"[...] the thesis - upheld among others by then British Foreign affairs minister Eden - that Hitler by declaring war on the USA would have squandered a big chance to avoid confrontation with them for at least a long time [...] does not hold into account the context of the international political conjuncture and the way Hitler interpreted it. While the great success of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor had taken out of the picture the bulk of the American warships in the Pacific fleet [...], Hitler did not think Japan's military capability in a large conflict against the USA was up to the task of taking out the States alone. A temporary deployment of the entire USA miliiltary forces in the Pacific to combat Japan would certainly have relieved for the time being his own burden in Europe, but he also considered the connected risk that Japan would quickly succumb to the American power (Hitller rated it very highly) and thus the American war machine, once in motion, would turn with all its strength against Germany. Thus, deciding to declare war on the USA immediately HItler chose the lesser evil on the basis of his conviction about the changing of the international political climate from Summer 1941. That way the USA were forced from the start to fight a war over two oceans, necessitating for them to split their forces whenever they wanted to change the focal point on either of the major theaters". (Andreas Hillgruber, Der Zweite Weltkriege, 1939-1945)
Thanks. From the way I looked at it, it was my understanding that the Germans were losing on the Russian front even before American involvement. And yes we were helping the Brits but that's not nearly as much as sending our own troops to the extent we did after formal war was declared. And we probably would have gone all out inevitably but it's not rational to declare war on another major power when you are already losing the war you're fighting as it is.
Although the Soviets were able to win some defensive victories, most historians would agree with the Red Army's historical section in saying that the "first period of war" in the Great Patriotic War - the period during which the Germans were generally on the offensive and possessed military superiority over the Red Army - lasted until November 1942. On 7 December 1941, the Wehrmacht was in the process of losing the Battle of Moscow, which was a real and meaningful Soviet victory. And the Germans undoubtedly fell short of what they were expecting to achieve in 1941, which would ultimately have severe consequences for their war effort. But they were not losing the war overall - yet. And Hitler himself certainly did not have a perception that Germany was losing the war - why would he, with his armies holding an iron grip on Europe?
I think that Hitler's irrationality, at least in terms of strategic choices, is usually exaggerated. He was a genocidal monster, which makes it easy to question his sanity, and near the end of his life most sources depict him as totally divorced from reality. It's tough to read that back to 1941, though. Hitler had reasons for making the decisions he did. (h/t to @Sofista for that quotation from Hillgruber, by the way.) They may have been the wrong reasons, but they were reasons. He was evil, not insane.
My understanding is he did make some insane decisions. One example is the Battle of Stalingrad.
From what I read, Stalingrad itself didn't have much strategical importance but he wanted for purely symbolic reasons as Hitler personally didn't like Stalin himself.
Then on top of that, he had forces divided between South Soviet Union land near oil fields and the Stalingrad invasion force.
It was bad because
1) Stalingrad itself was not strategically important
2) he had his army divided when they should have been on just one or other. Or that you typically need to outnumber enemy by at least 3 to 1 when trying to capture their city or fort, which they did not have that numerical superiority.
I mean that is just example, but it appears he did make decisions that were not rational.
My understanding is he did make some insane decisions. One example is the Battle of Stalingrad.
From what I read, Stalingrad itself didn't have much strategical importance but he wanted for purely symbolic reasons as Hitler personally didn't like Stalin himself.
Then on top of that, he had forces divided between South Soviet Union land near oil fields and the Stalingrad invasion force.
It was bad because
1) Stalingrad itself was not strategically important
2) he had his army divided when they should have been on just one or other. Or that you typically need to outnumber enemy by at least 3 to 1 when trying to capture their city or fort, which they did not have that numerical superiority.
I mean that is just example, but it appears he did make decisions that were not rational.
Hitler was not the only person in the German political-military hierarchy who lost focus and tried to take Stalingrad and the Caucasus simultaneously. Some German officers disapproved of the decision; others supported it wholeheartedly. Nor was it particularly "insane". You can be wrong without being mentally ill. Stalingrad had some operational value, as a bridgehead over the Volga, as a way to block the Soviets' connection to the Caucasus theater, and as the northern flank guard for the Caucasus invasion. It was a decent-sized city with a lot of heavy industry, so it was a valid strategic target, and its symbolic name did have some meaning. There were some reasons to be there. They did not justify the expenditure of all the blood and treasure that the Germans ultimately spent there, and there were higher priority targets - but the decision was not totally baseless or divorced from reality.
It's easy to point to certain military decisions in the past and come up with supposedly ironclad reasons for labeling them certain failures, and the decision-makers foolish for ever having embarked on them. The problem is that those ironclad reasons are often not actually true. For example, yes, the most advisable course of action is to outmass the enemy at the point of assault with, at minimum, a three-to-one numerical superiority. (The Soviets tested this extensively in their offensives from 1943 to 1945 and concluded that ten-to-one was optimal because a larger superiority in men reduced casualties to a remarkable degree.) However, there are things like force multipliers that can reduce the need for a three-to-one superiority. Some of these are tactical force multipliers, some are operational, and some strategic. The German way of war relied on such force multipliers to reduce the need for numerical superiority: troop training and experience, tactical doctrine, surprise, pinpoint air support, and so on. German forces were often, although not always, outnumbered during the war, yet they were able to win an awful lot of the time. Clearly the three-to-one "rule" was not ironclad.
German military history is littered with examples of two opponents facing each other, battered and bloody, each hemorrhaging casualties to a terrifying degree. German doctrine and teaching - Truppenpraxis - held that the last fighter standing would, more often than not, be the side with the will to persevere rather than, necessarily, the bigger battalions or the superior technical means or the greater quantity of supply. And Germans could point to plenty of times in military history that will or fighting spirit carried the day: the charnel house of Mars-la-Tour, for example, when Alvensleben and his III Corps faced down half the French army and won, or Torgau, where Frederick the Great eviscerated his entire army but drove the Austrians from the field. When it didn't work, like at Verdun or Stalingrad, the incessant German attacks were like trying to erode a rock with handfuls of boiled peas. But it worked often enough for the Germans to be convinced that it would.
Again, none of this means that the Germans weren't wrong. You are absolutely correct: Stalingrad did not justify the spend, and Stalingrad + the Caucasus at the same time was unlikely to work. But they weren't crazy to think that it might work. They thought that the Red Army was collapsing and that a big push would cause it to finally crumple, and that letting the foot off the gas pedal, so to speak (Mit Vollgas!), would give the Soviets time to recuperate and resist. And honestly, they came so freaking close at Stalingrad that it really might have worked without too much extra luck.
Soldiers and politicians make wrong choices all the time without being insane. The US Army's manpower replacement system during the Second World War was a severe drawback that badly hampered its infantry formations relative to their theoretical combat power, but nobody calls Lesley McNair or George Marshall "insane". 21 Army Group's leadership committed several compounding errors in late August and early September 1944 that effectively ended the Allied offensive in Northwest Europe for months, but nobody calls Bernard Law Montgomery "insane". Hitler's military errors, at least before 1945, were still fundamentally military errors with some reasoning behind them, and he was aided and abetted in them by the other members of the vaunted German high command. That falls far short of insanity.
Now, in the final struggle for Berlin? When he was moving around phantom armies and throwing fits about Felix Steiner and Hermann Fegelein and generally operating with a severe disconnect from reality? Then maybe you could start talking about "insane". Bandying about the word for the rest of Hitler's tenure, however, is just baseless. He was evil. He wasn't a madman.
As far as I can gather, Stalingrad was an intermediate objective on the way to Astrakhan, which would have been pretty much the extreme right of the German line and, being a principal port on the Caspian, difficult both oil shipments from the Caucasus and supply and reinforcement of Soviet formations there. Not sure just how close they could have come, but I think Stalingrad was one of the main points on the line from Astrakhan to central Russia.
Again, I think and I gather, I am not terribly knowledgeable on the matter and I would welcome an expert opinion, but that is my take.
Reposting from original thread for fun and profit:
They aren't really the same thing though. Those are just nicknames. The ones I listed are appellations that are making a statement about their importance within Christian scholasticism.
Augustine is The Doctor because his position as a Church Father (Doctor = "teacher" in Latin) is so pre-eminent that the implicit assumption when talking about a Church Father is that you must surely be talking about Augustine. Likewise for Paul as The Apostle Here is an example of it happening in Peter Abelard:
Spoiler:
Thus when I was laboring wholly in arrogance and extravagance, divine grace brought to me, however unwilling, a remedy to both ailments. First for extravagance, then for vanity; [the cure for] extravagance indeed by depriving me of those things by which I used to practice it, in the case of arrogance, however, since it was largely begotten in me from the knowledge of the writings [i.e. theology and philosophical study], as The Apostle says, "Knowledge puffs [one] up," I was therefore cured of the ailment of arrogance by humiliating me by burning that very book of which I was most proud
It's not an honorific, and it's not a nickname. It's simply a statement based on the assumption that no other Apostles matter, if you are talking about an apostle in the context of theological exegesis, you must surely be talking about Paul, and if you weren't talking about Paul, then you would specify who instead you were talking about, as, e.g. in the case of Einhard:
Spoiler:
He venerated before all other sacred and worshipful places, the church of St. Peter the Apostle located in Rome. In whose treasure-chamber, a large quantity of riches – as much in gold as in silver, to say nothing of gems, was accumulated by him.
The point is that neither "The Boss" nor "The King" are comparable here. If you are talking about Apostles, then surely you mean Paul; no others matter, and if you weren't talking about Paul then you would have specified. If you were talking about Doctors then you must be talking about Augustine, because no other Doctors matter. You can't analogize this to Springsteen or Elvis. Calling Springsteen The Boss is not making a statement about his preeminence among bosses, and that no other bosses matter, likewise for Elvis and The King. These epithets only make sense in the context of talking about those people. If you, apropos of nothing, were to say "I'm a fan of The King" you would probably get a quizzical look and be asked to specify "which king"?
The Bard is a good example, though, and you can see it making the same essential point when the epithet was first attributed in David Garrick's Shakespeare Jubilee in 1769:
He is ascribed the epithet of The Bard because no other bard is implied to matter. If you are talking of Bards, you must surely mean Shakespeare, and if you weren't talking about Shakespeare, you would have specified.
You can see a similar epithet in Samuel Johnson's 1765 Preface to The Plays of W. Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare is called The Poet.
A comparable example in California might be referring to San Francisco as The City, again, carrying the implicit assumption that if you are talking about a city you must surely be talking about SF, as no other cities matter, and if you had meant another city you would have specified as such. But this is an extremely regional thing which exists in the hinterland of basically every major city, and Californians get pretty heavy pushback whenever they talk to non-Californians about The City referring to SF.
Hitler's ultimate goal was always a showdown against the "Jewish-Bolshevik financiers" of New York that he believed dominated America. That was why he believed Germany needed to be a strong colossus ruling over all Europe: he saw it as preparation for the ultimate showdown. And he was willing to accept that ultimate showdown even though it came a little earlier than he'd anticipated.
Furthermore, in both World Wars, the German government tended to think that American protestations of neutrality were totally worthless.
From 1914 to 1917 the Americans sold billions of dollars of war materiel to the Entente powers despite professing neutrality. The Germans viewed the Wilson administration as fundamentally sympathetic to the Entente in general and the British especially, and saw the resignation of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan as being a purge of the neutralist camp in the American government. They were not entirely wrong, but underestimated the extent to which American civilian casualties would push the country into open war, while simultaneously failing to see that the Entente's cooperation with America was in large part based on limited financial resources that were almost exhausted by the beginning of 1917.
Hitler had even more reason to view the Americans as basically being on Britain's side. After Lend-Lease and the Destroyers for Bases agreements, the US was more or less officially committed to manufacturing whatever it could to fuel the British war machine, while obviously not offering the same service to Germany. The signature of the Atlantic Charter solidified the Anglo-American relationship, such that Roosevelt was more or less sure that America and Germany would be at war within a year. American convoys supported the British extensively, guarded by US Navy vessels. German U-boats and American destroyers fired on each other in the USS Greer incident in September 1941. A U-boat torpedoed USS Kearny the following month, and finally the USS Reuben James was actually sunk by a U-boat off Iceland on 31 October with 100 crew killed. America and Germany were effectively in a low-grade shooting war before Pearl Harbor. Realistically, Hitler was acknowledging what he thought was a state of affairs that already existed.
Both times, the Germans overreacted to what America was doing, but they didn't overreact that much. Wilson was in the tank for the Entente, although there was only so much he could do to support them without Americans being physically attacked. And Roosevelt was absolutely an Allied wannabe long before Pearl Harbor. If Hitler had not declared war on America, the Americans probably would have declared on Germany due to the Battle of the Atlantic before the year was out, while shipping arms and equipment to the UK all the while. Hitler's declaration of war changed American priorities and allowed the Allies to decide definitively on "Germany first", but even that decision was subject to a great deal of change and waffling over the course of the war. I'm not sure how much it actually meant at the time. And, of course, it's very difficult to imagine Hitler doing anything other than declaring war on the United States.
Assuming they captured it because of there not being a counterattack, they'd have another army of half a million or so gloating around. But Germany was overstretched, undersuppllied, and suffering from a manpower deficiency. So probably not all that much.
The Germans would have had a better shot at accomplishing their horribly scatterbrained but vaguely sensical plan. It's unlikely that they would have been able to overrun the entire Caucasus in 1942, because bad weather closed the Main Caucasus Ridge passes after September. But they might have held Tuapse and Ordzhonikidze and been able to parry any Soviet counterattack from the north. Not sure what would've happened in 1943.
At any rate it would have improved their chances of holding onto or interdicting a large area with valuable resources and potentially destroying other large Soviet formations into the bargain. That might not have meant conquest of the USSR, but it would have reduced Soviet ability to effectively counterattack to near zero. Oooor they might still have gotten pushed out of the Caucasus, just with more blood spilled. Their chances of success would've been better than they were, not certain.
and it talked about one final battle where the Americans and German regular soldiers fought against the SS together.
This sounds like a stupid question (which it probably is) but I'm trying to picture something.
If you are the SS, and you see American soldiers and German soldiers fighting on the same side, would that not make it incredibly obvious that the war is already over? By that point in time, it should have been common knowledge that the war was over regardless. If the German soldiers and American soldiers were wearing their respective uniforms (I'm guessing they were) then how could the SS not be able to tell just by looking at them what had happened? Literally, the only way the Germans and Americans could be fighting on the same side in the first place is if the war is over, so I don't get it.
and it talked about one final battle where the Americans and German regular soldiers fought against the SS together.
This sounds like a stupid question (which it probably is) but I'm trying to picture something.
If you are the SS, and you see American soldiers and German soldiers fighting on the same side, would that not make it incredibly obvious that the war is already over? By that point in time, it should have been common knowledge that the war was over regardless. If the German soldiers and American soldiers were wearing their respective uniforms (I'm guessing they were) then how could the SS not be able to tell just by looking at them what had happened? Literally, the only way the Germans and Americans could be fighting on the same side in the first place is if the war is over, so I don't get it.
In the beginning of his book The End, about the final months of the Second World War in Europe, Ian Kershaw describes the fall of Ansbach, in central Franconia.
On 18 April 1945, the Americans were within a few miles of the town. Many Nazi officials had already fled, but Ansbach's defenses, such as they were, remained in the hands of Oberst Dr. Ernst Meyer of the Luftwaffe, who refused to stand down. So, in order to aid the incoming Americans, a nineteen-year-old theology student, Robert Limpert - who had distributed some leaflets calling for the town's surrender earlier in the month - cut some telephone wires. He thought they connected Meyer's base to the Wehrmacht forces outside. They did not. But the act of sabotage was witnessed by some Hitlerjugend members, who informed on him. Limpert was arrested at his home almost immediately, and quickly processed by the civil authorities. Meyer personally oversaw a sham "trial" by tribunal that lasted a few minutes, and then sentenced him to be executed by hanging immediately.
Limpert managed to break free and run for it, but the police gave chase and caught him within a hundred meters. They dragged him back through the crowd to the noose at the gate of the Rathaus. Not a single person lifted a finger in his defense. Quite the opposite: he was beaten bodily by some of the crowd members before his hanging. In one last act of incompetence, the hangman's noose broke, but Meyer's goons fashioned a new one. Robert Limpert was executed in the early afternoon of 18 April, and Meyer ordered his body to hang "until it stinks". It was still hanging there, four hours later, when the Americans showed up. Meyer himself had already fled, along with the rest of the Wehrmacht. The Americans cut his body down and treated it with the respect it deserved.
Not a single person in Ansbach did a single thing to resist this last, most pointless vile act of the Nazi regime in their town. They knew the Americans were at the gates. The policemen might have delayed in arresting Limpert; they did not. The civil authorities might have procrastinated; instead, they cooperated with Meyer. The townsfolk might have hidden Limpert, or not informed on him; instead, they cooperated with the police and beat him half to death before his hanging.
The entirety of the Nazi state and society kept trying to function and resist until the bitter end. And if ordinary Germans were willing to act like good citizens of Hitler's Reich up to the point where the Allied soldiers were physically in their midst, you can imagine how ready the SS diehards were to fight. The unique part about the Battle of Schloß Itter (a relatively brief, if intense and undeniably weird, affair) wasn't that the SS continued to attack long after the war was blatantly, obviously lost. It was that some Wehrmacht troops, in contradistinction to basically the entire rest of the German military, were willing to recognize reality (and a sense of basic human decency) and protect the denizens of the Itter concentration camp and fight alongside the Americans.
and it talked about one final battle where the Americans and German regular soldiers fought against the SS together.
This sounds like a stupid question (which it probably is) but I'm trying to picture something.
If you are the SS, and you see American soldiers and German soldiers fighting on the same side, would that not make it incredibly obvious that the war is already over? By that point in time, it should have been common knowledge that the war was over regardless. If the German soldiers and American soldiers were wearing their respective uniforms (I'm guessing they were) then how could the SS not be able to tell just by looking at them what had happened? Literally, the only way the Germans and Americans could be fighting on the same side in the first place is if the war is over, so I don't get it.
He was taken to Major Josef Gangl, commander of the remains of a unit of Wehrmacht soldiers who had defied an order to retreat and instead thrown in with the local resistance, being made its head.
Gangl sought to maintain his unit's position in the town to protect local residents from SS reprisals. Nazi loyalists would shoot at any window displaying either a white- or Austrian flag, and would summarily execute males as possible deserters. Gangl's hopes were pinned on the Americans reaching Wörgl promptly and surrendering to them.[22] Instead, he would now have to approach them under a white flag to ask for their help.
Around the same time, a reconnaissance unit of four Sherman tanks of the 23rd Tank Battalion, 12th Armored Division of the US XXI Corps, under the command of Captain Lee, had reached Kufstein, Austria, 13 km (8 mi) to the north. There, in the town square, it idled while waiting for the 12th to be relieved by the 36th Infantry Division. Asked to provide relief by Gangl, Lee did not hesitate, volunteering to lead the rescue mission and immediately earning permission from his HQ.
Basically, this battle - and a film is supposedly coming out this year, although it seems likely it's been pushed back, unless it's being released over Christmas - was a freak occurrence. The SS commandant abandoned a bunch of high-profile prisoners because he feared for his life; those prisoners then took over the prison, with a few friendly former guards staying on to help. The prisoners also attempted to contact the Americans, but ended up in contact with the Austrian anti-Nazi resistance instead.
The head of the local resistance group was a Wehrmacht officer, Major Josef Gangl. His troops had realised the war was lost, weren't fans in the first place, and had refused to evacuate to Germany. Due to his military experience, the resistance put him in charge, and his main job was to defend Austrian civilians against SS reprisals. As soon as he discovered the existence of a prison full of French elites nearby, he realised it would be a prime target for the SS - mopping up their own mess and eliminating witnesses before the end - and both took off to protect the French and reached out to the Americans for help.
The Americans realised the same thing Gangl had, and also rushed to help. By this point, some of the remaining SS in the area had launched an attack on Castle Itter, and Gangl and his troops fought alongside the French POWs, and even a few remaining SS guards, until the Americans arrived to relieve them.
Gangl died in the defence, and is considered a national hero in Austria. He took a fatal bullet shielding former French Prime Minister Reynaud; the guy who promoted De Gaulle to general and made him a cabinet minister in 1940. Gangl has a street named after him in Worgl, the nearby Austrian town he was defending from the SS. I presume the only reason his corpse wasn't presented with numerous medals was because no one knew what medals to give a German soldier fighting for the Austrian resistance alongside American soldiers who saved a French Prime Minister's life.
As for your question of why the SS a would fight if the war was over...
which naturally revolves around the question that still remains unasked . Why the SS themselves left the camps open for perusal , so that the Allies would see them Jews , with all bones sticking out in their totally starved bodies ? Powerful images indeed , Erhard Milch , the Luftwaffe Marshall surrendered to a Lord Roberts , the Brigadier general commanding a 2nd British Commando , possibly a large special operations unit or something and Lord Roberts had just seen Dachau or some other place . The Brit calmly received the Marshall's baton , in strict accordance to the protocols military etiquette . Then broke it on Milch's head . Which naturally gets better as Milch was famous for survival in Nazi Germany despite his enemies "proving" he was a Jew and Goering bombastically declaring , as the head of Luftwaffe , ı think Gestapo at the time and possibly Prussia , that it's Goering who decides who's a Jew and who is not .
as for the camp , it might be related to discreet knowledge of Patton's raid on some camp , to save his son-in-law in early '45 . Raid going good and possibly would go bad only after the American tanks accidentally blew up a truck full of nurses . So , Germans apparently arranged a little thing with their reported super-panzers and the attack on the American task force was the only time the survivors ever saw Germans fighting in the way they were supposed to be fighting . But before that , the tanks had made it to the camp and were forced to stop shelling the Serbian PoWs by an American delegation . Which included Patton's son-in-law . Then some solitary guy rose from the grass in an uniform no one could tell and shot Patton's son-in-law in the groin . Barely survived by attention of the said Serbians with their highly qualified surgeon carrying out a fast operation in American wrecked buildings . Had Patton not been that embrassed , the whole 9th Air Force would napalm the whole region out of existance . And the French were indeed angry in 1945 .
There is a persistent myth that German was almost made the official language of the United States in the 1790s but lost by a single vote. A similar myth has been advanced for an official language of Pennsylvania vote. Neither is correct; the United States has no official language, as you know. They both appear to be based on a petition from 1795 from some German-speaking people living in Virginia (of all places), which was made to Congress on behalf of those German-speakers who did not understand English and wished for an official German-language translation of the Constitution. Congress debated the matter but ultimately did not include an official translation in any bill. Hence the no. (An author named Löher apparently made many fanciful exaggerations to the story of the vote, adding in a role for Speaker Muhlenberg, which spawned the official language myth.)
Realistically, the maximum proportion of Germans in any of the Thirteen Colonies was about 30% (Pennsylvania), and in the other colonies the population dropped off rather sharply from there. Although German immigration increased in the nineteenth century, and resulted in the heavily-German-populated Upper Midwest and Dakotas, by then the English-speaking population of the US was even larger and German continued to recede into the distance. Some municipalities maintained German-language media (including the Deitsch Eck, or '[Pennsylvania] German Corner', in the Allentown, PA, newspaper The Morning Call). There are some reports of some state documents being provided in German in places like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, although I myself haven't come across any proof of that. There's a sharp contrast to Spanish in modern America; documents in Spanish are readily available from both federal and state governments in many locations, and dual-sided English/Spanish documents are not uncommon.
The tiny bit of "yes" comes from the fact that it was a minority language with numerous speakers and was often viewed with the same hysteria that many Americans reserve for Spanish now. There are many accounts of WASP hand-wringing from the 1750s and onward about the fantastic number of Dutchmen in nearly every county that would allegedly swamp Pennsylvania with foreigners. Obviously didn't happen.
Literally, every single American born person of Latin American decent that I personally know is a native English speaker. Only the immigrants are native Spanish speakers, and in my experience, the majority of them attempt to learn English (and successfully do). The idea that "Spanish will eventually take over English." is laughable IMO. America becoming browner is one thing, but Spanish isn't 'taking over' in the long term.
Although German immigration increased in the nineteenth century, and resulted in the heavily-German-populated Upper Midwest and Dakotas, by then the English-speaking population of the US was even larger and German continued to recede into the distance.
What factors were ensuring it was becoming less prominent? The proportion of German-speaking immigrants being much lower (compared to the current situation in US Southwest) than the established English-speakers?
I'd imagine that Germany uniting as a sort of promised land helped stem the tide. And than two world wars made being German highly unpopular. The same thing that happened in parts of Europe.
What factors were ensuring it was becoming less prominent? The proportion of German-speaking immigrants being much lower (compared to the current situation in US Southwest) than the established English-speakers?
I'd imagine that Germany uniting as a sort of promised land helped stem the tide. And than two world wars made being German highly unpopular. The same thing that happened in parts of Europe.
More or less. German immigration dried up between 1800 and 1820, but started to climb again starting in the 1830s to a peak of a third of all immigrants to the US from 1850 to 1869. By then, however, many of the older German communities had lost a lot of members to Anglicization and internal migration. While the wave of the 1850s and 1860s certainly introduced a lot of native German-speakers to the Midwest and Upper Midwest, the Pennsylvania German community had shrunk dramatically. From what I understand, there were a few things that prevented the new German speakers from moving in near the old ones. The first was the American government's system of land appropriation and homestead creation, which drew millions of people west away from the old heartland around York, Lancaster, Reading, and Allentown. A second was the fact that a lot of these Germans came from different places; the OG Pennsylvania Germans were mostly Rhinelanders, but the new wave included South Germans and Prussians. They didn't really have that much affinity with each other.
Immigration from Germany didn't shrink much in absolute terms after 1860, and actually skyrocketed in absolute terms in the 1880s, but it steadily shrank as a proportion of overall immigration to the US over the next several decades. While the immediate aftermath of German unification may have had some effect slowing down German migration, what seems more likely is that it took some decades for Germans in the Kaiserreich to start to enjoy the technological and economic benefits of the Second Industrial Revolution there. Once Germany started to seem like a place worth staying, people mostly stayed there - with hiccups for the First World War and Second World War, a mild increase in the proportion of German immigrants as a whole in the 1930s due to the imposition of quotas on other groups, and a significant increase in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and extending into the 1950s.
Some historians date the decline in German as a spoken language in America to the First World War, and there's a decent amount of anecdotal evidence for that, but realistically Germans, like most immigrant communities, started to learn English in successive generations as they set down roots in the new country. The American government never felt significant pressure to adopt German as an alternative language. The German immigrant community had some transient political muscle in the 1860s, but it was mostly personality-based (and Civil War-based), it didn't significantly outweigh, say, the Irish immigrant community, and it rapidly disappeared at the end of the war.
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