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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They intermarried with all the other ethnic groups and now are generic American mutts. At least in my family!  We are german, italian, english, irish, who knows. [/quote]

Basically this. Plus, people distancing themselves from Germany after Holocaust/WW 2. [/quote]

There's German culture and then there's Germany. So many German immigrants came to the US before there was even a unified Germany, which emerged in the 1860s under the Prussian hegemony. And many German speakers came to the US via other countries that we don't think of as Germany, such as Switzerland or the Czech Republic.

I have German heritage ancestry and know plenty of people who do, after all, German surnames are very common in the US. Never received the impression people were ashamed of having German heritage and wanted to distance themselves from Germany any more than people of other heritages did to other countries in Europe. Most immigrants coming to the US saw themselves making a clean break and the old world was the old world. Many didn't have great memories of ye olde worlde, where they tended to be poorer and on the wrong side of a severely class divided society. [/quote]

Dude, just stop. The reality of today and that of the immediate aftermath of world war 1 are two separate things.  Your 'never received the impression that people were ashamed of having German heritage' should, at the very least ,be time stamped . Germanic immigrants literally couldn't rush to dump German as their primary language ( which they had chosen to keep speaking as opposed to learning English) fast enough . For decades, there was shame associated with overtly being German thanks to Germany triggering two world wars in the span of roughly four decades .[/quote]

+1000.  And even look at Hollywood today. Half the villains are all German.[/quote]

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