Otto Armster

Born in 1891, Otto Armster assumed command of the Vienna counterintelligence office as a colonel in April 1944. Since 1939 he had been in contact with the resistance group in the counterintelligence community headed by his friend Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. In Vienna, Armster worked with Georg Alexander Hansen, Hans Oster, and Ludwig Gehre and on several occasions met with Hermann Kaiser, a confidant of General Friedrich Olbricht. The conspirators planned to employ Otto Armster as a liaison officer in Military District XVIII (Salzburg). Arrested in Vienna on July 23, 1944, he was brought to Berlin and held in the Lehrter Straße Prison until he was released on April 25, 1945. On May 15, 1945, the Soviet Secret Police arrested Otto Armster and deported him to the Soviet Union, where he was forced to remain until 1955. All countries involved in WWII (on both sides) released their POW's at the end of the war, except the Soviet Union. Prisoners held by the Soviet were kept for many years after the war's end, and some never returned home. In undermining Hitler's power, Otto Armster was helping the Soviets, but they imprisoned him anyway.

Gerhard Anschütz

Born in 1867, the Heidelberg professor of constitutional law Gerhard Anschütz was regarded as a leading commentator on the Weimar state constitution. He therefore professed his faith in the Weimar Republic, regarding it as the rightful constitutional state. In 1933, Anschütz observed the National Socialist takeover of power with shock. He applied for early retirement as a professor, withdrawing into private life and never working to the advantage of the new regime. In his only academic paper to appear after 1933, he wrote in favor of autonomy of the church, thus supporting the position of the Confessional Church. Anschütz survived the National Socialist regime and died a highly honored man in Heidelberg in 1948. As a legal scholar, he understood that freedom for the church was the key to resisting the Nazis.

Martin Albertz

Born in Halle/Saale in 1883, Martin Albertz studied theology and became a pastor in Stampen near Breslau in 1910. In 1931 he became superintendent in the Berlin district of Spandau. In the struggle within the Church he fiercely opposed the National Socialist "German Christians", and was a member of the circle that established the Pastors Emergency Council in 1933. (The Nazis established the National Socialist German Christians group, which in reality was not Christian, but actually was a pro-Hitler group; they wanted to infiltrate the Christian churches in Germany and convert them into anti-Christian groups. The Pastors Emergency Council was started to prevent this.) In 1934 Albertz assumed responsibility for establishing and directing the Theological Examination Office of the Confessional Church of Berlin-Brandenburg. He also taught at the Protestant University, which was regarded as illegal from 1937 on. Any college or university which taught Christianity was made illegal by the Nazi government. In 1936, as a member of the Second Provisional Church Directorate, he was co-author of a memorandum to Hitler that included condemnation of state intervention in Church life and the persecution of Jews and political opponents. In 1938 Albertz was co-publisher of a prayer liturgy that confronted the German people with their shared responsibility for the impending war, and called for atonement. As a result of a disciplinary procedure initiated in 1938, Albertz was removed from his post in 1940. Since he continued teaching, holding examinations for the Confessional Church and helping persecuted people, the Gestapo arrested him in May 1941. The Berlin Special Court sentenced him to 18 months in prison in December 1941. Martin Albertz was imprisoned again in June 1944 for working as a pastor and for "demoralizing the troops". However, he survived the war. He died in 1956, and is remembered as someone who pointed out that the Nazis were, in some cases, forming groups which claimed to be Christian, but were in fact trying to insinuate themselves into truly Christian groups and stop the Christian resistance activities.

Hans Adlhoch

Born on January 29, 1884, Hans Adlhoch joined the Christian lumber workers federation when he was 17 years old, and from 1919 on headed the secretariat of the Catholic labor union movement in Augsburg. In 1925 he became vice president of the Catholic Congress in Stuttgart. The Gestapo arrested Hans Adlhoch for the first time in 1933 because he consistently spoke out against the National Socialists (remember, the word "Nazi" means "National Socialist"). He was repeatedly imprisoned and abused in the years that followed. Despite this treatment, he consistently sought to maintain the autonomy of the Catholic labor movement. Adlhoch was sent to the Dachau concentration camp following the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Severely ill, Adlhoch was in no condition to endure the extreme hardships of the death march of the Dachau inmates in late April 1945. Adlhoch survived the liberation of the column of inmates by American troops in Bad Tölz only to die in a field hospital on May 21, 1945, as a result of his incarceration. He is remembered as one of the Germans who realized that, if Germany was to be freed from the oppression of the Nazis, then Catholics and Lutherans and Protestants would have to work together as Christians to oppose Hitler. It was this "ecumenical" cooperation which formed an effective resistance.

Wolfgang Abendroth

Wolfgang Abendroth was born in Elberfeld in 1906. His father was a teacher. Wolfgang spoke bravely against the Nazis. In 1933, he lost his job as a junior lawyer for political reasons, and went on to provide legal advice for many opponents of the regime. Following his first arrest, Abendroth emigrated to Switzerland, where he gained his PhD. After acting as a courier for some time, he decided to return to Berlin in 1935. There, he was an active member of the resistance until he was imprisoned for several years in 1937. He was forcibly drafted into one of the 999th Division’s "probation units" in February 1943; this was military service demanded of those who opposed Hitler. His unit was sent to occupy Greece; he soon deserted to a Greek partisan resistance organization. He was taken prisoner by the British, and carried out political education for opponents of the regime in prisoner of war camps in Egypt. He died in 1985. He is remembered as one of the many Germans who courageously opposed the Nazis and their brutal oppression of the German people.

Where Did They Come From?

Thomas Sowell notes that immigrants have come from various specific German-speaking regions, and have settled in various parts of America: thus we see Saxons in Missouri, people from Schwabenland in southeastern Michigan, people from Frankenland in central Michigan, Swiss in Pennsylvania, and so forth.

Large-scale immigration from German to the United States has not been concentrated in a few decades, like immigration from other countries, but has occurred in many different eras of American and German history. There were German communities in colonial America, and Germans were a significant proportion of all immigrants to the United States throughout the nineteenth century. More than 100,000 people emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1852 and 1952, and in many other years in between. There were fluctuations in the size of the immigration - varying with the conditions in the United States and Germany - but the flow has remained substantial for nearly two centuries. At various periods of history, the flow has been predominately immigrants, at other times refugees. Sometimes the immigrants have been predominately Catholic, sometimes predominately Protestant, and sometimes predominately Jewish. The regional origins of this emigration in Germany have also differed. The net result is German Americans have been a highly diverse group - not only by such usual indications as class, religion, or region, but also differing greatly by how many generations they have been in America.

So it is, then, that leaders of the Jewish community, leaders of the Roman Catholic community, and leaders of the Protestant community in America share roots in Germany.

Keeping America Free and Safe

Over the centuries, millions of immigrants from German-speaking countries like Austria and Switzerland came to America to enjoy liberty. But they did not merely enjoy it, they worked to protect it.

If you enjoy living in peace and freedom, it is because somebody somewhere worked in past, or is working in the present, to preserve your liberty and security. Wherever citizens of one country enjoy justice, other countries will inevitably attack it. Thomas Sowell writes:

The German military tradition gave the United States some of its leading generals down through history - including those generals who led American armies to victory against Germany in World War I and World War II - Pershing and Eisenhower.

To those names we can add Chester W. Nimitz, who orchestrated American victories in the Pacific during WWII, and Baron von Steuben, who introduced effective training methods and tactics among Washington's troops.

A Harvard Scholar Assesses the Germans

Thomas Sowell, an economist from Harvard, evaluates the contribution which millions of Germans have made here in America:

More than twenty-five million Americans are of German ancestry. This is more than for any other ethic group except the descendants of people from the British Isles, who originally colonized the country and who now number twenty-nine million. Germans are the largest group to immigrate to America. They have played important roles in American history, and not merely because of the their numbers. American industry, education, military defense, eating and recreational patterns all reflect the contributions and influence of German Americans. The very language of the country reflects that influence, in such words as kindergarten, delicatessen, frankfurters, and hamburgers. The Conestoga wagons in which American pioneers first crossed the great prairie were created by Germans. So was the Kentucky rifle of the frontiersman. The Christmas tree was a German tradition that became an American tradition. The leading American optical firm - Bausch and Lomb - was created by Germans, as were all of the leading brands of American beer. Suspension bridges and the cables that hold them were both created by a German-American engineer. Iron, steel, automobiles, pianos, lumber, chocolate bars, and petroleum are among the many products in which American of German ancestry were pioneers and dominant figures.

We can give a few specific names to the generalizations above. The Kentucky Rifle first appeared among the German gunsmiths of the 1740's in Pennsylvania; one of the leaders in developing this technology was Jacob Deckard. Among the many brewers are names like Schlitz, Blatz, Busch, Anheuser, Pabst, and dozens of others. Among the military leaders, we find names like Eisenhower, Schwarzkopf, Zumwalt, and others.

Since Sowell wrote this paragraph in 1980, the number of German-Americans has risen to fifty-one million, according to the Census Bureau.