Anti-German sentiment

[6] An official proclamation of 10 August 1914 required all German citizens to register their domiciles at the nearest police station and to notify authorities of any change of address.

[11] The German-speaking Amish and Mennonites were Christian pacifists so they could not enlist and the few who had immigrated from Germany (not born in Canada) could not morally fight against a country that was a significant part of their heritage.

But it's important to remember that Canada was a society in transition – the country had absorbed massive numbers of immigrants between 1896 and the First World War, proportionately more than at any other time in our history.

[16]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.

[23] 711 Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime in Europe were interned at Camp B70 in Ripples, New Brunswick at the request of Winston Churchill, who worried that there could be German spies among their numbers.

[29] These acts were both exploited and exaggerated by the governments of the Allied Powers, who produced atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Germans as gorilla-like Huns who were all racially inclined to sadism and violence.

It is believed by historian Antony Beevor that "a 'high proportion' of at least 15 million women who lived in the Soviet zone or were expelled from Germany's eastern provinces were raped.

According to Alfred Vagts "The Battle of Dorking": appeared first in Blackwood's Magazine in the summer of 1871, at a time when the German Crown Prince and his English wife [the daughter of Queen Victoria] were visiting England.

Impressed by the late German victories, the author, a Colonel Chesney, who remained anonymous for some time, told the story of how England, in 1875, would be induced by an insurrection of the natives in India, disturbances in Ireland, and a conflict with the United States threatening Canadian security, to employ her navy and standing army far from her own shores; in spite of this dangerous position England, on account of a quarrel with Germany over Denmark, would declare war on Germany.

[46]In 1894, the newspaper publisher Lord Alfred Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Northcliffe commissioned author William Le Queux to write the serial novel The Great War in England in 1897, which featured France and Russia combining their forces in an attempt to crush Britain.

Now, Harmsworth used his newspapers the "Daily Mail" and "The Times" to denounce Berlin, inducing an atmosphere of paranoia, mass hysteria and Germanophobia that would reach their climax in the Naval Scare of 1908–09.

Most of these were found to be originating from Germany, whose government had introduced a protectionist policy to legally prohibit the import of goods in order to build up domestic industry (Merchandise Marks Act – Oxford University Press).

Joseph Bannister believed that German residents of Britain were mostly "gambling-house keepers, hotel-porters, barbers, 'bullies', runaway conscripts, bath-attenders, street musicians, criminals, bakers, socialists, cheap clerks, etc.".

[51] Following the signing of the Entente Cordiale alliance in 1904 between the United Kingdom and France, official relationships cooled, as did popular attitudes towards Germany and German residents in Britain.

[55] Most of these ideas about German-Jewish conspiracies originated from right-wing figures such as Arnold White, Hilaire Belloc, and Leo Maxse, the latter using his publication the National Review to spread them.

[57] In Great Britain, anti-German feeling led to infrequent rioting, assaults on suspected Germans and the looting of businesses owned by people with German-sounding names, occasionally even taking on an antisemitic tone.

[I]t is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. ...

There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil!

A vocal source of criticism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson's "anti-hyphen" ideology and particularly to their demands for "100% Americanism" came, quite understandably, from America's enormous number of White ethnic immigrants and their descendants.

Criticism from these circles occasionally argued that "100% Americanism" really meant Anglophilia and a Special Relationship with the British Empire, as particularly demonstrated by demands for tolerating only the English language in the United States.

In a letter published on 16 July 1916 in the Minneapolis Journal, Edward Goldbeck, a member of Minnesota's traditionally very large German-American community, sarcastically announced that his people would "abandon the hyphen", as soon as English-Americans did so.

In Nashville, Tennessee, Luke Lea, the publisher of The Tennessean, together with "political associates", "conspired unsuccessfully to have the German-born Major Stahlman declared an "alien enemy" after World War I began.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the offices of a pro-German socialist newspaper, the Philadelphia Tageblatt, were visited by federal agents after war broke out to investigate the citizenship status of its staff[81] and would later be raided by federal agents under the powers of the Espionage Act of 1917, and six members of its organization would eventually be arrested for violations of the Espionage Act among other charges after publishing a number of pieces of pro-German propaganda.

[106][107][108] The October 1939 seizure by the German pocket battleship Deutschland of the US freighter SS City of Flint, as it had 4000 tons of oil for Britain on board, provoked much anti-German sentiment in the US.

Postwar Era reconciliation was followed by the beginning of the Cold War, which led to Great Britain and West Germany both joining the NATO military alliance against and the Warsaw Pact.

Basil's panicked and offensive behaviour highlighted outdated British attitudes, with series co-creator John Cleese aiming to mock those clinging to the past rather than criticize Germans.

[156] A sociological study from 1998 showed that still two generations after it had ended, World War II remained influential, and "present-day parents and young people are negatively biased against Germany.

[172][173] A poll in 2012 by VPRC noted the existence of an anti-German sentiment in Greece, and that the majority of the respondents connected Germany with negative notions such as "Hitler", "Nazism" and "3rd Reich".

In August 2012, Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti warned that escalating arguments over how to resolve the Euro debt crisis are turning countries against each other and threatening to rip Europe apart.

Resentment in Italy is growing against Germany, the European Union and chancellor Merkel, he said, adding that "the pressures already bear the traits of a psychological break-up of Europe".