WI: What will Hitler view on the Amish?

Ok, so if Seelöwe and Barbarossa are successful, the Germans invaded America. Meanwhile in the Pennsylvania countryside the Wehrmacht units began to see The Amish, speaking similar German, riding buggies and doing 18th century life. What will they do to the Amish?

No Racism or Nazism intended in this thread, Be nice
 
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Ok, so if Seelöwe and Barbarossa are successful, the Germans invaded America. Meanwhile in the Pennsylvania countryside the Wehrmacht units began to see The Amish, speaking similar German, riding buggies and doing 18th century life. What will they do to the Amish?

No Racism or Nazism intended in this thread, Be nice

:rolleyes::eek::eek::eek:
 

Cook

Banned
They would be persecuted. There was no religious freedom in the Third Reich, persecution of the churches became more pronounced from 1938 onwards and was directed at the minority, and therefore more vulnerable, denominations most.

The Amish are pacifists, so would be in a similar situation to the Seventh Day Adventists with regards to compulsory military service in the Reich.

Forcing Amish children to attend Hitler Youth Camps, where they would be indoctrinated against their faith would also be a significant issue.
 
Ok, so if Seelöwe and Barbarossa are successful, the Germans invaded America. Meanwhile in the Pennsylvania countryside the Wehrmacht units began to see The Amish, speaking similar German, riding buggies and doing 18th century life. What will they do to the Amish?

No Racism or Nazism intended in this thread, Be nice

A little suggestion, on this site any thread suggesting a successful Sea Lion (often referred to as the pinned that shall not be named :D) should go in ASB. The responses to your suggestion have been quite polite so far but there are some members who will completely tear your suggestion to pieces.

It's a mistake most of us made when we joined the site :eek:
 
The Amish would end up like all the other pacifist groups like Jehova's Witnesses and such did under the Nazis: sent to the gas chambers.
 
A little suggestion, on this site any thread suggesting a successful Sea Lion (often referred to as the pinned that shall not be named :D) should go in ASB. The responses to your suggestion have been quite polite so far but there are some members who will completely tear your suggestion to pieces.

It's a mistake most of us made when we joined the site :eek:

The point of his exercise being, not on how the Germans won the war, but how they would treat the Amish.
 
The point of his exercise being, not on how the Germans won the war, but how they would treat the Amish.

Well, how you win a war generally impacts how you treat conquered peoples. The more places you have to handle, the harder it is to keep everyone oppressed. If we try and make ASB "realistic", the Nazis could very well try and set up puppet governments in America that keeps the area a non-threat but preserves it as a market and source of goods. In that scenario, they might care little for some small religious group in the middle of nowhere - they would have more important stuff to handle colonizing east europe.

But yes, in an ideal (for Hitler) world of absolute power, where practicality does not enter the equation, byebye amish.
 
The Amish would refuse to serve the Third Reich due to their belief in total no violence. They would've ended up in concentration camps much like the Jehovah Witnesses.
 
Yes, this is almost totally ASB, but the poster deserves an answer. I suspect, initially, the Amish and other related fringe religious groups like Mennonites would be ignored, and actually their German heritage might fool the Germans to initially believe they might be sympathetic to the occupation. However, as others have said, once the Nazis realize that the Amish have strong beliefs regarding pacificism and non-participation in the broader culture, they will be persecuted and eventually eliminated. Of course, a lot has to do with whether or not the USA is to be completely occupied and nazified like Poland or treated more like Vichy France - allowed a fair degree of self government in the small stuff. In the first case, the Amish have no chance. In the second case, if their pacifism also means they do not resist German authority, they may stay under the radar until the Great Chiropterans from Mars arrive and destroy all humanity.
 

DISSIDENT

Banned
However they win, I would guess you have a resisted invasion of the US mainland by German, Japanese and Italian armed forces, prolonged partisan resistance and an attempt by FDR and Truman to hold the line and repel the invasion that is somehow overwhelmed and finally they are killed in the invasion and with the other allies out of commision, US resistance disintegrates to the local level.

I guess there would probably be some kind of Vichy type state, maybe centered in Virginia or somewhere similarly wealthy but bigoted in its cultural attitudes at the time to Nazi Germany. Maybe put Charles Lindbergh or Henry Ford in as the local Marshall Petain equivalent. Have them say America should mind its own business and deal with its internal social, economic and...ethnic problems, stay out of the affairs of Europe and its wars, focus on restoring prosperity and say that the Nazis have brought order to Europe and it would be better to coexist with them than wage a pointless and economically wasteful war that costs American lives and jobs.

The new Fairfax United States we shall call it relegalises the German American Bund, allows Nazi warships to dock in US ports and SS recruitment on US soil as a gesture of "reconciliation and goodwill" to the Third Reich. Nazi troops directly occupy portions of the Northeast but are reduced in number not long after the neutered Axis ally under Lindy or Ford is put in power.

In Pennsylvania Amish communities, Nazi racial hygenicists are sent by the SS and Heinrich Himmler to ascertain the state of their Volkisch kin in America.

The SS officers discretely sent over conclude that though they are ethnic Germans, pure in their Aryan blood, not only does their religion and lifestyle, like other pacifist religious denominations in Germany proper, make them difficult if not impossible to integrate into the Third Reich, but they're...ahem...a little bit...too pure...in their Aryan breeding. At least in the isolated Amish communities in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio they are sent to inspect. In fact they are so pure in their Aryan breeding that at least the Amish they meet with are inbred.

Hitler pawns off the decision on Heydrich, his recently appointed new successor after Goering got a little bit ridiculous and Hess lost his mind and had to be removed though was not killed, who wants to gas them, but decides that it would violate the carefully created illusion of sovereignity he thinks should be cultivated in Fairfax America.

Hitler does not care really, being more concerned with redesigning Berlin, settling ethnic Germans in fortified settlement compounds in the Ukraine, making nice with recently recrowned British sovereign Edward the Eighth, and walking Blondi in the Berchtsgaden, thus the Amish Question is left to Lucky Lindy or Henry Ford, who does the same thing all Americans do with the Amish really...

Ignore them, occasionally buy their handicrafts and drive by them on the road as they ride by you in their horse and buggy and briefly stare, wondering how anyone could live like that and then keep driving.

Though, as American Jews are ghettoized, sterilized and sometimes killed by the new pro-Nazi government, the ancestors of a certain Al Yankovic are killed in 1949 and later so are the ancestors of a certain rap artist named Coolio during the Negro Relocation in the early 1950s, the song "Amish Paradise" is never recorded.
 
Maybe not. Theyre some of thevery few in america who self identtify as German....


Remember that "Aryan" wasn't exactly synonymous with German. Even though the Amish are an isolated community, technically close to "pure" German from the perspective of the Nazis' "Master Race" spiel, that doesn't mean the Nazis can't find some reason to invalidate them. Maybe they'll find them to be too "inbred" and thus "defective" - They'd compare them to the more numerous, mainstream white people of the Midwest and beyond, who might have ancestry from multiple European ethnic groups but still primarily "Nordic" ones (German, Dutch, Scandinavian, English). There are also stories in Pennsylvania Dutch Country families of Jewish and American Indian ancestors, so maybe the Nazis would latch on to that.
 

sharlin

Banned
In short "Breathe in....don't breath out. NEXT!" would be the answer to the Amish under Hitler and co.
 
Not sure how much violence there will be after the Nazis have defeated the armies of all their enemies, conquered all their enemies, and supressed all political/racial dissidents (which will be what they need to adequately win WWII.) There won't be much of anything else left standing in the world, but not an awful lot of enemies of the state to eliminate.

EDIT: That said, if the Amish oppose the Nazis for their massive butcher's bill (far from impossible), they get wiped out along with the rest of the Jews, lefties, gypsies, slavs...
 
They would be persecuted. There was no religious freedom in the Third Reich, persecution of the churches became more pronounced from 1938 onwards and was directed at the minority, and therefore more vulnerable, denominations most.

The Amish are pacifists, so would be in a similar situation to the Seventh Day Adventists with regards to compulsory military service in the Reich.

Forcing Amish children to attend Hitler Youth Camps, where they would be indoctrinated against their faith would also be a significant issue.

I think it'd largely depend on the individuals, for the most part. Someone who tows the line is probably going to last much longer than someone who chooses to stand up and say 'No!'(or Nein! as the case may be.).
In any case though, pa_dutch does have a point, though: if any Amish person in question happens to have Jewish, or other "non-Aryan" lineage in his family, it might not matter one bit to the SS, sick bastards they all were(the SS).
 
For what it's worth Himmler and the SS were really obsessed with recollecting, as it were, German blood that they considered 'lost'. It was part of the rationale behind the massive recruitment of foreigners into the SS. Nazi idea of Aryan wasn't really that exclusive, it was pretty much blonde just Blonde + Not Jewish, and if you were a blonde Slav it was assumed you were actually somehow a long lost treasure trove of good German breeding material that the Poles had no right to raise as one of their own. It would be like a more sane ideology collecting weapons from those they conquered, because the SS really believed 'German blood' was some kind of socio-political resource that had to be taken away from other nations. So, the Nazis being the weirdoes they were, I wouldn't put it past them that they might waste huge time and resources trying to say, brainwash Amish kids and bundle them away to the nearest Lebensborn camp.
 
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