Antisemitism
Antisemitism, discrimination against Jews as a religious or ethnic group, has been an important factor in German American relations, particularly since 1933. In the nineteenth century, antisemitism, along with economic factors, spurred emigration of German Jews to the United States.
With the rise of National Socialism, the American Jewish community worked to call attention to German antisemitism and to make it a central issue in German American political relations. This effort, impacted by the legacy of the Holocaust, continued after 1945, and in recent years Jewish-related issues, including antisemitism and Holocaust memorialization, have had a prominent place on the agenda of German American political and cultural relations.Despite the large wave of German Jewish immigration to the United States in the nineteenth century, antisemitism was seldom the primary motivating factor for leaving Germany. A sclerotic economy induced millions of Germans of all faiths to emigrate to the United States during the course of the 1800s, and likewise, German Jews most frequently emigrated for economic reasons, particularly beginning in the 1840s. After the defeat of Napoleon by the German states in the Wars of Liberation (1813), Jewish emancipation was partially or totally repealed by restoration governments throughout Germany. German Jews lost most of the political and economic rights granted to them by liberalizing governments in the early nineteenth century, and societal antisemitism manifested itself in more hostile forms, most notably the Hep-Hep riots of 1819. However, most German Jews sought to acclimate to the altered situation through acculturation or assimilation during the course of the nineteenth century.
In the nineteenth century, German Jewry dominated American Jewish life, and German Jews soon formed a majority of the Jewish community in many midwestern and southern cities.
Milwaukee, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were centers for German Jewish life well into the twentieth century. In the antebellum United States, Jews were not subject to nativist discrimination specifically as Jews, and Catholic Irish and German immigrants were more frequent targets of xenophobic prejudice. German Jewish immigrants also participated in German American organizations on an equal or near-equal basis in the early to mid-1800s. In Chicago, four of the five founders of the Republican Party's German-language wing were Jews, and the abolitionist movement numbered German Jews among its members. However, Jews faced rising societal antisemitism at the time of the Civil War, and they responded with increased patriotism. Although German Jews fought for both the Union and the Confederacy, antisemitism and economic hardship in the post-Civil War South persuaded many to migrate to the Northeast.German Jews in the United States established B’nai B’rith, a Jewish fraternal society, in 1843, and this organization founded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 1913 to fight antisemitism. However, German Jews in the United States did not always respond to antisemitism in such a proactive and insistent manner. Many German Jews perceived the rise in American antisemitism in the late nineteenth century to be a direct response to the increased numbers of eastern European Jewish immigrants entering the country and not a reaction to their own conspicuous success. They established schools to Americanize the recent arrivals, teaching them English and vocational skills. Others attempted to shunt new immigrants into the less densely populated and less Jewish American West. Some German Jews in the United States denied the existence of pervasive antisemitism in their new homeland.
Antisemitism was clearly on the rise in Germany in the late nineteenth century. Liberal German American circles deplored this trend as reported by German-language newspapers in the United States.
German American political leader Carl Schurz frequently attacked German antisemitism in the New York Evening Post. He also criticized German chancellor Otto von Bismarck for refusing to accept official condolences from the U.S. Congress on the death of Jewish German politician Eduard Lasker. Lasker, a rival of Bismarck and a leader of the National Liberal Party, died while visiting New York in 1884.In the early years of World War I, many American Jews sympathized with the Central Powers rather than the Allies. For some it was a matter of residual sympathy for their erstwhile homelands, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Others fervently supported the Central Powers’ struggle against antisemitic, czarist Russia. Regardless, this support evaporated with U.S. entry into the war in 1917. After the war, American Jewish groups, fearing for the position of Jews in the new Polish republic, exercised great pressure on the Allied governments to induce the Polish government to sign a treaty protecting the rights of non-Polish minorities. The provisions of the treaty applied both to Jews and to Germans, and until 1933 there was a joint German Jewish interest in protecting the rights of minorities in Poland.
The rise of National Socialism in Germany placed antisemitism at the forefront of German American relations. American discontent did not immediately lead to a policy of overt confrontation, but rather a slow atrophy of German American relations. Soon after the Nazi seizure of power, the U.S. embassy in Berlin reported to Washington on regular acts of violence directed against Jews, and President Franklin
D. Roosevelt received frequent briefings on the situation. The president expressed his distress to Reichsbank president Hjalmar Schacht, visiting the United States in May 1933, but Roosevelt repeatedly declined to make any public statement about the Jews’ plight in Germany. According to William
E. Dodd, U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937, Roosevelt was fully aware of the persecution of the German Jews and regretted it, but noted that it was “not a governmental affair.
We can do nothing except for American citizens.” Roosevelt felt that only personal influence and unofficial channels should be used. Secretary of State Cordell Hull was equally reluctant to condemn German antisemitism. During his tenure in office, Ambassador Dodd struggled to formulate an adequate response to German aggression, including German policy toward the Jews. Dodd was personally critical of Nazi policy and helped many Germans of Jewish descent to emigrate; however, his public statements on the issue were seldom forceful. Moreover, Dodd, a history professor, not a career diplomat, failed to receive support from the State Department for more vigorous action. Ineffective against the implementation of antisemitic policy in Germany and isolated within the State Department, Dodd was recalled from his position in 1937. His successor, career Foreign Service officer Hugh R. Wilson, felt that a less confrontational course of action would be more effective. He disapproved of attacks on Germany in the American press. After the pogrom of November 9—10, 1938, known as Reich- skristallnacht, Roosevelt, acting upon the recommendation of Assistant Secretary of State and former Consul General in Berlin George Messersmith, recalled Wilson to Washington for consultations, and Wilson did not return to Germany.Seeing the reluctance of their government, American Jewish groups and their non-Jewish allies pursued their own course of action in response to increasingly virulent German antisemitism. They staged rallies, most notably a giant protest assembly at Madison Square Garden in New York on March 27, 1933. Speakers included New York mayor John O’Brien, German-born U.S. senator Robert F. Wagner, and Episcopal bishop William T. Manning. Jewish groups also organized a boycott of German products. Although it had some success in New York City, it ultimately proved ineffectual. The U.S. government maintained a neutral position on the boycott. German officials, meanwhile, complained about the boycott to Secretary Hull, who refused to place pressure on Jewish groups to end the action.
The government also refused to squash a mock trial of Adolf Hitler held by the American Federation of Labor and the American Jewish Congress in 1934, despite official German protests.Antisemitism also shaped official German perceptions of the United States. Although Adolf Hitler spoke of the United States’ supposed Nordic racial core and Anglo-Saxon settlers who had colonized an entire continent, he also viewed the United States as a land where Jewry had flourished. For propagandistic purposes the Nazis continually overstated and exaggerated the influence of American Jews over their government’s policies. Hitler, who neither spoke English nor had been to an Englishspeaking country, considered Anglo-American democracy a Jewish invention, and he blamed the Jews for U.S. participation in World War I. He considered Roosevelt to be the pawn of an international Jewish cabal. Moreover, cultural antimodernism accompanied antisemitism in Nazi perceptions of the United States as an increasingly degenerate land of racial mixing. Some Americans of German descent supported the policies of the Nazi regime, including antisemitism. The most infamous of these groups was the Friends of the New Germany, later renamed the German American Bund, which gathered 20,000 for a rally at Madison Square Garden in February 1939. It activities fell under the scrutiny of an investigation launched by Jewish congressman Samuel Dickstein into Nazi propaganda activities in the United States. His inquiry gave rise to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Meanwhile, as Bund leader Fritz Kuhn was prosecuted for embezzlement, the group lost any prestige it had and eventually dissolved.
Many Americans perceived the 1936 summer Olympic Games, hosted by Germany, to be a propaganda show for Hitler’s Germany, and negative press reports colored their impressions. However, German officials, aware of the potential for negative publicity, removed anti-Jewish signs from public view for the duration of the games.
Prior to the Olympics, U.S. Olympic officials were divided over whether to boycott the games. Ernest Lee Jahnke, a German American and member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), encouraged a boycott, for which he was expelled from the IOC. He was replaced by Avery Brundage, who opposed any boycott. At the Berlin games, some Jewish American athletes were not allowed by their coaches to compete in their events. It remains a topic of controversy whether this was in deference to German wishes or for competitive reasons.As virulent antisemitism persuaded German Jews to emigrate, it was very difficult for them to seek refuge in the United States. Fears of economic competition and xenophobia had led in 1924 to the establishment of a quota system to limit immigration. Under popular pressure, these quotas were not relaxed in the 1930s to admit Jewish refugees facing Nazi persecution. In 1938, Roosevelt responded to the mounting refugee crisis by calling for an international conference, which was held in Evian, France, that summer. Thirty-two countries, including the United States, sent delegates; however, the United States was represented not by any State Department official but by Myron Taylor, an American industrialist and friend of the president. Despite universal regret expressed for the refugees’ plight, only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept more immigrants. Nazi officials considered it astounding that the United States, Britain, and others criticized Germany for its treatment of the Jews but refused to admit them as immigrants.
The late 1930s marked a high point in American antisemitism, and many U.S. State Department officials, themselves antisemitic, refused to make full use of the quota allotments available to Germans. Notable among these antisemitic officials was Assistant Secretary of State Breckenridge Long, who ordered U.S. consulates to hinder Jewish immigration as far as possible and who personally acted illegally to do so. Nonetheless, between January 1933 and September 1939, approximately 95,000 German Jews did emigrate to the United States, where they made important contributions to American public and academic life, notably at the New School in New York, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, and historically black colleges in the American South. Most notable among them were Albert Einstein, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse.
The U.S. Army was also not immune to antisemitism, and many important officers held the Jews collectively accountable for the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Xenophobia was rife in the officer corps. Although completely committed to the military defeat of Nazi Germany, many officers hoped for a postwar alliance of the United States and Germany against the Soviet Union. During the war, army officials did not press for the bombing of rail lines to concentration camps or the camps themselves, and some officers and War Department officials openly opposed such bombings, claiming them to be a diversion from tactical objectives. In the American Occupation Zone of Germany, some senior officers, most notably George S. Patton, did not hide their anti-Jewish prejudice. The physical appearance and general attitude of Jewish Holocaust survivors, compared to the healthy appearance, cleanliness, and deferential attitude of German civilians, repelled many U.S. soldiers and disposed them against the Jews. Others continued to support a U.S.-German alliance against the Soviets, whom they regarded in overtly racist terms.
Since 1945, fears of renewed antisemitism have affected German American relations. In the immediate postwar years, U.S. occupation officials considered antisemitism and Germany’s position on the Jews to be a barometer of German democratization. Despite their policy, U.S. officials were loathe to interfere in the affairs of West Germany regarding the Jews or manifestations of antisemitism, including a wave of cemetery desecrations in the 1950s and a riot in Munich in 1952 in response to an antisemitic letter published in the Suddeutsche Zeitung (South German News). The U.S. government approved of West German reparations to Israel and to Jewish Holocaust survivors, initiated in the early 1950s, but it placed no pressure on Konrad Adenauer’s government to conclude an agreement for restitution. Jewish groups in the United States, including the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and B’nai B’rith, maintained a skeptical attitude regarding West German efforts to combat reappearances of antisemitism. The participation of former Nazis and fellow travelers in public life exacerbated their fears, and they lobbied for a more critical and reserved embrace of West Germany as a U.S. ally.
These sentiments found little support within the U.S. government as increasing cold war tensions induced U.S. officials to overlook sensitive issues that had the potential to alienate support within the West German government or public.
In the 1950s, German antisemitism frequently accompanied nationalism, but after 1968, anti-Jewish sentiments became more frequent on the political Left. Anticapitalism, anti-Americanism, and support for so-called Third World liberation movements often merged with antisemitism. Israel’s strongest public detractors in Germany were members of the political New Left. Frequently their anticapitalist and anti-Zionist rhetoric merged and strayed into the realm of antisemitism. Israel’s strongest supporters in West Germany were political conservatives who embraced U.S. foreign policy marked by global anticommunism and support for Israel.
In the 1980s, the seeming irrelevance of antisemitism to German American diplomatic relations forced Jewish groups to reconsider their earlier agendas. In 1985, U.S. president Ronald Reagan visited Bitburg cemetery accompanied by West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, to the dismay and outrage of Jewish groups. In response to Jewish censure, Reagan also visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but criticism did not abate. The following year, the so-called Historikerstreit (historians’ debate) over the uniqueness and relative significance of the Holocaust raged within German and German American intellectual circles. Surprised at the general reaction to both events, American Jewish groups established permanent ties to German nongovernmental organizations, and the German embassy in Washington engaged more actively with Jewish issues.
East Germany, which had been seen by many Jews as having the potential to be a genuinely anti-Fascist Germany, embarked on an official campaign of antisemitism in 1952. Moreover, the new state rejected calls for reparations to Holocaust survivors and denied any responsibility for the actions of the Nazis. East German Jews fleeing renewed persecution received aid from Jewish charitable organizations, including the American Joint Distribution Committee. After Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953, antisemitism abated, but throughout its existence, East Germany maintained an antiZionist position that negatively affected its relations with Jews in the United States. Nonetheless, Jewish groups hoped that East Germany would change its position, and the Conference on Material Claims against Germany, which had negotiated a reparations agreement with West Germany in 1952, continued to maintain loose ties to East German front organizations. Only in the 1980s, as the East German regime faced financial catastrophe, did relations improve. Erich Honecker’s government, seeking most-favored-nation trade status and guarantees for foreign loans, approached American Jewish groups and initiated discussions regarding Holocaust reparations. The East German government believed that if it curried favor with American and world Jewry, Jews might use their supposed influence with the U.S. government on behalf of East Germany. This seemingly pro-Jewish attitude was based on older, antisemitic stereotypes of Jews exercising great power over policy formation, including in the United States. East Germany’s only democratically elected government continued these efforts in 1990, but no conclusive agreement was reached, and the German Democratic Republic soon ceased to exist as a separate state. Meanwhile, many American Jews initially opposed German reunification or were ambivalent to it, primarily out of fear of a resurgent Germany.
By the 1990s, Jewish groups had evolved from a reactive stance regarding antisemitism and German American relations to an active one in which they pursued specific agendas. As a result, Jewish issues, including the memory of the Holocaust, have become major factors in German American relations. In the late 1990s, Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat negotiated Holocaust reparations agreements with representatives of German government and industry. The ADL regularly reports on German neo-Nazism, and in 1998 the American Jewish Congress opened an office in Berlin. Its representatives frequently meet with German cabinet officials to discuss their concerns. In 1999 the German Bundestag voted to erect a giant Holocaust memorial designed by American Jewish architect Peter Eisenman. In 2001, after decades of discussions and planning, the city of Berlin opened a Jewish museum designed by Polish-born, American Jewish architect Daniel Libe- skind. Despite these German efforts to memorialize the German Jewish experience and the Holocaust, the actualization of these efforts has been largely a reactive process. Beginning in the late 1970s, the United States made plans for a Holocaust memorial in Washington, D.C., and that proposal led to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in 1993. Since that time, the Washington museum has become an international focal point for Holocaust research and has contributed significantly to an “Americaniza-
tion” of Holocaust memorialization. Similarly, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles has served as one of the world’s leading institutions devoted to researching and combating antisemitism. Despite its strong presence in Europe, the center does not maintain an office in Germany or Austria, where Wiesenthal operates his own research and documentation center on crimes against the Jews.
In the years since 1945, antisemitism has also had influence on a more nefarious variant of German American relations. Because Mein Kampf (My Battle) and other antisemitic propaganda are banned in the Federal Republic of Germany, many American neo-Nazis and white supremacists have reimported Nazi antisemitism to Germany. German right-wing extremists and Holocaust deniers or minimizers have come to rely on foreign groups to supply them with propaganda materials, including reprints of Mein Kampf. The United States, whose Constitution guarantees free speech and whose courts have overturned public censorship of neo-Nazi groups, has been home to many individuals assisting German groups. From the 1970s to the 1990s, the most infamous of these was Gary Lauck, who led the so-called National Socialist German Worker’s Party/Overseas Organization (NSDAP/AO). Lauck, the most important importer of neo-Nazi propaganda to Germany during that time, was arrested in Denmark and extradited to Germany in 1995. Since the late 1990s, right-wing American Internet sites have superseded earlier patrons of the movement. The United States has also been the source of much white power or skinhead rock music imported to Germany.
Jay Howard Geller
See also Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund; Bitburg; B’nai B’rith; Chicago; Cincinnati; Einstein, Albert; Frankfurt School; Friends of the New Germany; German American Bund; Horkheimer, Max; Kuhn, Fritz Julius; German-Jewish Migration to the U.S.; Marcuse, Herbert; Milwaukee; Morgenthau Plan; Schurz, Carl
References and Further Reading
Barkai, Avraham. Branching Out: German Jewish Immigration to the United States, 1820-1914. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994.
Bendersky, Joseph W The “Jewish Threat”: Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Gassert, Philipp. Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933-1945. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997.
Geller, Jay Howard. “Das Bild Konrad Adenauers vom Judentum und seine Beziehungen zu Vertretern judischer Organisationen nach 1945.” Adenauer, Israel, und das Judentum. Ed. Hanns Jurgen Kusters. Bonn: Bouvier, 2004, 137-155.
Junker, Detlef. “The Continuity of Ambivalence: German Views of America, 1933-1945.” Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776. Eds. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt. Cambridge and Washington: Cambridge University Press and German Historical Institute, 1997.
Mauch, Christof, and Joseph Salmons. German-Jewish Identities in America. Madison: Max Kade Institute for German American Studies, 2003.
Offner, Arnold A. American Appeasement: United States Foreign Policy and Germany, 1933-1938. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969.
Shafir, Shlomo. Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999.
Wyman, David S. Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1968.