thumb|World War I Anti-German propaganda: a [[dachshund wearing a Pickelhaube and an Iron cross being strangled by Uncle Sam.]]
Anti-German sentiment (also known as anti-Germanism, Germanophobia or Teutophobia) is fear, dislike, prejudice, or discrimination of Germany, its people, and its culture. Its opposite is Germanophilia.
Traces of anti-German sentiment can be found in the High Middle Ages, with Ekkehard of Aura and Odo of Deuil writing about frictions between the Germans and the French. After Germany completed its unification in 1871, anti-Germanism grew among the other great powers, fueled largely by fears of Germany's rapid industrialisation. Germanophobia reached its height in the Allied countries during World War I and World War II. Anti-German and anti-Austrian sentiments were generally held together, as Austrians worked with and were involved in the German military, especially in Nazi Germany, with most Austrians considering themselves German until the end of World War II in Europe.
Following the collapse of Nazi Germany, anti-German sentiment generally decreased as Europe entered a period of peace. In modern times, anti-German sentiment usually comes about from the major power Germany has economically over Europe, and its importance in the European Union.
History
Late 19th and early 20th centuries
thumb|The Battle of Dorking (1871) in which England is invaded by Germany
During the 1700s and 1800s, many states in the United States allowed male non-citizens to vote. Anti-Irish and anti-German Catholic sentiment following the War of 1812 and intensifying again in the 1840s led many states, particularly in the Northeast, to amend their constitutions to prohibit non-citizens from voting. States that banned non-citizen voting during this time included New Hampshire in 1814, Virginia in 1818, Connecticut in 1819, New Jersey in 1820, Massachusetts in 1822, Vermont in 1828, Pennsylvania in 1838, Delaware in 1831, Tennessee in 1834, Rhode Island in 1842, Illinois in 1848, Ohio and Maryland in 1851, and North Carolina in 1856.
Negative comments in Britain about Germany were first made in the 1870s, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. British war planners believed that they needed to prevent a possible German invasion of Britain. German advances eventually led to the popularity of invasion novels, such as The Battle of Dorking, which first appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in the summer of 1871.
In the 1880s and 1890s, German immigrants in the UK were the targets of "some hostility"; interviewees for the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration believed that Germans were involved in prostitution and burglary, and many people also believed that Germans who were working in Britain were threatening the livelihoods of Britons by being willing to work for longer hours. Anti-German hostility began to intensify in early 1896 when Kaiser Wilhelm II sent the Kruger telegram to President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal congratulating him for repelling the British Jameson Raid. At that time, attacks on Germans in London were reported by the German press, but contrary to the reports, no attacks occurred. The Saturday Review suggested: "be ready to fight Germany, as Germania delenda est" ("Germany is to be destroyed"), an allusion to Cato the Elder's coda in the Second Punic War.
Rising political tensions
Following the signing of the Entente Cordiale alliance in 1904 between the United Kingdom and France, official relationships cooled, as did popular attitudes towards Germany and German residents in Britain. A fear of German militarism replaced a previous admiration for German culture and literature. At the same time, journalists produced a stream of articles on the threat posed by Germany. In the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908–09, the Kaiser, in a badly misjudged attempt to show Germany's friendship towards England, said that he was among a minority of Germans friendly to Britain, that he had sent a military plan to Queen Victoria during the Boer War which the British Army had used successfully, and that Germany's fleet buildup was directed not against Britain but the "Yellow Peril" of the East.
Articles in Harmsworth's Daily Mail regularly advocated anti-German sentiments throughout the 20th century, telling their readers to refuse service at restaurants by Austrian or German waiters on the claim that they were spies and that if a German-sounding waiter claimed to be Swiss that they should demand to see the waiter's passport. At the same time, conspiracy theories which combined Germanophobia with antisemitism were concocted, they focused on the supposed foreign control of Britain, some of these conspiracy theories blamed Britain's entry into the Second Boer War on international German and Jewish financiers. Most of these ideas about German-Jewish conspiracies originated from right-wing figures such as Arnold White, Hilaire Belloc, and Leo Maxse, who used his publication the National Review to spread them.
Economic discrimination
thumb|alt=An old black and white comic strip. Two characters are talking about a clown that was bought for a birthday present. One character smashes the doll because it was made in Germany.|A 1917 [[comic strip in which the character smashes a clown doll because it was made in Germany|244x244px]]
German food such as the sausage was deprecated by Germanophobes. In the late 19th century, the label Made in Germany was introduced in Britain by the Merchandise Marks Act 1887 (50 & 51 Vict. c. 28), to mark foreign produce more obviously, as foreign manufacturers had been falsely marking inferior goods with the marks of renowned British manufacturing companies and importing them into the United Kingdom. Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry.
Anglicization in the West
thumb|upright|A sign in [[Covington, Kentucky, notes that a street name was changed from Bremen Street to Pershing Avenue due to "anti-German hysteria" during World War I.]]
In an attempt to further distance themselves from German culture, German street names in many cities were changed. German and Berlin streets in Cincinnati became English and Woodward; and Lubeck, Frankfort, and Hamburg Streets in Chicago were renamed Dickens, Charleston, and Shakespeare Streets. In New Orleans, Berlin Street was renamed in honor of General Pershing, head of the American Expeditionary Force. In Indianapolis, Bismarck Avenue and Germania Street were renamed Pershing Avenue and Belleview Street, respectively in 1917, and Brooklyn's Hamburg Avenue was renamed Wilson Avenue. In 1916, the city of Berlin in Canada was renamed to Kitchener, referring to Lord Kitchener, who was famously pictured on the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" recruiting posters. Several streets in Toronto that had previously been named for Liszt, Humboldt, Schiller, Bismarck, etc., were changed to names with strong British associations, such as Balmoral. Several streets in London which had been named after places in Germany or notable Germans also had their names changed; Berlin Road in Catford was renamed Canadian Avenue, and Bismarck Road in Islington was renamed Waterlow Road. In South Australia, Grunthal became Verdun and Krichauff became Beatty. In New South Wales, Germantown became Holbrook after the submarine commander Norman Douglas Holbrook. Some words of German origin were changed, at least temporarily. Sauerkraut came to be called "liberty cabbage", German measles became "liberty measles", hamburgers became "liberty sandwiches" In Great Britain, the German Shepherd breed of dog was renamed to the euphemistic "Alsatian"; the English Kennel Club only re-authorised the use of 'German Shepherd' as an official name in 1977. The German biscuit was renamed the Empire biscuit.
Many schools stopped teaching German-language classes. Books published in German were removed from libraries or even burned. In Cincinnati, the public library was asked to withdraw all German books from its shelves. In Iowa, in the 1918 Babel Proclamation, Governor William L. Harding prohibited the use of all foreign languages in schools and public places. Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the ban was illegal in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska). In parallel with these changes, many German Americans elected to anglicize their names (e.g. Schmidt to Smith, Müller to Miller).
World War I
thumb|Destroy this mad brute—[[Propaganda in the United States#World War I|U.S. WWI propaganda poster (Harry R. Hopps; 1917). This poster portrays Germany as a gorilla invading the United States, having conquered continental Europe.]]
In 1914, when Germany invaded neutral Belgium and northern France, Imperial German Army regularly court martialed Belgian and French civilians under German military law for offenses including espionage, perfidy, or being francs-tireurs, and executed 6,500 of them. These acts, referred to as the Rape of Belgium, were both exploited and exaggerated by the governments of the Allied Powers, who produced atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Germans as gorilla-like Huns who were all racially inclined to sadism and violence.
A vocal source of criticism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson's "anti-hyphen" ideology and particularly to their demands for "100% Americanism" came from America's enormous number of White ethnic immigrants and their descendants. Criticism from these circles occasionally argued that "100% Americanism" really meant Anglophilia and a Special Relationship with the British Empire, as particularly demonstrated by demands for tolerating only the English language in the United States. In a letter published on 16 July 1916 in the Minneapolis Journal, Edward Goldbeck, a member of Minnesota's traditionally large German-American community, sarcastically announced that his people would "abandon the hyphen", as soon as English-Americans did so. Meanwhile, he argued, "Let the exodus of Anglo-Americans start at once! Let all those people go who think that America is a new England!" A much smaller minority of German Americans came out openly for Germany. Similarly, Harvard psychology professor Hugo Münsterberg dropped his efforts to mediate between America and Germany, and threw his efforts behind the German war effort.
The Justice Department attempted to prepare a list of all German aliens, counting approximately 480,000 of them. The Committee of Internment of Alien Enemies recommended sending them to internment camps, though the idea was opposed by the War Department and the Attorney General. More than 4,000 German aliens were imprisoned in 1917–1918; the allegations included spying for Germany and endorsing the German war effort. In Collinsville, Illinois, German-born Robert Prager was dragged from jail as a suspected spy and lynched. The Red Cross barred individuals with German last names from joining in fear of sabotage. Some aliens were convicted and imprisoned on charges of sedition for refusing to swear allegiance to the United States war effort. Thousands were forced to buy war bonds to show their loyalty.
In Nashville, Tennessee, Luke Lea, the publisher of The Tennessean, together with "political associates", attempted to declare German-born Edward Bushrod Stahlman an "alien enemy" during World War I. Stahlman was the publisher of a competing newspaper, the Nashville Banner. and would later be raided by federal agents under the powers of the Espionage Act of 1917, and six members of its organization would eventually be arrested for violations of the Espionage Act among other charges after publishing a number of pieces of pro-German propaganda.
thumb|Propaganda poster, , from the British Empire Union calling for boycott of German goods and depicting German businesspeople selling their products in Britain as "the other face" of German soldiers who committed atrocities during World War I
In Great Britain, anti-German feeling led to infrequent rioting, assaults on suspected Germans and the looting of businesses owned by people with German-sounding names, which occasionally took an antisemitic tone. Increasing anti-German hysteria threw suspicion upon the British royal family; King George V was persuaded to change his German name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and relinquish all German titles and styles on behalf of his relatives who were British subjects. Prince Louis of Battenberg was not only forced to change his name to Mountbatten, he was forced to resign as First Sea Lord, the most senior position in the Royal Navy.
Attitudes to Germany were not entirely negative among British troops fighting on the Western Front; Robert Graves, who, like the King, also had German relatives, wrote shortly after the war during his time at Oxford University as an undergraduate that "Pro-German feeling had been increasing. With the war over and the German armies beaten, we could give the German soldier credit for being the most efficient fighting man in Europe ... Some undergraduates even insisted that we had been fighting on the wrong side: our natural enemies were the French." British writer Nicholas Shakespeare quoted a statement from a letter written by his grandfather during the First World War in which he says he would rather fight the French and describes German bravery.
Pre-World War II
On 25 July 1937, NKVD Order No. 00439 led to the arrest of 55,005 German citizens and former citizens in the Soviet Union, of whom 41,898 were sentenced to death. The Soviets were not successful in expelling all German settlers living in Western and Southern Ukraine due to the rapid advance of the Wehrmacht. The secret police, the NKVD, was able to deport only 35% of the ethnic Germans in Ukraine. Thus in 1943, the Nazi German census registered 313,000 ethnic Germans living in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. With the Soviet re-conquest, the Wehrmacht evacuated about 300,000 German Russians and brought them back to the Reich. Because of the provisions of the Yalta Agreement, all former Soviet citizens living in Germany at the war's end had to be repatriated, most by force. More than 200,000 German Russians were deported, against their will, by the Western Allies and sent to the Gulag. Thus, shortly after the end of the war, more than one million ethnic Germans from Russia were in special settlements and labor camps in Siberia and Central Asia. It is estimated that 200,000 to 300,000 died of starvation, lack of shelter, overwork and disease during the 1940s. Later during the war, Germans were suggested to be used for forced labour. The Soviet Union began deporting ethnic Germans in their territories and using them for forced labour. Although by the end of 1955, they had been acquitted of criminal accusations, no rights to return to their former home regions were granted, nor were the former self-determination rights returned to them. Near the end of World War II and during the occupation of Germany, Soviet forces invaded German villages and raped German women en masse. It is believed by historian Antony Beevor that "a 'high proportion' of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled from Germany's eastern provinces were raped."
World War II
thumb|320px|[[Prague-born restaurant owner Fred Horak of Somerville, Massachusetts, putting up a sign barring German customers from entering his property until "Hitler the Gangster" returns the lands seized from Czechoslovakia, 18 March 1939]]
Between 1931 and 1940, 114,000 Germans and thousands of Austrians moved to the United States, many of whomincluding Nobel prize winner Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bertold Brecht, Henry Kissinger, Arnold Schoenberg, Hanns Eisler and Thomas Mannwere either Jewish Germans or anti-Nazis who were fleeing Nazi oppression. About 25,000 people became paying members of the pro-Nazi German American Bund during the years before the war. The October 1939 seizure by the German pocket battleship Deutschland of the US freighter SS City of Flint, as it had 4000 tons of oil for Britain on board, provoked much anti-German sentiment in the US. Additionally, millions of people were murdered in state-sponsored genocides by Germans during World War II, turning families and friends of the victims anti-German. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship to register with the Federal government, and restricted their travel and property ownership rights. In 1941, the American writer Theodore N. Kaufman published Germany Must Perish!, a book in which he advocated genocide through the compulsory sterilization of all Germans and the territorial dismemberment of Germany, which he argued would achieve world peace.
Refusal to hire German-Americans
With the war ongoing in Europe but America remaining neutral, a massive defense buildup took place, requiring many new employees. Private companies sometimes refused to hire any non-citizen, or American citizens of German or Italian ancestry. This threatened the morale of loyal Americans. President Franklin Roosevelt considered this "stupid" and "unjust". In June 1941, he issued Executive Order 8802 and set up the Fair Employment Practice Committee, which also protected Black Americans. President Roosevelt sought out Americans of German ancestry for top war jobs, including General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and General Carl Andrew Spaatz. He appointed Republican Wendell Willkie as a personal representative. German Americans who had fluent German language skills were an important asset to wartime intelligence, and they served as translators and as spies for the United States. The war evoked strong pro-American patriotic sentiments among German Americans, few of whom by then had contacts with distant relatives in the old country.
Internment of Germans
Under the still-active Alien Enemy Act of 1798, the United States government interned 11,507 German citizens between 1940 and 1948. An unknown number of "voluntary internees" joined their families in the camps and were not permitted to leave. Following its entry into the War against Nazi Germany on 11 December 1941, the US Government interned a number of German and Italian citizens as enemy aliens. The exact number of German and Italian internees is a subject of debate. In some cases their American-born family members volunteered to accompany them to internment camps in order to keep the family unit together. The last to be released remained in custody until 1948. In Ontario, the largest internment centre for German Canadians was at Camp Petawawa, housing 750 who had been born in Germany and Austria. Although some residents of internment camps were Germans who had already immigrated to Canada, the majority of Germans in such camps were from Europe; most were prisoners of war.