The New Berlin Sentinel was one of the first major American newspapers to editorialize against the Nazi Party. Even before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Sentinel had come to view the Nazis as a serious danger not only to the German people but to America too; Hitler’s infamous “Night Of The Long Knives” purge of the SA in June of 1934 only served to reinforce the paper’s anti-Nazi attitudes. In a blistering screed published the day after news of the purge broke, the Sentinel’s editorial staff denounced the Führer as “a maniacal thug” who would one day plunge the world into disaster if he were not swiftly removed from power.

By the time the Wehrmacht occupied Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten region in October of 1938, the Sentinel had become the German-American community’s most influential anti-Nazi media outlet. It also acted as a kind of bulletin board for New Berlin residents seeking to make it to Europe to join in the fight against fascism which was going on in on in Spain at the time. The paper’s classifieds section regularly carried half-page ads seeking to recruit able-bodied men to join the Von Steuben Brigade, a volunteer corps composed of New Berliners and other German-Americans who sought to fight the Third Reich by any way they could-- even if it was only by proxy against Hitler’s chief ally in Spain, General Francisco Franco.

Although its exploits have been somewhat obscured by the more famous legend of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the Von Steuben played a significant role in its own right in the struggle to thwart the Falangist takeover of Spain and the expansion of Fascist power in western Europe. Dolores Ibuarra, the intense orator and Republican fighter better known as “La Pasionara” by her admirers, once praised the men of the Von Steuben Brigade as “the finest part of the German soul and Germany’s last hope of redemption from Hitler’s evil.”

Naturally Hitler’s propaganda machine sought to demonize the men of the Von Steuben Brigade as turncoats; the mere existence of this volunteer unit was a slap in the face to the Nazis’ ideal of “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer”. How could Hitler legitimately claim to represent the soul of all Germanic people when thousands of men of German descent were willing to fight, and in some cases die, to thwart his ambitions for Europe and the rest of the world? Thus Joseph Goebbels, the Führer’s propaganda chief, went out of his way to disassociate the Von Steuben volunteers from what he considered to be “true Aryans” according to the warped Nazi perspective on racial and cultural identity.

 But the Von Steuben Brigade wasn’t deterred by Goebbels’ smear campaign; instead, they waged a counter-propaganda offensive which was designed to call attention to Hitler’s hypocrisies and highlight the failures of the Nazi regime in addressing Germany’s real and very persistent domestic troubles. The counter-propaganda blitz was the brainchild of the brigade’s second-in-command, a Cornell University literature major whose senior year thesis had been on the topic of the use of words as an instrument of war. His theory was that if he could get just a few soldiers on the Falangist/Nazi side to question what their leaders back in Berlin and Madrid were telling them about the war, it might give the Republican forces some breathing room to regroup their men and mount a new offensive which would disrupt the fascists’ timetable for completing their takeover of Spain.

Eager to strike a blow at the New Berlin Sentinel for the role it had played in helping to spawn the Von Steuben Brigade, Hitler made up his mind in November of 1938 to make use of Gestapo “black ops” field agents in the mid-western United States to attack the anti-Nazi paper’s offices in the hopes that such an attack would simultaneously injure the Steuben Brigade’s morale while at the same time teaching a grim lesson to those who had dared speak out against the Third Reich and (in his warped view)betraying the Germanic race. Posing as newly arrived Austrian immigrants, these agents were assigned to infiltrate the Sentinel staff and assassinate the editorial board, then blow up the paper’s offices and printing plant.

Unfortunately for the Führer, things started going awry for the would-be attackers almost as soon as they unpacked their bags at the safe house which was supposed to serve as their base of operations. First the U-boat which was supposed to have delivered their weapons to the United States sank in rough seas several hundred nautical miles south of the Azores. Then the agents discovered much of their data in regard to the layout of the Sentinel’s printing plant was riddled with inaccuracies. And when they finally did get weapons for carrying out their terrorist plot, at least a third of those weapons turned out to be defective. The would-be francs-tireurs accomplished little in their mission other than to end up getting arrested by the FBI on espionage charges and further stoke already intense anti-Nazi sentiment among
the citizens of New Berlin.

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By June of 1940, when the Sentinel had merged with its chief local competitor the Advocate, the question among German-Americans was less if America would join the war in Europe than when and how it would happen. Some argued that the United States should get into the fight immediately, insisting that the fall of France had made it imperative for Washington to act before Hitler had a chance to launch his long-threatened invasion of England and turn it into a base from which to attack the United States. Others, citing the fact that many of the inadequacies which had plagued the U.S. military at the time the Second World War broke out in 1939 had still not been completely remedied, felt America should hold off at least another six months before starting to prepare for a direct military showdown with the Third Reich. This debate raged almost nonstop on the streets of New Berlin and in the editorial pages of the city’s newspapers.

Around the same time that New Berliners were arguing over when and how the United States should enter the Second World War, another segment of American society was preparing to follow in the footsteps of the original Deutsche-Amerikaner Freikorps. In San Francisco and
Los Angeles, Japanese-Americans distressed about the takeover of their ancestral homeland by iron-fisted militarists and the brutal war those
militarists were waging against Japan’s neighbor China had taken it on themselves to organize a volunteer brigade to fight in China’s defense until the militarist regime had been vanquished. This group, calling itself the Japan Liberation Corps, was first organized in late June of 1940; right from the start the new group’s sponsors were very quick to acknowledge the DAF’s influence on their own activities. Encountering much of the same skepticism the original DAF volunteers had confronted a quarter-century earlier, the members of the JLC nonetheless worked tirelessly to prepare themselves for the day when they’d finally have the chance to put their beliefs into action on the battlefield.

 Not surprisingly, the news of the JLC’s establishment was greeted with a certain amount of disbelief and astonishment back in China. Neither Chinese Nationalist head of state Chiang Kai-Shek nor Chinese Communist guerilla leader Mao Zedong could fathom the idea of men of Japanese descent taking up arms against other Japanese men for the sake of China’s defense. But when General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, Chiang’s primary military advisor at the time, had a chance to see the volunteer corps for himself and speak to some of the men who belonged to it, he was duly convinced their desire to aid China in its hour of need was genuine and intense.

Another skeptic who became an advocate of the JLC was the founder of the legendary Flying Tigers fighter squadron, General Claire Lee Chennault. His initial reaction to the news of the group’s formation was that it had to be some kind of ruse cooked up by the notorious Kempeitai military secret police in an attempt to spread chaos and false information; when he met with the JLC’s founders, however, he began to rethink his stance on the organization, and he became a staunch believer in both the corps and its mission after two of its platoons braved withering Imperial Japanese Army machine gun fire to escort a shipment of vital supplies to an Allied airfield in southern China. Indeed, by the time the United States formally entered the Second World War in December of 1941 Chennault had become highly active in working to secure funds and equipment for the JLC.

 Just as the original Deutsche-Amerikaner Freikorps had been absorbed into the regular U.S. Army when America entered World War I, so too would the JLC become integrated into the regular U.S. armed forces following Roosevelt’s declaration of war on Japan and Hitler’s subsequent announcement of a state of war between the United States and Germany. By October of 1942, as U.S. Marines were clearing out the last pockets of IJA resistance at Guadalcanal, the War Department had begun preparations to fold the JLC into the Army ground units fighting under General Douglas MacArthur’s command in the South Pacific. Five months later Secretary of War Henry Stimson signed an executive order re-organizing the unit as the 422nd Regimental Combat team; throughout the rest of the Pacific war the 422nd would be at the forefront of the struggle to liberate the territories under Tokyo’s occupation. By the time of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, the 422nd had the third-highest overall number of citations and medals of any American ground unit in the Pacific theater.

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Once the United States officially entered the Second World War, it was just a matter of time before the alumni of the Von Steuben Brigade were absorbed into the regular U.S. armed forces. In a case of events coming full circle, the greatest portion of these men-- nearly half the Brigade’s old number --were recruited to serve in the ranks of the 22nd Infantry Division, the successor to the original Deutsche-Amerikaner Freikorps. The 22nd’s first major combat operation following Pearl Harbor was Operation Torch, the Allied landings in North Africa. Casualties were very light, consisting mostly of injuries sustained in accidents or as a result of rough seas, but the men of the 22nd had no illusions about what awaited them once the full power of the Wehrmacht was brought to bear against them.

And indeed, as the 22nd fought its way through the Sicilian and Italian campaigns losses began to mount to an extent where some men on Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower’s staff back in London were wondering if Hitler were singling the division out for annihilation as revenge for the part it had played in the Kaiser’s defeat back in the First World War. But none of the men who made up this new incarnation of the 22nd Infantry had any second thoughts about enlisting; in fact; in the entire course of America’s involvement in the Second World War the 22nd was the only division in the U.S. Army that never had any AWOL or desertion incidents.

In the Normandy invasion, the 22nd played a critical role in helping to secure a foothold for the Allied armies landing on the French coast. Once the Allies had solidified their beachhead, the 22nd and its various support detachments remained in the forefront of the Anglo-American advance through western Europe; when Allied land forces finally crossed the Rhine River in the spring of 1945 the 22nd Infantry was one of the first units to breach the Germans’ crumbling defenses in that sector. Had American forces in Germany not been ordered to halt on the banks of the Elbe in mid-April, it’s distinctly possible that the 22nd could have been in the vanguard of an Anglo-American push on Berlin in the last days of the Second World War.

The 22nd Infantry would remain in Germany on occupation for most of the first decade of the postwar era; they would then be stationed for a short time in Hawaii before being recalled to the U.S. mainland in 1957 and disbanded for good in 1960. As for the 422nd Regimental Combat Team, it was recalled Stateside immediately after the final Japanese surrender and re-designated the 19th Infantry Division, under which designation it would subsequently see action in the Korean War and be stationed in Italy as part of NATO before it too was eventually
disbanded.

Units like the 22nd Infantry and the 422nd RCT may seem like an anachronism in today’s ethnically integrated U.S. armed forces, but the role they played in shaping modern American history will never be forgotten.