my German-born grandmother, lived with us during my childhood, so I was exposed to a lot of German culture, as well as German language when German speaking friends of hers visited her. Plus, we were members of a Lutheran church that was founded by German immigrants to the US.
Yet, I never felt any affinity to Nazism growing up. Neither did Aunt Emma or any of the rest of my huge extended German American family. I was 11 years old during the televised Eichmann trial for war crimes against Jews. When I came home from school for lunch, my mother and Aunt Emma were watching the trial. They would not let me see it because they considered the topic unsuitable to a child. But I remember Aunt Emma crying over what her homeland had become. She was only 6 years old when her parents brought her and her siblings to the US, but German language and culture at home were very much a part of her upbringing.
When I was in grade school in the 1950s, 2 Italian immigrant families arrived in our city and their kids went to my school. Their parents had lived through Mussolini's Italy. They were not fascists. In fact, they were so anti fascist that that's how they got their visa to immigrate to the US. Their families had been partisans who worked with the US military in Europe during WWII. I guess that "Italian culture" fascism did not sink in to them, although they seemed culturally Italian to me in language, food, and religion.
Culture and politics are not the same thing. Japanese culture has not produced another emperor worshipping generation trying to conquer Asia. German culture has not produced another Hitler trying to conquer the world. In fact, during the Trump years, it was Angela Merkel's Germany that was respected as the leader of the free world during America's absence from that role under Trump.
And the notion that descendants of German immigrants from COLONIAL times would be susceptible to fascism due to the culture of their ancestors from over 200 years ago is ludicrous. My maternal grandmother came to America when she was 3 years old in 1890, decades before the FIRST World War, and therefore, even longer before WWII. They identified with German culture, but had ZERO identification with the German politics of Nazism.
My maternal grandfather's family was from Germany, too. They arrived in the US in 1888, also long before both world wars. They also identified with German culture, but not with the politics of Nazism. In fact, they came to the US because my great-grandfather was part of a liberal political movement in Germany for a parliamentary government and was threatened with arrest by Kaiser Wilhelm II. That parliamentarian movement in Germany that great grandpa supported was not a new, radical idea. Germans had tried to implement that kind of government in 1848. In the 1880s, it was Kaiser Frederick and his British wife, Victoria (daughter of Queen Victoria) who led the parliamentarian movement in Germany. But Kaiser Frederick died in 1888 and his son, Kaiser Wilhelm II was an absolutist monarch due to the strong influence that Bismarck had on him. Wilhelm arrested his father's reform supporters so my great grandfather escaped out of the country with help from some friends.
Facts and history disprove the bigoted idea that descendants of German immigrants are culturally susceptible to fascism. For example, Eisenhower is a German name, but he led the Allied Forces in Europe against fascism.
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