One side of my family has a very Teutonic last name and the generation that was of service age during WWII still had very German sounding first names, but not only did one great uncle land at Omaha beach, another was in the USN in both Atlantic and Pacific, and my grandmother, who’s name sounded like a listing out of the Munich phone book, worked at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, VA (when it made torpedos, no it is an art gallery).
Interesting - never heard of him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_G._Goering
Hitler’s nephew also served in the U.S. Navy during WWII - dunno in what theater: William Stuart-Houston - Wikipedia
Must have been lots of fun serving in the USN under the name Hitler. I can see why he’d change it.
I remember one of my teachers talking about being a POW. He and several squad members were about to be captured at the Battle of the Bulge and they threw away their dogtags because one of them was Jewish.
My mother’s family fled Germany in 1938, and both of her brothers were drafted by the US army and sent to fight in Europe. Her older brother was killed at the Battle of the Bulge–he had been working as a translator. At college my mother was the only one willing to have a classmate of Japanese descent as her roommate.
Yes, “Stalin” is the name Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili picked for himself from Russian “Stal’” (steel).
He should have kept the last name, but changed his first name to Skippy or Peaches.
And nowadays (and probably back then, too), if you are a White American with ancestry in the US going back several generations, the chances that you have some German ancestry are rather high, probably significantly higher if you have ancestors from Pennsylvania or the upper Midwest.
I have some German ancestry but don’t really consider myself to be a “German-American”.
Also, it’s a lot easier for Germans (and Italians) to “pass” as someone of English or French ancestry than it is for a Japanese to do so. One simple name change (which was a lot easier back then anyway) from Wilhelm Schwartz to William Black for someone who immigrated as a child and speaks American English well with an acceptable American accent would be all it took.
We’re Swiss-American but with a Germanic surname. One uncle was OSS and stationed in London working on film development (he served under the director John Ford), but I believe he did go along on some photographic flights to back behind enemy lines.
Another uncle was sent to the Pacific, but I don’t think he saw any combat; I know he was in the Philippines after the war. And a third uncle who died when I was a child served, but I have no idea where or doing what; but since he was a navigator for the Flying Tigers cargo service post-war (he died in a crash of one of their planes), he may have been in the Army Air Corps.
I heard once of an American soldier who did actually have the name Hitler. A reporter once asked him if he’d ever considered changing his name, and he said “Hell no, let that bastard change his”.
Even in WWII, there was some resentment against German immigrants and their families. My maternal grandfather immigrated to a farming community in upstate New York in the late 20’s. During the war, a few folks in town accused him of being a Nazi sympathizer or a spy. My grandfather laughed it off.
My uncles, who could speak plattdeutsch (Low German) fluently, never spoke it outside of home during that period; that could get your ass kicked after school.
ETA: Just to be clear, the discrimination was more about bigotry, that being officially sanctioned (re:Japanese-Americans)
Or Nick.
Obligatory Hill Street Blues reference.
Surprisingly, I once knew a Jewish Austrian-American who escaped Vienna with his family prior to the Anschluss. A few years later, when he enlisted in the American army, he was deployed to Europe with a ski patrol unit.
A Japanese-American could probally fool most white people and pass for Chinese-American. It’d quickly turn into a diaster if they were in the same room as an actual Chinese-American though
That’s Vic Hitler.
That’s why TIME magazine published this handy guide in 1941:
My very much German-American grandfather was sent to Europe along with Patton; he drove ambulances and helped clean up the concentration camps. He met my grandmother, who had served the Nazis as a nurse, in Austria. (You can read that as “She was an extra pair of arms in the surgical ward until the Nazi war machine had collapsed far enough she could escape back home to Ebensee with her friend.” I doubt she ever got any serious medical training.) They spoke German to each other whenever they wanted to discuss things they didn’t want my dad, my uncle, or their grandchildren to understand.
On the other hand, the mixed Norwegian-Irish-Welsh-Paleface people on my mom’s side were all shipped out to the Pacific.
Frankly, I think it had more to do with trains than race: My dad’s family was in Chicago, whereas my mom’s family, all stolid North European farmers, had settled in Montana and North Dakota.
When I was living in Wisconsin two different middle aged women on different occasions mentioned to me that their fathers had served in the Pacific Theater in WWII and said that this had been the case for a lot of German-Americans from the Upper Midwest – it was considered better to send them to the Pacific than to Germany. However, I have nothing but their anecdotes to support this. I could believe it was just a rumor or urban legend that German-American men were more likely to be sent to fight the Japanese.
Wisconsin and Michigan National Guardsmen were in the 32nd Infantry Division (the descendant of the Iron Brigade of the Civil War). The were encamped in Massachusetts, preparing to be shipped to camps in Northern Ireland to fight the Germans, when the Japanese hacked their way over the top of the Owen Stanley mountains in New Guinea, threatening an invasion of Australia. So the 32nd boarded trains to California and shipped across the Pacific instead. It had nothing to do with their ethnic makeup.