Socialist revolution in all its phases.^[285]

Of course, there were aspects of Nazism which were reactionary, such as their attitude toward the role of women in society, which was completely traditionalist,^[286] calling for the return of women to the home as wives, mothers and homemakers, although ironically this ideological policy was undermined in reality by the growing labor shortages and need for more workers. The number of women in the workplace climbed throughout the period of Nazi control of Germany, from 4.24 million in 1933 to 4.52 million in 1936 and 5.2 million in 1938, numbers that far exceeded those of the Weimar Republic.^[287]

Another reactionary aspect of Nazism was in their arts policy, which stemmed from Hitler's rejection of all forms of 'degenerate'modern art, music and architecture.^[288] Overall, however, Nazism—being the ideology and practices of the Nazi Party, and the Nazi Party being the manifestation of Hitler's will^[289]—is best seen as essentially revolutionary in nature.

Post-war Nazism

Following Nazi Germany's defeat in World War II and the end of the Holocaust, overt expressions of support for Nazi ideas were prohibited in Germany and other European countries. Nonetheless, movements which self-identify as National Socialist or which are described as adhering to National Socialism continue to exist on the fringes of politics in many western societies. Usually espousing a white supremacistideology, many deliberately adopt the symbols of Nazi Germany.^[290]

See also

References

Notes

1. ^Jones, Daniel (2003) [1917]. Roach, Peter; Hartmann, James; Setter, Jane (eds.). English Pronouncing Dictionary. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-3-12-539683-8.
2. ^Evans (2003), p.229
3. ^ ^abcBaum, Bruce David (2006). The Rise and Fall of the Caucasian Race: A Political History of Racial Identity. New York City/London: New York University Press. p. 156.
4. ^Kobrak, Christopher; Hansen, Per H.; Kopper, Christopher (2004). 'Business, Political Risk, and Historians in the Twentieth Century'. In Kobrak, Christopher; Hansen, Per H. (eds.). European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920–1945. New York City/Oxford: Berghahn Books. pp. 16–7. ISBN978-1-57181-629-0.
5. ^Kershaw 1999, pp. 243–44, 248–49.
6. ^Gottlieb, Henrik; Morgensen, Jens Erik, eds. (2007). Dictionary Visions, Research and Practice: Selected Papers from the 12th International Symposium on Lexicography, Copenhagen 2004 (illustrated ed.). Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co. p. 247. ISBN978-9027223340. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
7. ^ ^abHarper, Douglas. 'Nazi'. etymonline.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
8. ^'Nazi'. Online Etymology Dictionary. Retrieved 18 August 2017.
9. ^Lepage, Jean-Denis (2009). Hitler Youth, 1922–1945: An Illustrated History. McFarland. p. 9. ISBN978-0786439355.
10. ^ ^abcRabinbach, Anson; Gilman, Sander, eds. (2013). The Third Reich Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 4. ISBN978-0520955141.
11. ^ ^abCopping, Jasper (23 October 2011). 'Why Hitler hated being called a Nazi and what's really in humble pie – origins of words and phrases revealed'. The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 22 October 2014.
12. ^Seebold, Elmar, ed. (2002). Kluge Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (in German) (24th ed.). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. ISBN978-3-11-017473-1.
13. ^Nazi. In: Friedrich Kluge, Elmar Seebold: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. 24. Auflage, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin/New York 2002, ISBN3-11-017473-1 (Online Etymology Dictionary: Nazi).
14. ^Goebbels, Joseph (1927) 'The Nazi-Sozi', translated and annotated by Randall Bytwerk, Calvin College German Propaganda Archive
15. ^Hitler, Adolph, Mein Kampf, translated by Ralph Manheim
16. ^Bormann, Martin, compiler, et. al., Hitler's Table Talk, republished 2016
17. ^See Selected Speeches of Field Marshal Hermann Goring
18. ^Maschmann, Melita, Account Rendered: A Dossier On My Former Self, originally published in 1963, republished in 2016, Plunkett Lake Press
19. ^'Theodore Fred Abel papers'.
20. ^Fritzsche, Peter (1998). Germans into Nazis. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN978-0674350922.
    Eatwell, Roger (1997). Fascism, A History. Viking-Penguin. pp. xvii–xxiv, 21, 26–31, 114–40, 352. ISBN978-0140257007.
    Griffin, Roger (2000). 'Revolution from the Right: Fascism'. In Parker, David (ed.). Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West 1560–1991. London: Routledge. pp. 185–201. ISBN978-0415172950.
21. ^Oliver H. Woshinsky. Explaining Politics: Culture, Institutions, and Political Behavior. Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2008. p. 156.
22. ^Hitler, Adolf in Domarus, Max and Patrick Romane, eds. The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary, Waulconda, Illinois: Bolchazi-Carducci Publishers, Inc., 2007, p. 170.
23. ^Koshar, Rudy. Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935, University of North Carolina Press, 1986. p. 190.
24. ^Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Bottom of the Hill Publishing, 2010. p. 287.
25. ^Dawidowicz, Lucy. A Holocaust Reader Behrman House, Inc, 1976. p. 31.
26. ^Adolf Hitler, Max Domarus. The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary. pp. 171, 172–73.
27. ^ ^abKershaw 1999, p. 135.
28. ^ ^abPeukert, Detlev, The Weimar Republic. Macmillan, 1993. ISBN9780809015566, pp. 73–74.
29. ^ ^abPeukert, Detlev, The Weimar Republic. 1st paperback ed. Macmillan, 1993. ISBN978-0809015566, p. 74.
30. ^ ^abBeck, Hermann The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light, Berghahn Books, 2008. ISBN978-1845456801, p. 72.
31. ^Beck, Hermann The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light, 2008. pp. 72–75.
32. ^Beck, Hermann The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: The Machtergreifung in a New Light, 2008. p. 84.
33. ^Bendersky 1985, pp. 104-106.
34. ^Stephen J. Lee. European Dictatorships, 1918-1945. Routledge, 1987. p. 169.
35. ^Bendersky 1985, pp. 106-107.
36. ^Miranda Carter. George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. Borzoi Book, 2009. 420 pp.
37. ^ ^abcdMann, Michael, Fascists, New York City: Cambridge University Press, 2004. p. 183.
38. ^Browder, George C., Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD, Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 2004. p. 202.
39. ^Hallgarten, George (1973). 'The Collusion of Capitalism'. In Snell, John L. (ed.). 'The Nazi Revolution: Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation'. D. C. Heath and Company. pp. 132
40. ^Hallgarten, George (1973). 'The Collusion of Capitalism'. In Snell, John L. (ed.). 'The Nazi Revolution: Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation'. D. C. Heath and Company. pp. 133
41. ^Hallgarten, George (1973). 'The Collusion of Capitalism'. In Snell, John L. (ed.). 'The Nazi Revolution: Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation'. D. C. Heath and Company. pp. 137, 142
42. ^Hallgarten, George (1973). 'The Collusion of Capitalism'. In Snell, John L. (ed.). 'The Nazi Revolution: Hitler's Dictatorship and the German Nation'. D. C. Heath and Company. pp. 141
43. ^ ^abBendersky, Joseph W. (2007). A Concise History of Nazi Germany. Plymouth, England: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. p. 96. ISBN9780742553637.
44. ^Heiden, Konrad (1938) Hitler: A Biography, London: Constable & Co. Ltd. p.390
45. ^Nyomarkay 1967, p. 123-124;130.
46. ^ ^abcdNyomarkay, Joseph (1967). Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party. Univ Of Minnesota Press. ISBN978-0816604296. p. 133.
47. ^Glenn D. Walters. Lifestyle Theory: Past, Present, and Future. Nova Publishers, 2006. p. 40.
48. ^ ^abWeber, Thomas, Hitler's First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War, Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011. p. 251.
49. ^ ^abGaab, Jeffrey S., Munich: Hofbräuhaus & History: Beer, Culture, & Politics, 2nd ed. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2008. p. 61.
50. ^Kershaw 1999, pp. 34–35, 50–52, 60–67.
51. ^Overy, R.J., The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. pp. 399–403.
52. ^ ^abcBendersky 1985, pp. 49. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name 'FOOTNOTEBendersky198549' defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name 'FOOTNOTEBendersky198549' defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
53. ^ ^abcBendersky 1985, pp. 50. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name 'FOOTNOTEBendersky198550' defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name 'FOOTNOTEBendersky198550' defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
54. ^ ^abTooze 2006, pp. 101.
55. ^Tooze 2006, pp. 100-101.
56. ^ ^abTooze 2006, pp. 99. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; name 'FOOTNOTETooze200699' defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
57. ^ ^abFuret, François, Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. ISBN0-226-27340-7, pp. 191–92.
58. ^Furet, François, Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, 1999. p. 191.
59. ^Nicosia, Francis R. (2000). The Third Reich and the Palestine Question. Transaction Publishers. p. 82. ISBN076580624X.
60. ^ ^abBuchanan, Patrick J. (2008). Churchill, Hitler, and 'The Unnecessary War': How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World. Crown/Archetype. p. 325. ISBN978-0307409560.
61. ^Ryback, Timothy W. (2010). Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life. New York City; Toronto: Vintage Books. ISBN978-0307455260. pp. 129–30.
62. ^ ^abcdRyback 2010, p. 129.
63. ^George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), pp. 19-23.
64. ^Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller, 'Introduction: The Landscape of German Environmental History,' in Germany's Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History, edited by Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 3.
65. ^The Nazi concept of Lebensraum has connections with this idea, with German farmers being rooted to their soil, needing more of it for the expansion of the German Volk - whereas the Jew is precisely the opposite, nomadic and urban by nature. See: Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 259.
66. ^Additional evidence of Riehl's legacy can be seen in the Riehl Prize, Die Volkskunde als Wissenschaft (Folklore as Science) which was awarded in 1935 by the Nazis. See: George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), p. 23. Applicants for the Riehl prize had stipulations that included only being of Aryan blood, and no evidence of membership in any Marxist parties or any organisation that stood against National Socialism. See: Hermann Stroback, 'Folklore and Fascism before and around 1933,' in The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich, edited by James R Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 62-63.
67. ^Cyprian Blamires. World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Volume 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2006. p. 542.
68. ^Keith H. Pickus. Constructing Modern Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany, 1815–1914. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999. p. 86.
69. ^ ^abJonathan Olsen. Nature and Nationalism: Right-wing Ecology and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. p. 62.
70. ^Andrew Gladding Whiteside, Austrian National Socialism before 1918, (1962), pp. 1-3
71. ^ ^abNina Witoszek, Lars Trägårdh. Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden. Berghahn Books, 2002. pp. 89–90.
72. ^Witoszek, Nina and Lars Trägårdh, Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden, Berghahn Books, 2002, p. 90.
73. ^ ^abGerwarth, Robert (2007). The Bismarck Myth: Weimar Germany and the Legacy of the Iron Chancellor. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0199236893. p. 150.
74. ^Gerwarth 2007, p. 149.
75. ^Gerwarth 2007, p. 54.
76. ^ ^abGerwarth 2007, p. 131.
77. ^ ^abDavid Nicholls. Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. pp. 236–37.
78. ^ ^abDavid Nicholls. Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. pp. 159–60.
79. ^Brigitte Hamann (2010). Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man. Tauris Parke Paperbacks. p. 302. ISBN978-1-84885-277-8.
80. ^ ^abcdefgBlamires, Cyprian; Jackson, Paul. World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia: Volume 1. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc, 2006. p. 62.
81. ^ ^abcdefgStackelberg, Roderick; Winkle, Sally Anne. The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, London: Routledge, 2002. p. 11.
82. ^The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus, p. 294. A. J. Woodman - 2009 'The white race was defined as beautiful, honourable and destined to rule; within it the Aryans are 'cette illustre famille humaine, la plus noble'.' Originally a linguistic term synonymous with Indo-European, 'Aryan' became, not least because of the Essai, the designation of a race, which Gobineau specified was 'la race germanique'
83. ^Blamires, Cyprian and Paul Jackson, World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia: Volume 1, 2006. p. 126.
84. ^Stefan Kühl (2002). Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0195149784.
85. ^ ^abWilliam Brustein. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003. P. 207.
86. ^ ^abcBrustein, 2003, p. 210.
87. ^William Brustein. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press, 2003. P. 207, 209.
88. ^Nina Witoszek, Lars Trägårdh. Culture and Crisis: The Case of Germany and Sweden. Berghahn Books, 2002. p. 89.
89. ^ ^abJack Fischel. The Holocaust. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1998. p. 5.
90. ^Philip Rees, Biographical Dictionary of the Extreme Right Since 1890, Simon & Schuster, 1990, p. 220
91. ^ ^abRyback 2010, p. 130.
92. ^Roderick Stackelberg, Sally Anne Winkle. The Nazi Germany Sourcebook: An Anthology of Texts, 2002. p. 45.
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98. ^Sarah Ann Gordon (1984). Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish Question'. Princeton University Press. p. 265. ISBN978-0-691-10162-0.
99. ^'Florida Holocaust Museum: Antisemitism – Post World War 1' (history), www.flholocaustmuseum.org, 2003, webpage: Post-WWI AntisemitismArchived October 3, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.
100. ^'THHP Short Essay: What Was the Final Solution?'. Holocaust-History.org, July 2004, webpage: HoloHist-Final: notes that Hermann Göring used the term in his order of July 31, 1941 to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).
101. ^ ^abcPeter J. Bowler. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 2nd edition. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. pp. 304–05.
102. ^Robert J. Richards. Myth 19 That Darwin and Haeckel were Complicit in Nazi Biology. The University of Chicago. http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/articles/Myth.pdf
103. ^Peter J. Bowler. Evolution: The History of an Idea, 1989. p. 305.
104. ^Denis R. Alexander, Ronald L. Numbers. Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins. Chicago, Illinois, USA; London, England, UK: University of Chicago Press, 2010. p. 209.
105. ^Henry Friedlander. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. p. 5.
106. ^ ^abWhitman, James Q. (2017). Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton University Press. pp. 37–47.
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108. ^ ^abcHüppauf, Bernd-Rüdiger War, Violence, and the Modern Condition, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1997. p. 92.
109. ^Rohkrämer, Thomas, 'A Single Communal Faith?: The German Right from Conservatism to National Socialism', Monographs in German History. Volume 20, Berghahn Books, 2007. p. 130
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114. ^Weitz, Eric D., Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2007. p. 336.
115. ^German Federal Archive image description
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117. ^Hughes, H. Stuart, Oswald Spengler, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1992. p. 109.
118. ^ ^abcKaplan, Mordecai M. Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life. p. 73.
119. ^Stern, Fritz Richard The politics of cultural despair: a study in the rise of the Germanic ideology University of California Press reprint edition (1974) p. 296
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124. ^Carlsten, F. L. The Rise of Fascism. 2nd ed. University of California Press, 1982. p. 80.
125. ^David Jablonsky. The Nazi Party in Dissolution: Hitler and the Verbotzeit, 1923–1925. London; Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass and Company Ltd., 1989. pp. 20–26, 30
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130. ^Steve Thorne. The Language of War. London: Routledge, 2006. p. 38.
131. ^Stephen J. Lee. Europe, 1890–1945. p. 237.
132. ^ ^abcdePeter D. Stachura. The Shaping of the Nazi State. p. 31.
133. ^Joseph W. Bendersk, A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945, p. 177
134. ^ ^abAndré Mineau. Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity. Rodopi, 2004. p. 36
135. ^Rolf-Dieter Müller, Gerd R. Ueberschär. Hitler's War in the East, 1941–1945: A Critical Assessment. Berghahn Books, 2009. p. 89.
136. ^Bradl Lightbody. The Second World War: Ambitions to Nemesis. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. p. 97.
137. ^ ^abcdefghijGeorge Lachmann Mosse. Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. p. 79.
138. ^ ^abS.H. Milton (2001). ''Gypsies' as social outsiders in Nazi Germany'. In Robert Gellately; Nathan Stoltzfus (eds.). Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany. Princeton University Press. pp. 216, 231. ISBN978-0691086842.
139. ^Michael Burleigh (1991). The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945. Cambridge University Press. p. 49. ISBN978-0-521-39802-2.
140. ^ ^abMajer 2003, p. 180.
141. ^ ^abMineau, André (2004). Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity. Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi. p. 180. ISBN90-420-1633-7.
142. ^Simone Gigliotti, Berel Lang. The Holocaust: a reader. Malden, MA; Oxford, England; Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 14.
143. ^ ^abSimone Gigliotti, Berel Lang. The Holocaust: A Reader. Malden, MA; Oxford; Carlton, Victoria, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 14.
144. ^William W. Hagen (2012). 'German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation'. Cambridge University Press. p. 313. ISBN0-521-19190-4
145. ^Sandner (1999): 385 (66 in PDF) Note 2. The author claims that the term Aktion T4 was not used by the Nazis and that it was first used in the trials of the doctors and later included in the historiography.
146. ^Hitler, Adolf (1961). Hitler's Secret Book. New York: Grove Press. pp. 8–9, 17–18. ISBN978-0-394-62003-9. OCLC9830111. Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State. The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children, in short, their destruction, was more decent and in truth a thousand times more humane than the wretched insanity of our day which preserves the most pathological subject.
147. ^Mike Hawkins (1997). Social Darwinism in European and American Thought, 1860–1945: nature as model and nature as threat. Cambridge University Press. p. 276. ISBN978-0-521-57434-1. OCLC34705047.
148. ^Clarence Lusane. Hitler's Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era. Routledge, 2002. pp. 112–13, 189.
149. ^Bryan Mark Rigg (2004). Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story Of Nazi Racial Laws And Men Of Jewish Descent In The German Military. University Press of Kansas. ISBN978-0-7006-1358-8.
150. ^Evans, p. 507
151. ^This was the result of either a club foot or osteomyelitis. Goebbels is commonly said to have had club foot (talipes equinovarus), a congenital condition. William L. Shirer, who worked in Berlin as a journalist in the 1930s and was acquainted with Goebbels, wrote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) that the deformity was caused by a childhood attack of osteomyelitis and a failed operation to correct it.
152. ^Anne Maxwell (2010 [2008]). Picture Imperfect: Photography and Eugenics, 1870–1940. Eastbourne, England; Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press p. 150.
153. ^John Cornwell. Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact. Penguin, 2004. [1]
154. ^Racisms Made in. Germany (Racism Analysis Yearbook 2 – 2011) Ed. by Wulf D. Hund, Christian Koller, Moshe Zimmermann p. 19
155. ^ ^abMax Weinreich. Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes Against the Jewish People. Yale University Press, 1999. p. 111.
156. ^ ^abcSteinweis, p. 28.
157. ^Steinweis, pp. 31–32
158. ^Steinweis, p. 29
159. ^André Mineau. Operation Barbarossa: Ideology and Ethics Against Human Dignity. Rodopi, 2004. pp. 34–36.
160. ^Steve Thorne. The Language of War. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2006. p. 38.
161. ^Anton Weiss Wendt (2010). Eradicating Differences: The Treatment of Minorities in Nazi-Dominated Europe. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 63. ISBN978-1-4438-2449-1.
162. ^Wendy Lower. Nazi Empire-building and the Holocaust In Ukraine. The University of North Carolina Press, 2005. p. 27.
163. ^Marvin Perry. Western Civilization: A Brief History. Cengage Learning, 2012. p. 468.
164. ^Bendersky, Joseph W. (2007). A Concise History of Nazi Germany. Plymouth, England: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc. pp. 161–62. ISBN978-0742553637.
165. ^Norman Davies. Europe at War 1939–1945: No Simple Victory. Pan Macmillan, 2008. pp. 167, 209.
166. ^Richard A. Koenigsberg. Nations have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust, and War. New York: Library of Social Science, 2009. p. 2.
167. ^ ^abGoebbels, Joseph; Mjölnir (1932). Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken. Munich: Franz Eher Nachfolger. English translation: Those Damned Nazis.
168. ^Mason 1993, p. 6.
169. ^ ^abMason 1993, p. 7.
170. ^Bendersky 1985, p. 40.
171. ^Bendersky 1985, p. 48.
172. ^ ^abDavid Nicholls. Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000. p. 245.
173. ^Grunberger, Richard, A Social History of the Third Reich, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1971. pp. 167, 175–76
174. ^Alf Lüdtke, 'The 'Honor of Labor': Industrial Workers and the Power of Symbols under National Socialism', in Nazism and German Society, 1933–1945, edited by David F. Crew (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 67–109.
175. ^ ^abRichard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p. 46, ISBN003-076435-1
176. ^Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. pp. 76–77.
177. ^Mason 1993, pp. 48–50.
178. ^ ^abMason 1993, p. 49.
179. ^Mason 1993, p. 44.
180. ^Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. p. 77.
181. ^Mason 1993, p. 48.
182. ^For more elucidation about this conception and its oversimplification, see: Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, 'Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work' in Renate Bridenthal, et al. (eds), When Biology Became Destiny in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), pp. 33–65.
183. ^Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 53–59.
184. ^Hitler on 23 November 1937. In Max Domarus ed., Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, (vol I). Triumph. (Würzburg: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962), p. 452.
185. ^Adolf Hitler in a speech to the National Socialist Women's Congress, published in the Völkischer Beobachter, 15 September 1935 (Wiener Library Clipping Collection). Cited from: George Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), p. 40.
186. ^Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), pp. 149, 185–87.
187. ^Jill Stephenson, Women in Nazi Germany (London and New York: Longman, 2001), pp. 37–40.
188. ^Gerda Bormann was concerned by the ratio of racially valuable women that outnumbered men and she thought that the war would make the situation worse in terms of childbirths, so much so that she advocated a law (never realised however) which allowed healthy Aryan men to have two wives. See: Anna Maria Sigmund, Women of the Third Reich (Ontario: NDE, 2000), pp. 17–19.
189. ^Anna Maria Sigmund, Women of the Third Reich (Ontario: NDE, 2000), p. 17.
190. ^Himmler was thinking about members of the SS fulfilling this task. See: Felix Kersten, Totenkopf und Treue. Aus den Tagebuchblättern des finnischen Medizinalrats Felix Kersten (Hamburg: Mölich Verlag, 1952), pp. 228–29.
191. ^ ^abLeila J. Rupp (1978). Mobilizing Women for War: German and American Propaganda, 1939–1945. Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-04649-5.
192. ^Helen Boak. 'Nazi policies on German women during the Second World War – Lessons learned from the First World War?': 4–5.
193. ^Robert Gellately (2001). Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. Oxford University Press. p. 155. ISBN978-0-19-160452-2.
194. ^Friedmann, Jan (2010-01-21). 'The 'Dishonorable' German Girls: The Forgotten Persecution of Women in World War II'. Der Spiegel. Retrieved January 21, 2010.
195. ^Robert Gellately (1990). The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933–1945. Clarendon Press. p. 224. ISBN978-0-19-820297-4.
196. ^Richard J. Evans (2012). The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster. Penguin Books Limited. p. 355. ISBN978-0-14-191755-9.
197. ^Majer 2003, p. 369.
198. ^Majer 2003, p. 331–32.
199. ^Jill Stephenson (2001). Women in Nazi Germany. Longman. p. 156. ISBN978-0-582-41836-3.
200. ^Peter Longerich (2012). Heinrich Himmler: A Life. Oxford University Press. p. 475. ISBN978-0-19-959232-6.
201. ^'The Jewish Question in Education'
202. ^Plant, 1986. p. 99.
203. ^Pretzel, Andreas (2005). 'Vom Staatsfeind zum Volksfeind. Zur Radikalisierung der Homosexuellenverfolgung im Zusammenwirken von Polizei und Justiz'. In Zur Nieden, Susanne (ed.). Homosexualität und Staatsräson. Männlichkeit, Homophobie und Politik in Deutschland 1900–1945. Frankfurt/M.: Campus Verlag. p. 236. ISBN978-3-593-37749-0.
204. ^Bennetto, Jason (November 1, 1997). 'Holocaust: Gay activists press for German apology'. The Independent. Retrieved December 26, 2008.^{[dead link]}
205. ^The Holocaust Chronicle, Publications International Ltd. p. 108.
206. ^Plant, Richard, The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals, Owl Books, 1988. ISBN0-8050-0600-1.
207. ^Neander, Biedron. 'Homosexuals. A Separate Category of Prisoners'. Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Retrieved August 10, 2013.
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209. ^ ^abMcNab 2009, p. 182.
210. ^ ^abDavid Redles. Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation. New York; London: New York University Press, 2005. p. 60.
211. ^Scholarship for Martin Luther's 1543 treatise, On the Jews and their Lies, exercising influence on Germany's attitude: * Wallmann, Johannes. 'The Reception of Luther's Writings on the Jews from the Reformation to the End of the 19th Century', Lutheran Quarterly, n.s. 1 (Spring 1987) 1:72–97. Wallmann writes: 'The assertion that Luther's expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have been of major and persistent influence in the centuries after the Reformation, and that there exists a continuity between Protestant anti-Judaism and modern racially oriented anti-Semitism, is at present wide-spread in the literature; since the Second World War it has understandably become the prevailing opinion.' * Michael, Robert. Holy Hatred: Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; see chapter 4 'The Germanies from Luther to Hitler', pp. 105–51. * Hillerbrand, Hans J. 'Martin Luther,' Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007. Hillerbrand writes: '[H]is strident pronouncements against the Jews, especially toward the end of his life, have raised the question of whether Luther significantly encouraged the development of German anti-Semitism. Although many scholars have taken this view, this perspective puts far too much emphasis on Luther and not enough on the larger peculiarities of German history.'
212. ^Ellis, Marc H. 'Hitler and the Holocaust, Christian Anti-Semitism'Archived July 10, 2007, at the Wayback Machine, Baylor University Center for American and Jewish Studies, Spring 2004, slide 14. Also see Nuremberg Trial ProceedingsArchived 2006-03-21 at the Wayback Machine, Vol. 12, p. 318, Avalon Project, Yale Law School, April 19, 1946.
213. ^Robert Anthony Krieg. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004. pp. 4–8.
214. ^ ^abcRobert Anthony Krieg. Catholic Theologians in Nazi Germany, 2004. p. 4.
215. ^Ausma Cimdiņa, Jonathan Osmond. Power and Culture: Hegemony, Interaction and Dissent. PLUS-Pisa University Press, 2006.
216. ^ ^abcRoger Griffin. Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion. Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2005. p. 85.
217. ^Roger Griffin. Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion, 2005. p. 93.
218. ^R.J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1–5.
219. ^R. J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 7–11.
220. ^Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1971), p. 19.
221. ^Tooze 2006, p. 37.
222. ^ ^abTooze 2006, p. 38.
223. ^Tooze 2006, p. 55.
224. ^Tooze 2006, p. 66.
225. ^Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 333.
226. ^ ^abTooze 2006, p. 100.
227. ^Tooze 2006, p. 102.
228. ^Tooze 2006, p. 114.
229. ^Guillebaud, Claude W. 1939. The Economic Recovery of Germany 1933–1938. London: MacMillan and Co. Limited.
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243. ^Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich, p. 79, ISBN003-076435-1
244. ^R.J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1–30.
245. ^Klaus Hildebrand, The Third Reich (London & New York: Routledge, 1986), pp. 39–48.
246. ^Jost Dülffer, Nazi Germany 1933–1945: Faith and Annihilation (London: Bloomsbury, 2009), pp. 72–73.
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248. ^Bendersky, Joseph W. A History of Nazi Germany: 1919–1945. 2nd ed. Burnham Publishers, 2000. p. 40.
249. ^Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, Hurst and Blackett ltd., 1939. p. 343
250. ^Bendersky 1985, p. 51.
251. ^Bendersky 1985, pp. 49–50.
252. ^'They must unite, [Hitler] said, to defeat the common enemy, Jewish Marxism.' A New Beginning, Adolf Hitler, Völkischer Beobachter. February 1925. Cited in: Toland, John (1992). Adolf Hitler. Anchor Books. p. 207. ISBN978-0-385-03724-2.
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256. ^Carsten, Francis Ludwig The Rise of Fascism, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 1982. p. 137. Quoting: Hitler, A., Sunday Express, September 28, 1930.
257. ^David Nicholls. Adolf Hitler: A Biographical Companion. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000. p. 50.
258. ^Ben Fowkes. Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic. St. Martin's Press, New York, 1984. pp. 166–67
259. ^Ben Fowkes. Communism in Germany under the Weimar Republic. St. Martin's Press, New York, 1984. pp. 170–71
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261. ^Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966. p. 619.
262. ^Bendersky, Joseph W. A History of Nazi Germany: 1919-1945. 2nd ed. Burnham Publishers, 2000. pp. 58–59.
263. ^ ^abcdOvery, R.J., The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. p. 399
264. ^Overy, R.J., The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. p. 230.
265. ^Kritika: explorations in Russian and Eurasian history, Volume 7, Issue 4. Slavica Publishers, 2006. p. 922.
266. ^ ^abcOvery, R.J., The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004. p. 402.
267. ^Read, Anthony, The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. p. 138
268. ^Read, Anthony, The Devil's Disciples: Hitler's Inner Circle, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004. p. 142
269. ^Nyomarkay 1967, pp. 110–11.
270. ^Nyomarkay 1967, p. 113.
271. ^Nyomarkay 1967, p. 119.
272. ^Nyomarkay 1967, pp. 123–24.
273. ^Nyomarkay 1967, pp. 123–24, 130.
274. ^Mosse, George Lachmann (1966). Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p. 239. ISBN978-0-299-19304-1.
275. ^Fest, Joachim (2013). Hitler. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 418. ISBN978-0544195547.
276. ^Browder, George C (2004). Foundations of the Nazi Police State: The Formation of Sipo and SD. University Press of Kentucky. p. 240. ISBN978-0813191119.
277. ^Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando, FL Harcourt Inc., 1973), pp. 305–459.
278. ^Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., 'Introduction – After Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared', in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 20–21.
279. ^ ^abBracher 1970, pp. 19–20.
280. ^Bracher 1970, p. 165.
281. ^Bracher 1970, pp. 231–32.
282. ^Evans 2003, p. 274.
283. ^Kershaw 1999, pp. 501–03.
284. ^Bracher 1970, pp. 300–02.
285. ^Housden, Martyn (2000) Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary?. New York: Routledge. p. 193. ISBN0-415-16359-5
286. ^Bracher 1970, p. 179.
287. ^Bracher 1970, pp. 421–22.
288. ^Kershaw 1999, p. 82.
289. ^Bracher 1970, p. 191.
290. ^Blamires, Cyprian P. (2006). Blamires, C. P.; Jackson, Paul (eds.). World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia. Vol. 1: A–K. ABC-CLIO. pp. 459–461. ISBN978-1576079409.

Bibliography

• Bendersky, Joseph W. (1985). A History of Nazi Germany. Nelson-Hall.
• Bracher, Karl Dietrich (1970). The German Dictatorship. Translated by Jean Steinberg. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN978-0-14-013724-8.
• Evans, Richard J. (2003). The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN978-0-14-303469-8.
• Evans, Richard J. (2005). The Third Reich in Power. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN978-0-14-303790-3.
• Fritzsche, Peter (1990). Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-505780-5.
• Kershaw, Ian (1999). Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris. Penguin. ISBN978-0140133639.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2004) [1985]. The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany, 1890–1935. Wellingborough, England: The Aquarian Press. ISBN0-85030-402-4, 1-86064-973-4.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2003) [2002]. Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press. ISBN978-0-8147-3155-0.
• Klemperer, Victor (1947). LTI - Lingua Tertii Imperii.
• Majer, Diemut (2003). 'Non-Germans' Under the Third Reich: The Nazi Judicial and Administrative System in Germany and Occupied Eastern Europe with Special Regard to Occupied Poland, 1939–1945. JHU Press. ISBN978-0-8018-6493-3.
• Mason, Timothy W. (1993). Social Policy in the Third Reich. Berg Publishers.
• McNab, Chris (2009). The Third Reich. Amber Books Ltd. ISBN978-1-906626-51-8.
• Nyomarkay, Joseph (1967). Charisma and Factionalism in the Nazi Party. Univ Of Minnesota Press. ISBN978-0816604296.
• Paxton, Robert (2005). The Anatomy of Fascism. London: Penguin Books Ltd. ISBN978-0-14-101432-6.
• Peukert, Detlev (1989). Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everyday Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN978-0-300-04480-5.
• Redles, David (2005). Hitler's Millennial Reich: Apocalyptic Belief and the Search for Salvation. New York: University Press. ISBN0-8147-7524-1.
• Miller, Barbara (2014). Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Documentation. University of Texas Press. ISBN978-1-4773-0445-7.
• Steigmann-Gall, Richard (2003). The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, 1919–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Steinweis, Alan. Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Harvard University Press, 2008.
• Jaworska, Sylvia (2011). 'Anti-Slavic imagery in German radical nationalist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century: A prelude to Nazi ideology?'(PDF). Patterns of Prejudice. 45 (5): 435–52. doi:10.1080/0031322x.2011.624762.
• Tooze, Adam (2006). The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin.

Further reading

• Hitler, Adolf (2000). '24 March 1942'. Hitler's Table Talk, 1941–1944: His Private Conversations. translation by Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens; introduction by H. R. Trevor-Roper. Enigma Books. pp. 162–63. ISBN978-1-929631-05-6.

External links

• The dictionary definition of Hitlerism at Wiktionary
• The dictionary definition of Nazi at Wiktionary
• NS-Archiv, a large collection of scanned original Nazi documents.
• Exhibit on Hitler and the Germans – slideshow by The New York Times
• Jonathan Meades (1994): Jerry Building – Unholy Relics of Nazi Germany on YouTube (in 4 parts)

German Americans (German: Deutschamerikaner) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 44 million in 2016, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the US Census Bureau in its American Community Survey.^[1] German-Americans account for about one third of the total ethnic German population in the world.^[6][7][8]

None of the German states had American colonies. In the 1670s, the first significant groups of German immigrants arrived in the British colonies, settling primarily in Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. Immigration continued in very large numbers during the 19th century, with eight million arrivals from Germany. Between 1820 and 1870 over seven and a half million German immigrants came to the United States. By 2010, their population grew to 49.8 million German Americans, reflecting a jump of 6 million people since 2000.

There is a 'German belt' that extends all the way across the United States, from eastern Pennsylvania to the Oregon coast. Pennsylvania has the largest population of German-Americans in the U.S. and is home to one of the group's original settlements, Germantown (Philadelphia), founded in 1683 and the birthplace of the American antislavery movement in 1688, as well as the revolutionary Battle of Germantown. The state of Pennsylvania has 3.5 million people of German ancestry.

They were pulled by the attractions of land and religious freedom, and pushed out of Germany by shortages of land and religious or political oppression.^[9] Many arrived seeking religious or political freedom, others for economic opportunities greater than those in Europe, and others for the chance to start fresh in the New World. The arrivals before 1850 were mostly farmers who sought out the most productive land, where their intensive farming techniques would pay off. After 1840, many came to cities, where 'Germania'—German-speaking districts—soon emerged.^[10][11][12]

German Americans established the first kindergartens in the United States,^[13] introduced the Christmas tree tradition,^[14][15] and introduced popular foods such as hot dogs and hamburgers to America.^[16]

The great majority of people with some German ancestry have become Americanized and can hardly be distinguished by the untrained eye; fewer than 5% speak German. German-American societies abound, as do celebrations that are held throughout the country to celebrate German heritage of which the German-American Steuben Parade in New York City is one of the most well-known and is held every third Saturday in September. Oktoberfest celebrations and the German-American Day are popular festivities. There are major annual events in cities with German heritage including Chicago, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Antonio, and St. Louis.

• 1History
  • 1.1Colonial era
  • 1.319th century
  • 1.4World Wars
• 2Demographics
  • 2.1German-American communities
• 4Culture
• 5Assimilation
• 8Notable people
• 12Further reading
• 13External links

History[edit]

The Germans included many quite distinct subgroups with differing religious and cultural values.^[17] Lutherans and Catholics typically opposed Yankee moralizing programs such as the prohibition of beer, and favored paternalistic families with the husband deciding the family position on public affairs.^[18][19] They generally opposed women's suffrage but this was used as argument in favor of suffrage when German Americans became pariahs during World War I.^[20] On the other hand, there were Protestant groups that emerged from European pietism such as the German Methodist and United Brethren; they more closely resembled the Yankee Methodists in their moralism.^[21]

Colonial era[edit]

The first English settlers arrived at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607, and were accompanied by the first German American, Dr. Johannes Fleischer. He was followed in 1608 by five glassmakers and three carpenters or house builders.^[22] The first permanent German settlement in what became the United States was Germantown, Pennsylvania, founded near Philadelphia on October 6, 1683.^[23]

Large numbers of Germans migrated from the 1680s to 1760s, with Pennsylvania the favored destination. They migrated to America for a variety of reasons.^[23]Push factors involved worsening opportunities for farm ownership in central Europe, persecution of some religious groups, and military conscription; pull factors were better economic conditions, especially the opportunity to own land, and religious freedom. Often immigrants paid for their passage by selling their labor for a period of years as indentured servants.^[24]

Large sections of Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia attracted Germans. Most were Lutheran or German Reformed; many belonged to small religious sects such as the Moravians and Mennonites. German Catholics did not arrive in number until after the War of 1812.^[25]

Palatines[edit]

In 1709, Protestant Germans from the Pfalz or Palatine region of Germany escaped conditions of poverty, traveling first to Rotterdam and then to London. Anne, Queen of Great Britain, helped them get to her colonies in America. The trip was long and difficult to survive because of the poor quality of food and water aboard ships and the infectious disease typhus. Many immigrants, particularly children, died before reaching America in June 1710.^[26]

The Palatine immigration of about 2100 people who survived was the largest single immigration to America in the colonial period. Most were first settled along the Hudson River in work camps, to pay off their passage. By 1711, seven villages had been established in New York on the Robert Livingston manor. In 1723 Germans became the first Europeans allowed to buy land in the Mohawk Valley west of Little Falls. One hundred homesteads were allocated in the Burnetsfield Patent. By 1750, the Germans occupied a strip some 12 miles (19 km) long along both sides of the Mohawk River. The soil was excellent; some 500 houses were built, mostly of stone, and the region prospered in spite of Indian raids. Herkimer was the best-known of the German settlements in a region long known as the 'German Flats'.^[26]

They kept to themselves, married their own, spoke German, attended Lutheran churches, and retained their own customs and foods. They emphasized farm ownership. Some mastered English to become conversant with local legal and business opportunities. They tolerated slavery (although few were rich enough to own a slave).^[27]

The most famous of the early German Palatine immigrants was editor John Peter Zenger, who led the fight in colonial New York City for freedom of the press in America. A later immigrant, John Jacob Astor, who came from Baden after the Revolutionary War, became the richest man in America from his fur trading empire and real estate investments in New York.^[28]

Louisiana[edit]

John Law organized the first colonization of Louisiana with German immigrants. Of the over 5,000 Germans initially immigrating primarily from the Alsace Region as few as 500 made up the first wave of immigrants to leave France en route to the Americas. Less than 150 of those first indentured German farmers made it to Louisiana and settled along what became known as the German Coast. With tenacity, determination and the leadership of D'arensburg these Germans felled trees, cleared land, and cultivated the soil with simple hand tools as draft animals were not available. The German coast settlers supplied the budding City of New Orleans with corn, rice, eggs. and meat for many years following.

The Mississippi Company settled thousands of German pioneers in FrenchLouisiana during 1721. It encouraged Germans, particularly Germans of the Alsatian region who had recently fallen under French rule, and the Swiss to immigrate. Alsace was sold to France within the greater context of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).

The JesuitCharlevoix traveled New France (Canada and Louisiana) in the early 1700s. His letter said 'these 9,000 Germans, who were raised in the Palatinate (Alsace part of France) were in Arkansas. The Germans left Arkansas en masse. They went to New Orleans and demanded passage to Europe. The Mississippi Company gave the Germans rich lands on the right bank of the Mississippi River about 25 miles (40 km) above New Orleans. The area is now known as 'the German Coast'.'

A thriving population of Germans lived upriver from New Orleans, Louisiana, known as the German Coast. They were attracted to the area through pamphlets such as J. Hanno Deiler's 'Louisiana: A Home for German Settlers'.^[29]

Southeast[edit]

Two waves of German colonists in 1714 and 1717 founded a large colony in Virginia called Germanna,^[30] located near modern-day Culpeper, Virginia. Virginia Lieutenant Governor Alexander Spotswood, taking advantage of the headright system, had bought land in present-day Spotsylvania and encouraged German immigration by advertising in Germany for miners to move to Virginia and establish a mining industry in the colony. The name 'Germanna', selected by Governor Alexander Spotswood, reflected both the German immigrants who sailed across the Atlantic to Virginia and the British Queen, Anne, who was in power at the time of the first settlement at Germanna.

In North Carolina, German Moravians living around Bethlehem, Pennsylvania purchased nearly 100,000 acres (400 km²) from Lord Granville (one of the British Lords Proprietor) in the Piedmont of North Carolina in 1753. They established German settlements on that tract, especially in the area around what is now Winston-Salem.^[31] They also founded the transitional settlement of Bethabara, North Carolina, translated as House of Passage, the first planned Moravian community in North Carolina, in 1759. Soon after, the German Moravians founded the town of Salem in 1766 (now a historical section in the center of Winston-Salem) and Salem College (an early female college) in 1772.

In the Georgia Colony, Germans mainly from the Swabia region settled in Savannah, St. Simon's Island and Fort Frederica in the 1730s and 1740s. They were actively recruited by James Oglethorpe and quickly distinguished themselves through improved farming, advanced tabby (cement)-construction, and leading joint Lutheran-Anglican-Reformed religious services for the colonists.

German immigrants also settled in other areas of the American South, including around the Dutch (Deutsch) Fork area of South Carolina,^[25] and Texas, especially in the Austin area.

New England[edit]

Between 1742 and 1753, roughly 1,000 Germans settled in Broad Bay, Massachusetts (now Waldoboro, Maine). Many of the colonists fled to Boston, Maine, Nova Scotia, and North Carolina after their houses were burned and their neighbors killed or carried into captivity by Native Americans. The Germans who remained found it difficult to survive on farming, and eventually turned to the shipping and fishing industries.^[32]

Pennsylvania[edit]

The tide of German immigration to Pennsylvania swelled between 1725 and 1775, with immigrants arriving as redemptioners or indentured servants. By 1775, Germans constituted about one-third of the population of the state. German farmers were renowned for their highly productive animal husbandry and agricultural practices. Politically, they were generally inactive until 1740, when they joined a Quaker-led coalition that took control of the legislature, which later supported the American Revolution. Despite this, many of the German settlers were loyalists during the Revolution, possibly because they feared their royal land grants would be taken away by a new republican government, or because of loyalty to a British German monarchy who had provided the opportunity to live in a liberal society.^[33] The Germans, comprising Lutherans, Reformed, Mennonites, Amish, and other sects, developed a rich religious life with a strong musical culture. Collectively, they came to be known as the Pennsylvania Dutch (from Deutsch).^[34][35]

Etymologically, the word Dutch originates from the Old High German word 'diutisc' (from 'diot' 'people'), referring to the Germanic 'language of the people' as opposed to Latin, the language of the learned (see also theodiscus). Only later did the word come to refer to the people who spoke a Germanic language, and only in the last 1-2 centuries to refer only to the people of the Netherlands. Other Germanic language variants for 'deutsch/deitsch/dutch' are: Dutch 'Duits' and 'Diets', Yiddish 'daytsh', Danish/Norwegian 'tysk', or Swedish 'tyska.' The Japanese 'doitzu' also derives from the aforementioned 'Dutch' variations. There were few German Catholics in Pennsylvania before the 1810s.^[36]

The Studebaker brothers, forefathers of the wagon and automobile makers, arrived in Pennsylvania in 1736 from the famous blade town of Solingen. With their skills, they made wagons that carried the frontiersmen westward; their cannons provided the Union Army with artillery in the American Civil War, and their automobile company became one of the largest in America, although never eclipsing the 'Big Three', and was a factor in the war effort and in the industrial foundations of the Army.^[37]

From names in the 1790 U.S. census, historians estimate Germans constituted nearly 9% of the white population in the United States.^[38]

American Revolution[edit]

The King of Great Britain, whose King George III was also the Elector of Hanover in Germany, hired 18,000 Hessians (career soldiers from small German states) to support British forces. Many were captured; they remained as prisoners during the war but some stayed and became U.S. citizens.^[39] German Americans served on both sides of the American Revolution. The religious minorities were neutral. The Lutherans were split. In New York, many were neutral or supported the Loyalist cause. In Pennsylvania most were on the patriot side.^[40] The Muhlenberg family, led by Rev. Henry Muhlenberg was especially influential on the Patriot side.^[41] His son Peter Muhlenberg, a Lutheran clergyman in Virginia became a major general and later a Congressman.^[42][43]

The brief Fries's Rebellion was an anti-tax movement among Germans in Pennsylvania in 1799-1800.^[44]

19th century[edit]

The largest flow of German immigration to America occurred between 1820 and World War I, during which time nearly six million Germans immigrated to the United States. From 1840 to 1880, they were the largest group of immigrants. Following the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states, a wave of political refugees fled to America, who became known as Forty-Eighters. They included professionals, journalists, and politicians. Prominent Forty-Eighters included Carl Schurz and Henry Villard.^[46]

'Latin farmer' or Latin Settlement is the designation of several settlements founded by some of the Dreissiger and other refugees from Europe after rebellions like the Frankfurter Wachensturm beginning in the 1830s—predominantly in Texas and Missouri, but also in other US states—in which German intellectuals (freethinkers, German: Freidenker, and Latinists) met together to devote themselves to the German literature, philosophy, science, classical music, and the Latin language. A prominent representative of this generation of immigrants was Gustav Koerner who lived most of the time in Belleville, Illinois until his death.

Jews[edit]

A few German Jews came in the colonial era. The largest numbers arrived after 1820, especially in the mid-19th century.^[47] They spread across the North and South (and California, where Levi Strauss arrived in 1853). They formed small German-Jewish communities in cities and towns. They typically were local and regional merchants selling clothing; others were livestock dealers, agricultural commodity traders, bankers, and operators of local businesses. Henry Lehman, who founded Lehman Brothers in Alabama, was a particularly prominent example of such a German-Jewish immigrant. They formed Reform synagogues^[48] and sponsored numerous local and national philanthropic organizations, such as B'nai B'rith.^[49] This German-speaking group is quite distinct from the Yiddish-speaking East-European Jews who arrived in much larger numbers starting in the late 19th century and concentrated in New York.

Northeastern cities[edit]

The port cities of New York, and Baltimore had large populations. As did Hoboken, New Jersey.

Cities of the Midwest[edit]

Cities along the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, and the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers attracted a large German element. The Midwestern cities of Milwaukee, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago were favored destinations of German immigrants. Also, the Northern Kentucky and Louisville area along the Ohio River was a favored destination. By 1900, the populations of the cities of Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati were all more than 40% German American. Dubuque and Davenport, Iowa had even larger proportions, as did Omaha, Nebraska, where the proportion of German Americans was 57% in 1910. In many other cities of the Midwest, such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, German Americans were at least 30% of the population.^[32][50] By 1850 there were 5,000 Germans, mostly Schwabians living in, and around, Ann Arbor, Michigan.^[51]

Many concentrations acquired distinctive names suggesting their heritage, such as the 'Over-the-Rhine' district in Cincinnati, 'Dutchtown' in South St Louis, and 'German Village' in Columbus, Ohio.^[52]

A favorite destination was Milwaukee, known as 'the German Athens'. Radical Germans trained in politics in the old country dominated the city's Socialists. Skilled workers dominated many crafts, while entrepreneurs created the brewing industry; the most famous brands included Pabst, Schlitz, Miller, and Blatz.^[53]

Whereas half of German immigrants settled in cities, the other half established farms in the Midwest. From Ohio to the Plains states, a heavy presence persists in rural areas into the 21st century.^[25][54]

Deep South[edit]

Few German immigrants settled in the Deep South, apart from New Orleans, the German Coast, and Texas.^[55]

Texas[edit]

Texas attracted many Germans who entered through Galveston and Indianola, both those who came to farm, and later immigrants who more rapidly took industrial jobs in cities such as Houston. As in Milwaukee, Germans in Houston built the brewing industry. By the 1920s, the first generation of college-educated German Americans were moving into the chemical and oil industries.^[25]

Texas had about 20,000 German Americans in the 1850s. They did not form a uniform bloc, but were highly diverse and drew from geographic areas and all sectors of European society, except that very few aristocrats or upper middle class businessmen arrived. In this regard, Texas Germania was a microcosm of the Germania nationwide.

The Germans who settled Texas were diverse in many ways. They included peasant farmers and intellectuals; Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and atheists; Prussians, Saxons, and Hessians; abolitionists and slave owners; farmers and townsfolk; frugal, honest folk and ax murderers. They differed in dialect, customs, and physical features. A majority had been farmers in Germany, and most arrived seeking economic opportunities. A few dissident intellectuals fleeing the 1848 revolutions sought political freedom, but few, save perhaps the Wends, went for religious freedom. The German settlements in Texas reflected their diversity. Even in the confined area of the Hill Country, each valley offered a different kind of German. The Llano valley had stern, teetotaling German Methodists, who renounced dancing and fraternal organizations; the Pedernales valley had fun-loving, hardworking Lutherans and Catholics who enjoyed drinking and dancing; and the Guadalupe valley had freethinking Germans descended from intellectual political refugees. The scattered German ethnic islands were also diverse. These small enclaves included Lindsay in Cooke County, largely Westphalian Catholic; Waka in Ochiltree County, Midwestern Mennonite; Hurnville in Clay County, Russian German Baptist; and Lockett in Wilbarger County, Wendish Lutheran.^[57]

Germans from Russia[edit]

Germans from Russia were the most traditional of German-speaking arrivals.^{[citation needed]} They were Germans who had lived for generations throughout the Russian Empire, but especially along the Volga River in Russia and near the Crimea. Their ancestors had come from all over the German-speaking world, invited by Catherine the Great in 1762 and 1763 to settle and introduce more advanced German agriculture methods to rural Russia. They had been promised by the manifesto of their settlement the ability to practice their respective Christian denominations, retain their culture and language, and retain immunity from conscription for them and their descendants. As time passed, the Russian monarchy gradually eroded the ethnic German population's relative autonomy. Conscription eventually was reinstated; this was especially harmful to the Mennonites, who practice pacifism. Throughout the 19th century, pressure increased from the Russian government to culturally assimilate. Many Germans from Russia found it necessary to emigrate to avoid conscription and preserve their culture. About 100,000 immigrated by 1900, settling primarily in the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska. The southern central part of North Dakota was known as 'the German-Russian triangle'. A smaller number moved farther west, finding employment as ranchers and cowboys.

Negatively influenced by the violation of their rights and cultural persecution by the Tsar, the Germans from Russia who settled in the northern Midwest saw themselves a downtrodden ethnic group separate from Russian Americans and having an entirely different experience from the German Americans who had emigrated from German lands; they settled in tight-knit communities that retained their German language and culture. They raised large families, built German-style churches, buried their dead in distinctive cemeteries using cast iron grave markers, and created choir groups that sang German church hymns. Many farmers specialized in sugar beets—still a major crop in the upper Great Plains. During World War I, their identity was challenged by anti-German sentiment. By the end of World War II, the German language, which had always been used with English for public and official matters, was in serious decline. Today, German is preserved mainly through singing groups and recipes, with the Germans from Russia in the northern Great Plains states speaking predominantly English. German remains the second most spoken language in North and South Dakota, and Germans from Russia often use loanwords, such as Kuchen for cake. Despite the loss of their language, the ethnic group remains distinct, and has left a lasting impression on the American West.^[58]

Musician Lawrence Welk (1903-1992) became an iconic figure in the German-Russian community of the northern Great Plains--his success story personified the American dream.^[59]

Civil War[edit]

Sentiment among German Americans was largely anti-slavery, especially among Forty-Eighters.^[46] Notable Forty-Eighter Hermann Raster wrote passionately against slavery and was very pro-Lincoln. Raster published anti-slavery pamphlets and was the editor of the most influential German language newspaper in America at the time.^[60] He helped secure the votes of German-Americans across the United States for Abraham Lincoln. When Raster died the Chicago Tribune published an article regarding his service as a correspondent for America to the German states saying, 'His writings during and after the Civil War did more to create understanding and appreciation of the American situation in Germany and to float U.S. bonds in Europe than the combined efforts of all the U.S. ministers and consuls.'^[61] Hundreds of thousands of German Americans volunteered to fight for the Union in the American Civil War (1861–1865).^[62] The Germans were the largest immigrant group to participate in the Civil War; over 176,000 U.S. soldiers were born in Germany.^[63] A popular Union commander among Germans, Major General Franz Sigel was the highest-ranking German officer in the Union Army, with many German immigrants claiming to enlist to 'fight mit Sigel'.^[64]

Although only one in four Germans fought in all-German regiments, they created the public image of the German soldier. Pennsylvania fielded five German regiments, New York eleven, and Ohio six.^[62]

Farmers[edit]

Western railroads, with large land grants available to attract farmers, set up agencies in Hamburg and other German cities, promising cheap transportation, and sales of farmland on easy terms. For example, the Santa Fe railroad hired its own commissioner for immigration, and sold over 300,000 acres (1,200 km²) to German-speaking farmers.^[65]

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the German Americans showed a high interest in becoming farmers, and keeping their children and grandchildren on the land. While they needed profits to stay in operation, they used profits as a tool 'to maintain continuity of the family.'^[66] They used risk averse strategies, and carefully planned their inheritances to keep the land in the family. Their communities showed smaller average farm size, greater equality, less absentee ownership and greater geographic persistence. As one farmer explained, 'To protect your family has turned out to be the same thing as protecting your land.'^[67]

Germany was a large country with many diverse subregions which contributed immigrants. Dubuque was the base of the Ostfriesische Nachrichten ('East Fresian News') from 1881 to 1971. It connected the 20,000 immigrants from East Friesland (Ostfriesland), Germany, to each other across the Midwest, and to their old homeland. In Germany East Friesland was often a topic of ridicule regarding backward rustics, but editor Leupke Hündling shrewdly combined stories of proud memories of Ostfriesland. The editor enlisted a network of local correspondents. By mixing local American and local German news, letters, poetry, fiction, and dialogue, the German-language newspaper allowed immigrants to honor their origins and celebrate their new life as highly prosperous farmers with much larger farms than were possible back in impoverished Ostfriesland. During the world wars, when Germania came under heavy attack, the paper stressed its humanitarian role, mobilizing readers to help the people of East Friesland with relief funds. Younger generations could usually speak German but not read it, so the subscription based dwindled away as the target audience Americanized itself.^[68]

Politics[edit]

Relatively few German Americans held office, but the men voted once they became citizens. In general during the Third party System (1850s–1890s), the Protestants and Jews leaned toward the Republican party and the Catholics were strongly Democratic. When prohibition was on the ballot, the Germans voted solidly against it. They strongly distrusted moralistic crusaders, whom they called 'Puritans', including the temperance reformers and many Populists. The German community strongly opposed Free Silver, and voted heavily against crusader William Jennings Bryan in 1896. In 1900, however, many German Democrats returned to their party and voted for Bryan, perhaps because of President William McKinley's foreign policy.^[69]

At the local level, historians have explored the changing voting behavior of the German-American community and one of its major strongholds, St. Louis, Missouri. The German Americans had voted 80 percent for Lincoln in 1860, and strongly supported the war effort. They were a bastion of the Republican Party in St. Louis and nearby immigrant strongholds in Missouri and southern Illinois. The German Americans were angered by a proposed Missouri state constitution that discriminated against Catholics and freethinkers. The requirement of a special loyalty oath for priests and ministers was troublesome. Despite their strong opposition the constitution was ratified in 1865. Racial tensions with the blacks began to emerge, especially in terms of competition for unskilled labor jobs. Germania was nervous about black suffrage in 1868, fearing that blacks would support puritanical laws, especially regarding the prohibition of beer gardens on Sundays. The tensions split off a large German element in 1872, led by Carl Schurz. They supported the Liberal Republican party led by Benjamin Gratz Brown for governor in 1870 and Horace Greeley for president in 1872.^[70]

Many Germans in late 19th century cities were communists; Germans played a significant role in the labor union movement.^[71][72] A few were anarchists.^[73] Eight of the forty-two anarchist defendants in the Haymarket Affair of 1886 in Chicago were German.

World Wars[edit]

Intellectuals[edit]

Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), a German psychologist, moved to Harvard in the 1890s and became a leader in the new profession. He was president of the American Psychological Association in 1898, and the American Philosophical Association in 1908, and played a major role in many other American and international organizations.^[74]

Arthur Preuss (1871–1934) was a leading journalist, and theologian. A layman in St Louis. His Fortnightly Review (in English) was a major conservative voice read closely by church leaders and intellectuals from 1894 until 1934. He was intensely loyal to the Vatican. Preuss upheld the German Catholic community, denounced the 'Americanism' heresy, promoted the Catholic University of America, and anguished over the anti-German America hysteria during World War I. He provided lengthy commentary regarding the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the anti-Catholic factor in the presidential campaign of 1928, the hardships of the Great Depression, and the liberalism of the New Deal.^[75][76]

World War I anti-German sentiment[edit]

During World War I (1914–18, American involvement 1917-18), German Americans were often accused of being too sympathetic to Imperial Germany. Former president Theodore Roosevelt denounced 'hyphenated Americanism', insisting that dual loyalties were impossible in wartime. A small minority came out for Germany, or ridiculed the British (as did H. L. Mencken). Similarly, Harvard psychology professor Hugo Münsterberg dropped his efforts to mediate between America and Germany, and threw his efforts behind the German cause.^[77][78]

The Justice Department prepared a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them, more than 4,000 of whom were imprisoned in 1917–18. The allegations included spying for Germany, or endorsing the German war effort.^[79] Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty.^[80] The Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. One person was killed by a mob; in Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched.^[81] A Minnesota minister was tarred and feathered when he was overheard praying in German with a dying woman.^[82]

In Chicago, Frederick Stock temporarily stepped down as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra until he finalized his naturalization papers. Orchestras replaced music by German composer Wagner with French composer Berlioz. In Cincinnati, the public library was asked to withdraw all German books from its shelves.^[83] German-named streets were renamed. The town, Berlin, Michigan, was changed to Marne, Michigan (honoring those who fought in the Battle of Marne). In Iowa, in the 1918 Babel Proclamation, the governor prohibited all foreign languages in schools and public places. Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the ban illegal in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska).^[84] The response of German Americans to these tactics was often to 'Americanize' names (e.g., Schmidt to Smith, Müller to Miller) and limit the use of the German language in public places, especially churches.^[85]

• American wartime propaganda depicted the bloodthirsty German 'Hun' soldier as an enemy of civilization, with his eyes on America from across the Atlantic

• German-American farmer John Meints of Minnesota was tarred and feathered in August 1918 for allegedly not supporting war bond drives.

World War II[edit]

Between 1931 and 1940, 114,000 Germans moved to the United States, many of whom—including Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein and author Erich Maria Remarque—were Jewish Germans or anti-Nazis fleeing government oppression.^[86] About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund during the years before the war.^[87] German aliens were the subject of suspicion and discrimination during the war, although prejudice and sheer numbers meant they suffered as a group generally less than Japanese Americans. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship to register with the Federal government and restricted their travel and property ownership rights.^[88][89] Under the still active Alien Enemy Act of 1798, the United States government interned nearly 11,000 German citizens between 1940 and 1948. Civil rights violations occurred.^[90] An unknown number of 'voluntary internees' joined their spouses and parents in the camps and were not permitted to leave.^[91][92][93]

President Franklin D. Roosevelt sought out Americans of German ancestry for top war jobs, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and USAAF General Carl Andrew Spaatz. He appointed Republican Wendell Willkie (who ironically ran against Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election) as a personal representative. German Americans who had fluent German language skills were an important asset to wartime intelligence, and they served as translators and as spies for the United States.^[94] 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.^[25][95]

Contemporary period[edit]

In the aftermath of World War II, millions of ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from their homes within the redrawn borders of Central and Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia. Most resettled in Germany, but others came as refugees to the United States in the late 1940s, and established cultural centers in their new homes. Some Danube Swabians, for instance, ethnic Germans who had maintained language and customs after settlement along the Danube in Hungary, later Yugoslavia (now Serbia), immigrated to the U.S. after the war.

After 1970, anti-German sentiment aroused by World War II faded away.^[100] Today, German Americans who immigrated after World War II share the same characteristics as any other Western European immigrant group in the U.S. They are mostly professionals and academics who have come for professional reasons. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and reunification, Germany has become a preferred destination for immigrants rather than a source of migrating peoples.^[101]

In the 1990 U.S. Census, 58 million Americans claimed to be solely or partially of German descent.^[102] According to the 2005 American Community Survey, 50 million Americans have German ancestry. German Americans represent 17% of the total U.S. population and 26% of the non-Hispanic white population.^[103]

The Economist magazine in 2015 interviewed Petra Schürmann, the director of the German-American Heritage Museum in Washington for a major article on German-Americans. She notes that all over the United States, celebrations such as German fests and Oktoberfests have been appearing.

Demographics[edit]

States with the highest proportions of German Americans tend to be those of the upper Midwest, including Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas; all at over one-third.^[104]

Of the four major US regions, German was the most-reported ancestry in the Midwest, second in the West, and third in both the Northeast and the South. German was the top reported ancestry in 23 states, and it was one of the top five reported ancestries in every state except Maine and Rhode Island.^[105]

At the 2000 census, this was the breakdown of German Americans by state, including the District of Columbia:

^{[106][failed verification]}

German-American communities[edit]

Today, most German Americans have assimilated to the point that they no longer have readily identifiable ethnic communities, though there are still many metropolitan areas where German is the most reported ethnicity, such as Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis – Saint Paul, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis.^[107][108]

Communities with high percentages of people of German ancestry[edit]

The 25 U.S. communities with the highest percentage of residents claiming German ancestry are:^[109]

1. Monterey, Ohio 83.6%
2. Granville, Ohio 79.6%
3. St. Henry, Ohio 78.5%
4. Germantown Township, Illinois 77.6%
5. Jackson, Indiana 77.3%
6. Washington, Ohio 77.2%
7. St. Rose, Illinois 77.1%
8. Butler, Ohio 76.4%
9. Marion, Ohio 76.3%
10. Jennings, Ohio and Germantown, Illinois (village) 75.6%
11. Coldwater, Ohio 74.9%
12. Jackson, Ohio 74.6%
13. Union, Ohio 74.1%
14. Minster, Ohio and Kalida, Ohio 73.5%
15. Greensburg, Ohio 73.4%
16. Aviston, Illinois 72.5%
17. Teutopolis, Illinois (village) 72.4%
18. Teutopolis, Illinois (township) and Cottonwood, Minnesota 72.3%
19. Dallas, Michigan 71.7%
20. Gibson, Ohio 71.6%
21. Town of Marshfield, Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin 71.5%
22. Santa Fe, Illinois 70.8%
23. Recovery, Ohio 70.4%
24. Town of Brothertown, Wisconsin 69.9%
25. Town of Herman, Dodge County, Wisconsin 69.8%

Large communities^{[definition needed]} with high percentages of people of German ancestry[edit]

U.S. communities with the highest percentage of residents claiming German ancestry are:^{[110][failed verification]}

1. Bismarck, North Dakota 56,1%
2. Dubuque, Iowa 43%
3. Fargo, North Dakota 31%
4. Madison, Wisconsin 29%
5. Green Bay, Wisconsin 29%
6. Levittown, Pennsylvania 22%
7. Erie, Pennsylvania 22%
8. Cincinnati, Ohio 19.8%
9. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 19.7%
10. Columbus, Ohio 19.4%
11. Beaverton, Oregon 17%

Communities with the most residents born in Germany[edit]

The 25 U.S. communities with the most residents born in Germany are:^[111]

1. Lely Resort, Florida 6.8%
2. Pemberton Heights, New Jersey 5.0%
3. Kempner, Texas 4.8%
4. Cedar Glen Lakes, New Jersey 4.5%
5. Alamogordo, New Mexico 4.3%
6. Sunshine Acres, Florida and Leisureville, Florida 4.2%
7. Wakefield, Kansas 4.1%
8. Quantico, Virginia 4.0%
9. Crestwood Village, New Jersey 3.8%
10. Shandaken, New York 3.5%
11. Vine Grove, Kentucky 3.4%
12. Burnt Store Marina, Florida and Boles Acres, New Mexico 3.2%
13. Allenhurst, Georgia, Security-Widefield, Colorado, Grandview Plaza, Kansas, and Fairbanks Ranch, California 3.0%
14. Standing Pine, Mississippi 2.9%
15. Millers Falls, Massachusetts, Marco Island, Florida, Daytona Beach Shores, Florida, Radcliff, Kentucky, Beverly Hills, Florida, Davilla, Texas, Annandale, New Jersey, and Holiday Heights, New Jersey 2.8%
16. Fort Riley North, Kansas, Copperas Cove, Texas, and Cedar Glen West, New Jersey 2.7%
17. Pelican Bay, Florida, Masaryktown, Florida, Highland Beach, Florida, Milford, Kansas, and Langdon, New Hampshire 2.6%
18. Forest Home, New York, Southwest Bell, Texas, Vineyards, Florida, South Palm Beach, Florida, and Basye-Bryce Mountain, Virginia 2.5%
19. Sausalito, California, Bovina, New York, Fanwood, New Jersey, Fountain, Colorado, Rye Brook, New York and Desoto Lakes, Florida 2.4%
20. Ogden, Kansas, Blue Berry Hill, Texas, Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida, Sherman, Connecticut, Leisuretowne, New Jersey, Killeen, Texas, White House Station, New Jersey, Junction City, Kansas, Ocean Ridge, Florida, Viola, New York, Waynesville, Missouri and Mill Neck, New York 2.3%
21. Level Plains, Alabama, Kingsbury, Nevada, Tega Cay, South Carolina, Margaretville, New York, White Sands, New Mexico, Stamford, New York, Point Lookout, New York, and Terra Mar, Florida 2.2%
22. Rifton, Manasota Key, Florida, Del Mar, California, Yuba Foothills, California, Daleville, Alabama. Tesuque, New Mexico, Plainsboro Center, New Jersey, Silver Ridge, New Jersey and Palm Beach, Florida 2.1%
23. Oriental, North Carolina, Holiday City-Berkeley, New Jersey, North Sea, New York, Ponce Inlet, Florida, Woodlawn-Dotsonville, Tennessee, West Hurley, New York, Littlerock, California, Felton, California, Laguna Woods, California, Leisure Village, New Jersey, Readsboro, Vermont, Nolanville, Texas, and Groveland-Big Oak Flat, California 2.0%
24. Rotonda, Florida, Grayson, California, Shokan, New York, The Meadows, Florida, Southeast Comanche, Oklahoma, Lincolndale, New York, Fort Polk South, Louisiana, and Townsend, Massachusetts 1.9%
25. Pine Ridge, Florida, Boca Pointe, Florida, Rodney Village, Delaware, Palenville, New York, and Topsfield, Massachusetts 1.8%

Counties by percentages of Germans[edit]

1. Emmons County, North Dakota 72.5%
2. McIntosh County, North Dakota 71.6%
3. Logan County, North Dakota 71.5%
4. Hutchinson County, South Dakota 67.6%
5. Faulk County, South Dakota 66.9%
6. Oliver County, North Dakota 66.6%
7. McPherson County, South Dakota 66.4%
8. Grant County, North Dakota 66.1%
9. Campbell County, South Dakota 66.0%
10. Cedar County, Nebraska 65.9%
11. Sheridan County, North Dakota 65.9%
12. Edmunds County, South Dakota 64.9%
13. Pierce County, Nebraska 64.7%
14. Brown County, Minnesota 63.8%
15. Morton County, North Dakota 63.7%
16. Hettinger County, North Dakota 63.0%
17. Kidder County, North Dakota 62.9%
18. Sibley County, Minnesota 62.7%
19. LaMoure County, North Dakota 61.9%
20. Washington County, Wisconsin 60.7%
21. Osage County, Missouri 60.5%
22. Calumet County, Wisconsin 60.5%
23. Wayne County, Nebraska 60.5%
24. Putnam County, Ohio 60.0%
25. Carroll County, Iowa 59.5%
26. Boone County, Nebraska 59.3%
27. Rush County, Kansas 59.0%
28. Slope County, North Dakota 58.4%
29. Sheridan County, Kansas 58.4%
30. Wells County, North Dakota 58.3%
31. Golden Valley County, North Dakota 58.1%
32. Walworth County, South Dakota 58.1%
33. Potter County, South Dakota 58.1%
34. Nemaha County, Kansas 58.1%
35. Stanton County, Nebraska 57.9%
36. Trego County, Kansas 57.8%
37. Burleigh County, North Dakota 57.8%
38. Taylor County, Wisconsin 57.7%
39. Lincoln County, Wisconsin 57.7%
40. Butler County, Iowa 57.6%
41. Ida County, Iowa 57.6%
42. Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin 57.3%
43. Cuming County, Nebraska 57.2%
44. McCook County, South Dakota 57.1%
45. Dodge County, Wisconsin 57.0%
46. Mercer County, Ohio 56.8%
47. Traverse County, Minnesota 56.5%
48. Stutsman County, North Dakota 56.3%
49. Dubois County, Indiana 56.3%
50. Sac County, Iowa 56.3%
51. Clayton County, Iowa 56.0%
52. Grundy County, Iowa 56.0%
53. Harlan County, Nebraska 55.9%
54. Hanson County, South Dakota 55.8%
55. Stark County, North Dakota 55.7%
56. Delaware County, Iowa 55.6%
57. Mercer County, North Dakota 55.5%
58. Wheeler County, Nebraska 55.5%
59. Webster County, Nebraska 55.4%
60. Manitowoc County, Wisconsin 55.4%
61. Renville County, Minnesota 55.3%
62. Chickasaw County, Iowa 55.2%
63. Brown County, South Dakota 55.2%
64. Grant County, South Dakota 54.9%
65. McLeod County, Minnesota 54.8%
66. Martin County, Minnesota 54.6%
67. Sully County, South Dakota 54.5%
68. Wabasha County, Minnesota 54.5%
69. Dubuque County, Iowa 54.5%
70. Jackson County, Minnesota 54.4%
71. Bremer County, Iowa 54.4%
72. Pierce County, North Dakota 54.3%
73. Dickey County, North Dakota 54.3%
74. Ellis County, Kansas 54.3%
75. Antelope County, Nebraska 54.3%
76. Thomas County, Nebraska 54.2%
77. Ness County, Kansas 53.9%
78. Waupaca County, Wisconsin 53.7%
79. Winnebago County, Wisconsin 53.6%
80. Jefferson County, Wisconsin 53.4%
81. Sheboygan County, Wisconsin 53.4%
82. Big Stone County, Minnesota 53.3%
83. Gregory County, South Dakota 53.3%
84. Stearns County, Minnesota 52.9%
85. Seward County, Nebraska 52.9%
86. Clinton County, Illinois 52.7%
87. Calhoun County, Illinois 52.4%
88. Spink County, South Dakota 52.4%
89. Liberty County, Montana 52.4%
90. Fillmore County, Nebraska 52.2%
91. Waseca County, Minnesota 52.1%
92. Blue Earth County, Minnesota 52.0%
93. Otoe County, Nebraska 52.0%
94. Thayer County, Nebraska 52.0%
95. Franklin County, Nebraska 52.0%
96. Miner County, South Dakota 51.9%
97. McHenry County, North Dakota 51.9%
98. Aurora County, South Dakota 51.9%
99. Auglaize County, Ohio 51.9%
100. Wood County, Wisconsin 51.9%
101. Washington County, Kansas 51.8%
102. Jones County, Iowa 51.8%
103. Hand County, South Dakota 51.8%
104. Holt County, Nebraska 51.6%
105. Knox County, Nebraska 51.5%
106. Washington County, Illinois 51.5%
107. Morrison County, Minnesota 51.5%
108. Faribault County, Minnesota 51.4%
109. Marshall County, Kansas 51.4%
110. Hamilton County, Nebraska 51.3%
111. Jackson County, Iowa 51.0%
112. Henry County, Ohio 51.0%
113. Howard County, Nebraska 51.0%
114. Hayes County, Nebraska 50.9%
115. Johnson County, Nebraska 50.9%
116. Iowa County, Iowa 50.9%
117. Frontier County, Nebraska 50.7%
118. York County, Nebraska 50.7%
119. Turner County, South Dakota 50.6%
120. Foster County, North Dakota 50.5%
121. Richland County, North Dakota 50.5%
122. Grant County, Wisconsin 50.5%
123. Fayette County, Iowa 50.5%
124. Benton County, Minnesota 50.4%
125. Murray County, Minnesota 50.3%
126. Marquette County, Wisconsin 50.3%
127. Buffalo County, Wisconsin 50.2%
128. Dunn County, North Dakota 50.1%
129. Langlade County, Wisconsin 50.1%
130. Clark County, Wisconsin 50.1%
131. Waukesha County, Wisconsin 50.1%
132. Wilkin County, Minnesota 50.0%

Culture[edit]

The Germans worked hard to maintain and cultivate their language, especially through newspapers and classes in elementary and high schools. German Americans in many cities, such as Milwaukee, brought their strong support of education, establishing German-language schools and teacher training seminaries (Töchter-Institut) to prepare students and teachers in German language training. By the late 19th century, the Germania Publishing Company was established in Milwaukee, a publisher of books, magazines, and newspapers in German.^[114]

'Germania' was the common term for German American neighborhoods and their organizations.^[115]Deutschtum was the term for transplanted German nationalism, both culturally and politically. Between 1875 and 1915, the German American population in the United States doubled, and many of its members insisted on maintaining their culture. German was used in local schools and churches, while numerous Vereine, associations dedicated to literature, humor, gymnastics, and singing, sprang up in German American communities. German Americans tended to support the German government's actions, and, even after the United States entered World War I, they often voted for antidraft and antiwar candidates. 'Deutschtum' in the United States disintegrated after 1918.^[116]

Music[edit]

Beginning in 1741, the German-speaking Moravian Church Settlements of Bethlehem, Nazareth and Lititz, Pennsylvania, and Wachovia in North Carolina had highly developed musical cultures. Choral music, Brass and String Music and Congregational singing were highly cultivated. The Moravian Church produced many composers and musicians. Haydn's Creation had its American debut in Bethlehem in the early 19th century.

The spiritual beliefs of Johann Conrad Beissel (1690–1768) and the Ephrata Cloister—such as the asceticism and mysticism of this Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, group - are reflected in Beissel's treatises on music and hymns, which have been considered the beginning of America's musical heritage.^[117]

In most major cities, Germans took the lead in creating a musical culture, with popular bands, singing societies, operas and symphonic orchestras.^[118]

A small city, Wheeling, West Virginia could boast of 11 singing societies—Maennerchor, Harmonie, Liedertafel, Beethoven, Concordia, Liederkranz, Germania, Teutonia, Harmonie-Maennerchor, Arion, and Mozart. The first began in 1855; the last folded in 1961. An important aspect of Wheeling social life, these societies reflected various social classes and enjoyed great popularity until anti-German sentiments during World War I and changing social values dealt them a death blow.^[119]

The Liederkranz, a German-American music society, played an important role in the integration of the German community into the life of Louisville, Kentucky. Started in 1848, the organization was strengthened by the arrival of German liberals after the failure of the revolution of that year. By the mid-1850s the Germans formed one-third of Louisville's population and faced nativist hostility organized in the Know-Nothing movement. Violent demonstrations forced the chorus to suppress publicity of its performances that included works by composer Richard Wagner. The Liederkranz suspended operations during the Civil War, but afterward grew rapidly, and was able to build a large auditorium by 1873. An audience of 8,000 that attended a performance in 1877 demonstrated that the Germans were an accepted part of Louisville life.^[120]

The Imperial government in Berlin promoted German culture in the U.S., especially music. A steady influx of German-born conductors, including Arthur Nikisch and Karl Muck, spurred the reception of German music in the United States, while German musicians seized on Victorian Americans' growing concern with 'emotion'. The performance of pieces such as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony established German serious music as the superior language of feeling.^[121]

Turners[edit]

Turner societies in the United States were first organized during the mid-19th century so German American immigrants could visit with one another and become involved in social and sports activities. The National Turnerbund, the head organization of the Turnvereine, started drilling members as in militia units in 1854. Nearly half of all Turners fought in the Civil War, mostly on the Union side, and a special group served as bodyguards for President Lincoln.

By the 1890s, Turners numbered nearly 65,000. At the turn of the 21st century, however, with the ethnic identity of European Americans in flux and Americanization a key element of immigrant life, there were few Turner groups, athletic events were limited, and non-Germans were members. A survey of surviving groups and members reflects these radical changes in the role of Turner societies and their marginalization in 21st-century American society, as younger German Americans tended not to belong, even in strongholds of German heritage in the Midwest.^[122]

Media[edit]

As for any immigrant population, the development of a foreign-language press helped immigrants more easily learn about their new home, maintain connections to their native land, and unite immigrant communities.^[123] By the late 19th century, Germania published over 800 regular publications. The most prestigious daily newspapers, such as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the Anzeiger des Westens in St. Louis, and the Illinois Staats-Zeitung in Chicago, promoted middle-class values and encouraged German ethnic loyalty among their readership.^[124] The Germans were proud of their language, supported many German-language public and private schools, and conducted their church services in German.^[125] They published at least two-thirds of all foreign language newspapers in the U.S. The papers were owned and operated in the U.S., with no control from Germany. As Wittke emphasizes, press. it was 'essentially an American press published in a foreign tongue.' The papers reported on major political and diplomatic events involving Germany, with pride but from the viewpoint of its American readers.^[126][127] For example, during the latter half of the 19th century, at least 176 different German-language publications began operations in the city of Cincinnati alone. Many of these publications folded within a year, while a select few, such as the Cincinnati Freie Presse, lasted nearly a century.^[128] Other cities experienced similar turnover among immigrant publications, especially from opinion press, which published little news and focused instead on editorial commentary.^[129]

By the end of the 19th century, there were over 800 German-language publications in the United States.^[130] German immigration was on the decline, however, and with subsequent generations integrating into English-speaking society, the German language press began to struggle.^[131] The periodicals that managed to survive in immigrant communities faced an additional challenge with anti-German sentiment during World War I^[132] and with the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which authorized censorship of foreign language newspapers.^[133]Prohibition also had a destabilizing impact on the German immigrant communities upon which the German-language publications relied.^[131] By 1920, there were only 278 German language publications remaining in the country.^[134] After 1945, only a few publications have been started. One example is Hiwwe wie Driwwe (Kutztown, PA), the nation's only Pennsylvania German newspaper, which was established in 1997.

Athletics[edit]

Germans brought organized gymnastics to America, and were strong supporters of sports programs. They used sport both to promote ethnic identity and pride and to facilitate integration into American society. Beginning in the mid-19th century, the Turner movement offered exercise and sports programs, while also providing a social haven for the thousands of new German immigrants arriving in the United States each year. Another highly successful German sports organization was the Buffalo Germans basketball team, winners of 762 games (against only 85 losses) in the early years of the 20th century. These examples, and others, reflect the evolving place of sport in the assimilation and socialization of much of the German-American population.^[135]

Religion[edit]

German immigrants who arrived before the 19th century tended to have been members of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches in Germany, and created the Lutheran Synods of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and New York. The largest Lutheran denominations in the U.S. today—the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod, and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod—are all descended from churches started by German immigrants among others. Calvinist Germans founded the Reformed Church in the United States (especially in New York and Pennsylvania), and the Evangelical Synod of North America (strongest in the Midwest), which is now part of the United Church of Christ. Many immigrants joined different churches from those that existed in Germany. Protestants often joined the Methodist church.^[25] In the 1740s, Count Nicolas von Zinzendorf tried to unite all the German-speaking Christians—(Lutheran, Reformed, and Separatists)—into one 'Church of God in the Spirit'. The Moravian Church in America is one of the results of this effort, as are the many 'Union' churches in rural Pennsylvania.

Before 1800, communities of Amish, Mennonites, Schwarzenau Brethren and Moravians had formed and are still in existence today. The Old Order Amish and a majority of the Old Order Mennonites still speak dialects of German, including Pennsylvania German, informally known as Pennsylvania Dutch. The Amish, who were originally from southern Germany and Switzerland, arrived in Pennsylvania during the early 18th century. Amish immigration to the United States reached its peak between the years 1727 and 1770. Religious freedom was perhaps the most pressing cause for Amish immigration to Pennsylvania, which became known as a haven for persecuted religious groups.^[136]

The Hutterites are another example of a group of German Americans who continue a lifestyle similar to that of their ancestors. Like the Amish, they fled persecution for their religious beliefs, and came to the United States between 1874 and 1879. Today, Hutterites mostly reside in Montana, the Dakotas, and Minnesota, and the western provinces of Canada. Hutterites continue to speak Hutterite German. Most are able to understand Standard German in addition to their dialect.^[137] The German speaking 'Russian' Mennonites migrated during the same time as the Hutterites, but assimilated relatively quickly in the United States, whereas groups of 'Russian' Mennonites in Canada resisted assimilation.^[138]

Immigrants from Germany in the mid-to-late-19th century brought many different religions with them. The most numerous were Lutheran or Catholic, although the Lutherans were themselves split among different groups. The more conservative Lutherans comprised the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod and the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod. Other Lutherans formed various synods, most of which merged with Scandinavian-based synods in 1988, forming the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.^[139]Catholic Germans started immigrating in large numbers in the mid to latter 19th century, spurred in particular by the Kulturkampf.

Some 19th-century immigrants, especially the 'Forty-Eighters', were secular, rejecting formal religion. About 250,000 German Jews had arrived by the 1870s, and they sponsored reform synagogues in many small cities across the country. About 2 million Central and Eastern European Jews arrived from the 1880s to 1924, bringing more traditional religious practices.^[140]

Language[edit]

After two or three generations, most German Americans adopted mainstream American customs — some of which they heavily influenced — and switched their language to English. As one scholar concludes, 'The overwhelming evidence .. indicates that the German-American school was a bilingual one much (perhaps a whole generation or more) earlier than 1917, and that the majority of the pupils may have been English-dominant bilinguals from the early 1880s on.'^[146] By 1914, the older members attended German-language church services, while younger ones attended English services (in Lutheran, Evangelical and Catholic churches). In German parochial schools, the children spoke English among themselves, though some of their classes were in German. In 1917–18, after the US entry into World War I on the side of the British, nearly all German language instruction ended, as did most German-language church services.^[85]

About 1.5 million Americans speak German at home, according to the 2000 census. From 1860–1917, German was widely spoken in German neighborhoods; see German in the United States. There is a false belief, called the Muhlenberg legend, that German was almost the official language of the U.S. There was never any such proposal. The U.S. has no official language, but use of German was strongly discouraged during World War I and fell out of daily use in many places.^[147]

There were fierce battles in Wisconsin and Illinois around 1890 regarding proposals to stop the use of German as the primary language in public and parochial schools. The Bennett Law was a highly controversial state law passed in Wisconsin in 1889 that required the use of English to teach major subjects in all public and private elementary and high schools. It affected the state's many German-language private schools (and some Norwegian schools), and was bitterly resented by German American communities. The German Catholics and Lutherans each operated large networks of parochial schools in the state. Because the language used in the classroom was German, the law meant the teachers would have to be replaced with bilingual teachers, and in most cases shut down. The Germans formed a coalition between Catholics and Lutherans, under the leadership of the Democratic Party, and the language issue produced a landslide for the Democrats, as Republicans dropped the issue until World War I. By 1917, almost all schools taught in English, but courses in German were common in areas with large German populations. These courses were permanently dropped.^[148]

Assimilation[edit]

Introduction[edit]

'Assimilation' in this context means the steady loss of distinctive characteristics (especially language), as the Germans melted into a common American nationality.

The apparent disappearance of German American identity[edit]

German Americans are no longer a conspicuous ethnic group.^[149] As Melvin G. Holli puts it, 'Public expression of German ethnicity is nowhere proportionate to the number of German Americans in the nation's population. Almost nowhere are German Americans as a group as visible as many smaller groups. Two examples suffice to illustrate this point: when one surveys the popular television scene of the past decade, one hears Yiddish humor done by comedians; one sees Polish, Greek, and East European detective heroes; Italian-Americans in situation comedies; and blacks such as the Jeffersons and Huxtables. But one searches in vain for quintessentially German-American characters or melodramas patterned after German-American experiences. .. A second example of the virtual invisibility is that, though German Americans have been one of the largest ethnic groups in the Chicago area (numbering near one-half million between 1900 and 1910), no museum or archive exists to memorialize that fact. On the other hand, many smaller groups such as Lithuanians, Poles, Swedes, Jews, and others have museums, archives, and exhibit halls dedicated to their immigrant forefathers'.^{[150]:93 - 94[a]}

But this inconspicuousness was not always the case. By 1910 German Americans had created their own distinctive, vibrant, prosperous German-language communities, referred to collectively as 'Germania'. According to historian Walter Kamphoefner, a 'number of big cities introduced German into their public school programs'.^[152]Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and other cities 'had what we now call two-way immersion programs: school taught half in German, half in English'.^[152] This was a tradition which continued 'all the way down to World War I.'^[152] According to Kamphoefner, German 'was in a similar position as the Spanish language is in the 20th and 21st century'; it 'was by far the most widespread foreign language, and whoever was the largest group was at a definite advantage in getting its language into the public sphere.'^[152] Kamphoefner has come across evidence that as late as 1917, a German version of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' was still being sung in public schools in Indianapolis.^[152] Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon, writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, states that before World War One, 'German was the primary language in the homes, churches and parochial schools'^[153] of German American settlers. She states that 'Many street signs were in German. (Main Street, for instance, was Haupt Strasse.) A large portion of local industry and commercial enterprises had at its roots German tooling and emigres. (An entire German town was moved to Fort Wayne when Wayne Knitting Mills opened.) Mayors, judges, firefighters and other community leaders had strong German ties. Social and sporting clubs and Germania Park in St. Joseph Township provided outlets to engage in traditional German activities'.^[153] She goes on to state that 'The cultural influences were so strong, in fact, that the Chicago Tribune in 1893 declared Fort Wayne a 'most German town.'^[153] Melvin G. Holli states that 'No continental foreign-born group had been so widely and favorably received in the United States, or had won such high marks from its hosts as had the Germans before World War I. Some public opinion surveys conducted before the war showed German Americans were even more highly regarded than immigrants from the mother culture, England'.^[150]:106 Holli states that the Chicago Symphony Orchestra once 'had so many German-American musicians that the conductor often addressed them in the German language'^[150]:101, and he states that 'No ethnic theater in Chicago glittered with such a classy repertory as did the German-American theater, or served to introduce so many European classical works to American audiences'.^[150]:102

The transition to the English language was abrupt, forced by federal, state and local governments, and by public opinion, when the U.S. was at war with Germany in 1917-18. After 1917 the German language was seldom heard in public; most newspapers and magazines closed; churches and parochial schools switched to English. Melvin G. Holli states that 'In 1917 the Missouri Synod's Lutheran Church conference minutes appeared in English for the first time, and the synod's new constitution dropped its insistence on using the language of Luther only and instead suggested bilingualism. Dozens of Lutheran schools also dropped instruction in the German language. English-language services also intruded themselves into parishes where German had been the lingua franca. Whereas only 471 congregations nationwide held English services in 1910, the number preaching in the tongue of Albion in the synod skyrocketed to 2,492 by 1919. The German Evangelical Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and other states also anglicized its name by dropping German from the title'.^[150]:106 Writing about Fort Wayne, Indiana, Cynthia Moothart O'Bannon states that, in the First World War, 'Local churches were forced to discontinue sermons in German, schools were pressured to stop teaching in German, and the local library director was ordered to purchase no more books written in German. The library shelves also were purged of English-language materials deemed sympathetic to or neutral on Germany. Anti-German sentiment forced the renaming of several local institutions. Teutonia Building, Loan & Savings became Home Loan & Savings, and The German-American bank became Lincoln National Bank & Trust Co.'^[153] She continues that 'in perhaps the most obvious bend to prevailing trends, Berghoff Brewery changed its motto from 'A very German brew' to 'A very good brew,' according to 'Fort Wayne: A Most German Town,' a documentary produced by local public television station WFWA, Channel 39'.^[153] Film critic Roger Ebert wrote how 'I could hear the pain in my German-American father's voice as he recalled being yanked out of Lutheran school during World War I and forbidden by his immigrant parents ever to speak German again'.^[154]

Melvin G. Holli states, regarding Chicago, that 'After the Great War it became clear that no ethnic group was so de-ethnicized in its public expression by a single historic event as German Americans. While Polish Americans, Lithuanian Americans, and other subject nationalities underwent a great consciousness raising, German ethnicity fell into a protracted and permanent slump. The war damaged public expression of German ethnic, linguistic, and cultural institutions almost beyond repair'.^[150]:106 He states that, after the war, German ethnicity 'would never regain its prewar public acclaim, its larger-than-life public presence, with its symbols, rituals, and, above all, its large numbers of people who took pride in their Teutonic ancestry and enjoyed the role of Uncle Sam's favored adopted son'.^[150]:107 He states 'A key indicator of the decline of 'Deutschtum' in Chicago was the census: the number identifying themselves to the census-taker as German-born plummeted from 191,000 in 1910 to 112,000 in 1920. This drop far exceeds the natural mortality rate or the number who might be expected to move. Self-identifiers had found it prudent to claim some nationality other than German. To claim German nationality had become too painful an experience'.^[150]:106 Along similar lines, Terrence G. Wiley states that, in Nebraska, 'around 14 percent of the population had identified itself as being of German-origin in 1910; however, only 4.4 percent made comparable assertions in 1920. In Wisconsin, the decline in percentage of those identifying themselves as Germans was even more obvious. The 1920 census reported only 6.6. percent of the population as being of German-origin, as opposed to nearly 29 percent ten years earlier .. These statistics led Burnell .. to conclude that: 'No other North American ethnic group, past or present, has attempted so forcefully to officially conceal their .. ethnic origins. One must attribute this reaction to the wave of repression that swept the Continent and enveloped anyone with a German past'.^[155]

The Catholic high schools were deliberately structured to commingle ethnic groups so as to promote ethnic (but not interreligious) intermarriage.^[156] German-speaking taverns, beer gardens and saloons were all shut down by prohibition; those that reopened in 1933 spoke English.

While its impact appears to be less well-known and studied than the impact which World War One had on German Americans, World War Two was likewise difficult for them and likewise had the impact of forcing them to drop distinctive German characteristics and assimilate into the general US culture.^[157][158] According to Melvin G. Holli, 'By 1930, some German American leaders in Chicago felt, as Dr. Leslie Tischauser put it, 'the damage done by the wartime experience had been largely repaired.' The German language was being taught in the schools again; the German theater still survived; and German Day celebrations were drawing larger and larger crowds. Although the assimilation process had taken its toll of pre-1914 German immigrants, a smaller group of newer postwar arrivals had developed a vocal if not impolitic interest in the rebuilding process in Germany under National Socialism. As the 1930s moved on, Hitler's brutality and Nazi excesses made Germanism once again suspect. The rise of Nazism, as Luebke notes, 'transformed German ethnicity in America into a source of social and psychological discomfort, if not distress. The overt expression of German-American opinion consequently declined, and in more recent years, virtually disappeared as a reliable index of political attitudes. . . .'^[150]:108 Holli goes on to state that 'The pain increased during the late 1930s and early 1940s, when Congressman Martin Dies held public hearings about the menace of Nazi subversives and spies among the German Americans. In 1940 the Democratic party's attack on anti-war elements as disloyal and pro-Nazi, and the advent of the war itself, made German ethnicity too heavy a burden to bear. As Professor Tischauser wrote, 'The notoriety gained by those who supported the German government between 1933 and 1941 cast a pall over German-Americans everywhere. Leaders of the German-American community would have great difficulty rebuilding an ethnic consciousness. . . . Few German-Americans, however, could defend what Hitler . . . had done to millions of people in pursuit of the 'final solution,' and the wisest course for German-Americans was to forget any attachment to the German half of their heritage.'^{[150]:108 - 109} Jennifer Hansler has stated that 'Fred Trump sought to pass himself off as Swedish amid anti-German sentiment sparked by World War II';^[159]Donald reaffirmed this myth in The Art of the Deal.^{[159][160][161]}

By the 1940s Germania had largely vanished outside some rural areas and the Germans were thoroughly assimilated.^[162] According to Melvin G. Holli, by the end of World War Two, German Americans 'were ethnics without any visible national or local leaders. Not even politicians would think of addressing them explicitly as an ethnic constituency as they would say, Polish Americans, Jewish Americans, or African Americans'.^[150]:109 Holli states that 'Being on the wrong side in two wars had a devastating and long-term negative impact on the public celebration of German-American ethnicity'.^[150]:106

Historians have tried to explain what became of the German Americans and their descendants. Kazal (2004) looks at Germans in Philadelphia, focusing on four ethnic subcultures: middle-class Vereinsdeutsche, working-class socialists, Lutherans, and Catholics. Each group followed a somewhat distinctive path toward assimilation. Lutherans, and the better situated Vereinsdeutsche with whom they often overlapped, after World War I abandoned the last major German characteristics and redefined themselves as old stock or as 'Nordic' Americans, stressing their colonial roots in Pennsylvania and distancing themselves from more recent immigrants. On the other hand, working-class and Catholic Germans, groups that heavily overlapped, lived and worked with Irish and other European ethnics; they also gave up German characteristics but came to identify themselves as white ethnics, distancing themselves above all from African American recent arrivals in nearby neighborhoods. Well before World War I, women in particular were becoming more and more involved in a mass consumer culture that lured them out of their German-language neighborhood shops and into English language downtown department stores. The 1920s and 1930s brought English language popular culture via movies and radio that drowned out the few surviving German language venues.^[163]

Factors making German Americans susceptible to assimilation[edit]

Kazal points out that German Americans have not had an experience that is especially typical of immigrant groups. 'Certainly, in a number of ways, the German-American experience was idiosyncratic. No other large immigrant group was subjected to such strong, sustained pressure to abandon its ethnic identity for an American one. None was so divided internally, a characteristic that made German Americans especially vulnerable to such pressure. Among the larger groups that immigrated in the country after 1830, none - despite regional variations - appears to have muted its ethnic identity to so great an extent.'^[163]:273 This quote from Kazal identifies both external pressures on German Americans and internal dividedness among them as reasons for their high level of assimilation.

Regarding the external pressures, Kazal writes: 'The pressure imposed on German Americans to forsake their ethnic identity was extreme in both nature and duration. No other ethnic group saw its 'adoptive fatherland' twice enter a world war against its country of origin. To this stigma, the Third Reich added the lasting one of the Holocaust. In her study of ethnic identity in the 1980s, sociologist Mary Waters noted that the 'effect of the Nazi movement and World War II was still quite strong' in shaping 'popular perceptions of the German-American character,' enough so that some individuals of mixed background often would acknowledge only the non-German part of their ancestry'.^[163]:273[b] Kazal contrasts this experience with the experiences of the Japanese, Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, east European Jews, and Irish. 'Japanese Americans, of course, suffered far more during the Second World War',^[163]:273 but until at least the 1950s, the pressure on Japanese Americans 'ran toward exclusion from, rather than inclusion in, the nation'.^[163]:273 'The state and many ordinary European Americans refused to recognize Asians as potentially American. In contrast, they pressured Germans to accept precisely that American identity in place of a German one'.^[163]:273 Kazal goes on to state 'The burden of 'enemy' status made those pressures far greater for Germans than for other European ethnic groups. To some extent, American intervention in World War I actually helped fuel ethnic nationalism in the United States among Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Italians, and east European Jews, who felt their desires for existing or prospective homelands stood to gain from an Allied victory. Indeed, some historians have depicted the following decade as one when immigrants transcended local or regional homeland affiliations to craft or further consolidate national identities as Poles, Czechs, and Italians. Such groups escaped the fury of '100 percent Americanism' during the war, in part because of their obvious stake in the defeat of the Central Powers'.^{[163]:273 - 274} As for Irish Americans, Kazal states that the lack of enthusiasm of many of them for helping England made them 'vulnerable to the wartime 'antihyphen' climate',^[163]:274, but that 'Irish nationalist activity intensified during and immediately after that war, as many Irish Americans became swept up in the events leading to the creation of the Irish Free State',^[163]:274 and that 'It made a difference for the long-term viability of Irish-American identity that the Irish homeland not only did not go to war with the United States but, in fact, emerged during the interwar years as a sovereign nation'.^[163]:274

Kazal then goes on to discuss the internal dividedness. He writes: 'German-American identity fell victim not only to a peculiar set of events, but also to an extraordinarily high level of internal diversity. All ethnic groups have internal divides, whether of class, religion, gender, politics, or homeland region. What distinguished German America was that it incorporated not just some but all of these divisions. Irish Americans, for example, had lost their status as primarily a proletarian group by 1900, yet they were united by religion and politics. 'Irish American' had come to mean Irish Catholic; the vast majority of Irish Americans subscribed to some form of Irish nationalism conflated with American patriotism; and Irish-American voters were overwhelmingly Democrats. The power of this synthesis, Kerby Miller argued, explains the survival of Irish-American identity despite the ebbing of organised Irish-American nationalism after the Free State's founding. For German Americans, however, religion and party politics were sources of division rather than of unity'.^[163]:274 Kazal goes on to state that 'The subcultures of German America, meanwhile, had ample opportunity for contact, however testy, with non-German counterparts. The latter beckoned as destinations when the cost of being German-American rose too high'.^[163]:274 It is not just Kazal who has pointed out the internal dividedness of the German American community. Kathleen Neils Conzen has pointed it out; David Peterson states that Conzen, 'along with many others, concludes that German-Americans' heterogeneity, particularly in religion, hampered their ability to build socially and politically stable ethnic communities',^[165]:27 and that Conzen 'stresses that German Americans assimilated relatively rapidly and that their diversity played a key role in that assimilation'.^[165]:47[c] (Conzen is also drawn upon by Joy Kristina Adams, who cites Conzen when she (Adams) states that 'The diversity and size of the German settlements made them susceptible to long-term Americanization by fostering factionalism, increasing contacts between Germans and non-Germans, and weakening unified leadership'.)^[166] The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains also stresses the internal dividedness, stating 'One of the distinguishing characteristics of the German population in North America (especially in comparison to other immigrant groups) has been its relative degree of cultural diversity, reflected especially in the number of Christian denominations to which Germans belonged. In part this reflects patterns that had developed over centuries in Germany, whose population came to include nearly every variety of Christianity–from Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed groups to more radical Anabaptist pietistic movements such as Amish, Mennonites, Schwenkfelders, and the Moravian church. It is not surprising, then, that nearly all of these denominations were represented among the German immigrant population in North America.'^[167] Robert Paul McCaffery points out that 'Despite their numbers .. and unlike many immigrant groups, Germans never united as a powerful ethnic block. Religious disputes brought from the old country prevented them from uniting in the new. The two strongest denominations, Catholics and Lutherans, could not come together; and the Free Thinkers distrusted and shunned them both.'^[168]:4 'These divisions ran so deep that German-Americans could neither unite to fend off attacks engendered by World War I, nor elect German candidates for political office'.^[168]:4 McCaffery states that 'Discussions of the disunity of the Germans are many',^[168]:15 giving a work by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and a work by Kathleen Neils Conzen as examples,^[168]:15 and he states that Leslie V. Tischauser 'maintains that neither World War I, political questions of importance to Germans, nor German candidates could unite the German-Americans of Chicago'.^[168]:16 Jason Todd Baker, meanwhile, writes that 'Divided by imported regional prejudices, religious differences, political affiliations, and spread in pockets across the city, the Germans in nineteenth-century St. Louis comprised the city's largest immigrant ethnicity and possibly its least cohesive'.^[169]:95 He goes on to state that German Americans in St. Louis 'could not be relied upon to do much of anything as a group. St. Louis served (and still does) as the seat of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a conservative American Lutheran confession, and their local strength led to friction with Germans of other faiths. These Lutherans did not traffic much with the sizable German Catholic population of the city, who often shared their houses of worship and political stances with the Irish. The small rabbinical German Jewish community remained insular. The Freethinkers, atheists, socialists, et al., had little use for any of these groups. In addition, the Germans, while heavily concentrated in a few pockets of north and south St. Louis, were spread across the city proper and into the larger countryside'.^[169]:99 And according to the Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 'The diversity of religious expression among German-speaking immigrants was paralleled by a high degree of heterogeneity stemming from differences in regional and linguistic origins. This situation differed from that of other nineteenth-century immigrant groups, notably the Irish, but also Italians and people of other European backgrounds. The resulting lack of a unified and clearly definable German-American community explains in part why only few Americans, including those of German descent, have any idea when Steuben Day or German-American Day falls, whereas the Irish St. Patrick's Day is one of America's most popular celebrations, and Columbus Day, named after the Italian explorer, is a federal holiday'.^[170][d]

Persistence of unassimilated German Americans[edit]

Despite the remarkable level of assimilation reached by German Americans, it is worth noting that a distinct German American ethnicity survived well into the mid/late-20th century in some places. Writing about the town of Hustisford, Wisconsin, Jennifer Ludden discusses Mel Grulke, who was born in 1941, with German his first language at home; 'Grulke's great-grandparents immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1880s, yet three generations later, his farmer parents still spoke German at home, attended German language church services and chatted in German with shopkeepers when they brought their farm eggs into town to sell'.^[152] Bethany Lutheran Church in Hustisford offered German-language services into the 1970s;^[152] Zum Kripplein Christi, in the same county as Hustisford (Dodge County), 'offered a Sunday service in German as recently as the 1990s';^[170] St. Luke Lutheran Church, in Wishek, North Dakota, still held German-language services until as recently as about 1994;^[173] St. Matthew's Lutheran Church in San Francisco still holds German-language services to this day.^[174][175] Homer Rudolf, a man from North Dakota of German Russian descent, stated in 2004 that his maternal grandmother, who died in 1980 at the age of 90, 'did not learn English'.^[176] As recently as 1990, one quarter of North Dakota's households included a German speaker.^[177]

To this day, relatively unassimilated people of German-speaking heritage can be found in the United States among different Anabaptist groups - the Old Order Amish and most Old Order Mennonites speak Pennsylvania Dutch (or Bernese German or Alsatian by a minority of Amish) along with High German to various degrees (though they are generally fluent in English).^[178] All Hutterites speak Hutterite German and many 'Russian' Mennonites speak Plautdietsch, a German dialect coming originally from the area around Danzig. The three Amish dialects as well as Hutterite German are still learned by all children of the group, whereas Plautdietsch-speakers tend much more to assimilate. Another group of relatively unassimilated people of German-speaking heritage can be found in the Amana Colonies in Iowa; according to the website Statistical Atlas, all of the residents of East Amana speak German at home, and only 67.7% can speak English 'Very Well'.^[179]

It has been shown that cultural differences between the attitudes towards farming of German Americans, on the one hand, and of British-ancestry Yankees, on the other, lasted into the 1980s and have to some extend lasted into the 21st century; German Americans have tended to see farming in a more family-oriented manner than Yankees.^[180]

German-American influence[edit]

Germans have contributed to a vast number of areas in American culture and technology. Baron von Steuben, a former Prussian officer, led the reorganization of the U.S. Army during the War for Independence and helped make the victory against British troops possible. The Steinway & Sons piano manufacturing firm was founded by immigrant Henry E. Steinway in 1853. German settlers brought the Christmas tree custom and other German Christmas traditions to the United States. The Studebakers built large numbers of wagons used during the Western migration; Studebaker, like the Duesenberg brothers, later became an important early automobile manufacturer. Carl Schurz, a refugee from the unsuccessful first German democratic revolution of 1848 became an influential politician first in the Republican then in the Democratic party, and served as U.S. Secretary of the Interior.^[181]

After World War II, Wernher von Braun, and most of the leading engineers from the former German V-2 rocket base at Peenemünde, were brought to the U.S. They contributed decisively to the development of U.S. military rockets, as well as rockets for the NASA space program and the initiation of the Apollo program to land on the Moon.^[182] Similarly, fellow German aviation technologist Siegfried Knemeyer, the former top aviation technologist within ReichsmarschallHermann Göring's Reich Air Ministry during World War II, was brought to the United States through a similar path to von Braun, and served as a civilian employee of the USAF for over twenty years.

The influence of German cuisine is seen in the cuisine of the United States throughout the country, especially regarding pastries, meats and sausages, and above all, beer. Frankfurters (or 'wieners', originating from Frankfurt am Main and Vienna, respectively), hamburgers, bratwurst, sauerkraut, and strudel are common dishes. German bakers introduced the pretzel, which is popular across the United States. Germans introduced America to lager, the most-produced beer style in the United States, and have been the dominant ethnic group in the beer industry since 1850.^[25][183]

The oldest extant brewery in the United States is D. G. Yuengling & Son of Pottsville, Pennsylvania (approximately 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia), founded in 1829 by an immigrant from Aldingen in what is today Baden-Württemberg; the brewery's flagship product remains a 19th-century German-style amber lager.^[184] By the late 19th century, Milwaukee, with a large population of German origin, was once the home to four of the world's largest breweries owned by ethnic Germans (Schlitz, Blatz, Pabst, and Miller) and was the number one beer producing city in the world for many years. Almost half of all current beer sales in the United States can be attributed to German immigrants, Capt. A. Pabst, Eberhard Anheuser, and Adolphus Busch, who founded Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis in 1860.^[185] Later German immigrants figured prominently in the rebirth of craft brews following Prohibition, culminating in the microbrew movement that swept the U.S. beginning in the late 1980s.

German and German-American celebrations, such as Oktoberfest, Rhenish Carnival, German-American Day and Von Steuben Day are held regularly throughout the country. One of the largest is the German-American Steuben Parade in New York City, held every third Saturday in September. There are also major annual events in Chicago's Lincoln Square neighborhood, a traditional a center of the city's German population, in Cincinnati, where its annual Oktoberfest Zinzinnati^[186] is the largest Oktoberfest outside of Germany^[187] and in Milwaukee, which celebrates its German heritage with an annual German Fest.^[107] Many of the immigrants from Germany and other German-speaking countries came to Pennsylvania to what was then 'Allegheny City' (now part of the North Side of the City of Pittsburgh). So many German speakers arrived, the area became known as 'Deutschtown' and has been revived as such.^[188][189] Within Deutschtown and since 1854, The Teutonia Männerchor has been promoting and furthering German cultural traditions.^[190]

Skat, the most popular card game in Germany, is also played in areas of the United States with large German American populations, such as Wisconsin and Texas.^[107]

One of the most popular news channels (Der Konservative by TWA media) on social media in Germany and Austria is entirely being produced by German Americans in Oakland, California.

Education[edit]

The following German international schools are in operation in the United States, serving German citizens, Americans, and other U.S. residents:

Notable people[edit]

German Americans have been influential in almost every field in American society, including science, architecture, business, sports, entertainment, theology, politics, and the military. Many of these individuals were of German Jewish descent or anti-Nazis who fled Nazi oppression.^[191]

German American general/flag military officers Baron von Steuben, George Armstrong Custer, John Pershing, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Chester W. Nimitz, Carl Andrew Spaatz and Norman Schwarzkopf commanded the United States Army in the American Revolutionary War, American Civil War, Indian Wars, World War I, World War II, and the Persian Gulf War, respectively.

German Americans were famous American politicians, including Carl Schurz, Friedrich Hecker, Frederick Muhlenberg, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Dwight D. Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover, Henry Kissinger, John Boehner and Donald Trump.

Many German Americans have played a prominent role in American industry and business, including Henry J. Heinz (H. J. Heinz Company), Frank Seiberling (Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company), Walt Disney (Disney), John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil), William Boeing (The Boeing Company) and (United Airlines), Walter Chrysler (Chrysler Corporation), Frederick and August Duesenberg (Duesenberg Automobile Corporation), Studebaker brothers (Studebaker Automobile Corporation), George Westinghouse (Westinghouse Electric Corporation), Levi Strauss (Levi Strauss & Co.), Charles Guth (PepsiCo Inc.), Bill Gates (Microsoft Corporation), Jawed Karim (YouTube), Elon Musk (SolarCity), (SpaceX) and (Tesla Motors), James L. Kraft (Kraft Foods Inc.), Henry E. Steinway (Steinway & Sons), Charles Pfizer (Pfizer, Inc.), John Jacob Astor (Waldorf Astoria Hotels and Resorts), Conrad Hilton (Hilton Hotels & Resorts), Guggenheim family (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation), (Guggenheim Partners), Marcus Goldman and Samuel Sachs (The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.), Lehman Brothers (Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.), Charles Diebold (Diebold Nixdorf), Bernard Kroger (Kroger), Carl Laemmle (Universal Studios), Marcus Loew (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc.), Harry Cohn (Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.), Herman Hollerith (International Business Machines Corporation (IBM)), Steve Jobs (Apple Inc.),^[192]Michael Dell (Dell Inc.), Eric Schmidt (Google Inc.) and (Alphabet Inc.), Peter Thiel (PayPal Inc.), Adolph Simon Ochs and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (The New York Times), Charles Bergstresser (The Wall Street Journal), Al Neuharth (USA Today), Eugene Meyer (The Washington Post) etc.

German Americans were pioneers and dominated beer brewing for much of American history, beginning with breweries founded in the 19th century by German immigrants August Schell (August Schell Brewing Company), Christian Moerlein (Christian Moerlein Brewing Co.), Eberhard Anheuser (Anheuser-Busch InBev), Adolphus Busch (Anheuser-Busch InBev), Adolph Coors (Molson Coors Brewing Company), Frederick Miller (Miller Brewing Company), Frederick Pabst (Pabst Brewing Company), Bernhard Stroh (Stroh Brewery Company) and Joseph Schlitz (Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company).^[185]

Some, such as Brooklyn Bridge engineer John A. Roebling and architects Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, left behind visible landmarks.

Others, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Wernher von Braun, Linus Pauling, John Peter Zenger, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Weizenbaum set intellectual landmarks while Neil Armstrong was the first human to land on the moon.

Still others, such as Bruce Willis, George Eyser, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Jack Nicklaus, Dale Earnhardt, Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff (Doris Day), Grace Kelly, Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Johnny Weissmuller, Ernst Lubitsch, Walter Damrosch, Henry John Deutschendorf (John Denver), John Kay, Heidi Klum, Meryl Streep, Marlon Brando, Kim Basinger, Sandra Bullock, David Hasselhoff, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin George Knipfing (Kevin James) became prominent athletes, actors, film directors or artists.^[193]

German-American presidents[edit]

There have been three presidents whose fathers were of German descent: Dwight D. Eisenhower (original family name Eisenhauer and maternal side is also German/Swiss), Herbert Hoover (original family name Huber), and Donald Trump (whose paternal grandparents were immigrants from the Palatinate region of Germany). Presidents with maternal German ancestry include Richard Milhous Nixon (Nixon's maternal ancestors were Germans who anglicized Melhausen to Milhous)^[194] and Barack Obama, whose maternal family's ancestry includes German immigrants from the South German town of Besigheim^[195] and from Bischwiller in the Alsace region that is nowadays part of France; both families came to America around 1750.^[196]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^Similarly, W. Bruce Leslie has written that 'German American invisibility in contemporary society and in history is an anomaly deserving attention. By standard statistical measurement, the Germans were the largest immigrant group. Yet historians have been far more interested in Italian, Irish, Polish, and Eastern European Jewish immigration and culture. Irish bars, Italian restaurants, and Jewish humor abound. German language is rarely studied in high schools or colleges and German restaurants are an endagered culinary species. The blending of so many millions into the American mainstream with barely a trace is one of the major untold stories in American history'.^[151]:294
2. ^In the book that Kazal appears to be quoting here, Waters states 'Many people cited various political or social events as having an effect on their consciousness and degree of ethnic identity. I have already noted Laurie Jablonski's stronger identification with her Polish than with her German ancestry, a fact she attributed to the influence her surname had on how others reacted to her. When I asked about times when the relative influence of one or the other side might be stronger, however, she revealed that political events in Germany and Poland had a lot to do with how she chose to identify herself'.^[164]:83 Waters goes on to state that 'The association of being German with being a Nazi is still strong for Laurie, forty years after World War II. A similar story to Laurie's is related in a description by Hinda Winawer-Steiner and Norbert Wetzel of a workshop for family therapists on ethnicity and family therapy. The therapists were supposed to talk about their ethnicity and how it might influence their work. A discussion of a German-American family revealed that two of the therapists who had identified themselves as Polish-American at the beginning of the workshop were, in fact, half German. It turned out that they were suppressing their German identity because of the negative connotations associated with being German. 'When asked, one explained that she simply considered herself Polish. The other, after some reflection, said that in a group that was half Jewish, she had been reluctant to acknowledge her German heritage' (Winawer-Steiner and Wetzel 1982, 253)'.^[164]:84
3. ^Peterson himself seems not to fully agree with this, stating 'Most community studies have examined very large, heterogeneous German-American urban populations that assimilated relatively quickly or, less commonly, large, homogeneous rural ones that did not. Hence, German-Americans' diversity has emerged as perhaps the crucial variable accounting for their assimilationist propensities. Otter Tail County, certainly a rural area, had German-American communities that were diverse and small, and these communities succeeded in maintaining crucial ethnic boundaries into the twentieth century. The persistence of these heterogeneous, lightly populated German-American communities suggest that place of residence was the key factor in the rate of German-American assimilation. Urban orientation may have corroded German-American ethnic boundaries more than diversity did, though the two variables were not unrelated'.^{[165]:47 - 48}
4. ^A similar statement about the diversity of German Americans has been made by Andrew R. L. Cayton: 'In the process of participating in the public culture of Ohio, some Germans struggled to keep connections with their birthplaces. A coherent community was difficult to maintain, however. Proud as they were of 'Deutschthum,' or the sum of Germanness, it became increasingly vague. Germans were too diverse in terms of religion and politics. 'Wherever four Germans gathered,' observed the Deutsche Pionier in 1879, 'they will find four different ideas.'^[171]:155 Another similar statement about the diversity of German Americans has been made by Randall M. Miller. Writing about New Orleans, Miller states 'During the nineteenth century, the Irish and Germans provided the largest numbers of mmigrants and gave the city its immigrant cast. The Irish and Germans differed, however, in their ethnic cohesiveness and interactions with the host culture(s)'.^[172]:129 Miller then states that 'German immigrants .. lacked sufficient cultural and social unity to impose a single powerful German imprint on the city. They were widely dispersed throughout the Second and Third Municipalities, and in Carrollton and Lafayette, and they were fragmented by differences in religion, region of origin, and class. The proliferation of German clubs, associations, and institutions bespoke the Germans' numerical significance in the city, but it also attested to their divisions, for such organizations tended to cater to very specific groups rather than bind the various German strands together. To be sure, distinct concentrations of Germans existed in various parts of the city, wherein various German cultural values survived and influenced the culture of non-Germans in their midst, and German Gemütlichkeit was easily accommodated in the city's genial public culture. But, overall, Germans were too diverse and divided to dominate the city'.^[172]:129 Miller contrasts this situation with the situation of Irish Americans in New Orleans: 'Irish immigrants had greater cohesion and wider influence than the Germans. In the great waves of late antebellum immigration, the vast majority of Irish immigrants entering New Orleans came from a few select counties in Ireland. They shared a common faith, poverty, and national identity. .. New Orleans was small enough so that dispersal did not diminish Irish power; in fact, Irish immigrants everywhere shared so many common cultural and class interests that dispersion served to broaden Irish influence on the city's culture'.^[172]:129

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189. ^'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on 2011-11-26. Retrieved 2011-11-03.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)
190. ^'Archived copy'. Archived from the original on 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2012-05-17.CS1 maint: Archived copy as title (link)'MÄNNERCHOR, DAMENCHOR, GEMISCHTER CHOR, ALPEN SCHUHPLATTLER UND TRACHTENVEREIN, PITTSBURGH DISTRICT KINDERCHOR, SCHÜTZENKAMERADEN, TEUTONIA HAUSKAPELLE, LUSTIGEN MUSIKANTEN, and 66 CARD LEAGUE'
191. ^Sass, Ed. 'GermAmChron'. www.eds-resources.com.
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193. ^'Rating the Top Baseball Players of All Time'. Baseballguru.com. Retrieved 2007-11-28.
194. ^Stephen E. Ambose Nixon chapter 1 (1987)
195. ^'Researchers: Obama has German roots', USA Today, June 4, 2009
196. ^'Ancestry of Barack Obama'. Archived from the original on 2008-12-03. Retrieved 2008-10-09.

Further reading[edit]

• Adams, Willi Paul. The German-Americans: An Ethnic Experience (1993).
• Bade, Klaus J. 'From emigration to immigration: The German experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.' Central European History 28.4 (1995): 507-535.
• Bade, Klaus J. 'German emigration to the United States and continental immigration to Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.' Central European History 13.4 (1980): 348-377.
• Bank, Michaela. Women of Two Countries: German-American Women, Women's Rights and Nativism, 1848–1890 (Berghahn, 2012).
• Baron, Frank, 'Abraham Lincoln and the German Immigrants: Turners and Forty-Eighters,' Yearbook of German-American Studies, 4 (Supplemental Issue 2012), 1–254.
• Barry, Colman J. The Catholic Church and German Americans. (1953).
• Bronner, Simon J. and Joshua R. Brown, eds. Pennsylvania Germans: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (: Johns Hopkins UP, 2017), xviii, 554 pp.
• Brancaforte, Charlotte L., ed. The German Forty-Eighters in the United States. (1989).
• Bungert, Heike, Cora Lee Kluge, & Robert C. Ostergren (eds.). Wisconsin German Land and Life. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006.
• Coburn, Carol K. Life at Four Corners: Religion, Gender, and Education in a German-Lutheran Community, 1868–1945. (1992).
• Conzen, Kathleen Neils. 'Germans' in Stephan Thernstrom (ed.). Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. (1980). pp. 405–425.
• Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Germans in Minnesota. (2003).
• Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Immigrant Milwaukee, 1836–1860: Accommodation and Community in a Frontier City. (1976).
• DeWitt, Petra. Degrees of Allegiance: Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri's German-American Community during World War I (Ohio University Press, 2012).
• Dobbert, Guido A. 'German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 1870–1914'. American Quarterly 19 (1967): 663–680.
• Efford, Alison Clark. German Immigrants: Race and Citizenship in the Civil War Era. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Ellis, M. and P. Panayi. 'German Minorities in World War I: A Comparative Study of Britain and the USA', Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (April 1994): 238–259.
• Emmerich, Alexander. John Jacob Astor and the First Great American Fortune. (2013); Astor (1763-1848) came to the US in 1783
• Ernst, Robert. Immigrant Life in New York City, 1825-1863 (1949), detailed coverage of Germans and Irish.
• Faust, Albert Bernhardt. The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence. 2 vol (1909). vol. 1, vol. 2
• Fogleman, Aaron. Hopeful Journeys: German Immigration, Settlement, and Political Culture in Colonial America, 1717–1775 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996) online
• 'German-Americans: The silent minority'. The Economist February 7, 2015, With a statistical map by counties
• German Historical Institute. Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present. (2010, updated continually)
• Gross, Stephen John. 'Handing down the farm: Values, strategies, and outcomes in inheritance practices among rural German Americans', Journal of Family History, (1996) 21: 2, 192–217.
• Grubb, Farley. German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709–1920 (Routledge Explorations in Economic History) (2011).
• Guenther, Karen. 'A Question of Loyalty: German Churches in Reading During the First World War,' Pennsylvania History' (2017) 84#3:325-53 online
• Hawgood, John. The Tragedy of German-America. (1940).
• Iverson, Noel. Germania, U.S.A.: Social Change in New Ulm, Minnesota. (1966). emphasizes Turners.
• Jensen, Richard. The Winning of the Midwest, Social and Political Conflict 1888–1896. (1971). Voting behavior of Germans, prohibition, language, and school issues.
• Johnson, Hildegard B. 'The Location of German Immigrants in the Middle West'. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 41 (1951): 1–41.
• Jordon, Terry G. German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-century Texas. (1966).
• Kamphoefner, Walter D. and Wolfgang Helbich, eds. German-American Immigration and Ethnicity in Comparative Perspective. Madison, Wisconsin: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin–Madison (2004).
• Kamphoefner, Walter D., 'Uprooted or Transplanted? Reflections on Patterns of German Immigration to Missouri,' Missouri Historical Review, 103 (January 2009), 71-89.
• Kamphoefner, Walter D. 'Immigrant Epistolary and Epistemology: On the Motivators and Mentality of Nineteenth-Century German Immigrants.' Journal of American Ethnic History (2009): 34-54. in JSTOR, on deep-reading their letters
• Kazal, Russell A. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity. (2004).
• Keller, Christian B. 'Flying Dutchmen and Drunken Irishmen: The Myths and Realities of Ethnic Civil War Soldiers,' Journal of Military History, 73 (January 2009), 117–145.
• Keller, Phyllis. States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979.
• Knarr, Mary L. 'Faith, frauen, and the formation of an ethnic identity: German Lutheran women in south and central Texas, 1831–1890'. (Ph.D. dissertation, Texas Christian U. 2009). online
• Kulas, S. John. Der Wanderer of St. Paul: The First Decade, 1867-1877: a Mirror of the German-Catholic Immigrant Experience in Minnesota (Peter Lang, 1996).
• Levine, Bruce. The Spirit of 1848: German Immigrants, Labor Conflict, and the Coming of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
• Lohne, Raymond. 'Team of Friends: A New Lincoln Theory and Legacy', Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society Fall/Winter 2008, vol. 101 no. 3/4, pp. 285–314. German American politics and Abraham Lincoln
• Luebke, Frederick C. Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans During World War I. (1974).
• Luebke, Frederick C., ed. Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln. (1971).
• Luebke, Frederick C. Germans in the New World. (1990).
• Luebke, Frederick. Immigrants and Politics: The Germans of Nebraska, 1880–1900. (1969).
• Nadel, Stanley. Little Germany: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in New York City, 1845-80 (1990).
• O'Connor, Richard. German-Americans: an Informal History. (1968), popular history
• Otterness, Philip. Becoming German: The 1709 Palatine Migration to New York (2004) 235 pp.
• Pickle, Linda. Contented among Strangers: Rural German-Speaking Women and Their Families in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (1996).
• Pochmann, Henry A. and Arthur R. Schultz; German Culture in America, 1600–1900: Philosophical and Literary Influences. (1957).
• Ritter, Luke, 'Sunday Regulation and the Formation of German American Identity in St. Louis, 1840–1860,' Missouri Historical Review, (2012), vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 23–40.
• Roeber, A. G. Palatines, Liberty, and Property: German Lutherans in Colonial British America. (1998).
• Salamon, Sonya. Prairie Patrimony: Family, Farming, and Community in the Midwest (U of North Carolina Press, 1992), focus on German Americans.
• Salmons, Joseph C. The German Language in America, 1683-1991. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1993.
• Schiffman, Harold. 'Language loyalty in the German-American Church: The Case of an Over-confident Minority' (1987).
• Schirp, Francis. 'Germans in the United States'. The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Appleton, 1909.
• Schlossman, Steven L. 'Is there an American tradition of bilingual education? German in the public elementary schools, 1840-1919.' American Journal of Education (1983): 139-186. in JSTOR
• Tatlock, Lynne and Matt Erlin, eds. German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation. (2005).
• Thernstrom, Stephan, ed. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980) online
• Tischauser, Leslie V. The Burden of Ethnicity: The German Question in Chicago, 1914–1941. (1990).
• Tolzmann, Don H., ed. German Americans in the World Wars, 2 vols. Munich, Germany: K.G. Saur, (1995).
• Tolzmann, Don H. German-American Literature (Scarecrow Press, 1977).
• Trommler, Frank & Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History. (2 vol 1985); vol 1: Immigration, Language, Ethnicity; vol 2: The Relationship in the Twentieth Century. Essays by scholars covering broad themes.
• Turk, Eleanor L. 'Germans in Kansas: Review Essay'. Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 28 (Spring 2005): 44–71.
• van Ravenswaay, Charles. The Arts and Architecture of German Settlements in Missouri: A Survey of a Vanishing Culture (1977; reprint University of Missouri Press, 2006).
• Walker, Mack. Germany and the Emigration, 1816–1885 (1964).
• Where Have All the Germans Gone?. New York: Films Media Group, 1976.
• Wittke, Carl Frederick. The German-Language Press in America. (1957).
• Wittke, Carl Frederick. Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America. (1952).
• Wittke, Carl Frederick. We Who Built America: The Saga of the Immigrant. (1939), ch. 6, 9.
• Wood, Ralph, ed. The Pennsylvania Germans. (1942).
• Zeitlin, Richard. Germans in Wisconsin. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, (2000).

Historiography[edit]

• Hustad, Bradley Jake. 'Problems in Historiography: The Americanization of German Ethnics.' (MA thesis, Mankato State University, 2013). online
• Kazal, Russell A. 'Revisiting Assimilation: The Rise, Fall, and Reappraisal of a Concept'. American Historical Review 100 (1995): 437–71.
• Kluge, Cora Lee. Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans, 1850–1914. Madison, Wis.: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 2007.
• Ortlepp, Anke. 'Deutsch-Athen Revisited: Writing the History of Germans in Milwaukee' in Margo Anderson and Victor Greene (eds.), Perspectives on Milwaukee's Past. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009.
• Miller, Zane L. 'Cincinnati Germans and the Invention of an Ethnic Group', Queen City Heritage: The Journal of the Cincinnati Historical Society 42 (Fall 1984): 13–22.
• Parish, Peter J., ed. (2013). Reader's Guide to American History. Taylor & Francis. pp. 294–95.CS1 maint: Multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: Extra text: authors list (link)

Primary sources[edit]

• Kamphoefner, Walter D., and Wolfgang Helbich, eds. Germans in the Civil War; The Letters They Wrote Home. (U of North Carolina Press, 2006).
• Kamphoefner, Walter D., Wolfgang Johannes Helbich and Ulrike Sommer, eds. News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home. (Cornell University Press, 1991).
• 'German'. Chicago Foreign Language Press Survey. Chicago Public Library Omnibus Project of the Works Progress Administration of Illinois. 1942 – via Newberry Library. (English translations of selected German-language newspaper articles, 1855-1938).

In German[edit]

• Emmerich, Alexander. Geschichte der Deutschen in Amerika von 1680 bis in die Gegenwart. (2013).
• Rehs, Michael. Wurzeln in fremder Erde: Zur Geschichte der südwestdeutschen Auswanderung nach Amerika DRW-Verlag, 1984. ISBN3-87181-231-5
• 'List of Newspapers and Periodicals Printed Wholly or in Part in Languages Other Than English: German', American Newspaper Directory, New York: Geo. P. Rowell & Co., 1880

External links[edit]

German-American history and culture[edit]

• German-American Business Biographies from the German Historical Institute

German-American organizations[edit]

• Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Max Kade German-American Center at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis
• Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center at Kutztown University

Local German-American history and culture[edit]