German Veteran Emigrants and the Long First World War

The end of the Great War marked a watershed moment in the international migration of human beings. Nation-states, emboldened by their strengthened wartime authority, began controlling the movement of their citizens in unheard of ways. Restrictive immigration laws meant that people were no longer welcome where they once had been, and could less often choose where they wanted to live. My presentation advances the history of border-crossings by cross-pollinating two fields of history not currently linked: the history of emigration after the Great War, and the history of German Great War veterans. Historians of emigration have rarely singled out veterans in their studies, and historians of German veterans have neglected emigration as a response to war and post-war conditions. This neglect, in effect, cements the presumed bind between veterans and the nation-state for which they had fought, a link perpetuated by state-sponsored memorials and cemeteries.

This paper is about veterans who survived the war healthy enough to seek a new life outside Germany; men, in other words, whose response to war’s aftermath was flight. I argue that emigrating veterans’ experiences reveal the extent to which the German government—despite its recent defeat—manipulated the concept of nationalism to prevent its citizens from leaving. In the U.S., where the majority of interwar German travellers went, U.S. nationalism constituted a deadly weapon wielded against German veteran immigrants, effecting what Great War historians have called the “long First World War.” The history of German veterans who came to the United States lends support to what historian George L. Mosse controversially called the “war’s brutalizing effect.” In 1932, for example, German immigrant and veteran Richard Geiss was shot and killed by a Chicago policeman who was also a Great War veteran—on the U.S. side—but who also happened to be a German immigrant.