OVERVIEW

German Americans are immigrants or descendants of people from Germany, a country in Central
Europe. Today Germany shares borders with nine countries: Denmark to the north; Poland and
the Czech Republic to the east; Austria and Switzerland to the south; and the Netherlands,
Belgium, Luxembourg, and France to the west. In the north, Germany borders the North Sea and
the Baltic Sea. The country's geography is impressively diverse, from the peaks of the Alps in the
south, through forested hills in central Germany, to broad valleys through which flow some of
Europe's most important rivers, including the Rhine, Danube, and Elbe. Germany is 138,000
square miles (357,000 square kilometers) in size, approximately the combined size of Minnesota
and Wisconsin.
The population of Germany was 81,857,000 in 2012. According to the CIA World Factbook, 34
percent consider themselves Protestant (Evangelisch or Lutheran), 34 percent Roman Catholic,
and 28 percent unaffiliated. About 3.7 percent are Muslims, and 200,000 are Jewish. Berlin has
the fastest growing Jewish community in the world. Germany's standard of living is among the
highest in the world, and the distribution of wealth compares favorably with that of the other
advanced countries. Incentives in the form of housing subsidies and tax concessions induce
savings. Both workers and employers are assured adequate income, vacations, and broad health
care coverage. Value-added tax revenues and balanced employer–employee incomes have
boosted Germans' satisfaction with their living standards even in the face of the early twenty-first
century economic crisis in Europe.
Although a few Germans arrived with the Jamestown settlers in 1608, the first significant group
of German settlers were thirteen families of Quakers and Mennonites from Krefeld, who arrived
in Philadelphia on October 6, 1683, aboard the Concordia, and founded the city of Germantown,
now incorporated into Philadelphia. German immigration was particularly important in the early
decades of the United States, and German-speaking districts of American cities were once
common. Since the mid-twentieth century most German immigrants have been professionals
coming for work reasons.
According to the 2010 U.S. Census, German is the leading ancestry group in the United States,
with about 50 million people, or 17 percent of the U.S. population, declaring German heritage
(of whom only 1.5 million still speak German at home). Another 337,000 identified as
“Pennsylvania German” or “Pennsylvania Dutch,” a specific group descended from immigrants
from Southwest Germany who continue to live largely in Southeastern and South Central
Pennsylvania. The states with two million or more Americans of German descent are Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois, New York, Texas, California, Florida, and Wisconsin. More
than half of the nation's 3,143 counties reported a plurality of people describing themselves as
German American. Today many German Americans are fully assimilated into U.S. culture and
may not identify themselves with their ancestral group.
HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE
Early History
Germany is derived from Germania, a region of Central Europe first mentioned by the Roman
historian Tacitus about 98 CE, from which the English appellation Germany developed. The
people have referred to themselves throughout history variously as Saxons, Burgundians,
Bavarians, or simply as Deutsch, the latter meaning roughly “the people,” hence the country's
contemporary name, Deutschland. Recorded German history begins with Tacitus, who recounted
a battle involving Arminius, a prince of the Germanic tribe the Cherusci, who vanquished three
Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE near the town of Kalkriese (Oldenburg). The
name Deutschland came into use in the eighth century when Charlemagne incorporated German
and French speakers into a common nation. As cohesion among the population of the eastern
realm increased, the term Deutsch became applicable to all German speakers. Once confined
west of the Elbe River, Germans gradually penetrated farther east into former Slavic territory,
often peacefully but sometimes by force.
Germany bore versions of the name Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, beginning with
the Salian dynasty and proceeding with rule by Hohenstaufens, Habsburgs, and Hohenzollerns.
When a Wittenberg Catholic priest named Martin Luther proposed religious reforms in 1517, he
initiated the Protestant Reformation, which led to pillaging of the country (and many other parts
of Europe) by those who profited from the weakened central political, religious, and social ruling
structures. The religiously motivated Thirty Years War (1618–1648) that erupted a century after
Luther's death devastated both Germany's territory and its moral fiber until the age of French
absolutism. During the Age of Enlightenment, Prussian King Frederick the Great (1740–1786)
became a patron of the American Revolution. Frederick sent Baron von Steuben, Nikolaus
Herchheimer, Johannes DeKalb, and others to train American military novices at Valley Forge,
Pennsylvania, and elsewhere.
During the Napoleonic period the Holy Roman Empire dissolved and was replaced by the
Deutscher Bund (German Confederation), a loose federation of individual sovereign states that
functioned with a single central participatory government unit—the Bundestag—a non-elected
but delegated parliament in Frankfurt. Often the Bundestag behaved like a monarchical
oligarchy, suppressing freedom, enforcing censorship, and controlling the universities and
political activity.
Arguments among the liberals arose over whether to establish a “greater Germany” along the
lines of Great Britain or a “smaller Germany” that would include only the more traditionally
German principalities and leave out Austria. Because Austria wanted to bring its different ethnic
groups into the union, the National Assembly opted for the smaller Germany. They offered a
constitution to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, but his rejection of it triggered popular
uprisings in the German states, which were met with military suppression. At this time a
significant number of German intellectual liberals, known as Forty-eighters, immigrated to the
United States to escape persecution. The contemporary flag of Germany, with its black, red, and
gold stripes, derives from the flag used by this Forty-eighter parliament.
Despite reactionary forces at the higher levels of government, an economic entity called the
Deutscher Zollverein, or German Customs Union (occasionally considered the precursor of the
current European Community), came into being in 1834. It was an inland unitary market system
for the whole of Germany, which was facilitated in 1835 by the opening of the first German
railway lines. This event was due in part to a return emigrant from the United States, Friedrich
List (1789–1846). Exiled to the United States in 1825 for attempting to abolish tariffs and tithes
in his native Württemberg, List worked hard to streamline the U.S. economy by offering free
trade between the states and also by founding various railroads in Pennsylvania.
In 1870 the new Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck united the remaining German states into
the “smaller German” Reich, which lasted until World War I, but its military bluster in foreign
affairs led to Germany's downfall in world affairs. Coupled with domestic unrest that erupted
when Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to suppress the domestic socialist working class, Germany in
the early twentieth century struck up alliances with Austria and Ottoman Turkey that triggered
fear abroad and ultimately the alliance between France, England, and Russia, which concluded
with Germany's World War I defeat in November 1918.
Modern Era
After the war the German Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party wrote a constitution
that instituted the Weimar Republic. From its outset, burdensome war reparations, inflation,
foreign military occupation west of the Rhine, and heavy losses of territory doomed the republic.
In 1925 Field Marshal von Hindenburg, a hero during World War I, was elected president.
Following the onset of the worldwide economic depression in 1929, Hindenburg appointed Adolf
Hitler to be chancellor in 1933. Hitler promptly banned all political parties, expelled
Communists from the government, and restructured the military. Hitler's goals were to purify
Germany by removing anyone without pure Teutonic blood and to expand German territory
throughout Europe. By 1939 Germany had conquered Poland and was occupying
Czechoslovakia and Austria. Germany took France the following year, along with Norway and
whole regions of western Russia. In the process the policy was to exterminate unwanted peoples,
including Jews, the Roma people, and others.
Hitler's death squads rounded up Jews in Germany and the occupied countries and sent them,
along with Communists, clergy, disabled people, homosexuals, and political prisoners from
Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, Holland, and the Soviet Union, to a series of work camps and
death camps where many starved to death and many more were murdered outright. About six
million Jews perished, but if Catholic clergy, prisoners of war, and forced work details are
included, the figure is at least double that of Jews alone. Germany finally fell to the Allies in
1945, with Hitler dying in his Berlin bunker.
Following the war the Allies occupied the country. The western zones were then consolidated as
the Federal Republic of Germany in 1948, and the Soviet-occupied eastern zones became a
Russian satellite called the German Democratic Republic. For nearly 40 years distrust between
East Germans and West Germans was encouraged by the Soviet Union on the one hand and by
the West on the other. Both feared a united Germany. In 1989 demonstrations in East Germany
caused the Communist regime to relent, and the Berlin Wall, which isolated West Berlin from
East Berlin and Eastern Germany, was opened on November 9. On October 3, 1990, Germany
was officially reunited, and Berlin became the nation's capital. In the decades of separation, West
Germany had become a modern economic and industrial powerhouse, while East Germany had
suffered from economic stagnation and cultural malaise.
Chancellor Helmut Kohl shepherded the united nation through its first few years, when economic
matters were precarious; former West Germans blamed the former East Germans for the
problems associated with addressing their aging infrastructure, lack of modernization, and high
unemployment rate. Gerhard Schroeder became chancellor in 1998, leading a coalition
government of the Social Democratic Party and the Green Party. He instituted the Agenda 2010
program, which sought to curtail the country's broad social welfare policies, lower taxes, and
reform employment regulations. This program was decidedly unpopular. In 2002 Germany
replaced the Deutsche Mark with the Euro and, as one of the stronger economies in Europe, took
a leading role in the European Union.
In 2005 Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian Democratic Union, became chancellor, following
a stalemate election that led to a coalition government between the CDU, the Christian Social
Union, and the Social Democratic Party of Germany; Merkel was reelected in 2009. During her
chancellorship, Merkel became the president of the European Council and was considered the
leader of the European Union. Her negotiations during the debt crisis spawned by the global
recession of 2008 proved key in keeping Greece from seceding from the European Union. Her
leadership in the subsequent sovereign debt crisis led to calls for new austerity measures, which
would upset decades of generous government support for most European citizens. While this
resulted in her popularity plummeting, Merkel's deft negotiations during the fiscal crisis gained
her the reputation as the most powerful woman in the world, according to Forbes magazine, and
the second most powerful person in the world. Germany's economic state remained strong as the
rest of the eurozone endured a period of austerity and uncertainty.
SETTLEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES
With their arrival at Jamestown in 1608 and for four centuries thereafter, Germans have been one
of the three largest ethnic groups in American society. When Christopher Columbus discovered
the Americas in 1492, he did so in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain—that is, with the
entitlement of the Habsburgs, who also ruled Germany as part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was
a German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller, who suggested the New World be designated
America.
Between 1671 and 1677 Pennsylvania founder William Penn made trips to Germany on behalf of
his Quaker faith. His recruiting attracted the Mennonite settlers who founded Germantown in
1683, as well numerous others who created communities that were symbolic in two ways: they
were specifically German-speaking and they were comprised of religious dissenters.
Pennsylvania has remained the heartland for the various branches of Anabaptists (Old Order
Mennonites, Ephrata Cloisters, Brethren, and Amish), but it also became home for many
Lutheran refugees from Catholic provinces (e.g., Salzburg), as well as Catholics who had been
discriminated against in Protestant provinces.
Significant numbers of Germans immigrated to flee war and poverty. For example, in 1709,
15,000 Palatines fleeing a French invasion of the southwest German region called the Pfalz
departed for England at the invitation of Queen Anne, who offered them money and land in the
New World. Arriving on ten ships to New York harbor, 850 families settled in the Hudson River
Valley, others went to Little Falls on the Mohawk River, and some to the Schoharie Valley. In
1734 another group of religiously persecuted emigrants, around 300 Protestants from the
province of Salzburg, accepted Governor Oglethorpe's invitation to Georgia in 1734.
On balance, though, most of the immigration from Germany resulted not from religious
persecution but economic conditions, as industrialization and urbanization resulted in widespread
social and demographic changes. By the time of the first U.S. census in 1790, over 8.5 percent of
the U.S. population was German, although in Pennsylvania it was more than 33 percent. During
the Revolutionary War, the German Americans were numerically strengthened by the arrival of
about 30,000 Hessian mercenaries who fought for England during the hostilities, of whom some
5,000 choose to remain in the New World after the war.
Until about 1815 Americans and some foreign shippers brought many Germans to the United
States under the redemptioner system. The scheme was that a German peasant traveled on a
sailing vessel without charge and upon arrival at an Atlantic port was sold to an American
businessman to work from four to seven years to redeem his passage and win his freedom. For
some of the early sectarians, including the Baptist Dunkers, the Schwenkfelders, and the
Moravian Brethren, this was the only way to reach the United States.
Populous as German immigrants to America were by the end of the eighteenth century, the major
waves of immigration awaited the conclusion of Napoleonic wars in 1815. Germany's economy
began to suffer in several ways: Too many goods were imported, especially cloth, from an
industrialized England. Antiquated inheritance laws in southwestern Germany caused land
holdings to be subdivided continuously, rendering farms too miniscule for subsistence. Cottage
industries collapsed when faced by a flood of foreign products. Finally, the population had
skyrocketed and many were dependent on the potato crops. As in Ireland, rural Germany in the
1840s was suddenly hit by famine precipitated by a potato blight.
When the 1848 revolutions Europe failed to bring democracy to Germany, several thousand
fugitives left for America in addition to nearly 750,000 more who immigrated in the following
years. While a mere 6,000 Germans had entered the United States in the decade of the 1820s,
nearly one million did so in the decade of the 1850s, the first great influx from Germany. Despite
annual fluctuations, especially during the Civil War period when the decadal figure dropped to
723,000, the tide swelled again to 751,000 in the 1870s and peaked at 1,445,000 in the 1880s.
In the nineteenth century religious and political refugees were numerous. During the 1820s, for
example, Prussia had forced a union of the Reformed and Lutheran congregations, which by the
late 1830s caused many Old Lutherans to emigrate. Saxon followers of Martin Stephan came in
1839 to escape the “wickedness” of the Old World. Other refugees were the Pietists who founded
communal societies in Harmony and Economy, Pennsylvania; Zoar, Ohio; St. Nazianz,
Wisconsin; and Amana, Iowa.
Societies sponsored by German princes used emigration as a solution to social problems at home.
For example, the Giessener Emigration Society (1833) and the Adelsverein of Texas (1843)
operated on the principle that a one-way ticket for the downtrodden was cheaper than a long-
term subsidy. Also influential in unleashing a tidal wave of German emigration were writers like
Gottfried Duden whose 1829 book Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten
Nordamerika's (Report of a Journey to the Western States of North America) was a bestseller and
compared the Mississippi region to the Rhine region in Germany.
During the 1850s small farmers and their families dominated the first major wave of immigrants,
who often came from southwest Germany. Soon after, artisans and household manufacturers
were the main arrivals from the more central states of Germany, while day laborers and
agricultural workers from the rural northeast states characterized subsequent waves of German
immigrants. Not until Germany's industrialization process caught up with the English in the late
nineteenth century did Germans no longer have to leave the country to improve their lives.
Beginning in the late 1880s and for several decades thereafter, migration from depressed
agricultural regions was destined less for America and more for the manufacturing regions of
Berlin, the Ruhr, and the Rhine in Germany itself.
Interspersed among these waves of economic emigrants were also those fleeing a variety of
oppression, including German Jews who left because of economic and social discrimination.
Young men sometimes fled to avoid serving in the Prussian military service. Organized industrial
laborers also fled the antisocialist laws enacted when a would-be assassin threatened the life of
Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm I, who blamed Socialist labor leaders for the attempt. Catholics, too,
were oppressed by Bismarck's infamous May Laws of the 1870s, sometimes called the
Kulturkampf, which suppressed the Catholic Center Party and its drive for greater democracy
during the first decade of the emperor's reign.
Also during the latter half of the nineteenth century, agents fanned out across Germany to drum
up emigration. Some were outright recruiters operating against the law. Others were agencies
that took the form of aid societies working to better the lot of the emigrés in Germany, such as
the Catholic Raphael Society, the Bavarian Ludwigmissionsverein, the Leopoldinen Stiftung in
Vienna, the Pietist society of Herrnhut in Saxony, and the Lutheran support groups of
Neuendettelsau in Franconia in northern Bavaria. Frankenmuth, Michigan, for example, traces its
roots to such Lutheran groups. Aiding the immigrants on this side of the Atlantic were the
Catholic Leo House in New York and the Central-Verein in St. Louis. Much better funded
promoters were those established by the North Central states (most prominently Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota) as they joined the Union, many of which had ample support from
legislatures for their Immigration Commissioners. Even more influential were the
transcontinental railroads that sent agents to the ports of debarkation along the Atlantic and
Germany to recruit immigrants either to take up their land grants or to supply freight activity for
their lines. Especially active was the Northern Pacific during the time when German immigrant
Henry Villard headed the corporation and sought to populate his land grant with industrious
German farmers.
In the latter phases of German immigration newcomers joined established countrymen in a
phenomenon called chain migration. Chain migration is defined as the movement of families or
individuals to join friends and family members already established in a given place. Chain
migration strengthened already existing German regions of the United States. One such
concentrated settlement pattern gave rise to the so-called “German triangle,” defined by St. Paul,
Minnesota; St. Louis, Missouri; and Cincinnati, Ohio, with lines stretching between them so that
the triangle incorporated Chicago, Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Milwaukee, Davenport, and other
strongly German cities. Other descriptors include the more accurate “German parallelogram,”
which stretches from Albany, New York, westward along the Erie Canal to Buffalo and farther
westward through Detroit to St. Paul and the Dakotas, then south to Nebraska and Kansas, back
to Missouri and eastward along the Ohio River to Baltimore. Except for large settlements in
Texas, San Francisco, and Florida, German settlement is still largely contained within this
German belt.
Data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau shows that German, Irish, and English are the most
frequently reported ancestry groups. According to the Census Bureau's American Community
Survey estimates for 2009–2011, about 49 million persons claim German ancestry, many more
than the second-place group, the Irish, with 35 million. In terms of distribution, the 2000 census
data confirm that those of German heritage predominate in the northern half of the country, as
well as Florida and Alaska. Those of German heritage form the plurality of the population from
Pennsylvania in the east to Oregon and Washington in the West, with every Midwestern and
Western state in between (the exceptions being Utah, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and
Texas). States with the highest total population of German Americans include California (3.3
million), Pennsylvania (3.4 million), Ohio (over 3 million), Wisconsin (2.4 million), New York
(2.1 million), Michigan (2.1 million), Texas (2.6 million), Florida (2.1 million), and Illinois (2.5
million).