Category Archives: Germany

by | 17 April 2006 · 6:18 pm

Speaking German in Moscow, 1941

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova’s father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova’s friend replied that the description ‘German’ was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments ‘from Leningrad to the Far East’ began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova’s cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called ‘Moscow emigration’ of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf’s two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré’s novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany’s academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. ‘People sitting around us,’ wrote Vova, ‘turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy’s language.’

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 173-174

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by | 12 April 2006 · 9:04 pm

Targeting Russian Émigrés, 1920s

This period [the early 1920s] was one of intense secret operations abroad mounted by INO (Inostrannyi Otdel), the Foreign Intelligence Department of the OGPU. Even after the destruction of the White armies, Lenin was determined to pursue counter-revolution abroad. In December 1920, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Cheka, had begun to organize operations against émigré groups in France and Germany. Berlin alone contained 200,000 White Russian refugees.

Relatives of prominent émigrés were seized as hostages at home and agents were rapidly recruited for operations abroad to infiltrate émigré organizations and arrange the kidnapping of their leaders. A sophisticated development was to create fake White Guard organizations within Russia to trap the regime’s enemies. These activities were given the highest priority. For the first dozen years of its life, INO’s ‘main foreign target remained the White Guard movement’.

The White Guard movement was directed from Paris by the Russian combined Services Union (ROVS), led by General Kutepov, who was kidnapped in Paris by OGPU agents in January 1930. A successor, General Miller, was also kidnapped in December 1936. He was taken back to the Soviet Union drugged inside a trunk, interrogated, tortured and then shot. The émigré world of White Russians in the early 1920s was a political demi-monde of agents and double agents, mostly working for the OGPU. Homesick White Russians in Paris and Berlin, many of them well-born officers working at night as taxi drivers, were prepared to betray their closest friends for the chance of what they thought was a guarantee of safe conduct home….

The Russian émigré community in Berlin was more like a colony, largely because it was so concentrated on the western centre of the city. Berliners jokingly called the Kurfürstendamm the Nöpski Prospekt’, and Charlottenburg was known as ‘Charlottengrad’. Writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Ilya Ehrenburg and Boris Pasternak treated the cafés of the area, such as the Prager Diele, in the same way as French existentialists later used the cafés of Saint-Germain. There were around 200 Russian-language newspapers, magazines and journals in Berlin, a number of publishing houses and even a Russian high school. But this already precarious community was to be devastated and scattered within a decade by the economic crisis and unemployment triggered by the Wall Street Crash.

SOURCE: The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor (Penguin, 2005), pp. 95-97

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by | 9 January 2006 · 5:56 pm

Indian Sati, German Totenfolge in Universal Context

The September 2004 issue of Journal of World History has a thought-provoking article on a much maligned, but not nearly rare enough phenomenon: the Indian custom of sati (= suttee). Author Jörg Fisch’s title is Dying for the Dead: Sati in Universal Context. Here’s the conclusion (courtesy of The History Cooperative).

Sati, the burning of widows in India, has probably been the best-known (and the most despised or lamented) Indian custom in Europe since the ancient Greeks. Comparisons with other customs usually have been made on the phenomenological level, especially with the burning of witches and heretics. Here it is suggested to introduce comparisons on the functional level. The main question is thus not what happens, but what the function and purpose of the act are. Seen in this perspective, the central aspect becomes the connection between this world and the other world, between the living and the dead. On the basis of a belief in a hereafter that is an immediate continuation of this life, both worlds are connected by an act in which a dead person is followed, voluntarily or by force, in a public ceremony, by one or several living persons, thus emphasizing the continuity between the two worlds. The particulars of the ritual, whether it is killing or self-killing, and the manner of killing are, from a functional point of view, unimportant. Usually, this manner corresponds to the manner of disposing of the dead. Thus, for example, in Indian castes that bury the dead, sati is usually performed by burying alive. In other contexts, the method of killing is to preserve the body of the followers as intact as possible, so as to enable them to do their duties in the hereafter, which often leads to strangling.

Following into death thus defined can be shown to have occurred, in the course of history, in most areas of the world for a longer or a shorter time, with the notable exception of Western Europe [Eva Braun?–J.], for which there is no satisfactory explanation so far, due to the lack of sources. Two further important questions cannot be answered either: we can only guess the context in which such customs had their origin, as we don’t know when they developed, and we do not know whether there was a kind of diffusion from one point of origin or whether the relevant customs developed independently from each other in different places. The only exceptions are Southeast Asia, where the occurrence of widow burning makes Indian influence very likely, and Japan, where there was probably Chinese influence.

Following into death is of special interest because it links two worlds and thus religious with sociopolitical aspects. It is a matter of life and death. As it is physically impossible to accompany every dead person, the question of who has the right to be followed and who has the duty to follow arises. Following into death thus not only becomes a mirror of social structure and political power; it also can influence them. There are two main functions in this framework. Especially in India, sati reflects, confirms, and strengthens the subordination of men to women [vice versa, surely–J.]. In many other places it has the same effect for the superiority of the ruling groups. The ceremony of killing the followers shows the long-term results of social and political power struggles.

Following into death presupposes certain religious beliefs (as a necessary, not a sufficient, condition). Wherever beliefs in a final judgment prevailed over beliefs in a transfer of this world into the other, following into death either vanished, if the beliefs of the people at large changed, or were suppressed, if foreign conquerors had sufficient strength to abolish them. This is what European colonialism did, mainly with humanitarian arguments, but basically because of its own religious background.

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by | 6 July 2005 · 8:29 am

Medieval German vs. Mongol Shock and Awe

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who ranks as one of Germany’s greatest historical and cultural heroes, best exemplified the use of terror in the West. When he tried to conquer the Lombard city of Cremona in the north of modern Italy in 1160, he instituted an escalating series of violent acts of terror. His men beheaded their prisoners and played with the heads outside the city walls, kicking them like balls. The defenders of Cremona then brought out their German prisoners on the city walls and pulled their limbs off in front of their comrades. The Germans gathered more prisoners and executed them in a mass hanging. The city officials responded by hanging the remainder of their prisoners on top of the city walls. Instead of fighting each other directly, the two armies continued their escalation of terror. The Germans then gathered captive children and strapped them into their catapults, which were normally used to batter down walls and break through gates. With the power of these great siege machines, they hurled the living children at the city walls.

By comparison with the terrifying acts of civilized armies of the era, the Mongols did not inspire fear by the ferocity or cruelty of their acts so much as by the speed and efficiency with which they conquered and their seemingly total disdain for the lives of the rich and powerful. The Mongols unleashed terror as they rode east, but their campaign was more noteworthy for its unprecedented military success against powerful armies and seemingly impregnable cities than for its bloodlust or ostentatious use of public cruelty….

One of the worst slaughters was unleashed on the citizens of Omar Khayyám‘s home city of Nishapur. The residents revolted against the Mongols, and in the ensuing battle an arrow fired from walls of the city killed Genghis Khan’s son-in-law, Tokuchar. In revenge for the revolt and as a lesson to other cities, Genghis allowed his widowed daughter, who was pregnant at the time, to administer whatever revenge she wished upon the captured city. She reportedly decreed death for all, and in April 1221, the soldiers carried out her command. According to widely circulated but unverified stories, she ordered the soldiers to pile the heads of the dead citizens in three separate pyramids–one each for the men, the women, and the children. Then she supposedly ordered that the dogs, the cats, and all other living animals in the city be put to death so that no living creature would survive the murder of her husband….

While the destruction of many cities was complete, the numbers given by historians over the years were not merely exaggerated or fanciful–they were preposterous. The Persian chronicles reported that at the battle of Nishapur, the Mongols slaughtered the staggeringly precise number of 1,747,000. This surpassed the 1,600,000 listed as killed in the city of Herat. In more outrageous claims, Juzjani, a respectable but vehemently anti-Mongol historian, puts the total for Herat at 2,400,000. Later, more conservative scholars place the number of dead from Genghis Khan’s invasion of central Asia at 15 million within five years. Even this more modest total, however, would require that each Mongol kill more than a hundred people; the inflated tallies for other cities required a slaughter of 350 people by every Mongol soldier. Had so many people lived in the cities of central Asia at the time, they could have easily overwhelmed the invading Mongols.

SOURCE: Genghis Khan and the Remaking of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford (Three Rivers Press, 2004), pp. 116-118

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Filed under Central Asia, Europe, Germany, Mongolia

by | 6 June 2005 · 9:32 pm

Ultimului Strajer al Capitalei, 1916

Halfway Down the Danube shares a telling snapshot of the monument To the Last Defender of Bucharest against the Germans in 1916.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, Germany, Romania, war

by | 1 May 2005 · 2:59 pm

German and Chinese Classmates in My "Curs de Perfecţionare"

My year of linguistic research in Romania in 1983–84 was pretty much a bust. Having done fieldwork in a kind of New Guinea Sprachbund, I intended to study the Romanian literature on the Balkan Sprachbund. But my advisor, an Albanian specialist, wasn’t interested in much but a Daco-Thraco-Illyrian substrate. And no one wanted to talk about any Slavic substrate or superstrate. I came away much less impressed by the Balkan Sprachbund than by the Western European one, with all those preposed articles, a stronger tendency to render subordinate clauses in the infinitive rather than the subjunctive, and a clearly discernible Latin superstrate.

But one of the many peripheral bright spots was the chance to sit in on a Romanian “curs de perfecţionare” with classmates from China, East Germany, and the U.S. What made the class interesting was not the sometimes stupifyingly dull lectures, but rather the need to use Romanian to communicate with our classmates, not all of whom were stupifyingly dull.

The four young German girls were all Russian majors (at the University of Leipzig, I believe) picking up a second language to enhance their translator/interpreter career prospects. Two of them were very reliable members of the Party; the other two were not. I ran into one of the latter, a chunky little red-head, at an art exhibit and reception in the West German embassy. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone I had seen her there. I didn’t and, as far as I know, she didn’t get in any trouble.

When it came time to give oral presentations in one of our classes, they all chose safe and boring presentations on such topics as sports terminology and shipping terminology. The latter talk, by a girl from the Baltic seaport of Rostock, is where I first heard the term “roll-on/roll-off” (also roro) for a type of ship.

During the second term, I got permission to attend their course introducing Bulgarian, but I couldn’t keep up since the class assumed prior knowledge of Russian.

The two Chinese women in the class were broadcasters for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service. In fact, they still are! One was very reserved, and I never got to know her very well, but the other was quite outgoing and I found her not only far more interesting, but much less frustrating to talk with than the only other American linguist among my classmates. (That’ll have to be another post.)

At one point during the long, lean winter, with markets usually barren of fresh meat and vegetables, she managed to supply us with a chunk of meat from the Chinese embassy. Just before we left, we passed on to her the cassette player/shortwave radio we had brought with us.

Her class presentation was the most interesting one of all. A group from the Chinese embassy had taken a holiday trip through Yugoslavia and Hungary, but she focused mostly on Janos Kadar, less about his economic reforms than about his anti-personality cult. He was so modest, according to her sources, that he would not cut to the head of a line waiting to get into some place–at least not until someone noticed and then everyone deferred to him. As she was talking, I would occasionally glance up at the portrait of Mr. Personality Cult himself that hung in every Romanian classroom. Our professor, the most pleasant and sensitive of our lot, did a good job of taking it all in stride. I thought, if any of us could trash a personality cult, it was someone who had lived through the last years of Mao Zedong. (I learned only recently about the long relationship between Janos Kadar and the Chinese Communist Party.)

Four years later, on a trip to Beijing after a year teaching English in a small town in Guangdong, we had a chance to meet again. I called Radio Beijing and managed in my barely adequate Chinese to get someone to call her to the phone. But then when she answered and I tried to switch to my somewhat faded Romanian, I had trouble keeping Chinese out of it. She brought her six-year-old son and her husband to our small hotel near the Temple of Heaven and spent a few hours chatting in the courtyard garden during a blackout with my wife and me and our two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, her husband spoke a fair bit of English, having worked as an Italian translator/interpreter for a travel agency, so we didn’t have to depend entirely on my rusty Romanian befreckled with dots of Chinese.

Next installment: the three weird Americans in my class.

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by | 4 February 2005 · 8:44 am

Volga Germans Steer for Home

The invaluable Argus notes a story about Volga Germans in Kazakhstan.

ALMATY, 1 February (IRIN) – For Irina Geisler, a young ethnic German in the Kazakh commercial capital of Almaty, ‘returning’ to Germany, couldn’t be more natural. “I feel German. It’s my dream,” the 19-year-old linguistics student told IRIN. Her application for German citizenship currently awaits approval.

“All my life I’ve heard about Germany. It’s part of my life,” she said with a German accent heavily influenced by the Schwabian roots of her ancestors. Such dreams remain strong for thousands of such ethnic Germans in today’s Kazakhstan, with many of Irina’s friends torn between both countries. “Half of the young ethnic Germans would like to return, the other half don’t want to leave Kazakhstan,” Geisler conceded, describing it as an individual decision many young people like her still face.

“I’ve thought about going to Germany but I’ve finished my education already,” 29-year-old Evgenija Mayer, an employee at the Fredrich Ebert Stiftung in Almaty, told IRIN. “I worry I would have to start all over again.” But starting again is precisely what hundreds of thousands like her have done already. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, more than 900,000 ethnic Germans and their families have emigrated to Germany, the German Embassy in Almaty told IRIN.

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by | 28 January 2005 · 8:50 pm

When Germans Threatened the Soviet Gulag

Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History (Anchor Books, 2003) describes what happened when the German Army’s Operation Barbarossa in 1941 threatened camps full of Soviet prisoners.

The experience of being on a prisoner train during an air raid was relatively unusual, however–if only because prisoners were rarely allowed on the evacuation train at all. On the train leaving one camp, the families and the baggage of camp guards and administrators took up so much space that there was no room for any prisoners. Elsewhere, industrial equipment took priority over people, both for practical and propaganda reasons. Crushed in the West, the Soviet leadership promised to rebuild itself east of the Urals. As a result, that “significant proportion” of prisoners–in fact, the overwhelming majority–who [former Gulag system chief administrator Victor] Nasedkin had said were “evacuated on foot,” endured long forced marches, descriptions of which sound hauntingly similar to the marches undertaken by the prisoners of the Nazi concentration camps four years later: “We have no transport,” one guard told an echelon of prisoners, as bombs fell around them. “Those who can walk will walk. Protest or not–all will walk. Those who can’t walk–we will shoot. We will leave no one for the Germans … you decide your own fate.”

Walk they did–although the journeys of many were cut short. The rapid advance of the Germans made the NKVD nervous, and when they became nervous, they started shooting. On July 2, the 954 prisoners of the Czortkow jail in western Ukraine began their march to the east. Along the way, the officer who wrote the subsequent report identified 123 of them as Ukrainian nationalists and shot them for “attempted rebellion and escape.” After walking for more than two weeks, with the German army within 10 to 20 miles, he shot all those still alive.

Evacuees not killed were sometimes hardly better off. Nasedkin wrote that “the apparat of the Gulag in the frontline regions was mobilized to ensure that evacuating echelons and transports of prisoners had medical-sanitary services and nourishment.” Alternatively, here is how M. Shteinberg, a political prisoner arrested for the second time in 1941, described her evacuation from Kirovograd prison:

Everything was bathed in blinding sunlight. At midday, it became unbearable. This was Ukraine, in the month of August. It was about 95 degrees [Fahrenheit] every day. An enormous quantity of people were walking, and on top of this crowd hung a hazy cloud of dust. There was nothing to breathe, it was impossible to breathe …

Everyone had a bundle in their arms. I had one too. I had even brought a coat with me, since without a coat it is hard to survive imprisonment. It’s a pillow, a blanket, a cover–everything. In most prisons, there are no beds, no mattresses, no linen. But after we had traversed 20 miles in that heat, I quietly left my bundle by the side of the road. I knew that I would not be able to carry it. The vast majority of the women did the same. Those who didn’t leave their bundles after the first 20 miles left them after 130. No one carried them to the end. When we had gone another 10 miles, I took off my shoes and left them too …

When we passed Adzhamka I dragged behind me my cell mate, Sokolovskaya, for 20 miles. She was an old woman, more than seventy years old, completely gray-haired … it was very difficult for her to walk. She clung to me, and kept talking about her fifteen-year-old grandson, with whom she had lived. The last terror in Sokolovskaya’s life was the terror that he would be arrested too. It was difficult for me to drag her, and I began to falter myself. She told me to “rest a while, I’ll go alone.” And she immediately fell back by 1 mile. We were the last in the convoy. When I felt that she had fallen behind, I turned back, wanting to get her–and I saw them kill her. They stabbed her with a bayonet. In the back. She didn’t even see it happen. Clearly, they knew how to stab. She didn’t even move. Later, I realized that hers had been an easy death, easier than that of others. She didn’t see that bayonet. She didn’t have time to be afraid.

In all, the NKVD evacuated 750,000 prisoners from 27 camps and 210 labor colonies. Another 40,000 were evacuated from 272 prisons, and sent to new prisons in the east. A significant proportion of them–though we still do not know the real numbers–never arrived.

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by | 28 January 2005 · 8:26 am

Rainy Day Diaries from World War II

Eamonn Fitzgerald’s Rainy Day blog, whose diary entries were among my first inspirations to start my own blog, has been commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (by the Soviet Army) by posting diary entries from that era. Who wrote the following entries? Rainy Day has the answers. Just scroll down.

  • 4 December 1940 “Watch the newsreel with the Führer, who is very pleased with it. The shots of London burning make a particularly profound impression on him. He also takes careful note of the pessimistic opinions from the USA.

    Nevertheless, he does not expect the immediate collapse of England and probably rightly. The ruling class there has now lost so much that it is bringing up its last reserves. By which he means not so much the City of London as the Jews who if we win will be hurled out of Europe, and Churchill, Eden, etc., who see their personal existences as dependent on the outcome of the war. Perhaps they will end up on the scaffold. We can expect little resistance to them from the masses at the moment. The English proletariat lives under such wretched conditions that a few extra privations will not cause it much discomfort. There will be no revolution, anyway, because the opportunity is lacking. England will thus survive through the winter. The Führer does not intend to mount any air-raids at Christmas. Churchill, in his madness, will do so, and then the English will be treated to revenge raids that will make their eyes pop.”

  • 21 May 1941 “Sonnenstein has long ceased to be the regional mental asylum. The SS is in charge. They have built a special crematorium. Those who are not wanted are taken up in a kind of police van. People here all call it ‘the whispering coach’. Afterward the relatives receive the urn. Recently one family here received two urns at once. We now have pure Communism. But Communism murders more honestly.”

  • 1 July 1942 [Holland] “New measures again. Not only are we not allowed to cycle any more, we are not allowed to ride the trams either. We have to be off the streets by eight, and we are not allowed inside non-Jewish homes. Shopping is restricted for us to the hours between three and five p.m. It’s a mess. I’ve moved back home. I couldn’t stay with the Fernandes’ [non-Jewish friends] any more. I did have a wonderful time there. At my last meal with them last night, I read them a poem of thanks I had written. We were all so moved and depressed because of the new measures, and crying so hard about everything, that we ended up sobbing with laughter. It was a comical tragedy, really.”

  • 22 March 1945 [Bergen-Belsen] “The weather affects the mood of the camp most profoundly. Had it not been such a gloriously fine spring day today, we would all be feeling as dejected as on our worst days.

    Last night a transport of two thousand people arrived from Buchenwald concentration camp. The shouting, abusing, crying, taunting, groaning, cracking of the whips and thuds of the beatings could be heard throughout the night.

    This morning behind Hut 16 we saw hundreds of corpses being dragged onto a heap and stripped of their clothing. They also removed the gold teeth from their mouths. Never has it been as bad as this. All day, the heap of emaciated, naked bodies was left lying in the sun. Their facial expressions are frightening. They seem to know what is being done to them.”

  • 6 May 1945 “Last week I would not go to see the Belsen horror-camp pictures. I felt the ones in paper quite dreadful enough. They were shown again tonight, as requested by someone. I looked in such pity, marvelling how human beings could have clung to life: the poor survivors must have had both a good constitution and a great will to live. What kept them alive so long before they dropped as pitiful skeletons? Did their minds go first, I wonder, their reasoning leaving nothing but the shell to perish slowly, like a house left untenanted? Did their pitiful cries and prayers rise into the night to a God who seemed deaf and pitiless as their cruel jailers?”

And Siberian Light cites a memoir in the Guardian by Yakov Vinnichenko, one of the first Russian soldiers to enter Auschwitz.

Just five survivors remain today from the three Soviet divisions which liberated Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945. I am the youngest – I was only 19 when the war ended. But the events of 60 years ago are as fresh in my memory as if they happened yesterday.

I come from Vinnitsa in Ukraine. But my mother took me to Moscow in 1934 because of famine. In the summer of 1941 I went to help my grandad in Ukraine with his vegetable garden. I arrived on Saturday June 21, and the next day we took his cow to the market. At noon, we heard on the loudspeaker that war had begun. Money became worthless immediately. We could have got twice as much for the cow, but it was too late.

Although I was just 15 years old, I was immediately conscripted. We were kept in reserve, but when I turned 17 I was sent to the front. I had my baptism of fire in January 1943, when we kicked the Germans out of Voronezh. The following month, we liberated Kursk. It was a bloodbath: a whole regiment was killed in three hours. Later, I was badly wounded in the chest in the battle of Kursk. On recovery, I caught up with my regiment, under the command of General Vasily Petrenko, who died not long ago. He was a great commander. Under him we liberated Lvov in the summer of 1944, and on January 19 1945 we freed Krakow, a beautiful ancient city

At about 4am on January 27 we approached Oswiecim (Auschwitz). It is a small town on the Sola river. We didn’t even know there was a concentration camp there.

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by | 13 February 2004 · 10:27 pm

Germans in Hawai‘i: Beer, Bible, Music, Commerce, Grammar

In 2000, the Lutheran Church in Hawai‘i celebrated its 100th anniversary. But Germans in Hawai‘i go back much farther than that.

  • Heinrich Zimmerman, who arrived with Captain James Cook in 1778, published his own journals in Germany three years before Captain Cook’s official English version was released.

  • Ship captain Henry Barber from Bremen, Germany, made his name by running an English ship aground at Kalaeloa (‘the long cape’) on O’ahu, later named Barber’s Point (and now renamed back to Kalaeloa).

  • The German scholar Adelbert von Chamisso, a naturalist who arrived in 1815 aboard Captain Otto von Kotzebue’s Russian brig Rurik, wrote one of the first Hawaiian grammar books.

  • Claus Spreckles, a California sugar refiner, found his business greatly threatened by the Kingdom of Hawai‘i’s 1876 reciprocity treaty with the United States. Rather than fight the treaty, he sailed to Hawai‘i and immediately bought half the sugar crop of 1877 just before its value skyrocketed. His innovations in sugar planting included steam plows, electric lights, railroads for hauling cane, and controllable irrigation.

  • Sprecklesville in Maui, and Spreckles Street, Widemann Street, Hausten Street, Isenberg Street, and Hamm Place in Honolulu, all signify the heritage of Germans in Hawai‘i.

  • The Deutsch-Evangelisch-Lutherische Gemeinde zu Honolulu was founded in 1900. The Hackfelds and Isenbergs each donated $25,000 to build it and import a pastor and pipe organ from Germany. Henri Berger, Royal Hawaiian Band bandmaster and composer of the state anthem “Hawaii Pono‘i,” was a charter member and the first organist.

  • Rev. Arthur Hörmann who came as pastor in 1916 at the instigation of his brother-in-law, who managed the old Primo Brewery, would later tell people he came to Hawaii “for beer and the Bible.”

World War I changed everything. According to “The Effect of World War I on the German Community in Hawaii” by Sandra E. Wagner-Seavey in The Hawaiian Journal of History 14 (1980): 109-140:

  • In October 1914, two Japanese warships, the Hizan and Asama, arrived off Honolulu to intercept the German warship Geier and its collier Locksun, which were then interned in Honolulu under very friendly conditions until February 1917, right after the U.S. severed relations with Germany, when Honolulu authorities discovered that the German crews had sabotaged much of the machinery aboard their ships.

  • In June 1917, U.S. Army Private Luisz Sterl was sentenced to hard labor and dishonorably discharged for treasonously refusing to fight in France and disparaging U.S. troops sent there to fight.

  • A devastating anthrax epidemic aroused suspicions (never proved) against Max Weber, a German timekeeper at Pioneer Mill.

  • Many Germans lost their jobs, including Minna Maria Heuer, an assistant professor of German and French at the College of Hawaii, who failed her loyalty test. She then taught at the German language school in Lihue until it was forced to shut down in 1918.

  • Under the Rev. Dr. Arthur Hörmann’s guidance, the Lutheran church changed from a German-speaking, foreign-based congregation to an American church. English services were introduced gradually and both languages were used in the ministry until 1941, when the U.S. entered World War II and the church legally became “The Lutheran Church of Honolulu.”

  • In 1918, H. Hackfeld & Co. was reorganized as American Factors, and the B. F. Ehlers & Co. department store was reorganized as Liberty House (which lasted until Macy’s bought it out in 2001).

“By the end of the war, there was no longer a German community in Hawaii, as there once had been. Germans had lost their jobs, church, leadership, and the respect of their neighbors. Many had migrated to the West Coast to escape persecution. Those who remained assimilated into the greater haole community, some by anglicizing their names. Young Germans after the war did not renew their cultural ties to Germany. They kept no German publications or customs, spoke no German, and did not even use German gestures. Their homes were 100% American and so were they. The German community simply disappeared.”

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