German American Bund

Section II. The Emergence of the German American Bund

A.  The Significance and Influence of Deutschtum

Before we can examine the German-American Bund as an American political movement, it is critical to examine the history of Germany, for the German-American Bund was inextricably tied to the unique cultural phenomenon of Deutschtum.  In fact, the history of Germany is inextricably tied to Germans outside the homeland.[1]  Because there was no such entity as a centralized “German” state until 1871, emigration of Germans was widespread throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries.[2] There were many characteristics of the German diaspora which were unique, but the most important feature of the German experience was the notion of Deutschtum.    

It is impossible to define Deutschtum in a single phrase, for the term is virtually untranslatable. Perhaps the closest translation to Deutschtum is “Germandom,” but this term is inadequate.  Deutschtum can perhaps be expressed as the unique, deeply rooted national consciousness of Germans, the shared totality of ideas and sentiments about the German character, and what it means to be German.[3]  Deutschtum also entails the special relationship Germans have with the homeland and the unique sense of destiny which Germans possess.  Perhaps the closest analogy to Deutschtum is the Americans’ belief in American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, that there is something unique and special and perhaps even superior about the American ideal, and that it should be spread throughout the world.  But this analogy too is inadequate.  Deutschtum is system of mental, moral and political ideas which are organized around two closely connected central concepts:  spiritual connection to the state and the singularity and superiority of German people and culture. 

Deutschtum is a philosophy which has deeply permeated the thought of the German people. As something of a “chosen people,” Germans had a mission to extend German ideas and German Kultur throughout the world.[4] As such, German immigrants, particularly in America, did not always readily assimilate.[5]  As one author noted, “Germans in America between 1855 and 1915 lived not in the United States, but in German America, they lived and wrote for German America…rather than for the United States of America.”[6]  Yet, as purveyors of higher culture, German-Americans believed they could both remain “German” and help civilize the young American nation.[7]  Many kept the hyphen and maintained that they were not simply “Americans,” but rather, “German-Americans.” 

The sentiments of Deutschtum were immersed in the consciousness and practices of German-Americans long before the existence of the Bund.  However, three key factors had a profound impact on the conception of Deutschtum among German-Americans during the 1920s and 1930s: the traumatic experience associated with the persecution of German-Americans during the Great War, the resurgence of a strong new Germany under Nazism and the renewed national pride associated with this event, and the Nazi usurpation of the concept and meaning of Deutschtum.  These three factors had an enormous impact on a small group in America who became the seeds of the German-American Bund. 

World War One was an absolute shattering experience for German-Americans.  The cataclysm of the Great War forever changed the lives of German-Americans as well as the health and perception of American Deutschtum.  The war and its immediate aftermath saw the near destruction of Deutschtum in America as persecution of German-Americans led to rapid assimilation.  For many Americans, World War One unleashed profound anxieties about the “German character” and the loyalty of German-Americans.  Allied propaganda of German brutality and tales of espionage and sabotage led many to see Germans as traitors or pawns of the Kaiser.  Newspapers and official U.S. propaganda portrayed German soldiers as criminal barbarians and murderous Huns.  As hyphenated citizens, German-Americans bore the brunt of the negative American perceptions of Germans.  After America entered the war, a wave of Germanophobia swept across the nation which created a dangerous and hostile environment for German-Americans.[8]  The Great War proved disastrous for German-American Heimat clubs, the German-American press, and the mutual-aid societies.  Once the United States entered the war against Germany, all German-American clubs and societies became vulnerable to charges of disloyalty.  Anything and everything German including language, music, and publications, became suspect.[9] 

Even before the United States entered the war against Germany, the raging war in Europe created a hostile environment for Germans and German-Americans in the United States.  On the outset of war, many German-American societies lobbied to prevent America’s entry into the war and some organizations even aided in the German war effort.  Perhaps the best known defender of Germany in America during WWI was George Sylvester Viereck whose widely circulated English-language newspaper, The Fatherland, was unapologetically pro-German.  The Fatherland advocated neutrality in the brewing European conflict and argued against American foreign entanglements.[10]  When war between Germany and America ensued, Viereck professed allegiance to both Germany and the United States.  He defended his dual allegiance by explaining that if Germany was his mother, than the U.S was like his wife. He would ultimately stand by his wife but would always defend his mother.   In the brewing conflict of World War Two, the Bund was making similar arguments when challenged about their loyalty to the United States. While both Vierneck and the Bund professed a profound dual love and devotion to the homeland and to the United States, they both ultimately helped polarize American opinion against German-Americans.  Their publications inspired boycotts of German-owned businesses and contributed to the economic hardships of German-Americans. 

In America, there was no room for dual loyalties among German-Americans, for the war “had split their German-ism from their Americanism.”[11] Patriotism reached a feverish pitch and the United States entered a period of intolerance as never seen before.[12]  Congress passed a series of draconian legislation such as the Espionage Act of 1917, Sabotage Act April 1918, and the Sedition Act of May 1918, making dissent not only disloyal but illegal.  In the fall of 1917, Wilson ordered all aliens over age of fourteen to register with the government, and all property owned by German aliens became subject to government control.[13]  Such measures further aggravated the already pervasive anti-German hysteria in America.  Those who escaped federal or state sedition law often found themselves victim of vigilante justice at the hands of a host of so-called patriotic organizations and societies.  Groups like the Councils of National Defense, American Defense Society, Knights of Liberty, Sedition Slammers, and the Boy Spies of America harassed German-Americans and often concocted ludicrous accusations of disloyalty and sedition.

For many German-Americans, their civil liberties were to be put on hold during the war.  The World War, with its hatreds and persecutions, its propaganda and its coercion, shook the hyphen loose from its moorings and ended the German-American era which had persisted for so long.  The “German-American” was an anomaly which could no longer exist, and German-Americans had to divide into either “Germans” or “Americans.”  The state of Deutschtum in America was all but destroyed.

In 1918, the war was over but the negative perception of Germans in America lingered.  With rapid assimilation the disappearance of the hyphen, the health of Deutschtum was at its lowest point ever. In 1919, with the war’s end and Germany in political shambles, the newly created Weimar Republic was left to repair Germany’s international image.  It also sought to revive the health of Deutschtum in America which was so tarnished by the war. German state officials as well as many private organizations actively sought to preserve cultural and economic ties with their German brethren in America.[14]  To this end, the Weimar government created the Reichs Wanderung Amt, (the Reich Emigration Office) or RWA in 1919.[15]  Private organizations further played an important role in Germans’ efforts to preserve the “ethnic consciousness” among German abroad.  The most important semi-private German organization dedicated to improving the tarnished image of Germany and Germans abroad was the Deutsches Auslans Institut or DAI, otherwise known as the German Foreign Institute. [16] The DAI took extreme pains to maintain close ties with German emigrants to the United States by disseminating a myriad of literature about Germany.   It wanted to approach Germans abroad on a cultural basis so there could be no accusation of violating the sovereignty of other nations or of cultivating supranational feelings among Germans abroad.  The organization believed that the best way to rekindle feelings of Deutschtum was to create a world-wide Verein wherein both Germans at home and abroad could maintain close contacts for the express purpose of sustaining their German-ness.[17]  By the middle of the 1920’s, the DAI was sending large quantities of German cultural and political material to the United States which was distributed amongst the various German organizations that had slowly begun to reappear in the United States in the 1920s. 

Within the United States, the most important private German organization was the Steuben Society.  Created in May 1919, it was composed of German-Americans dedicated to preserving and celebrating German culture.  Its members called themselves “American citizens of German origin”[18] and attempted to promote German culture in a non-threatening way.  English was the society’s official language.  They celebrated an annual “German Day” which consisted largely of picnics and parades.   The society emphasized the positive contributions Germans had made to American society as it attempted to portray Germanism as a colorful and benevolent addition to the American mosaic.  Like the DAI, the Steuben Society worked to dampen the “anti-Kraut” hatred that Germans in America suffered as a result of the anti-German hysteria of World War One.  The Society’s founders wanted to emphasize that German-Americans had always been and remained loyal Americans; that they were not “mongrels with divided allegiance…hyphenates, whose hyphen, like the kiss of Judas, is linked to treachery.”[19]  By the middle of the 1920’s the Steuben Society was the largest receiver and disseminator of DAI materials in the United States. 

            By 1930, the German population in America was over one million six hundred thousand.  However, less than one quarter of all German-Americans was German-born, and most were born before the war.[20] Considering these figures, many academics and ethnological institutions in Germany, including the DAI, maintained that America was largely a Germanic nation.  They began to speculate whether or not the large German-based element in America could be unified to form a potential political force, influenced by the politics and culture of the homeland.  

In middle of the 1920s, the DAI conducted a study to determine if the German-American community was in any way ethnically or politically united.[21]  Though impressed by the relatively healthy state of Deutschtum in the U.S., it concluded that German-America as a political force had all but collapsed as a result of the anti-German hysteria of WWI.  They noted the “dissolution of the hyphen” as German-Americans rapidly assimilated into the American melting pot. World War One had left the German-American community split, disillusioned, and badly shaken by the “100 percent Americanism” of the previous few years.[22] Wartime prohibitions against teaching German had practically destroyed the cohesiveness of American Deutschtum.  Thousands of German-American organizations had dissolved. Academic study of Germanic culture was at a bare minimum. The DAI had little hope for the future of American Deutschtum. Pre-war German-America was gone for good.  The Veriene organizations and hundreds of German travelers to the United States all seemed to concur.  

German notions of Deutschtum during the Weimar years usually had few racial or political overtones.  Throughout its existence, the DAI conducted numerous ethnological studies of Germans both abroad and within the homeland.  For the DAI, the study of the ethnological background of the German people was synonymous with the study of Deutschtum.  However, throughout the 1920s, a small number within the DAI began to equate Deutschtum with the mystical qualities of the German Volk, equating Deutschtum with National Socialist notions of race.[23] 

With the rise of National Socialism in Germany, conceptions of Deutschtum took on an entirely new meaning.  A key concept in Nazi ideology was that of the Volk, (nation, people, race), a deeply spiritual notion concerning the unique qualities of German culture and “community.”  Inherent in the notion of Volk was a feeling of the superiority of German culture and the idea of a universal mission for the German people.  Volkisch ideology consequently emphasized the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, a racial or blood descended national community which could not assimilate alien people such as Jews because they would be harmful to the community.[24]  The Nazis similarly subscribed to the belief that Germans everywhere, regardless of their geographic location, ultimately remained German, not only by culture but by blood and race.[25] 

The Nazis held to supranational notions of the Volksgemeinschaft and could thus lay claim to the ideological loyalty of citizens of foreign countries who were of German stock.  They had a strong tendency to claim territory outside the Reich and argued that the German government should hold hegemony over all Germans worldwide.[26]  The inclusion of people living outside the borders of Germany became an essential feature of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.  Germans abroad were still Germans and thus still part of the larger Volksgemeinschaft; they just simply lived in the wrong place.[27]  The early German-American fascist organizations in the U.S., from which the German American Bund ultimately evolved, took the ideas of the Volksgemeinschaft quite literally. 

Nazi language of the 1930s explained the supranational concept of the Volksgemeinschaft as follows: “Even he, who is not a citizen of the German Reich, but of some other state, or a stateless person, belongs to the German Volksgemeinschaft, if he belongs to the German Volkstum [national character].”[28]   Further, a Nazi Party paper published in 1933, stated that “the only way the German-Americans will get prestige is to be recognized as a viable force with dual citizenship, i.e., a community.”[29] The Nazi Weltanschauung [worldview] maintained that all those of German blood, irrespective of nationality, owed their primary allegiance to the homeland.  In the Nazi view, blood was stronger than citizenship, and the magnetism of volkisch bonds transcended generations or boundaries.  It was therefore the duty of German-Americans to assert their Deutschtum.  Because the United States possessed more German blood than any other nation outside the Reich, it became a prime target for Nazi propaganda.  Some Party officials in Germany believed that if galvanized as a unified community, Germans in America could exert considerable political influence. The official Nazi viewpoint was that German-Americans had made extraordinary contributions to the historical evolution of the United States and therefore deserved a proportionate share of political power.[30]  However, they understood that only when feelings of Deutschtum had been rekindled sufficiently in America could Germany hope to influence the political attitudes and behavior of German-Americans. 

By December, 1934, the DAI had been absorbed into Nazi administrative structure.[31]  The Party turned to its own Foreign Organization (Die Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP, or AO) and Foreign Office (Das Aussenpolitische Amt der NSDAP, or APA) as a means to disseminate Nazi ideology abroad and to unify the world-wide German community.  Deputy Fuehrer Rudolf Hess turned the authority concerning overseas Germans to Ernst Wilhelm Bohle.  Bohle was placed in charge of Abteilung fur Deutsche im Ausland, which had over one hundred fifty overseas Party groups under its control including one in the U.S. with several hundred members.  Congruent with Nazi ideal of Gleischultung, Bohle coordinated German policy by bringing all the agencies involved with ethnic Germans abroad under his authority. In January 1937, the AO was given an independent position in the Foreign Ministry and by 1939, the AO had sixty five thousand members and employed eight hundred persons.[32] Bohle’s aim was to coordinate the Nazi endeavor in bringing all Germans abroad into the Nazi fold.[33] 

While the Nazis demanded the loyalty and allegiance of the Heimat [homeland] abroad, their ties to Germany would not disrupt “loyal obedience to all legal responsibilities (of Germans abroad) towards the foreign state of residence [volkstumfremd].”[34]   The Nazis were, however, pragmatic enough to realize that treatment of ethnic Germans would have to vary from nation to nation.  Despite the supranational rhetoric, the Party remained ambivalent about its views and policies towards Germans in America.   Hitler himself advocated the notion that a German was a German, anywhere and everywhere, because “blood and race determine the German mentality.”[35] He was, however, quite disgusted by the state of Deutschtum in the United States.  He remarked that he was “deeply distressed at the thought of those millions of Germans, men of good faith, who emigrated to the United States and are the backbone of the country…For these men, mark you, are not only good Germans, lost to their fatherland; rather, they have become enemies, more implacably hostile than others.”[36] In fact, National Socialism largely viewed the ideologies of Americanism and Deutschtum as two conflicting worldviews.  The Nazis, along with numerous other right-wing German nationalists, denounced Americanism for undermining racial purity by fostering the Schmelztopf, (ethnic melting pot).[37]   Hitler remarked, “Transfer a German to Kiev, and he remains a perfect German.  But transfer him to Miami and you make a degenerate out of him- in other words- an American.”[38] He believed it was not only racial amalgamation that ruined German America, but rather the “pernicious influences” of American culture. 

While the German government remained ambivalent about the health and usefulness of Deutschtum in America, a great number of German émigrés arrived on American shores imbued with the National Socialist Weltanschauung and a sense of duty to the Fatherland.  To strengthen American Deutschtum and promote National Socialist ideology, these indoctrinated immigrants formed a variety of organizations in America, such as the National Socialist Teutonia Association and the Friends of the New Germany which were the embryo of the German American Bund.  The following section outlines the evolution of German-American fascism from its earliest roots in 1924 to the creation of the German American Bund in 1935.