World War II, German American Soldiers in
When World War II broke out, over 1.6 million people of German extraction were living in the United States. Approximately 600,000 of them had come to the United States since the end of World War I.
Of this group, a little over half were still German citizens (O’Connor 1968, 437; Krammer 1997, 26). Most works on the experience of German Americans during World War II do not go beyond the generalization that the vast majority of German Americans opposed Nazism. Recent scholarship, however, has revealed that approximately 11,000 German Americans were interned during World War II. This discovery has led to political action. In October 2003, Senator Russell Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, introduced legislation known as the Wartime Treatment Study Act. If passed, the act will establish two fact-finding commissions to review the treatment by the U.S. government of 11,000 German Americans, along with Italian Americans, and Jewish refugees during World War II.At the time of this writing, the act is awaiting approval from the U.S. Senate.
But while these developments will enhance our knowledge about the German American experience during World War II, there is much work that needs to be done on the subject. To wit, no work has been done on German emigres who fought in the U.S. Army during the war. These men represent a significant cohort; statistics from the U.S. Military Institute in Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, show that over 30,000 men of German birth served in the U.S. Army during World War II (Miller 1948, 274). Half of these men were not citizens of the United States when they entered the armed forces. There is a good chance that most of the noncitizens were recent emigres who left Germany because of their opposition to the Nazi movement.
Despite their significant numbers, little is known about these men as a group.
Though several German American veterans of the U.S. Army have written their memoirs—Joachim von Elbe, Witness to History: A Refugee from the Third Reich (1988); Tom Frazier, Between the Lines (2001); Kurt Gabel, The Making ofa Paratrooper, Airborne Training and Combat in World War II (1990); and Hans Schmitt, Lucky Victim. An Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times 1933-1946 (1989)—their works do not place their experiences in the wider context of the other native-born Germans who fought with them. Nor as of 2005 has any work been done to assess their contributions to the war effort, particularly in Germany.Taken collectively, these memoirs show that German emigre soldiers played an important and unheralded role in the war against Nazism and its aftermath—particu- larly in the European theater of operations. They were distinguished by their commitment to fight the war in general and Adolf Hitler’s regime in particular. As one of them put it, “I felt very strongly that I should go into combat, because these boys they came from Pennsylvania and South Dakota, they didn’t even know what a Nazi was. They had no idea what they were fighting for, and they were going to get killed for it, too. I felt I had a much higher obligation” (Kollander and O’Sullivan 2005). The memoirs of many other German emigres echo these sentiments.
But despite their commitment to the war effort, many of these men were placed under a cloud of suspicion because of their backgrounds. When the United States entered the war against Germany, Germans in the United States who were not yet citizens were labeled “enemy aliens.” This designation was particularly galling for those who had fled Hitler’s Germany. Some were cleared by draft boards in order to serve, others were investigated by the FBI before they entered the army. Even after they were cleared for service, German emigre soldiers found themselves in the same bind as many of their Japanese counterparts, who fought for a government that was at the same time interning many of their friends and families back home in detention camps.
And after they returned from the war, many felt that the fact that they were Germans held them back from the kinds of jobs and promotions they thought they deserved.The fact remains, however, that these men made a unique contribution to the war effort. Along with their special sense of commitment to fight Hitler and Nazism, their language skills and their connection to the German way of life enabled them to do their various jobs—in- terpreting German documents, interrogat
ing prisoners of war, and ferreting out war criminals and administering the occupation—more efficiently and rapidly than non-German-speaking American military personnel. Their treatment of their former countrymen appears to have been aboveboard and quite fair; this also made the Germans perhaps better disposed toward their American conquerors. Hence, these men not only fueled the U.S. campaign to defeat Hitler, they also played an important role in laying the foundation for good postwar relations between Germany and the United States.
Patricia Kollander
See also Heym, Stefan; Kissinger, Henry; World War I and German Americans; World War I, German Prisoners and Civilian Internees in
References and Further Reading
Kollander, Patricia, and John O’Sullivan. “I
Must Be a Part of this War. ” A German Americans Fight Against Hitler and Nazism Fordham University Press, forthcoming, Fall 2005.
Krammer, Arnold. Undue Process: The Untold Story of America’s German Alien Internees. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.
Miller, Watson B. “Foreign Born in the US Army During World War II, with Special Reference to the Alien.” Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, US Military History Institute, 1948.
O’Connor, Richard. The German-Americans, An Informal History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1968.