Intergroup Relations

The adaptations made by German-speaking immigrants to New France, Nova Scotia, and Labrador in the eighteenth century exemplify the accommodation that newcomers would reach with the larger society in the new homeland. In New France they tended to intermarry with francophones and assimilate rapidly. The pressure to do so was enormous, as indicated by the attention given to foreign origins. “Dit l’allemand” in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church records identified not only German-speaking immigrants of all backgrounds – the first one was Hans Daigle from Vienna in 1674 – but even their assimilated grandchildren.

In Nova Scotia the Foreign Protestants recruited by the British in the 1750s were the charter group in Lunenburg County. Characterized by Nova Scotia chronicler Thomas Chandler Haliburton in 1829 as “the most industrious and useful settlers amongst us,” they maintained German-language church services until the end of the century and experienced little pressure to assimilate from the larger society. Such challenges of the sea as fishing, boat-building, and maritime trade, as well as contacts ranging from Newfoundland fishermen and Moravian missionaries in Labrador to American boatbuilders and traders in the West Indies, encouraged gradual acculturation.

In northern Labrador a relatively small number of Moravian missionaries had a decisive impact on the survival of the Inuit after 1771. Their concerns ranged from providing medical services to protecting the native peoples and their culture from the spiritually and socially corrosive influence of traders and fishermen penetrating Labrador from the south. Literacy was a high priority for the Moravians. By creating a written language, grammar, and dictionary for the Inuit, the Moravians helped to preserve their cultural identity. For spiritual concepts and items of everyday life lacking in Inuktitut, the Moravians provided a large body of new vocabulary, including German loanwords that became part of the language. They established Labrador’s first school in 1791, and by 1843 most of the Inuit whom they taught were literate in their native language. The missionaries also introduced European customs and traditions, such as brass bands, that are still found in Inuit culture. The missionary work in Labrador was not the only Moravian contact with native peoples in Canada. At the Bay of Quinte, a New York-born German Moravian named Bininger arrived in 1784 to teach the Loyalist Mohawk. In 1791 David Zeisberger, known as the “apostle to the Indians,” guided a party of persecuted Delaware from Ohio to southwestern Upper Canada, where they founded Moraviantown, later renamed Schoenfeldt (Fairfield).

Throughout the nineteenth century, German Canadians interacted with numerous other immigrant groups. For example, at Lord Selkirk’s Red River settlement they formed a short-lived community with Scots. Four Loyalist townships on Lake Ontario were assigned to a mixed group of Dutch and German Loyalists, where they lived in harmonious coexistence. According to the area’s historian, these settlers made Adolphustown “the centre of civilization in Upper Canada at the time.” In the upper Ottawa valley between the 1860s and the 1890s, German immigrants from northeastern Prussia arrived at the same time as newcomers of Polish, Kashub, and Wendish origin, who settled in the same areas but formed separate parishes from the Protestant Germans. In Alberta, contacts between German settlers from Galicia and former Ukrainian neighbours led to migrations from Ukraine in 1892. The first Ukrainian immigrants found employment on Mennonite farms and established homesteads adjacent to a German-speaking colony near Fort Saskatchewan.

Pre–World War I English-speaking Canadians had few reservations about accommodating Germans, and the latter, in turn, faced no problems over dual identity or divided loyalty. Their confidence in the harmony of their customs and traditions (including the annual celebration of the kaiser’s birthday) with Canadian life was unquestioned, and anglophone Canadian officials and intellectuals confirmed the affinity of German traits, customs, and values on numerous occasions. They considered Germans to be culturally compatible and racially akin. As “white people like ourselves,” they were easily assimilated, social activist J.S. Woodsworth declared in 1909, and he even suggested that “in the long run it would seem as if it is often the others who are Germanized.”

World War I abruptly changed the attitude of British Canadians. Overnight, Germans were transformed into the country’s most undesirable immigrants. Among the national and ethnic minorities identified as enemy aliens, they were perhaps the most vilified during the war. Hostility towards them, unlike that towards Ruthenians/Ukrainians, was not tempered by efforts to win them over to the British cause. Affected were farmers and labourers as well as the wealthy and prominent. University professors, senior municipal administrators, and managers of public utilities lost their jobs. Such prominent entrepreneurs as Alvo von Alvensleben and Martin Nordegg were removed from their enterprises and excluded from Canada. Adam Beck, Canadian-born and knighted in 1914, and British Columbia lieutenant governor Frank Stillman Barnard, whose wife was of German descent, had to endure great indignities during the war. Athletes of German origin were barred from sports competitions. Canadians of even the remotest German background suffered devastating consequences, including social ostracism and closure of their businesses, from the relentless witch-hunt.

In 1916 Germanophobia escalated into acts of violence and the destruction of property. The courts charged enemy aliens with treason and sedition, although no accusation was ever proven. Unruly mobs, usually led by soldiers, were allowed to attack Germans and ransack German-owned hotels, restaurants, bakeries, beer halls, breweries, print shops, and club rooms in many cities across the country. In February prominent Canadians in Toronto launched an Anti-German League aimed at the dismissal of all Canadians of German or Austrian origin from the public service and a permanent ban on German products, immigrants, and influence in Canada. The often deliberately provocative renaming of places with German names has left reminders of this climate of hate. For example, Coblenz was changed to Cavell, Kaiser to Peebles, Prussia to Leader, Waldorf to Béthune, Carlstadt to Alderson, Wittenberg to Leedale, Little Dusseldorf to Freedom, and Berlin to Kitchener. The renaming of Berlin, Ontario, was accomplished through two ballots conducted in an atmosphere in which opposition to the proposed change was equated with disloyalty and silenced by intimidation.

By 1917 most German ethnic associations were dissolved, German schools closed, and German-language instruction removed from the curricula of schools and universities. What remained of the German-language press was heavily censured and, six weeks before the end of the war, totally suppressed. As well, the Wartime Elections Act of September 1917 disenfranchised all conscientious objectors and citizens naturalized after March 1902 if their birthplace or mother tongue was of an enemy country, legislation that was in place until 1920. Coupled with the three-year (raised to five in 1917) residency requirement for naturalization, this act in effect removed the right to vote from German-speaking immigrants who had arrived as long ago as 1899. Further, the government in 1919 extended the waiting period for naturalization of immigrants from enemy countries from five to ten years. Resentment among disenfranchised Canadians, although little in evidence in 1917, would influence German-Canadian voting patterns in western Canada until the 1930s.

They, however, had more pressing worries than loss of their franchise. German-speaking Canadians feared that they might be drafted to fight against Germany and Austria or have their homesteads taken away. Faced with propaganda demanding that they hate Germans for crimes that they believed their own kind were incapable of committing, they were unsure and divided over how to prove their Canadian loyalty. Little help and guidance came from their churches and ethnic press since these institutions concentrated on serving immediate needs. Until they were prohibited, the German-language papers attempted to act in a conciliatory fashion and advised compliance with Canadian laws.

The legal basis for the escalating deprivation of civil rights was the War Measures Act of 1914. It authorized censorship, compulsory registration, denunciation of alleged disloyalty, arrest for suspicious behaviour, detention, internment, and exclusion. Providing justification for the denial of access to the courts by enemy aliens, the act sanctioned personal attacks, destruction of property, and economic discrimination. German nationals and German Canadians of various backgrounds suffered a devastating loss of citizenship because the enemy-alien category, originally confined to non-naturalized immigrants, was extended to Canadians of second-generation or later German descent. Across Canada “Germans” were denied employment, customers, and fellowship in local communities. The result was often unemployment, reliance on local relief, or internment.

Confinement in one of twenty-four Canadian camps became the fate of 8,579 of the 88,000 registered enemy aliens. These internees included 2,009 citizens of Germany and 5,954 Ukrainians, Germans, Croats, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Czechs of Austro-Hungarian nationality. While a labour shortage in 1916 allowed internees of non-German origin to be released, some 2,000 Germans were kept interned until 1919–20, well after the armistice. Confinement in the camps was imposed for reasons ranging from unemployment to denunciations by overzealous patriots. Mining communities in British Columbia and northern Ontario demanded the dismissal and mass internment of German and Austrian employees. Hundreds of sailors and merchant seamen arrested in Canadian ports or transferred to Canada from the West Indies and Newfoundland were automatically confined. Maltreatment and unsanitary conditions in the camps led to the death of thirty-two German and sixty-nine Austrian internees.

Newfoundland arrested all of its thirty-five nationals of enemy-alien origin, including twenty-two Germans, in July 1915 and shipped them to Canadian internment camps. In Labrador twenty-two mostly German-born Moravian missionaries were placed under police guard, and one of them suspected of disloyalty was deported with his wife and three children to a British camp and then repatriated to Germany in 1918. The witch-hunt for suspects even resulted in the expulsion of foreign visitors associated in any way with German identity or culture. The war left few traces of the pre-war community in Newfoundland, but the legend of Germans acting as spies and saboteurs survives to this day.

In Canada anti-German sentiment peaked in early 1919, when enemy aliens were accused of being traitors who fomented labour unrest. In February the Canadian government decreed that any complaint “evidencing a feeling of public apprehension entertained by the community” was sufficient cause for the internment of an individual as an enemy alien. Suspects were entitled neither to legal counsel nor even to the right to be informed of the proceedings against them. At the time, the government gave serious consideration to acting upon petitions demanding the internment and mass expulsion of all registered aliens. “It is not necessary to wait for palatial ships,” clamoured Conservative member of Parliament H.S. Clements; “cattle ships are good enough for them.” However, fear of international repercussions and a shortage of transportation reduced the number of those actually repatriated to Germany to 1,644 and Austria to 302, including 60 women and children.

The trauma of World War I not only taught German Canadians the expediency of camouflaging their ethnic identity but also reinforced their tendency to assimilate rapidly. As a rule, those from Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia responded to the conflict of loyalties owed to their native and adopted homelands by suppressing or hiding their German background. Some even assumed Dutch, Scandinavian, or Russian identities. Endeavours to define a German-Canadian identity remained stifled until 1923, when Canada reopened its gates to immigration from Germany. Long after the war, attribution of negative characteristics based on wartime propaganda continued.

The fervently pro-British and anti-foreign sentiments stirred up by the propaganda remained a strong force through the 1920s. These attitudes were fuelled by nativists, veterans’ organizations, and labour leaders, who pointed to the revelation in the 1921 census that 41 percent of the population of the prairie provinces claimed non-British origin. Rapid assimilation of the “foreigner” under the label of Canadianization became a priority. Non-British immigrants were under strong pressure to renounce their ancestral culture and conform to British-Canadian values. For example, children were required to attend English-language public schools, and bilingual or German-language schools continued to be prohibited.

During World War II German ethnicity was singled out as suspect for the second time within the lifespan of some members of the community, and German Canadians were once again a helpless minority within a hostile society. Although the government spared them the severe maltreatment to which individuals had been subjected during World War I, it nonetheless arrested and interned 837 German-Canadian farmers, workers, and club members denounced or deemed to be disloyal. Some 66,000 German and Austrian nationals and immigrants naturalized after 1922 were ordered to report regularly to the police.

Newfoundland rounded up 29 merchant seamen and residents for detention in a hastily improvised “concentration camp,” as it was locally known, and in 1941 deported them to Canadian camps, where three of them died. The remaining 31 residents of German background identified by the constabulary were stigmatized as enemy agents, restricted in their movements, and socially ostracized. In the closed rural society of 320,000 Newfoundlanders, almost all of British origin, this treatment was equivalent to internment.

Because of the fear of provoking resentment and reprisals, German-Canadian cultural activities ceased almost completely during World War II. They fell victim to endeavours by the community to demonstrate unambiguous loyalty to the war effort. After 1945 the recovery of ethnic confidence seemed problematic enough without the post-war discoveries of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. These revelations perpetuated the stigmatization of Germans everywhere regardless of their individual involvement or lack of it in Nazi war crimes. They also delayed restoration of respect for German identity until the 1980s.

The experience of the two world wars unified, as well as divided, the various German-Canadian groups. On the one hand, the commonality of fate imposed by the Third Reich – the experience of being persecuted as Germans and stigmatized as Nazis – reinforced the internal and external boundaries of German-Canadian identity. On the other hand, German survivors of Nazi genocidal policies found themselves unable to associate with those who had either contributed to or tolerated these crimes. Prior to 1933 German Jews had visibly and proudly participated in the life of urban German-Canadian communities. After 1945 most immigrants of Jewish origin preferred to associate with the Jewish community in Canada. (See also JEWS.)

Among Sudeten Germans, the pre-war social-democratic refugees maintained their separate identity vis-à-vis the post-war expellees, who had tolerated or collaborated with the Nazi regime. They published their own paper, the Vorwärts (Forward; Toronto, 1948–55), and began to refer to themselves as Sudeten Canadians. Staunch supporters of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and its successor, the New Democratic Party, they initially formed their own German-speaking clubs within riding associations. After 1965 more conservative Sudeten Germans began to rally behind the Sudeten-Botev (Sudeten Messenger; Pouce-Coupe, B.C., 1965– ), published by the Westkanadische Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Sudetendeutschen (Western Canadian Partnership of Sudeten Germans).

Pre–World War II Danube Swabians had cultivated such cherished customs as Schlachtfest (livestock-butchering festival), Trachtenfest (costume festival), and especially Kirchweih (church dedication), a purely secular festival devoted to fun, games, dancing, and reunions. The post-war refugees continued these customs, but their expulsion and ethnic cleansing at the hands of the Marshall Tito regime in Yugoslavia became the overriding unifying symbol. They commemorate their identity in the annual Danube Swabian Day and pilgrimage to the shrine at Marylake, an event that draws thousands. The pilgrimage was initiated by Father Wendelin Gruber, who recorded his ten-year ordeal in Yugoslavian death camps. Arguments in the 1950s with natives of Germany over responsibility for World War II and reichsdeutsche pretension to superiority caused conflicts in Toronto and Montreal.

Among Germans from Russia, too, the post-war refugees who had been forcibly uprooted added a new dimension to existing divisions within the largely rural community, and between it and urbanized Germans from Germany. Those from Russia had not established secular clubs, nor had they participated actively in political and public life. Their culture had revolved around the church. The Volga German world-view idealized pietism and hard work as ends in themselves. Settlement patterns in Russia had perpetuated certain in-group allegiances, such as the household, kindred, village, and religious community, in an environment where as Germans they were privileged colonists.

In Medicine Hat, for example, where Germans of Russian and other ethnic German origin outnumbered those from Germany four to one, they labelled themselves “die Deutschen” (the Germans) and those from Germany the “Deutschländer” as late as the 1970s. In the larger pre-war North American environment, however, they stood near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and their ethnocentric culture was difficult to maintain. Although they viewed themselves as Germans, to an urbanized outsider their culture and lifestyle made them appear more like Russian peasants.

In some areas, especially the United States, other Germans sometimes looked down upon those from Russia and, as one Canadian historian put it, “showed contempt for the ‘ignorant Russians,’ who did not speak ‘good German,’ and generally had but little education.” Postwar German refugees from Russia and Volhynia (which includes much of what today is Ukraine), in turn, resent reichsdeutsche arrogance. They have made significant contributions to the maintenance and study of the German-Canadian cultural heritage by, for example, establishing a German Canadian Studies Foundation and a chair in German-Canadian studies at the University of Winnipeg.