War fever created widespread hostility towards German Canadians and German-Canadian culture.
First World War
Before and during World War I, there was some anti-German sentiment in the Waterloo County area and some cultural sanctions on the community, primarily in Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener). Mennonites in the area were pacifist and so not would not enlist. Also, some had immigrated from Germany and so found it morally difficult to fight against a country that was a significant part of their heritage. Anti-German sentiment that precipitated the Berlin to Kitchener name change in 1916. The city was named after Lord Kitchener, who was famously pictured on the " Lord Kitchener Wants You" recruiting posters.
Several streets in Toronto that had previously been named for Liszt, Humboldt, Schiller, Bismarck, etc. were changed to names with strong British associations, such as Balmoral. There were anti-German riots in Victoria and in Calgary during the first years of the war.
News reports from Waterloo County, Ontario, indicate "A Lutheran minister was pulled out of his house... he was dragged through the streets. German clubs were ransacked through the course of the war. It was just a really nasty time period." That sentiment was the primary reason for the 1916 Berlin to Kitchener name change in Waterloo County. A document in the Archives of Canada makes the following comment: "Although ludicrous to modern eyes, the whole issue of a name for Berlin highlights the effects that fear, hatred and nationalism can have upon a society in the face of war."
Across Canada, internment camps opened in 1915 and 8,579 "enemy aliens" were held there until the end of the war. Many were German-speaking immigrants from Austria, Hungary, Germany, and Ukraine. Only 3,138 were classed as prisoners of war; the rest were civilians.
Second World War and later
The Second World War saw a renewal of anti-German sentiment in Canada. Under the War Measures Act, some 26 prisoner-of-war camps opened and interned those who had been born in Germany, Italy, and particularly in Japan if they were deemed to be "enemy aliens". For Germans, that applied especially to single males who had some association with the Nazi Party of Canada. No compensation was paid to them after the war. In Ontario, the largest internment centre for German Canadians was at Camp Petawawa, which housed 750 who had been born in Germany and Austria.
Between 1945 and 1994, some 400,000 German-speaking immigrants arrived in Canada; approximately 270,000 of these arrived by the early 1960s. Around a third of postwar German immigrants were from various parts of Eastern Europe and formerly German or German-ruled territories which fell outside of the boundaries of the two postwar German states. Migration followed a sponsorship system predominantly led by churches, leading to an influx of German immigrants to existing German neighbourhoods in cities like Toronto, Vancouver, and Winnipeg, as well as rural townships in the Prairies. Alexander Freund remarks that "for postwar Canadians [...] the great influx of German-speaking immigrants after the war posed, at least potentially, a personal confrontation with the recent past that could be difficult to navigate." There were also tensions between Germans and other European immigrants, some of whom had suffered under German occupation in Europe. Postwar Canadians "did not distinguish between Germans and Nazis", and this perspective was bolstered by decades of American war films which portrayed Germans in an unsympathetic light. Pressure increased on Germans to assimilate. German-Canadians began to create advocacy organizations to promote their interests, such as the Trans-Canada Alliance for German Canadians, which was founded in 1951 by social democrats but was soon taken over by right-wing elements of the German community.
Going into the 1960s, Canadian nationalism and ethnic politics revolved increasingly around the Anglophone-Francophone divide, leaving little place for other groups, including the Germans. As the war became more distant, the Canadian national narrative, guided by historians, journalists, and veterans' organizations, was formed with the exclusion of German or other inter-cultural perspectives on the war, emphasizing instead themes of heroism and sacrifice by Canadian soldiers. Some German-Canadians "withdrew into a 'culture of grievance.'" As time went on, Canadian perspectives broadened around controversial Allied actions such as the bombing of Dresden, which some German-Canadians found encouraging.
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