The fate of German immigrants during WW II in the U.S. finally gets a hearing | By Uwe Siemon-Netto
After war broke out between the U.S. and Germany 67 years ago, 11,000 German immigrants, including women and children, were sent to detention camps. Unlike ex-detainees of Japanese descent, they never received an apology. Finally, a Congressional subcommittee has begun looking into their fate. Eberhard E. Fuhr, who spent nearly five years in confinement, is one of them still around.
When you talk to Eberhard E. Fuhr, he sounds just like what he is: an elderly gentleman from the Midwest; educated, articulate, humorous, contented with his past career as a corporate executive; proud of his three children, eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren; and pleased with his ranch-style home in Palatine, Illinois. In short, he is very American but when pressed he admits: “Sometimes I still feel like an outsider here.”
Fuhr can’t remember the German village of Wiesdorf near Leverkusen where he was born as a baker’s son 84 years ago. Nor does he recall crossing the Atlantic, wearing a sailor’s uniform as little European boys did in those days, back in 1928.
What he will not forget was that day in August 1942 when U.S. agents came to the Fuhrs’ brick house on Baymiller Street in Cincinnati to detain his parents and his younger brother, Gerhard. Neither can he forget his own arrest seven months later, nor the years of captivity that followed.
Fuhr lost his freedom while he was a senior at Woodward High School in Cincinnati, where he had been an excellent student and coveted athlete. He was quick-witted, too. With a chortle, he relates the inane question put to him by the Civilian Alien Hearing Board: “What would you say to your German cousin if he came to you for sanctuary after coming up the Ohio River in his German U-boat?” Fuhr shot back: “The Ohio River drafts only four feet; it’s not deep enough for submarines.”
With sadness, he reminisces about the behavior of the Lutheran parish to which the Fuhr family belonged. After his parents’ arrest, he and his older brother Julius continued to live in their modest family home for a while. “The church elders stopped by demanding our parents’ pledge – when we could not make payment, our parents were dropped from the church’s rolls,” said Fuhr, now a practicing member of a Lutheran congregation in Palatine.
When Fuhr and his brother were eventually led away in handcuffs, they were 17 and 18, respectively. The were first incarcerated in Hamilton County Prison where felons yelled threats at them from neighboring cells, calling them Nazis, Krauts and Huns. “Worse than this experience was the humiliating and painful way by which we were driven from Cincinnati to Chicago – in the backseat of a car, handcuffed all the way to my belt and to my brother in a manner forcing us to face each other all the time, even when nature called,” he recalled. “It was excruciating.”
He insists that he and his family had nothing to do with the Nazis, who came to power in Germany after the Fuhrs had left. “My parents were faithful Christians, and if they had any political leanings at all they felt nostalgia for the monarchy,” he said. In the scorpion-infested detention camp in Crystal City, Texas, where the Fuhr family was finally reunited, Fuhr did become aware of some captives celebrating Hitler’s birthday on April 20. “But on the whole, I rarely heard German inmates expressing sympathy for the Nazis,” he said.
In the Crystal City camp, the Fuhrs learned that their Cincinnati home had been ransacked. “Everything was taken, our furniture, stamp collection, piano, violin, even our family photographs and all private memorabilia whose loss my mother mourned until she died in 1961,” Fuhr said. “My father asked the camp authorities to grant him leave so that he could secure his house. They said, ‘Sure, if you are prepared to pay for the time and travel of three armed guards.’ My father did not have that kind of money; as a baker he had never made more than $35 per week.” The Fuhrs lost their house to foreclosure as did many other detainees.
In the Crystal City camp, the Fuhrs lived side-by-side with Japanese families. “German and Japanese babies were born on the same table,” he recalled. “The only difference between them was that after the war the Japanese children received restitution and the Germans did not.” But the relationship between the two groups was friendly. “We played baseball together,” he added. “Later, when Peruvian detainees of Japanese extraction joined us, they proved to be great soccer partners.”
The U.S. government had persuaded Latin American governments to arrest some of their citizens and residents of German, Austrian and Japanese extractions and send them to the U.S. for internment. About 4,050 Germans, including Jews, were transported north in dark, dank holds of ships and were rarely allowed on deck. “Some were of dark complexion, suggesting Hispanic ancestry,” Fuhr recalled. “We welcomed their arrival because they brought their wonderful music with them, making life in the camp more bearable.”
Such distraction was much appreciated in Crystal City, a hellishly hot place just north of the Mexican border teeming with thousands of inmates living in family units, watched over by armed guards in lookout towers. “We were not mistreated,” he said. “Our guards simply did their jobs. Still, in a way we civilians were worse off than German prisoners of war who were allowed out of their camps and often lived on farms.”
The inmates’ mail was censored; they were cut off from the outside world. They had no real dollars, which they could have used beyond their barbed wire fence but were paid in SCRIP, a substitute currency without legal tender. It was accepted only in the camp’s own store and at its farm that grew vegetables.
The best thing that happened to Fuhr in Crystal City was meeting his future wife, Barbara, the daughter of a German wire service correspondent who refused to be repatriated when war broke out and instead, insisted on remaining in the United States with his American wife and child. So they were interned. But marriage between Fuhr and Barbara had to wait well beyond the end of World War II in 1945. First the Fuhrs had to stay on in Crystal City to help dismantle the camp. Then they were transferred to Ellis Island, N.Y. where conditions were worse, where the food was barely edible and where the detainees were allowed only brief moments in the open air every day.
It wasn’t until 1948 that the last German-American detainees were released from Ellis Island due to efforts of Republican Senator William Langer from North Dakota. Before they were allowed to go, most were made to sign secrecy oaths. “Many (were) threatened with deportation with no prospect of return if they spoke of their ordeal,” according to Karen E. Ebel, an internee’s daughter heading the German American Internee Coalition. “Many internees, always fearful, (took) their secret to their graves [...] Reportedly, camp employees (were also made to) sign oaths of secrecy.”
After their release, most detainees faced destitution. Their bank accounts were frozen, their properties gone. Worse still, their wartime experience of humiliation and stigmatization left them with “deep psychological scars,” said Fuhr. “This is why we must encourage these people to tell their story without fear of recrimination. They are not criminals but persons caught in the web of wartime hysteria.”
Largely due to organizations such as Ebel’s, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law began debating their fate this spring. In a hearing, it focused on the U.S. treatment of European Americans, Latin Americans, Japanese Latin Americans and Jewish refugees during World War II.
Whether in years to come German-American victims of U.S. detention policies in World War II will receive compensation as did their Japanese and Italian counterparts, is doubtful, according to Fuhr. “At any rate, even if money was offered to me I wouldn’t take it. I was not the one who lost everything: my father was and he is dead.”
Despite losing years of his youth, Fuhr did well in life. Working as a secretary, his wife Barbara paid for his education, which allowed him to finish high school, graduate from college with honors, and then obtain an MBA. Then followed a successful career in industry: His last position was that of national sales manager of Pioneer Plastics Corporation, a leading producer of high quality laminates.
“I was blessed with a wonderful marriage of 56 years,” said Fuhr, whose wife died a few years ago. “I have been to Germany six times and developed a sense of belonging there.” But of course he knows that this is no option for him. He will doubtlessly live out his days in America, loved by his children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and to live with his memories but not in the way other former detainees did. They suffered their shame silently. Fuhr is determined to continue speaking out.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
Berlin’s American Heart
The capital seeks a buyer for a transatlantic landmark – By Caroline Fetscher
The legendary Amerika Haus, a transatlantic cornerstone of postwar Berlin, is going up for sale. Dedicated citizens are trying to restore the legendary site to new transatlantic purpose and glory. All they need is a like-minded investor.
It had landmark, even cult status in West Berlin. To Germans in the divided city, Amerika Haus represented a beacon of hope. As a cultural outpost of the free West founded in the winter of 1946, it provided a gushing source of information and inspiration soon after World War II.
Its beginnings were modest. In a makeshift consular office of the U.S. military government, American soldiers offered their own used books and newspapers to the German public. After the closure of the office on Kleiststrasse 12, it was turned into a tiny library opened in February 1946. A year later, this became an official U.S. Information Center with the German name, Amerika Haus.
For 60 years to come, under the guidance of the State Department, Amerika Haus grew into an influential institution: the cultural branch of American diplomacy in Berlin. Since June 1957, it has been housed in a modern, two-story building by architect Bruno Grimmek near Zoo Station, the center of West Berlin.
Berliners cherished its jazz concerts and modern art exhibitions. Besides the works of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville and Dashiell Hammett in its library, the institution also provided access to the New York Times and the Washington Post. A theater staged productions by leading American playwrights. All this was “an enormously precious gift,” as Berliners from that period still say today.
Renowned figures like Thornton Wilder, James Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Jackson Pollock and Robert Kennedy mingled with the Berlin public there. Hundreds of debates were organized in the Amerika Haus. Those events were greatly appreciated in the dire setting of a Cold War Berlin forced to slowly dig itself out of the ruins left by the war.
Eleven million visitors came in the first decade, their numbers steadily growing. Aided by funds from the European Recovery Program, Berlin’s Amerika Haus, like many others in occupied Germany, conveyed to the people the realm of opportunities their liberators and patrons stood for.
Of course, in 1968, when emotions ran high among Berlin’s student community against the war in Vietnam, capitalism and the establishment, Amerika Haus became the target of street protests. Throwing paint bombs and tomatoes at the modernist facade, the young showed their parents’ generation and the NATO adherents how they felt.
Remarkably, even former demonstrators remember how surprised they were when the Americans remained open to discussion while German authorities preferred to crack down on the obstreperous youngsters.
Even in fraught times, Amerika Haus radiated a spirit of democracy. As years went by, it carried on its work and kept its spirit, hosting now-legendary U.S. election night parties. After the September 11 attacks, Berliners flocked to Amerika Haus in solidarity, laying down flowers and lighting thousands of candles.
Now the place no longer reverberates with percussions or discussions. Its rooms occasionally house temporary exhibitions by corporations and cultural groups. In September 2006, anticipating the return of the U.S. embassy to its former Berlin site in a new building near the Brandenburg Gate, then-Ambassador William R. Timken handed the keys of Amerika Haus back to Berlin’s municipal government. “We built the house to attract Berliners,” Timken said in his speech marking the occasion. “And the Berliners came.”
One of them was Karlheinz Baetz who headed the program for language and debates at Amerika Haus from 1951 to 1962. “The house is a cultural and political landmark of Berlin’s postwar history and should not be torn down,” he told a Berlin newspaper in 2006. “Amerika Haus once was the cultural heart of a Berlin in ruins. It gave culture-starved Berliners the kind of contact with the outside world they craved.”
His call was heeded, to a degree: The building has since been listed as an official landmark since May 1995 and cannot be torn down.
Many Berliners as well as Americans still hope that the city will be able to rekindle the transatlantic tradition of Amerika Haus. Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who praised it as “a symbol of dialogue,” has pledged “to preserve the spirit of the building” for future transatlantic use.
Various initiatives such as turning Amerika Haus into a hotel, a museum for West Berlin, a museum for the student movement of 1968, an office space for organizations and media outlets like National Public Radio in Berlin have been floated and disappeared again – for lack of financing, consensus or a coherent transatlantic model.
“It would be a sad thing for Berlin, for Germany to allow Amerika Haus to pass into oblivion: We still need it badly,” said Beate Lindemann, veteran director of the transatlantic initiative, Atlantik-Brücke.
Among the supporters of Amerika Haus now campaigning to save and revive the place is Alexander Longolius, founding member of Amerika Haus Circle of Friends.
Born in 1935 in Berlin-Steglitz, Longolius was a 10-year-old, curious boy when the war ended and allied soldiers arrived in his hometown. Soon thrilled with American music and literature, the young Longolius became a frequent visitor to Amerika Haus. Then, in 1952, he jumped at the opportunity offered by the American Field Service (AFS) to spend a year as a student at a school in Connecticut. “Anything transatlantic fascinated me more and more by the day,” he recalled. Both he and his wife are AFS alumni.
With its ideology-free concept, Amerika Haus opened new horizons for him and his peers, Longolius said. Like many others, young and old, he is determined to keep Amerika Haus alive. They stress that in a changing urban environment with half of all students having immigrant backgrounds filled with anti-American stereotypes, a functioning Amerika Haus is now as vital as in 1945.
Longolius, a former vice president of the Berlin municipal assembly, helped found Partnership of Parliaments, a German-American council of state legislators. He serves as chairman of the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation in Berlin and is involved with the Berlin-USA Initiative for exchanges between young people. His is a truly transatlantic life. His energy and that of his young co-workers never wanes when it comes to commitment to the Amerika Haus project so close to their hearts.
Another active player is a non-governmental organization called the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in Berlin. It took part in a series of events organized by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education. Together, they reopened the doors of Amerika Haus for public debates on the 2008 election last fall.
“The house was packed,” said Mark Donfried who runs ICD. In the three years to come, a portion of the house will be rented by a development agency striving to make over the economic face of Berlin’s western districts.
However, a big investor is still necessary. In today’s ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin, Amerika Haus is up for sale. Yet the city is determined not to hand its Amerika Haus to just any buyer.
But time is running out and the pressure to sell is growing. “We dream of an investor who would wholeheartedly return Amerika Haus to its transatlantic mission,” said Irina Dähne, spokeswoman for Berlin’s real estate management agency. “Anything from a transatlantic museum with cultural events to a transatlantic forum that would offer debates, exhibitions like in the previous decades. We in Berlin would be overjoyed!”
Save the Amerika Haus Berlin!
For more than half a century, Amerika Haus in West Berlin was a meeting place for Germans and Americans before closing in 2006. The building has been saved but no decision has yet been taken about its future.
The Atlantic Times calls on all its readers, in Germany and in the U.S., to speak up in favor of establishing a new transatlantic center in the venerable old landmark.
The legendary Amerika Haus, a transatlantic cornerstone of postwar Berlin, is going up for sale. Dedicated citizens are trying to restore the legendary site to new transatlantic purpose and glory. All they need is a like-minded investor.
It had landmark, even cult status in West Berlin. To Germans in the divided city, Amerika Haus represented a beacon of hope. As a cultural outpost of the free West founded in the winter of 1946, it provided a gushing source of information and inspiration soon after World War II.
Its beginnings were modest. In a makeshift consular office of the U.S. military government, American soldiers offered their own used books and newspapers to the German public. After the closure of the office on Kleiststrasse 12, it was turned into a tiny library opened in February 1946. A year later, this became an official U.S. Information Center with the German name, Amerika Haus.
For 60 years to come, under the guidance of the State Department, Amerika Haus grew into an influential institution: the cultural branch of American diplomacy in Berlin. Since June 1957, it has been housed in a modern, two-story building by architect Bruno Grimmek near Zoo Station, the center of West Berlin.
Berliners cherished its jazz concerts and modern art exhibitions. Besides the works of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville and Dashiell Hammett in its library, the institution also provided access to the New York Times and the Washington Post. A theater staged productions by leading American playwrights. All this was “an enormously precious gift,” as Berliners from that period still say today.
Renowned figures like Thornton Wilder, James Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Jackson Pollock and Robert Kennedy mingled with the Berlin public there. Hundreds of debates were organized in the Amerika Haus. Those events were greatly appreciated in the dire setting of a Cold War Berlin forced to slowly dig itself out of the ruins left by the war.
Eleven million visitors came in the first decade, their numbers steadily growing. Aided by funds from the European Recovery Program, Berlin’s Amerika Haus, like many others in occupied Germany, conveyed to the people the realm of opportunities their liberators and patrons stood for.
Of course, in 1968, when emotions ran high among Berlin’s student community against the war in Vietnam, capitalism and the establishment, Amerika Haus became the target of street protests. Throwing paint bombs and tomatoes at the modernist facade, the young showed their parents’ generation and the NATO adherents how they felt.
Remarkably, even former demonstrators remember how surprised they were when the Americans remained open to discussion while German authorities preferred to crack down on the obstreperous youngsters.
Even in fraught times, Amerika Haus radiated a spirit of democracy. As years went by, it carried on its work and kept its spirit, hosting now-legendary U.S. election night parties. After the September 11 attacks, Berliners flocked to Amerika Haus in solidarity, laying down flowers and lighting thousands of candles.
Now the place no longer reverberates with percussions or discussions. Its rooms occasionally house temporary exhibitions by corporations and cultural groups. In September 2006, anticipating the return of the U.S. embassy to its former Berlin site in a new building near the Brandenburg Gate, then-Ambassador William R. Timken handed the keys of Amerika Haus back to Berlin’s municipal government. “We built the house to attract Berliners,” Timken said in his speech marking the occasion. “And the Berliners came.”
One of them was Karlheinz Baetz who headed the program for language and debates at Amerika Haus from 1951 to 1962. “The house is a cultural and political landmark of Berlin’s postwar history and should not be torn down,” he told a Berlin newspaper in 2006. “Amerika Haus once was the cultural heart of a Berlin in ruins. It gave culture-starved Berliners the kind of contact with the outside world they craved.”
His call was heeded, to a degree: The building has since been listed as an official landmark since May 1995 and cannot be torn down.
Many Berliners as well as Americans still hope that the city will be able to rekindle the transatlantic tradition of Amerika Haus. Mayor Klaus Wowereit, who praised it as “a symbol of dialogue,” has pledged “to preserve the spirit of the building” for future transatlantic use.
Various initiatives such as turning Amerika Haus into a hotel, a museum for West Berlin, a museum for the student movement of 1968, an office space for organizations and media outlets like National Public Radio in Berlin have been floated and disappeared again – for lack of financing, consensus or a coherent transatlantic model.
“It would be a sad thing for Berlin, for Germany to allow Amerika Haus to pass into oblivion: We still need it badly,” said Beate Lindemann, veteran director of the transatlantic initiative, Atlantik-Brücke.
Among the supporters of Amerika Haus now campaigning to save and revive the place is Alexander Longolius, founding member of Amerika Haus Circle of Friends.
Born in 1935 in Berlin-Steglitz, Longolius was a 10-year-old, curious boy when the war ended and allied soldiers arrived in his hometown. Soon thrilled with American music and literature, the young Longolius became a frequent visitor to Amerika Haus. Then, in 1952, he jumped at the opportunity offered by the American Field Service (AFS) to spend a year as a student at a school in Connecticut. “Anything transatlantic fascinated me more and more by the day,” he recalled. Both he and his wife are AFS alumni.
With its ideology-free concept, Amerika Haus opened new horizons for him and his peers, Longolius said. Like many others, young and old, he is determined to keep Amerika Haus alive. They stress that in a changing urban environment with half of all students having immigrant backgrounds filled with anti-American stereotypes, a functioning Amerika Haus is now as vital as in 1945.
Longolius, a former vice president of the Berlin municipal assembly, helped found Partnership of Parliaments, a German-American council of state legislators. He serves as chairman of the Checkpoint Charlie Foundation in Berlin and is involved with the Berlin-USA Initiative for exchanges between young people. His is a truly transatlantic life. His energy and that of his young co-workers never wanes when it comes to commitment to the Amerika Haus project so close to their hearts.
Another active player is a non-governmental organization called the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy (ICD) in Berlin. It took part in a series of events organized by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education. Together, they reopened the doors of Amerika Haus for public debates on the 2008 election last fall.
“The house was packed,” said Mark Donfried who runs ICD. In the three years to come, a portion of the house will be rented by a development agency striving to make over the economic face of Berlin’s western districts.
However, a big investor is still necessary. In today’s ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin, Amerika Haus is up for sale. Yet the city is determined not to hand its Amerika Haus to just any buyer.
But time is running out and the pressure to sell is growing. “We dream of an investor who would wholeheartedly return Amerika Haus to its transatlantic mission,” said Irina Dähne, spokeswoman for Berlin’s real estate management agency. “Anything from a transatlantic museum with cultural events to a transatlantic forum that would offer debates, exhibitions like in the previous decades. We in Berlin would be overjoyed!”
Save the Amerika Haus Berlin!
For more than half a century, Amerika Haus in West Berlin was a meeting place for Germans and Americans before closing in 2006. The building has been saved but no decision has yet been taken about its future.
The Atlantic Times calls on all its readers, in Germany and in the U.S., to speak up in favor of establishing a new transatlantic center in the venerable old landmark.
Bad German, Good German
The experience of collective shame in an otherwise friendly land | By Uwe Siemon-Netto
Our correspondent has reported from the United States for nearly half a century and encountered the most varied reactions to his German identity, ranging from rank prejudice and nuttiness to heart-warming welcome.
TV host Glenn Beck’s last name sounds more German than mine and he looks it, too. Recently, his colleague Bill O’Reilly interviewed him, which is the sort of thing TV moderators do in today’s perplexing media landscape. O’Reilly said, “I am Irish-American and you are German-American.” Beck waved his hands in a gesture of rejection: “Oh no, no, no, I am just an American.”
There are 49 million German-Americans. They constitute 17 percent of the U.S. population, outnumbering their compatriots of Irish and English ancestry. Irish-Americans are not ashamed of their heritage, neither are Anglo- or Italian-Americans of theirs. Yet while many U.S. citizens are taking a renewed interest in their German roots, Beck’s dismissal of his origins on the air was by no means atypical. In fact, it was quite German.
Sixty years ago, when the Federal Republic of (West) Germany was founded, I was in boarding school. I remember listening on the radio to our first president, Theodor Heuss, presenting a formula of how to deal with our nation’s Nazi past. Those uninvolved with Hitler’s crimes – I was not even born when he came to power – should not feel collective guilt but a sense of collective shame, he said.
Of course even this would not apply to Beck who came into this world in Mount Vernon, Washington, in 1964. But, strangely, he rejected “his” German background in the way many Germans of my generation once first tried to hide their identity. Today, I am embarrassed to admit that when we began hitchhiking around Europe in the 1950s, we sometimes pretended to be Swiss or Dutch, Luxembourgers or even Austrians, disregarding the heavy Austrian contribution to our shared legacy, starting with Hitler himself.
Ever since arriving in America as a foreign correspondent in 1962, I have experienced regular reminders, some saddening and some maddening, of the collective shame Heuss spoke about. The day after I moved into my New York apartment, I went to a newsagent on First Avenue to order my “Times.” Thinking I was British, another customer asked, “Where in England are you from?” I answered, “I am German, born in Leipzig.” He said, “I was in Leipzig, too, as a bombardier in 1944. Sorry I missed you.” He was sorry not to have killed a seven-year-old child.
A little later, I interviewed an official of a Jewish restitution agency. I believe his name was Hans Müller, one decidedly more German than mine. “Before you ask questions, let me show you something,” he said, opening his desk drawer. Then he handed me his “Pour le Mérite.” It was the highest military medal Germany awarded in World War I. “I was a first lieutenant then and very patriotic,” Müller explained.
Müller exuded that aura of elegiac incomprehension that was most wrenching to this young reporter when encountering Jewish refugees. Why, he seemed to ask, was he, a wounded German veteran decorated for his bravery, hounded out of his homeland? He did not point an accusing finger at me. He wanted rather to befriend me – me, a fellow German. In moments like this, I was overcome by the most profound sense of shame.
In those days, the Washington Heights section of New York City was teeming with survivors of concentration camps. I befriended many of them. They eagerly asked about the Old Country. As they fed me German and Austrian dishes, they told me of their sadness over the derailment of the culture they and I shared and loved.
There were other times, though, when my sense of shame was challenged. Once a reporter of a leading U.S. newspaper with whom I shared office space accused me of “still being a Nazi.” We were both working on a story about American racial issues. He looked over my shoulders trying to make sense of my German manuscript and spotted the word, “schwarz.”
“Don’t you idiot know that schwarz is a derogatory term in this country?” he shouted. “But I am writing for Germans and ‘schwarz’ is the German word for black,” I replied. “I don’t give a s…., change it!” he commanded. “You have no right to use racist language in this country.” He was serious and sober: It was too early in the day for him to have had his first drink. (“Schwarz” is also the Yiddish word for black but sometimes used in a negative sense in American jargon).
On occasion, the opposite of anti-German prejudice ticked me off just as much as this incident. While covering the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, I was often told, “We chose the wrong allies in World War II,” meaning that the United States should have sided with Hitler. When I shook my head, I was accused of being a “Commie,” although this has never been my political preference: I was a refugee from Communist East Germany.
Then again, anti-German bias had light moments. Once I overheard the following argument between a husband and his wife:
He: “Our Audi is a lemon, I am going to get a Mercedes.”
She: “I would never get into a German car.”
He: “Well, what about the Audi, then?”
She: “I have nothing against Italians.”
He: “O.K. let’s get a BMW.”
She: “Fine, I like the British.”
This happened in the early 1980s around the time when former President Ronald Reagan caused much media stir by meeting then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the German military cemetery at Bitburg. It was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. But Reagan’s statement that some of the young German soldiers buried there were “just as surely” – Reagan took care not to say, “just as much” – victims of an evil regime caused uproar. Over and over again, American television kept showing the grave of a fallen soldier who was barely 17 by the time he died.
One day during a party at my apartment, the discussion about Reagan’s remark became a screaming match until my friend Emil Landau, a Holocaust survivor with a thick German accent, shouted: “Stop it! I am the only one here who can speak about this subject with authority.” He rolled up his sleeve to show us the concentration camp number tattooed to his lower arm. Then he told us the following story:
He was an inmate in Auschwitz-Birkenau, young and strong enough to be “selected out,” as the Nazi jargon went, to work in a field rather than be murdered straight away in the gas chamber. The guard leading Landau to his workplace was a young Waffen SS (combat SS) conscript. He had been severely wounded at the Russian front and seconded temporarily to concentration camp duties while recovering from his injuries. According to Landau, they discovered that they were both 17 and hailed from the industrial city of Witten.
“So we are from the same town, what are you doing in this place?” the soldier wanted to know.
“I am here because I am Jewish,” Landau replied.
“But that’s no reason…”
At that point the soldier’s sergeant noticed that the SS man and the inmate were engaged in a personal conversation, which was forbidden. “The sergeant beat the soldier up and had him led away,” Landau recalled. “I never saw him again. I am sure that he was immediately returned to the front to die. To think that he was just a kid like I. Don’t tell me he was not a victim of an evil regime.”
This ended the party. Silently, the guests filed out of the apartment. In the years that followed, Landau spent much of his time working for the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, and telling young Germans about their country’s Nazi past. He died in 2007. He too rejected the idea of collective guilt. But in his presence, it was easy for his German contemporaries to comprehend the concept of collective shame.
Our correspondent has reported from the United States for nearly half a century and encountered the most varied reactions to his German identity, ranging from rank prejudice and nuttiness to heart-warming welcome.
TV host Glenn Beck’s last name sounds more German than mine and he looks it, too. Recently, his colleague Bill O’Reilly interviewed him, which is the sort of thing TV moderators do in today’s perplexing media landscape. O’Reilly said, “I am Irish-American and you are German-American.” Beck waved his hands in a gesture of rejection: “Oh no, no, no, I am just an American.”
There are 49 million German-Americans. They constitute 17 percent of the U.S. population, outnumbering their compatriots of Irish and English ancestry. Irish-Americans are not ashamed of their heritage, neither are Anglo- or Italian-Americans of theirs. Yet while many U.S. citizens are taking a renewed interest in their German roots, Beck’s dismissal of his origins on the air was by no means atypical. In fact, it was quite German.
Sixty years ago, when the Federal Republic of (West) Germany was founded, I was in boarding school. I remember listening on the radio to our first president, Theodor Heuss, presenting a formula of how to deal with our nation’s Nazi past. Those uninvolved with Hitler’s crimes – I was not even born when he came to power – should not feel collective guilt but a sense of collective shame, he said.
Of course even this would not apply to Beck who came into this world in Mount Vernon, Washington, in 1964. But, strangely, he rejected “his” German background in the way many Germans of my generation once first tried to hide their identity. Today, I am embarrassed to admit that when we began hitchhiking around Europe in the 1950s, we sometimes pretended to be Swiss or Dutch, Luxembourgers or even Austrians, disregarding the heavy Austrian contribution to our shared legacy, starting with Hitler himself.
Ever since arriving in America as a foreign correspondent in 1962, I have experienced regular reminders, some saddening and some maddening, of the collective shame Heuss spoke about. The day after I moved into my New York apartment, I went to a newsagent on First Avenue to order my “Times.” Thinking I was British, another customer asked, “Where in England are you from?” I answered, “I am German, born in Leipzig.” He said, “I was in Leipzig, too, as a bombardier in 1944. Sorry I missed you.” He was sorry not to have killed a seven-year-old child.
A little later, I interviewed an official of a Jewish restitution agency. I believe his name was Hans Müller, one decidedly more German than mine. “Before you ask questions, let me show you something,” he said, opening his desk drawer. Then he handed me his “Pour le Mérite.” It was the highest military medal Germany awarded in World War I. “I was a first lieutenant then and very patriotic,” Müller explained.
Müller exuded that aura of elegiac incomprehension that was most wrenching to this young reporter when encountering Jewish refugees. Why, he seemed to ask, was he, a wounded German veteran decorated for his bravery, hounded out of his homeland? He did not point an accusing finger at me. He wanted rather to befriend me – me, a fellow German. In moments like this, I was overcome by the most profound sense of shame.
In those days, the Washington Heights section of New York City was teeming with survivors of concentration camps. I befriended many of them. They eagerly asked about the Old Country. As they fed me German and Austrian dishes, they told me of their sadness over the derailment of the culture they and I shared and loved.
There were other times, though, when my sense of shame was challenged. Once a reporter of a leading U.S. newspaper with whom I shared office space accused me of “still being a Nazi.” We were both working on a story about American racial issues. He looked over my shoulders trying to make sense of my German manuscript and spotted the word, “schwarz.”
“Don’t you idiot know that schwarz is a derogatory term in this country?” he shouted. “But I am writing for Germans and ‘schwarz’ is the German word for black,” I replied. “I don’t give a s…., change it!” he commanded. “You have no right to use racist language in this country.” He was serious and sober: It was too early in the day for him to have had his first drink. (“Schwarz” is also the Yiddish word for black but sometimes used in a negative sense in American jargon).
On occasion, the opposite of anti-German prejudice ticked me off just as much as this incident. While covering the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, I was often told, “We chose the wrong allies in World War II,” meaning that the United States should have sided with Hitler. When I shook my head, I was accused of being a “Commie,” although this has never been my political preference: I was a refugee from Communist East Germany.
Then again, anti-German bias had light moments. Once I overheard the following argument between a husband and his wife:
He: “Our Audi is a lemon, I am going to get a Mercedes.”
She: “I would never get into a German car.”
He: “Well, what about the Audi, then?”
She: “I have nothing against Italians.”
He: “O.K. let’s get a BMW.”
She: “Fine, I like the British.”
This happened in the early 1980s around the time when former President Ronald Reagan caused much media stir by meeting then-Chancellor Helmut Kohl at the German military cemetery at Bitburg. It was meant to be a gesture of reconciliation. But Reagan’s statement that some of the young German soldiers buried there were “just as surely” – Reagan took care not to say, “just as much” – victims of an evil regime caused uproar. Over and over again, American television kept showing the grave of a fallen soldier who was barely 17 by the time he died.
One day during a party at my apartment, the discussion about Reagan’s remark became a screaming match until my friend Emil Landau, a Holocaust survivor with a thick German accent, shouted: “Stop it! I am the only one here who can speak about this subject with authority.” He rolled up his sleeve to show us the concentration camp number tattooed to his lower arm. Then he told us the following story:
He was an inmate in Auschwitz-Birkenau, young and strong enough to be “selected out,” as the Nazi jargon went, to work in a field rather than be murdered straight away in the gas chamber. The guard leading Landau to his workplace was a young Waffen SS (combat SS) conscript. He had been severely wounded at the Russian front and seconded temporarily to concentration camp duties while recovering from his injuries. According to Landau, they discovered that they were both 17 and hailed from the industrial city of Witten.
“So we are from the same town, what are you doing in this place?” the soldier wanted to know.
“I am here because I am Jewish,” Landau replied.
“But that’s no reason…”
At that point the soldier’s sergeant noticed that the SS man and the inmate were engaged in a personal conversation, which was forbidden. “The sergeant beat the soldier up and had him led away,” Landau recalled. “I never saw him again. I am sure that he was immediately returned to the front to die. To think that he was just a kid like I. Don’t tell me he was not a victim of an evil regime.”
This ended the party. Silently, the guests filed out of the apartment. In the years that followed, Landau spent much of his time working for the reconciliation between Germans and Jews, and telling young Germans about their country’s Nazi past. He died in 2007. He too rejected the idea of collective guilt. But in his presence, it was easy for his German contemporaries to comprehend the concept of collective shame.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
An Unexpected Freedom
What black U.S. soldiers experienced in Germany after the war – By Peter H. Koepf
Of all places, the country that took racism to the absolute extreme appeared to black U.S. soldiers as a haven of racial tolerance. In the land of the Nazis, which they had helped to defeat, they felt like emancipated human beings for the first time in 1945.
It happened sometime in 1946, in the nightclub of the U.S. Army in a small Bavarian town: A couple of black soldiers danced in the middle of the room with German ‘Frolleins.’
That in itself was already a remarkable occurrence because at that time no black man would have dared to even approach a white woman in the U.S., especially in the South. At that time, white women danced with, dated and married only white men.
In Germany however, where racist mania had raged only a short time earlier, the black soldiers were very popular after initial distrust. Among those Germans who had direct contact with them, they were considered good-natured, generous and nice to children.
A study published in 1954 by the International Union for Child Welfare in Geneva, stated that Puerto Rican-Americans were particularly popular. They “particularly distinguished themselves through their amiable manner and through an impeccable comportment toward German citizens and they helped wherever they could. Due to this behavior, they were known and popular in every family and even established close ties within some families on occasion.”
According to an October 1946 report in Ebony magazine, that evening in Amberg, five white U.S. soldiers entered the soldiers’ club. What they saw apparently outraged them. One of the white soldiers, Floyd D. Hudson, threw a beer bottle onto the dance floor.
The black soldiers, under attack, did what they would have never dared to do back home: They went and got a few .30 caliber carbines and shot at the white soldiers. Hudson died while the four others survived their injuries. The aftermath was the same that it would have been back home: A court sentenced three of the black solders to death by hanging.
Also, there was the question of who owns the spoils of war, when these are women. Let’s not kid ourselves: It wasn’t only Russian soldiers who raped German women: More than 1,500 such acts committed by U.S. soldiers are on record in 1945. In her book, “GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations,” Petra Goedde wrote that some soldiers “regarded the ‘taking’ of a German woman as a form of revenge.”
Still, there was certainly much consensual fraternization. First of all, in 10 percent of the documented cases it was supposedly the parents who compelled their daughters to have intercourse with the occupying Allied soldiers, according to the Geneva study. The goal was always the same: “The black soldiers were particularly sought-after as a source of food, candy and tobacco products because they were known for their benevolence and generosity,” the researchers wrote.
War correspondent Meyer Levin paraphrased such relationships in the magazine Search in 1950 this way: “Rape in Germany was accomplished through the medium of a bar of chocolate, and was known as fraternization.” Furthermore, he analyzed “the lustful eagerness of German girls to fulfill their roles as conquered women.” Others characterized the relationships as “between love affairs and prostitution.”
Initially however, contact between the soldiers and the local population had been prohibited. In February 1945, in Stolberg near Aachen, four women were charged with “acting in a manner prejudicial to the good order of members of the Allied Armed Forces.” The court said that they had invited U.S. soldiers into their homes after dark, “tempted them into violating the fraternization rule.”
In October 1945, the ban on fraternization was lifted. Nonetheless, Germans still did not have access to the nightclubs of the U.S. Army. Because of that, the soldiers frequently explained that their companions were allegedly displaced persons, in other words, not Germans, that they were Polish, for example. In the spring of 1946, the military in Nuremberg reviewed whether it would make sense to issue “social passes” for desirable members of the German population – naturally, all of them women.
But the affairs between German women and GIs had long since become customary. Newsweek had already asked in December: “Do the Fräuleins change our Joe?”
The Fräuleins did indeed change Joe. However, not in the way that Newsweek had feared, namely that the U.S. soldiers would not denazify Germans but rather that “Veronica Dankeschön” could infect the soldiers with venereal diseases, and even worse, with the Nazi virus. Billy Wilder turned this topic into his propagandistic anti-fraternization movie, “A Foreign Affair.”
At the time, Americans back home were also clearly against their soldiers being allowed to date German women: 70 percent of young women responding and 40 percent of men under 30 said they opposed such unions.
The soldiers in Germany perceived the situation differently: “Most American soldiers held Germans collectively responsible for the war but absolved the Germans they knew from individual guilt,” Goedde wrote in her book. Most importantly for the U.S. soldiers, women were not part of the pool of Nazi sympathizers. And they were certainly not political missionaries, which is why not a single U.S. soldier returned home as a Nazi.
The German experience very much changed the black Joe however: it shook his life and self-image. In “racist” Germany of all places, he found his personal freedom, in the same Germany whose inhabitants – that is what he had been told – had collectively murdered millions of people for racist reasons until only a few months earlier.
In “Last of the Conquerors,” William Gardner Smith’s character, a black sergeant, says: “You know what the hell I learned? That a nigger ain’t no different from nobody else. I had to come over here to learn that. I hadda come over here and let the Nazis teach me that.”
There were approximately 30,000 black U.S. soldiers who had come to liberate the world from German fascism. “Many of them, particularly those from the American South, experienced for the first time in their lives the freedom to date white women without fear of retribution,” according to Ebony magazine. “At a time, when lynching was still all too common in the American South, Germany appeared, especially to those who grew up in the South, like a haven of racial tolerance.” Ebony wrote that black soldiers enjoyed “more friendship and equality in Berlin than in Birmingham or on Broadway.”
By 1951, the relationships between German women and U.S. soldiers had produced about 94,000 children, about 3,000 of them “Mischlinge” (mixed-race children) as they were called at the time. Four-fifth of these children, who were conspicuous in appearance to Germans in the postwar period, lived with their mothers or close relatives. The Survey magazine concluded from a poll in 1949 that “German mothers treated their ‘Mischlingskinder’ considerably better than their counterparts in England and Japan.” English mothers often sent them to children’s homes or orphanages and “some Japanese mothers had even resorted to infanticide of occupation children (both black and white).” Survey went on: “In Germany not only is infanticide unthinkable but even separation is rarely considered.”
Nonetheless, one should not sugarcoat it: Women who got involved with black soldiers had problems in Germany as well. They had to endure ridicule and contempt. Especially those returning from the front and prisoner of war camps berated and beat them – and not only their own husbands.
In her 2002 dissertation, “Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung. Afrodeutsche ‘Besatzungskinder’ im Nachkriegs-Deutschland” (Between care and marginalization: Black-German “occupation children” in postwar Germany), Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria reports on the case of a girl whose mother had placed with her parents. The parents allegedly could not let the mixed-race child out into the street “and when guests came to visit, the child would be hidden.”
Nonetheless, the 1954 Geneva study came to the following conclusion overall: “According to our investigation, the cases in which mixed-race children are being rejected by their communities because of their family background should be considered the exception. Generally, the relatives, neighbors and other children meet them with cordiality and affection. It is not uncommon that they are even being particularly favored and pampered, be it because they make friends quickly due to their funny manner and their cuddly nature, be it because the grown-ups feel pity for these children for whom they anticipate a difficult future.”
Nonetheless, well-meaning pastors’ wives and eager youth welfare office employees came up with numerous solutions in order to help the children and their mothers: children’s homes just for them, adoption in the U.S., Africa and Venezuela. In the end, most children stayed in Germany. There could have been worse solutions.
But there could have been betters solutions as well: At least one quarter of the black fathers paid alimony, more than among the white fathers. One in five made an effort to get permission to marry his girlfriend. But that only succeeded in one out of 200 cases.
Starting in 1946, the so-called “Sweetheart bill” (War Brides Act) allowed brides to enter the United States. By June 1950, 14,175 German wives had come to the United States – six husbands and 750 children as well – predominantly the brides of white soldiers, however.
While researching files of the headquarters of the European Command (EUCOM), Faria found the following statistic: By September 1947, 908 black-American soldiers had filed a request to be allowed to marry their German girlfriends. Fourteen were given permission, 1.5 percent. It is no surprise, though: Until 1967, she writes, such interracial marriages were banned in 30 states.
INFORMATION
For an extensive project, writer Peter H. Koepf is looking to speak with children of black American soldiers with German mothers, and with their respective parents. Please write to: peter.koepf@times-media.de
Of all places, the country that took racism to the absolute extreme appeared to black U.S. soldiers as a haven of racial tolerance. In the land of the Nazis, which they had helped to defeat, they felt like emancipated human beings for the first time in 1945.
It happened sometime in 1946, in the nightclub of the U.S. Army in a small Bavarian town: A couple of black soldiers danced in the middle of the room with German ‘Frolleins.’
That in itself was already a remarkable occurrence because at that time no black man would have dared to even approach a white woman in the U.S., especially in the South. At that time, white women danced with, dated and married only white men.
In Germany however, where racist mania had raged only a short time earlier, the black soldiers were very popular after initial distrust. Among those Germans who had direct contact with them, they were considered good-natured, generous and nice to children.
A study published in 1954 by the International Union for Child Welfare in Geneva, stated that Puerto Rican-Americans were particularly popular. They “particularly distinguished themselves through their amiable manner and through an impeccable comportment toward German citizens and they helped wherever they could. Due to this behavior, they were known and popular in every family and even established close ties within some families on occasion.”
According to an October 1946 report in Ebony magazine, that evening in Amberg, five white U.S. soldiers entered the soldiers’ club. What they saw apparently outraged them. One of the white soldiers, Floyd D. Hudson, threw a beer bottle onto the dance floor.
The black soldiers, under attack, did what they would have never dared to do back home: They went and got a few .30 caliber carbines and shot at the white soldiers. Hudson died while the four others survived their injuries. The aftermath was the same that it would have been back home: A court sentenced three of the black solders to death by hanging.
Also, there was the question of who owns the spoils of war, when these are women. Let’s not kid ourselves: It wasn’t only Russian soldiers who raped German women: More than 1,500 such acts committed by U.S. soldiers are on record in 1945. In her book, “GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations,” Petra Goedde wrote that some soldiers “regarded the ‘taking’ of a German woman as a form of revenge.”
Still, there was certainly much consensual fraternization. First of all, in 10 percent of the documented cases it was supposedly the parents who compelled their daughters to have intercourse with the occupying Allied soldiers, according to the Geneva study. The goal was always the same: “The black soldiers were particularly sought-after as a source of food, candy and tobacco products because they were known for their benevolence and generosity,” the researchers wrote.
War correspondent Meyer Levin paraphrased such relationships in the magazine Search in 1950 this way: “Rape in Germany was accomplished through the medium of a bar of chocolate, and was known as fraternization.” Furthermore, he analyzed “the lustful eagerness of German girls to fulfill their roles as conquered women.” Others characterized the relationships as “between love affairs and prostitution.”
Initially however, contact between the soldiers and the local population had been prohibited. In February 1945, in Stolberg near Aachen, four women were charged with “acting in a manner prejudicial to the good order of members of the Allied Armed Forces.” The court said that they had invited U.S. soldiers into their homes after dark, “tempted them into violating the fraternization rule.”
In October 1945, the ban on fraternization was lifted. Nonetheless, Germans still did not have access to the nightclubs of the U.S. Army. Because of that, the soldiers frequently explained that their companions were allegedly displaced persons, in other words, not Germans, that they were Polish, for example. In the spring of 1946, the military in Nuremberg reviewed whether it would make sense to issue “social passes” for desirable members of the German population – naturally, all of them women.
But the affairs between German women and GIs had long since become customary. Newsweek had already asked in December: “Do the Fräuleins change our Joe?”
The Fräuleins did indeed change Joe. However, not in the way that Newsweek had feared, namely that the U.S. soldiers would not denazify Germans but rather that “Veronica Dankeschön” could infect the soldiers with venereal diseases, and even worse, with the Nazi virus. Billy Wilder turned this topic into his propagandistic anti-fraternization movie, “A Foreign Affair.”
At the time, Americans back home were also clearly against their soldiers being allowed to date German women: 70 percent of young women responding and 40 percent of men under 30 said they opposed such unions.
The soldiers in Germany perceived the situation differently: “Most American soldiers held Germans collectively responsible for the war but absolved the Germans they knew from individual guilt,” Goedde wrote in her book. Most importantly for the U.S. soldiers, women were not part of the pool of Nazi sympathizers. And they were certainly not political missionaries, which is why not a single U.S. soldier returned home as a Nazi.
The German experience very much changed the black Joe however: it shook his life and self-image. In “racist” Germany of all places, he found his personal freedom, in the same Germany whose inhabitants – that is what he had been told – had collectively murdered millions of people for racist reasons until only a few months earlier.
In “Last of the Conquerors,” William Gardner Smith’s character, a black sergeant, says: “You know what the hell I learned? That a nigger ain’t no different from nobody else. I had to come over here to learn that. I hadda come over here and let the Nazis teach me that.”
There were approximately 30,000 black U.S. soldiers who had come to liberate the world from German fascism. “Many of them, particularly those from the American South, experienced for the first time in their lives the freedom to date white women without fear of retribution,” according to Ebony magazine. “At a time, when lynching was still all too common in the American South, Germany appeared, especially to those who grew up in the South, like a haven of racial tolerance.” Ebony wrote that black soldiers enjoyed “more friendship and equality in Berlin than in Birmingham or on Broadway.”
By 1951, the relationships between German women and U.S. soldiers had produced about 94,000 children, about 3,000 of them “Mischlinge” (mixed-race children) as they were called at the time. Four-fifth of these children, who were conspicuous in appearance to Germans in the postwar period, lived with their mothers or close relatives. The Survey magazine concluded from a poll in 1949 that “German mothers treated their ‘Mischlingskinder’ considerably better than their counterparts in England and Japan.” English mothers often sent them to children’s homes or orphanages and “some Japanese mothers had even resorted to infanticide of occupation children (both black and white).” Survey went on: “In Germany not only is infanticide unthinkable but even separation is rarely considered.”
Nonetheless, one should not sugarcoat it: Women who got involved with black soldiers had problems in Germany as well. They had to endure ridicule and contempt. Especially those returning from the front and prisoner of war camps berated and beat them – and not only their own husbands.
In her 2002 dissertation, “Zwischen Fürsorge und Ausgrenzung. Afrodeutsche ‘Besatzungskinder’ im Nachkriegs-Deutschland” (Between care and marginalization: Black-German “occupation children” in postwar Germany), Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria reports on the case of a girl whose mother had placed with her parents. The parents allegedly could not let the mixed-race child out into the street “and when guests came to visit, the child would be hidden.”
Nonetheless, the 1954 Geneva study came to the following conclusion overall: “According to our investigation, the cases in which mixed-race children are being rejected by their communities because of their family background should be considered the exception. Generally, the relatives, neighbors and other children meet them with cordiality and affection. It is not uncommon that they are even being particularly favored and pampered, be it because they make friends quickly due to their funny manner and their cuddly nature, be it because the grown-ups feel pity for these children for whom they anticipate a difficult future.”
Nonetheless, well-meaning pastors’ wives and eager youth welfare office employees came up with numerous solutions in order to help the children and their mothers: children’s homes just for them, adoption in the U.S., Africa and Venezuela. In the end, most children stayed in Germany. There could have been worse solutions.
But there could have been betters solutions as well: At least one quarter of the black fathers paid alimony, more than among the white fathers. One in five made an effort to get permission to marry his girlfriend. But that only succeeded in one out of 200 cases.
Starting in 1946, the so-called “Sweetheart bill” (War Brides Act) allowed brides to enter the United States. By June 1950, 14,175 German wives had come to the United States – six husbands and 750 children as well – predominantly the brides of white soldiers, however.
While researching files of the headquarters of the European Command (EUCOM), Faria found the following statistic: By September 1947, 908 black-American soldiers had filed a request to be allowed to marry their German girlfriends. Fourteen were given permission, 1.5 percent. It is no surprise, though: Until 1967, she writes, such interracial marriages were banned in 30 states.
INFORMATION
For an extensive project, writer Peter H. Koepf is looking to speak with children of black American soldiers with German mothers, and with their respective parents. Please write to: peter.koepf@times-media.de
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