Searching for the roots of persistent anti-Germanism

"The Germans Arrive" - 1918 war propaganda painting by American artist George Bellows portrays imaginary atrocity committed by German troops in Belgium - where he had not been. (click to enlarge) The story is below.

By Carolyn Yeager

From acute hatred in 1914 to smoldering prejudice today, where did anti-Germanism start and why does it persist?

I cannot find any documentation of this phenomenon prior to the lead-up to World War I in the nineteenth century, and centered in the British Foreign Office. The image presented was of an exaggerated authoritarianism in both the German personality and culture.

Germans had always, up to then, been seen as a nation of “Poets and Thinkers” who were “disinclined to war,” acccording to Dr. Michael F. Conners in his book Dealing in Hate: The Development of Anti-German Propaganda. I have just now found Dr. Conners book online, as I am preparing to post this article, and will read what he has to say with interest ex post facto, as it were.

Conners' study seems to confirm the correctness of placing the beginning of anti-Germanism in the late nineteenth century and as a product of British foreign policy. New extreme lows of propaganda warfare were first used in the Great War of 1914-18 by the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), more commonly known as MI6. Formed in 1909, SIS “experienced dramatic growth during World War I” and continued expanding through WWII, but was not officially acknowledged until 1994. For that reason, it was essentially under no legal constraints prior to 1994.

In both world wars Germans were portrayed as depraved monsters and the opponents of civilization and humanity. Such extremely inhuman portrayals of Germans throughout the two most devastating wars in history appear to have been enough to permanently damage and change the image of Germans throughout the world, even to the point that Germans themselves began to believe in their own evil nature and the necessity to do penance. After the end of the 2nd phase of the Great War, starting in 1945, the German people themselves were the actual target of the continuing anti-German propaganda campaign.

British newspapers today continue the onslaught of discredited war atrocity stories against this past-tense Germany on a very regular basis - almost as if they have a quota of so many per month!

A very unfortunate and culture-distorting result of the British policy was that Germans who were living in Allied lands found it necessary to deny, denounce or reject their own identity in order to live peaceably in their surroundings, and this rejection was not easily thrown off later. In too many cases, Teutonic people never again recognized or approved of their German-ness.

An overview

Negative comments about Germany had begun to appear in Britain in the 1870s, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71. The unification of Prussia with the German Confederation into the new German Empire was what increased England's fears, and it was the Prussian military stereotype that they began to project as 'the German.'

In 1887, the label Made in Germany was introduced in Britain, with the idea to get British buyers to adhere to the concept of "buying British." But after suffering some initial losses, German manufacturers soon found the label to be helpful as German-made goods were found by the public to be superior, or equally as good at lower prices than British!

(click to enlarge)

In the 1890's, Germans living in Britain were seen as lower class, but also willing to work for longer hours. (Herbert A. Strauss (1993). Germany – Great Britain – France. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 352–54.) 

By the turn of the century the USA and Germany had overtaken Britain in industrial production strength.

In 1906 a novel “The Invasion of 1910” began to appear in serial form in the London Daily Mail. Written by author William Le Queux at the request of Daily Mail owner Lord Northcliffe, it has been described by historians as inducing an atmosphere of paranoia, mass hysteria and Germanophobia that would climax in the Naval Scare of 1908–09 (when Britain feared the Kaiser was increasing German shipbuilding at a faster rate than formerly).

Articles in the Daily Mail regularly advocated anti-German sentiments throughout the 20th century, telling British readers, for example, to refuse service at restaurants by Austrian or German waiters on the claim that they were spies. and told them that if a German-sounding waiter claimed to be Swiss, they should demand to see the waiter's passport. [Philipp Blom. The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914. Basic Books, 2010. Pp. 181].

At the same time, conspiracy theories were concocted combining Germanophobia with antisemitism, concerning the supposed foreign control of Britain, some of which blamed Britain's entry into the Boer War on international financiers "chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race." [Panayi, P. (1989). "Anti-German Riots in London during the First World War"]

The British Foreign Office conspired to engineer a crushing war defeat for Germany because their “Balance of Power” policy deemed it necessary if Britain were to remain the strongest power in Europe. As they put it, for the British way of life to survive, Germany must be destroyed. It was fear, pure and simple, of German intelligence, ability and industriousness. The Canadians followed along with Great Britain and behaved in a downright thuggish manner with their attacks on innocent German citizens. They changed the names of towns, cities, streets from German to English. They opened internment camps in 1915 for their own civilians, not POW's.

In Australia, a proclamation of 10 August 1914 required all German citizens to register their domiciles at the nearest police station and to notify authorities of any change of address. The original German names of settlements and streets were officially changed. Both enemy aliens and naturalized subjects were prohibited from changing their name or the name of any business they ran. German language material was prohibited and schools attached to Lutheran churches were forced to abandon German as the language of teaching or were closed by the authorities. German clubs and associations were also closed. [Jupp, James (2001). The Australian People. Cambridge University Press. pp. 371–372.]

Most of the anti-German feeling was created by the press. But anti-German propaganda was also inspired by local and British companies who were keen to take the opportunity to eliminate Germany as a competitor in the Australian market. Germans in Australia were increasingly portrayed as evil by the very nature of their origins. (Jupp)

When the United States entered the war on the British side, the attacks on Germans increased. A painting by the well-known and important American artist George Wesley Bellows is a case in point. Bellows did not serve in the war but he very publicly expressed his support for U.S. intervention in it. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically depicted atrocities which the Allies and newspapers said had been committed by Germany during its invasion of Belgium. Notable among these was "The Germans Arrive" (image at top of article), which gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose hands had just been severed.

Why did Bellows paint this, when he had never seen such a thing? He was criticized for some of the liberties he took in capturing scenes of war and fellow New York artist Joseph Pennell argued that because Bellows had not witnessed the events he painted firsthand, he had no right to paint them.

I agree that Bellows was merely extending war propaganda, but Bellows and others used the defense of “artistic freedom.” Another of Bellow's paintings from this series was titled “The Barricade” which was Bellows' interpretation of another 1914 war story that German soldiers had used Belgian townspeople as human shields. Look for the “cowardly” Germans looking out from behind the naked (!?) bodies.

The Barricade by George Wesley Bellows (click to enlarge)

A partial explanation may be that Bellows associated with a group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left," who tended towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School in New York City, and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses, to which he contributed many drawings and prints beginning in 1911.

It didn't turn out all that well for Bellows. Later, many Americans believed that their country had been tricked and manipulated into joining the conflict and unfortunately for George Bellows he and his War Series were regarded as part of this deception. In 1925, the American art critic and historian, Virgil Barker commented on the series saying:

“…[they were as] ill-judged in their appeal to the passion of hatred as anything produced in America’s most hysterical war years…”

All this is prelude to my introducing you to two articles in G. S. Viereck's September 6, 1914 issue of THE FATHERLAND weekly. These were compilations of reports on atrocities visited upon the Germans in Belgium and France, both military and civilian. Let us not forget that there were German folk who had been living and running businesses in England, in France, and in Belgium. The war began suddenly and caught many of these civilians unprepared for the violent emotions that erupted.

v1 no 5 Sept 6, 1914 Page 6

TALES OF WAR'S BARBARITY

Are the Germans Justified in Punishing Antwerp? Read the other side below.

THE one-sided presentation of the war news in the leading American papers in New York—like the Herald and Telegram, which are owned by an expatriated American whose home is in Paris; the Tribune owned by the estate of the late ambassador to England; the American and Journal, owned by Mr. Hearst, who punished several important publications in London, and other papers closely allied to the London financial groups with headquarters in New York—is well illustrated by the prominence given to reports of German cruelty and barbarism and the complete suppression of news giving facts on the other side, notably the cowardly attacks on helpless women and children in Antwerp, where the stevedores in one case snatched an infant from the arms of a fugitive German woman and drowned it before her eyes. No particulars are given of the outrages committed upon the German troops by non-combatant civilians after a place had been evacuated. Every report is colored with the personal animus of the British correspondents who are running amuck in the American press, and it is made to appear that what the Germans are doing in retaliation for inexpressible crimes upon their own people stand as exceptional examples of cruelty in the annals of war.

That “snipers” are summarily dealt with by every army is evidenced by the following telegram which relates in incomplete form an incident connected with the taking of Vera Cruz by our own [American] forces as printed in the Evening Sun under the double headlines:

“Trying Woman Sniper.

She is Charged with Killing Eight Bluejackets”:

Vera Cruz, May 5—A woman “sniper” was ordered before a military court martial today to be tried on a charge of murdering eight bluejackets or marines during the first of the fighting, having picked them off one after the other in the streets.

The woman was betrayed by a Mexican, who led troops to her house last night. The building was searched, and as a quantity of arms and ammunition was found, she was arrested.

That the woman was dealt with as the Germans are dealing with the same class of non-combatants, if proven guilty, is evident from the fact that she was tried by court martial, which is governed by but one law in such cases.

Stories of cruelty against helpless Germans are coming in by every ship which reaches port and by letters from army surgeons writing to friends in this country. We have all read with a feeling of intense sympathy of the “brave Belgians” and the “poor, innocent non-combatants” who fell victims to the German Zeppelins recently. And yet, though we cannot deny our sympathy to the unhappy victims of war's fury, news from the besieged city of Antwerp tends rather to justify the hard fate that has befallen it. It has taken hardly three weeks for retribution to visit a city which has probably gone farther than any other in its persecution of defenseless Germans.

That is the story of Mrs. Edmund Kandler, the young wife of the officer of the Belgian steamer, “Vaderland.”

Only a month ago they were married and established their little home in Antwerp, the harbor of her husband's ship. Today the stately young officer is out of employment, and his little blonde wife could only leave Antwerp at the risk of her life. All that she was allowed to take was a small hand satchel. The pretty little home with all its pretty things which they had established had to be abandoned. She is thankful that she is in New York, able to begin life over again at the side of her devoted husband.

The “brave Belgians” and the “poor sufferers of Antwerp!” How strange, how different, how ugly they seem as described by Mrs. Kandler, who saw and heard, and herself experienced the savage brutality of these civilized Belgians against helpless Germans.

“I don't know how I should have escaped from Antwerp with my life,” declared Mrs. Kandler, who lived for many years in Antwerp, “but for the aid of a dear friend. Howling mobs passed through the streets in the early part of the month and attacked the German residents, robbing and murdering them. Any one appearing in the streets with baggage was torn from his conveyance and robbed of his satchels and trunks, while the police looked complacently upon the spectacle of men and women being deliberately tortured and outraged.

“My friend tried to send me across the border by train before the expiration of the time limit for all Germans to leave the city. He went to the station to learn when the next train would leave, but soon returned pale and trembling.

“ 'I witnessed some awful scenes of barbarism during the Boer war,' he said, 'but such excesses as those committed by my countrymen surpass everything in my experience.'

“That night my friend took me aboard the Finland, where I remained in hiding for three days until we set sail for America. But oh, the stories told me by other refugees aboard the Finland! Any one who looked German or had a German name, or was suspected of entertaining German sympathies, was a shining mark for the mob. No one was spared! Even citizens of forty-five years residence in Antwerp, and universally respected were driven out like criminals. The murder of Mr. von Malinkrot cries to heaven for vengeance. He was one of Antwerp's benefactors. He was shot dead as a German spy. And a man who had been employed for thirty years by the Red Star Line and been decorated by King Albert was persecuted like every one else, despite the fact that two of his sons were fighting in the Belgian army.

“The German school, the best school in Antwerp, was the special object of Flemish vengeance, as also the German Seamen's Home. Every window was smashed, and the work of destruction only ceased when the two buildings were turned into hospitals and the Red Cross flag hoisted over their roof.

“Countless Germans with their families were thrown into prison, and a young Russian woman who had been mistaken for a German and had also been locked up told me of harrowing scenes of small, half-naked children, weeping, starving and sick on the naked stones of the Prison.”

__________________________

Page 7

BELGIAN, FRENCH VS. GERMAN CRUELTY

IN view of the circumstance of Belgian's reported protest against “German Cruelty” to the American government at Washington, the following letter of a German surgeon attached to the Red Cross, received in New York last week, is peculiarly timely:

“At the hands of men, women and half-grown boys our troops have experienced here all the horrors usually attributed to savages. Belgian non-combatants are blazing away at everything German from every house and every thicket with perfectly fanatical hatred. During the very first days we had a number of dead and wounded from assaults by civilians, women as well as men. Day before yesterday a German had his throat cut from ear to ear in bed during the night; another house displayed the Red Cross flag; five men were quartered there. The next day all five were found assassinated.

“Yesterday morning we found in a village in front of Verviers a single soldier, his hands tied behind his back with both eyes gouged out. A motor car from Liege day before yesterday stopped in a village; a young woman stepped up close to the chauffeur, suddenly put a pistol to his head and killed him. Of course, such acts are promptly followed by the execution of the criminals, but neither this nor the burning of their houses deters the inhabitants. Of the wounded under my care several had wounds I could not account for … (Description omitted because unprintable). Two of my patients have birdshot each in one eye; a serious wound of the wrist was inflicted while the troops in passing a hedge in the dark were fired upon by a concealed sniper at such short range that the powder marks were left on the skin. Another had his right arm so badly lacerated with birdshot fired at close range in the dark that his arm had to be immediately amputated.

At Gemmenich, an hour's tramp from Aix la Chapelle, an automobile sanitary column was fired upon in mass from the snipers by the villagers last Wednesday. The escort of hussars was too weak, but two of the miscreants were seized and shot, and the house from which most of the shots were fired was burned. The Red Cross on our sleeves and wagons affords the surgeons no protection. In several engagement it happened that wounded men carried our of the firing lines, and others being conveyed to the field hospitals in the rear, were butchered in cold blood by the peasants from the villages. In removing the obstructions from a barred tunnel many Germans were seriously injured. Women who come from all directions threw stones at the wounded men, and eered them. A gentleman from Aix la Chapelle, driving with a military chauffeur through a Belgian frontier village, Gemmenich, while compelled to alight just beyond the place, was killed by a shot from a near-by hedge.

That is the way the civilized people of Belgium are conducting the war. Can a man be held accountable if his blood boils and his mind is robbed of the power of reflection by such deeds? Yet the Belgians profess surprise that we should summarily proceed against civilians who give rise to suspicion.

ARE the French any less blood-thirsty than the Belgians in their furious assaults on helpless Germans? If any one thinks so let him read the following from the New York American of August 25^th:

“It will never be known how many Germans were killed in Paris during the three-day riots of July 30 and 31 and August 1. The crimes of that period, could they be become known, would shame the civilized world.”

This statement was made yesterday by Henry M. Ziegler, a Cincinnati millionaire, who has made his home in Paris for the last five years but fled with the American refugees and returned on the steamship La France. Describing the scenes in Paris during the three days of rioting before martial law was declared, Mr. Ziegler said:

“It was unsafe for any foreigner, particularly one who could not speak French, to go on the streets. For a German it was little short of suicidal.

“I saw one German driving down a boulevard with a woman in a cab. How the mob learned he was a German I do not know, but they upset the cab. The woman fainted and was trampled on, but some one finally dragged her away.

“The man made a gallant fight for his life. With his back to the overturned cab he fought desperately for several minutes, and he was a big fellow, too. He struck out with his fists, right and left, and bowled his assailants over as fast as they got within reach. But he was finally overpowered and trampled and stabbed to death by the mob.

“Every shop over which there appeared a German name was wrecked. At frequent points along the boulevards were shops with the windows broken and the interior looking as though a bomb had been exploded there. In other quarters of the city even buildings were torn down.

“I know a family that had a German cook, a woman who had been with them many years. The sons went off to war with the first army, but that was not guarantee of protection for the woman. Some one told the mob, and my friends had to hide the old woman in the cellar under a pile of boxes to save her life.

“I was on the street one evening with a friend. We saw the mob chasing a German. He almost got away but was caught in an alley. My friend recognized one of his employees in the mob. The next day he told me his employee had boasted that they not only got the German we saw them after but three others. All were stabbed to death after being beaten into insensibility.

“One of the most noticeable things in Paris are the electric signs of 'Maggi' the big milk distributor. He has upwards of 100 milk depots in Paris, and is worth between $5,000,000 and 6,000,000. He is a German, but has lived in Paris for twenty years or more.

“The mob wrecked his electric signs and milk depots and then some one started the report that he had poisoned the milk and was going to kill all his customers. The mob went hunting for him, but he escaped.”

Final thoughts

Knowing the source of anti-Germanism and what/who is keeping it alive allows us to also know how to put an end to it. The way is historical revisionism that corrects the lies, errors, misconceptions both intended and unintended by a fair appraisal of the record of the 20th Century. However, that is easier said than done. Here's why:

The main beneficiary of the anti-German war narratives is the Liberal-Jewish New World Order, which is now being challenged, but only to some extent, by the new crop of anti-immigration politicians. The post-war regime in Germany is a 'made in America' establishment, with 'approved' parties that hold in place the de-Nazification policies of 1945-55. So they will not challenge it. The Europe-wide “consensus Order” (now the EU) is dominated by the Left, so also holds the line against any loosening of the WWI-II official script. But then we also have the so-called Alt-Right/pro-White/antisemitic “nationalists” who won't oppose the “Holocaust” mythology and/or the Kaiser/Hitler hatefest, or give up their allegiance to Hail Britannia! as the ultimate expression of western freedom, mostly because they don't know enough about the history of the wars to defend any other position.

Until we can liberate ourselves from all this, we're up a creek with a very small paddle.