German-speaking men and women departed Europe for many parts of the world but in particularly large numbers for North America.
Agricultural settlers, miners, and skilled workers came from the contiguous German-language territories in Central Europe and, toward the end of the nineteenth century, in secondary migrations from earlier migration destinations and settlement enclaves in SouthEastern and Eastern Europe.
Until the early nineteenth century German speakers who reached North America were mainly indentured servants. In the next decades, large numbers came in search of agricultural land; from the mid-nineteenth century on, migrants were predominantly laboring men and women. Refugees reached the Americas first after the unsuccessful revolutions of 1848 and 1849 in Europe; then under Otto von Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws after 1878; finally, and most importantly, after the Nazi rise to power in 1933. From the 1880s to 1918, at the height of its nationalism and imperialist designs, the German Reich attempted to use the migrants, designated Auslandsdeutsche, for expansionist designs and thus warped the processes by which these immigrants became part of their host societies.