ACH: German-American mafia

[JoeMulk]

How could you get a timeline where there ends up being a significant German-American organized crime presence in the US?

[Shaby]

Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Goebbels exhiled to USA after abortive Putcsh, perhaps? Their rule in Germany had some major elements of organized crime, so they could findvthemselves a niche.

[Martinus Paduei]

A possible big and ugly conflict with the Jewish and Black organized crime figures of the period if Hitler has the same opinions he had in OTL.

[azander12]

Originally Posted by Shaby

Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Goebbels exhiled to USA after abortive Putcsh, perhaps? Their rule in Germany had some major elements of organized crime, so they could findvthemselves a niche.

That might be interesting, especially if they are exiled after they attempt a counter-revolution against a Spartacist government in Germany. It would be really interesting for a whole bunch of anti-communist Germans to flee to the United States, where they link up with the German community there. They end up getting into organized crime as a means of funding resistance to the Communists, kind of like what the Tamil Tigers and elements of the IRA did.

[The Vulture]

I suppose it's possible for some of the German-American communities to organize their own Ringvereine during the Depression or Prohibition (IMO, really the best time for such a formation) similar to the ones operating in Weimar Germany until they got shut down by the Nazis. It'd probably work best in cities with a German community like Saint Louis or Milwaukee.

Problem is they'd be coming up against organized, already established groups like the American Mafia or Jewish gangs. Best case scenario is that they end up running franchises or simply being muscle for one of the established gangs.

[Kome]

Mhmm, most of the German immigrants went into rural communities and farming iirc. Not exactly the ideal environment for organized crime. Although there's still a lot of German Americans in the cities so that wouldnt matter much i suppose.

Also it helps if there's a large history of organized crime in the Old Country for the immigrants to draw from.

[azander12]

Originally Posted by Kome

Mhmm, most of the German immigrants went into rural communities and farming iirc. Not exactly the ideal environment for organized crime. Although there's still a lot of German Americans in the cities so that wouldnt matter much i suppose.

Also it helps if there's a large history of organized crime in the Old Country for the immigrants to draw from.

The thing about rural communities is that they would be ideal for production of illegal alcohol. If you just put a still on a couple farms and use some excess grain, you'll be able to get some pretty significant production pretty quickly. If that is combined with muscle from ex-soldiers and anti-Communist exiles with a bone to pick and weapons training, they might be able to push out some of the Jewish and Italian gangs in the Midwest.

[The Vulture]

You might find this useful, though some of the conclusions reached are fallacious in the extreme.

[King Gorilla]

Originally Posted by Kome

Mhmm, most of the German immigrants went into rural communities and farming iirc. Not exactly the ideal environment for organized crime. Although there's still a lot of German Americans in the cities so that wouldnt matter much i suppose.

Also it helps if there's a large history of organized crime in the Old Country for the immigrants to draw from.

Not exactly. Most German immigrants probably ended up in rural areas, simply because during the era's of heavy german immigration, most americans lived and worked in rural areas. Nevertheless, Germans were by far the largest immigrant ethnic group in American history and there were large communities of Germans in pretty much every northern metro pole.

The biggest problem with a German Mafia, is that Germans were in many ways the model immigrant group. Their cultural values and customs tended to closely match those of mainstream Anglo-american culture, and consequently they could assimilate almost effortlessly into American society. There was little reason for organized German criminal gains to form and to be sustained by their respective communities.

[Wolfpaw]

That's almost impossible. Mafias spring up among groups that require protection due to disenfranchisement or outright negligence by local authorities. Since Germans rarely faced this sort of discrimination in the US (unless they were Catholic), the need for a "mafia" never emerged.

Sicilians and Jews, on the other hand, tended to bring mafia systems over from the Old Country and continue the practice here since they were minorities that tended to be targeted/exploited/ignored by the preexisting Irish city machines that bore no particular love for "sheenies" or "guineas."