The decline of emigration in the 1890s reduced cultural transfer from Germany to the societies in the Americas.
The role of Auslandsdeutsche imposed by Germany’s nationalism imperiled insertion into the host societies. This unsolicited conceptual unification from outside was detrimental to the communities after 1914.
In protest or simply in order to escape discrimination, many Germans changed ethnic affiliation to Dutch when in 1920 and 1921 the U.S. and Canadian censuses were taken. The further development of the ethnic communities in Canada, the United States, and Latin America, as well as migration to the three regions, followed different patterns. Immigration caesurae varied from country to country. The United States first legislated restrictions on immigration during World War I, while Canada and Latin American imposed restrictions only during the Great Depression.In the United States, two brief twentieth-century peaks of immigration came after each of the world wars. Men and women who saw no chance in devastated Germany left for the better options and less militaristic attitudes in the United States. In Canada, immigration continued in the decades before World War I, and after the Treaty of Versailles, so-called Volksdeutsche from territories outside of the post-1918 German borders came in considerable numbers. Economically far less secure than earlier immigrants from Germany proper, they were also marginalized by the latter’s attitude of superiority. From 1919 to 1929, half a million Germans departed (Marschalck 1986). Immigration slowed with the beginning of the worldwide depression after 1929, and the Canadian state tightened immigration regulations. However, throughout the 1920s, Russian Mennonites and Russian Germans from the Soviet Union were accepted as settlers for prairie communities. As in Canada, doors remained open in Latin America, and Germans continued to arrive in the 1920s.
The rise of fascism to power in 1933 resulted in the flight of Germans of Jewish faith and of those politically persecuted.
However, racism was not confined to Europe’s Fascist regimes. Many states in the Americas, like the West European democracies, were slow in accepting Jewish refugees—the Canadian immigration authorities being particularly adamant in this respect. At the July 1938 refugee conference in Evian, France, U.S. diplomats insisted on establishing an Inter-Governmental Committee on Refugees to negotiate an end to the chaos of expulsions and procedures of property transfer. The latter would free receiving societies from the cost of support. This was a subterfuge to keep refugee admission low. In the decade before 1939, a mere 120,000 immigrants from Germany were admitted into the United States (Marschalck 1986).In Latin America, the refugees from fascism had little in common with either the rural or the urban communities of earlier migrants. They came ill prepared and impoverished, selecting Latin American countries because visas were available, rather than because of cultural or economic preference. On the other hand, after 1945 the fugitives from prosecution for war crimes found a certain receptiveness in the prewar ethnic communities. The capture of, or rumors about, hiding Nazi officials have made headlines from time to time.
At the end of World War II, the Allies prohibited German emigration but, after a short period of hesitation, accepted displaced persons (DPs) from the forced labor, prisoner-of-war, and concentration camps. A total of 450,000 had received visas by the end of 1951. The figures included Germans of Jewish faith who had survived the Holocaust. A mere 118,000 people designated as Germans immigrated to the United States in the 1940s (Marschalck 1986). In Canada, migration resumed in the late 1940s with further Volksdeutsche being admitted under humanitarian demands by the churches. Because of the economic dependency of the Latin American economies on the United States, these societies no longer attracted migrants from West Germany after the 1950s.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, authorities attempted to slow down emigration of able-bodied men; under a still-racial concept of the unity of the Volk, they were needed to rebuild the ruins. The government, however, supported emigration of unwanted members of the Volk—single women and refugee landowners from eastern, formerly German, territories. Even with these restrictions, approximately 577,000 still migrated to the United States. With the economic upswing in the mid-1950s, the post—World War II peak of emigration came to an end. Less than a quarter of a million left for the United States in the 1960s (Marschalck 1986). Since then small numbers have continued to depart, in particular to the United States and, increasingly, to Canada.See also Argentina; Barbie, Klaus; Eichmann, Karl Adolf; Great Depression; Latin America, Nazis in
References and Further Reading
Bade, Klaus J., ed. Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland. Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Munchen: Beck, 1992.
Froschle, Hartmut, ed. Die Deutschen in Lateinamerika. Schicksal und Leistung. Tubingen: Erdmann, 1979.
Goni, Uki. The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perδns Argentina. London: Granta, 2002.
Hoerder, Dirk. “The German-Language Diasporas. A Survey, Critique, and Interpretation.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7—44.
Hoerder, Dirk, and Jorg Nagler, eds. People in Transit. German Migrants in Comparative Perspective, 1820—1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1995.
Marschalck, Peter, comp. Inventar der Quellen zur Geschichte der Wanderung, besonders der Auswanderung in Bremer Archiven. Veroffentlichung aus dem Staatsarchiv der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, Bd. 53. Bremen: Staatsarchiv, 1986, 47—51.
Meding, Holger. Flucht vor Nurnberg? Koln: Bohlau, 1992.
Sauer, Angelika E., and Matthias Zimmer, eds. A Chorus of Different Voices. German-Canadian Identities. New York: Lang, 1998.