Milwaukee, in particular, was the beating heart of Wisconsin’s Deutschtum (Germanness). There were Protestants and Catholics, Jews, freethinkers, and socialists of various stripes. The Badger State was home to people from all the German-speaking parts of Europe, from Pomerania to Austria. Roughly forty percent of the state’s 1930 population was either German born or first generation German-American. In the early twentieth century, Wisconsin was perhaps the most German of all the American states. The result was the darkest period in the history of Wisconsin’s most prominent ethnic group. The German-American Bund, a fascist organization inspired by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party in Germany, hoped to convert their ethnic brethren in America to the Nazi cause. These threats came not from outside the German community, but from within. One Milwaukee businessman received an anonymous postcard with a picture of an exploding cannon on the front, and on the reverse was written: “When you ask for ads again look this over carefully.” A woman got a letter warning her to be careful about her public utterances or her relatives back in Europe “would have to suffer” for them.
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