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Internment of German resident aliens and German-American citizens occurred in the United States during the periods of World War I and World War II. During World War II, the legal basis for this detention was under Presidential Proclamation 2526 , made by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act .
German-Americans were the largest ethnic contingent to fight for the Union in the American Civil War [citation needed]. More than 200,000 native-born Germans, along with another 250,000 1st-generation German-Americans, served in the Union Army, notably from New York, Wisconsin, and Ohio. Several thousand also fought for the Confederacy.
Questions of German American loyalty increased due to events like the German bombing of Black Tom island [98] and the U.S. entering World War I, many German Americans were arrested for refusing allegiance to the U.S. [99] War hysteria led to the removal of German names in public, names of things such as streets, [100] and businesses. [101]
Hostilities ended six months after the United States saw its first action in World War I, and only a relatively small number of German prisoners of war reached the U.S. [1] Many prisoners were German sailors caught in port by U.S. forces far away from the European battlefield. [2]
Robert Paul Prager (February 28, 1888 – April 5, 1918) was a German immigrant who was lynched in the United States during World War I as a result of anti-German sentiment. He worked as a baker in southern Illinois and then as a laborer in a coal mine, settling in Collinsville, a center of mining.
Gustav Tafel – colonel in the Union Army during the American Civil War; Stephen J. Townsend – U.S. Army general, served with the 10th Mountain Division during the war in Afghanistan; born in (West) Germany [503] Max Weber – brigadier general in the Union army during the American Civil War; [504]
During the French and Indian War in 1756, Great Britain utilized them by forming the Royal American Regiment, whose enlisted men were principally German colonists. [77] Other Germans immigrated then, including Frederick, Baron de Weissenfels , who settled in New York as a British officer.
German Americans who had fluent German language skills were an important asset to wartime intelligence, and they served as translators and as spies for the United States. [86] The war evoked strong pro-American patriotic sentiments among German Americans, few of whom by then had contacts with distant relatives in the old country. [87] [88] [89]