#30
Post
by Sam Wren » 03 Oct 2014, 05:09
I think the Germans viewed their fellow soldiers with Anglo-Celtic names the same way that we Americans viewed our General Eisenhower, Admiral Nimitz and others of German and Italian descent, especially if they had been born in Germany and their family had been present for at least a few generations, spoke German and/or the local dialect with no accent and acted German.
To me it is a bit puzzling the surprise that there were German soldiers with English names. When most people think of immigration during the last several centuries, they generally think of the large waves of European immigration to North America and South America, but there are myriads of reasons that one might choose to move to another country whether it be for employment, education, love, religion, or adventure and, while I have been unable to unearth any data on immigration numbers between European countries prior to WWII, my first instinct would not be to think that encountering people with foreign surnames would be an ultra-rarity in pre-war Europe. Just off the top of my head I can think of officers in the Wehrmacht who were to my knowledge German-born (not foreign volunteers) with Italian, French and Swedish surnames. There are others that I know of with Hungarian, Russian and Rumanian surnames but these are all Volksdeutsch (which is a different can of worms). But perhaps, being American living in Texas where large German & Moravian communities settled during the 19th century, my viewpoint is skewed by the overabundance of people who do not have Anglo-Celtic surnames.
