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March 18th, 2016 
Awake Goy by Professor Revilo P. Oliver (October 1989)
In the 1930s I occasionally visited the Classics Library of the University of Chicago, which stood, in a rather handsome building of its own, on the Midway, and I became acquainted with its amiable and learned Librarian, Walter R. Rathke. As our acquaintance progressed, I learned that after he earned the degree of A.M. in German philology at the University of Chicago in 1912, he supported himself and his wife by teaching German literature at a respected college in Wisconsin, intending eventually to obtain a doctoral degree from Chicago. After more than half a century, I dare not trust my recollection of the name of the college, and the University of Chicago appears to have no record of it.
When the American people became hysterical and demented in 1917, the college patriotically abolished study of the damnable language of a wicked race that spent its time impaling babies on bayonets and using the corpses of men killed in combat to manufacture soap. Mr. Rathke, accordingly, became a librarian, a relatively safe employment, since the Americans had not thought of abolishing books.
I asked Mr. Rathke the obvious and inevitable question: How was it possible for such blithering idiocy to be tolerated in Wisconsin, a state of which probably the larger, and certainly the dominant, part of the population was of German ancestry and included many of German birth?
He did not know the answer, and we considered a series of hypotheses. The majority of the Germans who migrated to Wisconsin came from the lower classes, but so did immigrants from, for example, Ireland, who were always ready to fight if they heard any slur on Erin’s emerald isle and its Celtic people. For that matter, the upper classes of any European nation tend to be cosmopolitan in the better sense of that word, and a traditional loyalty to the homeland is usually most emotionally maintained by persons from the lower classes.
Many Germans who migrated to the United States did so to escape a short term of obligatory military service: yes, but how could that have made them eager to see their sons conscripted to fight in a foolish war in which many of them would certainly be killed or maimed for life?
Germans and British were the two nationalities from which came the greater part of the Americans, even in colonial times, so that the two were regarded as authentically and naturally Americans, and did not seem somewhat exceptional, as did Swedes and even Italians of predominantly Nordic ancestry. True, but the Germans, no less than the British, had not forgotten their origins; many Lutheran and other churches held services in German, and both Cincinnati and St. Louis had been the home of large publishing houses that issued books in German, many of them written in this country. Furthermore, in the United States before 1917 German was thought to be the most important modern foreign language, given the acknowledged fact of German leadership in almost all domains of learning, from Classical philology to chemistry and biology. Many children of British ancestry were taught German in their childhood so that they would be equipped for serious study or success in industry when they grew up, and surely that fact must have stimulated further the ethnic patriotism of Germans in the United States. (It should also have made other Americans, who had read German works in the originals, immune to the epidemic of madness, but that is another matter.)
Before 1870, Germany had been divided into a number of independent states, large and small, which were often rivals and occasionally at war with each other, with latent antagonisms surviving from the Thirty Years’ War. True, but the essential unity of all Germans, except those in Austria, had been affirmed by the establishment of the German Empire after 1870, and how could any residue of divisive sentiments among Germans be as strong as the aftermath of the savagery shown in the invasion and conquest of the Southern states during their tragic War for Independence?
The Germans who came to the United States brought with them, or acquired here, an irrational antipathy to monarchy per se. It seems, however, that many of them proudly displayed in their homes pictures of the Kaiser, and, in any case, such a sentiment could make them prefer residence in the United States, but it is hard to believe that it could have made them believe in the praeternatural wickedness of the blood in their own veins.
Mr. Rathke and I considered other hypotheses. One that we overlooked was the possibility that the unsuspecting Germans in the United States may have been greatly influenced by the indeterminate number of Jews who came to this country from Germany and posed as Germans. It does not seem likely, however, that this could have been more than a contributing factor, at most. The Jews who pretended to be Germans were, at least ostensibly, pro-German in their attitudes in 1914-1916 and until their fellow tribesmen had extorted the Balfour Declaration from the desperately embattled British.
One question was the attitude of the German clergy. Other holy men, with a few honorable exceptions, found in antagonism to Germany an opportunity for righteous ranting. Did the German churchmen as resolutely oppose them? According to Mr. Rathke, some joined the howling pack, while others were intimidated by the “democratic” tyranny in Washington and the Attorney General’s lawless henchmen. Only a few courageous clergymen spoke out, but they were not supported by their cowed congregations and were silenced by means that were usually flagrantly illegal and tyrannical. (1)
It was true that for decades there had been in the United States a certain antagonism toward Germany on both rational and sentimental grounds. The conception of Manifest Destiny, which the invertebrate weaklings of today cannot begin to comprehend, usually led to the acceptance as inevitable of a conflict between the two rising and proudly ambitious nations of the civilized world. (2) A strong prevention in favor of the tradition Humanistic culture recognizing a threat in the great technological superiority of Germany. (3) This was re‰inforced by the divergence between conceptions of scholarship. (4) But it seemed unlikely that those attitudes, confined to a part of the educated minority, could have greatly influenced the bulk of the population.
In the end, Mr. Rathke and I had to dismiss the problem as insoluble, and agree that we could think of no plausible explanation of the German-Americans’ fatuous acquiescence and even participation in a mad hysteria excited by propaganda they must have known to be mendacious and absurd.
I remembered those conversations at the end of the 1930s when our great War Criminal began, with sickening hypocrisy, to drive his American cattle to an attack on Germany, and, except for the few members of the Bund, the large Germanic part of our population slavishly acquiesced.
I remembered them again when Hans Schmidt began his effort to form a political organization from the “52 million persons of German descent” in the United States. (5)
And I remember Mr. Rathke again now, when, in Professor Martin’s new book I find the first clear formulation of the problem. In his Note 1 he remarks that “the part played by Americans of partial of full German descent in bringing about the defeat of their ancestral country twice in global wars in the 20th century, primarily for the benefit of third, fourth, and fifth parties, was not only vast and unprecedented, but unmatched by any other people, and the performance in the war of 1939-1945 was far more lethal and destructive than in that of 1914-1918. Though the U.S.A.’s largest continental European strain, German-Americans participated in it all with the casualness of a housewife pouring hot water on an ant-hill, and the involvement of very many men with German forebears in the American armed forces in positions of high rank has been a subject of wide notice over the years. Taken in the context of a racial and/or ethnic rather than a national or patriotic fact, it is worth a modicum of pondering. It will be granted that most of the people involved were one to three generations removed from Germany physically and culturally as well as psychically, but in the case of people of British or French ancestry in America, for example, separation from their motherlands by even on or two centuries has had little effect upon the intensity of their affections for their ethnic origination point.”
Professor Martin has posed the question clearly. The answer that seems obvious at first sight is the one we cannot make, for the Germans in 1939-1945 gave proof of a heroism and courage unsurpassed in all history and unmatched in modern times. They were also the only nation that had a rational perception of the realities of the modern world and the exigencies they impose–the only nation that dared to perceive and confront the deadly danger that impended over all civilized mankind–the only nation on whom there does not now rest the inexpiable guilt of the Suicide of the West.
So what is the explanation?
1. Only a few year ago I heard a reference to the death of a clergyman, not of Germanic origin as I recall, who was remembered for having been “in trouble” for “pro-German sympathies” in 1917.
2. Typical is a now forgotten short story by Robert W. Chambers, who is now remembered only for the peculiar horror of “The King in Yellow.” In 1895 he published a story set in the United States states a quarter of a century in the future, which he accordingly described as what then seemed likely. The United States and Germany engaged in a war to determine which should annex the Samoan islands. A German army that invaded the United States states evidently suffered the fate of Cornwallis at Yorktown. Americans learned from the war in which they had been finally victorious. They made their navy overwhelmingly superior and maintained six great fleets of battleships and cruisers that patrolled the oceans of the entire globe. They established an army modeled on the Prussian, and a centralized government, modeled on the German, which supported a national opera, national art gallery, and the like. As a measure of self-preservation, they excluded Jews, stringently controlled immigration, and herded the niggers into a large reservation, probably policed by Indians, who were thus made useful. The United States annexed not only Samoa, but also the Hawaiian islands and Cuba. Remember that Chambers was writing before the annexation of the islands and the American attack on Spain, both of which took place in 1889.) Germany, however, was demoralized by her defeat and, with the other nations of the Continent, was undermined and destroyed by subversive agitation, to the profit of Russia. Remember that Chambers was not trying to be prophetic; he was concerned only with sketching a plausible and convincing background for the characters of his story.
3. The effect of heavy industry was regarded as dehumanizing, not without justification. This attitude is well represented by the great Italian historian, Guglielmo Ferrer, who had been a guest of honor in the White House under an intellectually alert President. His view that true culture was the work of the Mediterranean, rather than the Nordic, race, and that technological progress is equivalent to cultural decadence, was expressed in articles published early in this century and summarized in *Le G‚nie latin* (Paris, 1917). This view commended itself to many cultivated Anglo-Saxons who failed to see that the power given by technology is irresistible, and that instead of futilely decrying and deploring its advance, they should strive to control it. A crude and vulgar expression of the same view may be found in some of the novels by Jules Verne, which are really stories for boys. In several tales he imagined a secret installation of the great steel industry of Germany in some isolated region (once in California!), where huge cannons and other weapons of war were secretly fabricated by enslaved workers for conquest of the whole world when *Der Tag* came.
4. Although now generally overlooked, this was an important factor during the Nineteenth Century. In the humane studies, Anglo-Saxons resented and disparaged the German cult of *Realwissenschaft*, inaugurated by Friedrich August Wolfe, and a university system that led to the degree of Ph.D. This was early expressed by the derisive rhyme:
In Greek the Germans are sadly to seek,
Not five in five score, but ninety-five more:
All Germans but Hermann–
And Hermann’s a German.
This was exasperated when the Germans began to publish great compilations of learning in German instead of Latin, thus making it necessary to learn their damned language. (You may recall an echo of this in George Eliot’s *Middlemarch*.)
5. I wish Mr. Schmidt every success, but I cannot but wonder how many of the fifty-two million are more than vestigially German. The Germans who came to this country were generally prolific and had numerous children, but what proportion of their children and grandchildren married persons of the same origin?
This article originally appeared in Liberty Bell magazine.
Source Article from http://renegadetribune.com/the-odd-germans/
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