Cruel World (35 page)

The first signs of this policy were noted, with some concern, by U.S. diplomats in the summer of 1933. On July 14, the Nazi government passed a law declaring that German citizenship “might be withdrawn from all Germans who refuse to return to Germany when summoned to do so by the Minister of the Interior,” and also from those “the Government considers to have acted in a hostile or disloyal manner toward Germany.” In addition, citizenship could be arbitrarily withdrawn from anyone who had gained it between November 9, 1918, and January 30, 1933. People denied nationality under these rules would lose any property they owned in Germany, and their children, even if still in Germany, would also lose their citizenship. This action would take care of political refugees. But it was not enough. Present German citizens would be divided into three main categories: those of pure blood who were “worthy” of full citizenship, those of pure blood who were not, and those of “alien blood.”

The classification was reported with considerable disgust by American Ambassador William Dodd, who, happily ignoring the existence of segregation in the United States, noted vehemently in his cable to Washington
that “the sacred American principle that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights has no room in Hitler’s Third Reich.” And he added that it was especially strange, given the fact that Hitler himself had only become a German citizen in 1932, and then only by a bureaucratic ruse. In a more practical mode, the Ambassador also pointed out that the new law might result in visiting Germans being stranded in the United States, and cause “a collision with our immigration laws.”

While the first and third categories of citizens were easy to identify, being loyal Nazis or Jews and members of other unacceptable races, category two was less obvious. A naturalization document published by the state of Baden made things clearer. Naturalization must be “especially justified.” Dissenters, freethinkers, and atheists should be suspected of being Communists, and “representatives of liberalism may also fall under this category.” Foreign nationals could not be naturalized in principle until they had performed “special services” for Germany. If the petitioner descended from an alien and a German parent, the competent district physician had to decide which line of descent was predominant. Hereditary defects were, of course, unacceptable, and political adherence since 1918 was investigated. Nazi Party membership and military service in the correct World War I formations would help. But in the end, full citizenship could only be granted to those “who support the national government without reserve” and are willing to “hold their opinion abroad.” It was abundantly clear that millions of ethnic Germans, no matter how pure their blood, would not find a place in the new Valhalla.
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As we have seen, keeping track of the varieties of citizens within the Reich proper was an immense, but possible, task, in which the new powers accorded to Nazi governmental agencies could be employed to investigate both public and private sources of human demography such as church registers, census archives, tax returns, and medical records. Tracking Germans worldwide would be much harder, but by 1934 the process was well in hand.

There was no need to set up a new agency for this foreign project. The Nazis simply took over a number of existing organizations founded to promote German cultural and business activities abroad and maintain links with émigrés. Principal among these were the League for Germans Abroad (VDA) and the German Overseas Institute (DAI). The new official status of these organizations was not made public so that they could continue to operate “where the government and the Party are not able and may not do this on account of political reasons.
²
By December 1933, Rudolf Hess,
deputy leader of the Nazi Party, had let it be known that all nongovernmental organizations concerned with ethnic German questions would be controlled from the Reich by a “Volksdeutsch Council.” This was necessary because “abroad tension had developed between a generation striving toward leadership and the old leadership which could be fatal.… Therefore, discipline had to be ruthlessly established within the German national groups.” Indeed some of the tensions had already had a negative effect. It was reported that some ethnic German parents in Brazil had not sent their children to the local German school because of “the interference with these schools of the … National Socialist Party.”
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Hess was not alone in this project: virtually every Nazi agency from the Propaganda Ministry to the Tourist Office would soon have programs to compete for the souls of ethnic Germans abroad.

By 1934 the DAI had become the premier covert organization, though the fact that its letterhead featured a Hansa ship with a swastika on its sail might have made some people suspicious. For years the DAI had been receiving information on Germans abroad and had kept a file of their addresses. The United States, with its large population of German background, was of particular interest. The pre-Hitler efforts had been somewhat haphazard. An unknown correspondent from New York City had covered reams of paper with spidery notes on the names of German and other immigrants of interest, including the upper-crust denizens of the Hudson Valley. Sometimes these files were enlivened by lurid, if seemingly irrelevant,
New York World
clippings about scandals such as the Brewster murder case of 1926.
⁴

In 1935, recent immigrants to the United States from Germany were surprised to receive a series of folksy
Heimatbriefe
, or “letters from the homeland.” Their responses, often containing information on other relatives and their current addresses, were carefully filed. The replies range from wildly pro-Hitler to wildly pro-California. One correspondent even sent back information on the Flower Festival in his new hometown.
⁵
As the 1930s went on, the flow of information increased. There were lists of prominent Americans with German names, of German seamen living in port cities, of loyal people in Central America and Cuba. There were bibliographies on Mennonite and Moravian settlements. Students in the German city of Bremen were put to work checking shipping manifests back to the eighteenth century for emigrants. German consulates were requested to inform the DAI of every German who handed in his passport and to provide statistics on former German citizens in their jurisdictions.

The more traditional officials of the German Foreign Office did not
take kindly to such busywork and told the DAI that they might find the information through the U.S. Department of Labor.
⁶
This agency, clearly suspicious of such inquiries, sent them on to the State Department, which asked the German embassy for an explanation. The embassy replied, somewhat revealingly, that the information was needed to update German military rolls and “to benefit individuals so that they would not incur the possibility of molestation if they should enter German territory.”
⁷

And on it went. Names and addresses on form letters that began with “The following person is particularly important to us in our work …” poured in. The subject’s profession was noted, and the sender was asked to check one of two comments asking whether the subject was “a convinced supporter of a volkish, National Socialist worldview,” or, if his worldview was not known, whether he had shown readiness to undertake “independent Volksdeutsch activity.”
⁸
All this information was carefully entered in personal dossiers in a central file in Stuttgart. Each dossier also included the subject’s reasons for emigration, hobbies, language proficiency, religion, and the names and ages of all children under eighteen.
⁹

The reports on American society received back in the Fatherland did not always give a recognizable view of the United States. One intrepid operative toured Connecticut by car in the late 1930s. His vision of the Nutmeg State, written in a Baedeker-like style, is quite startling. He was shocked to note that the “fertile soil of the valleys and less fertile soil of the highlands” was tilled not by real Yankee farmers, but by former inhabitants of Russia, Poland, and Italy and their children. This fact could only be ascertained, however, by actually talking to the individuals, who not only looked like Yankees, but, deceptively, lived in colonial-style houses. Indeed, two-thirds of the population seemed to be “foreign-born” or the children of the foreign-born. The tobacco industry he found to be controlled by Jews and Russians. The magnificent dairy and poultry farms did have some German owners and workers, but many more were run by Poles, Italians, Swiss, or “other foreign ethnic groups.” The factories, banks, and financial institutions were still owned by “old Americans,” but they did not do much of the actual work. Personal service, he correctly noted, was performed mostly by people of “foreign origin or alien race.” He was impressed by the “multiplicity of churches and synagogues” where members “pray to their God in language and manner brought from their lands of birth.” The Connecticut Germans, sad to say, seemed not to be particularly unified, and had “adapted themselves remarkably well to American life.”
¹⁰
Missing entirely the miracle of the United States, he never seemed to realize that, despite their ethnic and
social differences, all the groups he described considered themselves real Americans.

By February 1938 another DAI official, Heinz Kloss, felt he had enough material on the United States to propose an ambitious educational program. To start, the DAI should publish a German-American
“Heimat
Atlas.” This tome would list the number of ethnic Germans in each town and its principal German organizations, thereby making it possible to approach “separate German splinter groups.” The atlas would be bilingual for those who were no longer fluent in their “native” tongue. He also proposed the publication of textbooks for German-American schoolchildren, which would point out similarities between Germany and the United States, such as the Reich Labor Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps and the “German Jewish question and the American Negro question.” The books would include the poems of a “little known Texas-German Homeland poet” and pioneer tales from “the North-Dakota Russo-German communities,” which only a truly dedicated researcher could ever have found. The DAI official, apparently ignorant of the subject matter of Bible studies, also suggested supplying church schools with maps of the Reich, as he had observed that many of them had maps of Palestine, but not of Germany. Most importantly, “young German-Americans,” especially ones born “over there,” should be sent for at least six months a year to towns in Germany so that they could bond with the inhabitants.
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It is not clear which, if any, of these secret projects actually bore fruit, but at least one reaction survives. Carefully saved in the DAI files is an article from an unknown Pennsylvania newspaper that accurately notes that “a certain Heinz Kloss,” who had visited Allentown from Germany in order to “study” the local culture and traditions, was suspected of being a “Hitler agent” and of having “a lot to do” with unsolicited mail being received by local citizens:

By the late 1930s the activities of certain overt pro-Nazi groups established by Americans, such as the publicity-seeking Amerikadeutscher Volksbund (known as the Bund), were the source of such public outrage that, in 1938, German Ambassador Hans Heinrich Dieckhoff, brother-in-law of German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, aware that the often absurd displays of the Bund were making German-American relations worse by the day, advised the German government to sever official relations with them and forbid Reich citizens to be members. Among other things, the Bund, perhaps also influenced by Winnetou, had unsuccessfully tried to enlist the “pure ethnic” Native Americans as “natural partners,” and had flirted with the Ku Klux Klan. Even worse, the federal government had outlawed the Bund Youth camps.
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The Ambassador also tried to point out that very few ethnic Germans in America had any interest in National Socialism and that the “conspiratorial child’s play”
¹⁴
being carried on by the DAI would only have disastrous results. This was soon borne out by a plethora of congressional hearings and investigations aimed at subversive German activities, which exposed spying by exchange students, the fact that several German nationals had been jailed for trying to obtain military secrets, and the sleazier activities of the Bund leadership.

But the final blow to any mass movement of German-Americans to the Reich was struck in early November 1938, by the violent events of Kristallnacht. In a series of telegrams, Ambassador Dieckhoff noted that “large and powerful sections of the American people” who up to then had regarded Germany as a “stronghold of order and a bulwark against riots and against unlawful encroachment upon private property” had changed their views. Public opinion, he reported,