The German-speaking Immigrant Experience in Utah

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 52, 1984, No. 4

The German-speaking Immigrant Experience in Utah

BY ALLAN KENT POWELL

IN EARLY SPRING 1776 The Lossberg Regiment left the army garrison at Rinteln, a German town on the Weser River fifteen miles downstream from Hameln of Pied Piper fame. Included in the ranks of this regiment of Hessian mercenaries was Anton John Watermann, a twenty-year-old weaver born near the Weser River village of Fischbeck.

Sailing first to Portsmouth, England, Watermann and his comrades left for the New World on May 6, 1776, and landed at Staten Island, New York, on August 15 just in time to take part with the English against the American rebels in the Battle of Long Island. Successful in the Long Island fight, the battle of White Plains, and the capture of Fort Washington, the Lossberg Regiment was sent to Newport, Rhode Island, on December 8, 1776. Shortly after his arrival in Rhode Island, Watermann deserted the English forces, escaping north into Massachusetts where the Norton town records for February 15, 1777, reveal that he and Hannah Newland petitioned for permission to marry. Forbidden to do so by the town selectmen, apparently because of the German's questionable background, the young couple left Norton and were married in an unknown location. After establishing residence in North Providence, Rhode Island, Watermann joined Capt. Stephen Olney's company of volunteers and fought against his former comrades in an unsuccessful attempt to drive the British and the hired Hessian soldiers from Rhode Island. Fearful that his status as a deserter might be discovered, Watermann changed his name to John Christian Burgess and continued to serve as an American with the Rhode Island troops until the end of the war.

About 1790 John and Hannah moved to the Lake George region of New York where eleven children were born to them. A number of the children joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints in 1832 and participated in the events in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois before their exodus to Utah in 1848. Once in Utah the Burgesses continued their pioneer ways, operating saw mills in Parleys Canyon and Pine Valley in Utah's Dixie, farming and herding livestock in Wayne County, keeping bees in Huntington, and raising a large posterity for the one-time Hessian mercenary.

Thousands of Utahns and millions of Americans are descended from German-speaking people like John Watermann. Though motives and reasons varied for coming to America, the Germanspeaking immigrants who came from present-day West Germany, East Germany, Austria, Switzerland, parts of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Rumania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Russia have had a significant impact in shaping the patterns and texture of our national and state history.

Utah's German-speaking population came primarily from Germany and Switzerland. Beginning with a population of 60 in 1850, the number grew steadily to 4,000 in 1900 and then nearly doubled to 7,500 by 1910. World War I saw the influx of Germans drop dramatically during the second decade of the twentieth century and by 1920 the population was 6,000 — a figure that remained constant until World War II when another significant drop of nearly 25 percent occurred. The upheaval and destruction of World War II coupled with close ties between Utah and Germany saw a dramatic increase in the number of German-born emigrating to Utah in the 1950s. Coming at the rate of between 300 and 500 a year during the decade after the war, the present German-born population in Utah is estimated at about 20,000.

The vast majority of German immigrants to Utah came because of the Mormon church. However, an important group of non- Mormons came because of business opportunities, including a substantial number of Germanborn Jewish merchants in the 1860s and 1870s. Others came because of the transcontinental railroad completed in 1869 or because of mining opportunities made possible by the railroads.

We may never know the first German-born wanderer to set foot in Utah. However, one of the first to write about Utah was the famous German geographer, collections.

Baron Alexander von Humboldt. He studied the journal of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition to Utah and, based on that information, prepared a map of the Lake Timpanogos, or Utah Lake, area that was included in his Political Essay on the Kindgom of New Spain published in 1811.

A case can be made for John H. Weber as the first German in Utah. The fur trapper for whom Weber Canyon, Weber River, and Weber County are named was born in Altona near Hamburg in the state of Holstein in 1779. Holstein, though its population was overwhelmingly German, was then under the control of Denmark. Weber's son recalled that his father "received a fairly good education, and grew to a vigorous and well developed manhood. While quite young he ran away to sea and . . . was captain and commander of a passenger ship before he was 21 years old."

By 1807 Weber had given up the life of a seaman, immigrated to America, and settled in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. There he became acquainted with William H. Ashley and Andrew Henry whom he joined in their first fur trading venture in 1822. Two years later Weber led a party of trappers, one of whom was Jim Bridger, to Bear Lake which was known among American fur trappers for a time as Weaver's (Weber's) Lake in honor of his discovery in 1824. From Bear Lake Weber's party moved into Cache Valley, then called Willow Valley, where they spent the winter of 1824-25. Pushing south out of Cache Valley in the spring of 1825, Weber was one of the first white men to see the Great Salt Lake. He trapped the mountains of central and northern Utah until he left the fur trade in 1827.

Frederick A. Wislizenus, an adventuresome German traveler cut from the same mold as his countrymen Frederick Paul Wilhelm — duke of Wurttemberg, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, Karl Bodmer, and Heinrich Baldwin Mollhausen, journeyed to the Rocky Mountains from St. Louis in 1839 with a fur trading party under the leadership of Black Harris. A native of Schwarzburg- Rudolstadt, Wislizenus had studied at the universities of Jena, Goettingen, and Tuebingen before joining with a number of student revolutionaries on April 3, 1833, to seize two important military buildings in Frankfurt am Main, the Constables Watch and the Main Watch. The abortive revolution was quickly quelled, though most of the young students managed to escape, including Wislizenus who made his way to Switzerland where he took his degree as doctor of medicine at the University of Zurich. In 1835 he arrived in New York; a year later he continued west' to St. Louis; and three years later he found himself on the Green River in Wyoming as a witness to the last great fur trade rendezvous.

At the conclusion of the rendezvous, Wislizenus traveled to Fort Hall, Idaho, where he spent eight days. Abandoning his plan to continue on to the Columbia River and then California and Santa Fe, he and two others enlisted a Mr. Richardson as guide and began the return trip to St. Louis. Opting to travel south toward the Santa Fe Trail they made their way to Soda Springs, then to the Bear River which they followed for four days, then southeastward to Henry's Fork which they followed to its junction with the Green River at a point just inside the present Utah-Wyoming border and now covered by the waters of Flaming Gorge Reservoir. They continued for two days down the Green River to Fort Davy Crockett, a trading post operated by three Americans named Thompson, Gray, and Sinclair. The fort, Wislizenus reported, was "a low one-story building, constructed of wood and clay, with three connecting wings, and no enclosure . . . the whole establishment appeared somewhat poverty stricken, for which reason it is also known to the trappers by the name of Fort Misery." Their meat supply exhausted, the fort proprietors purchased "a lean dog from the Indians for five dollars and considered its meat a delicacy. Wislizenus disclosed, "I too tried some of it, and found its taste not so bad."

From Fort Davy Crockett the party continued southeastward to the South Fork of the Platte River and Bent's Fort on the Arkansas River before returning to Missouri where Wislizenus helped found the St. Louis Academy of Sciences and the Missouri Historical Society and served as president of the St. Louis Medical Society. He died in St. Louis in 1889 at the age of seventy-nine.

While Wislizenus was the first known German to write of his travels in present-day Utah, he also hinted that other Germans may have preceded him. He wrote of a few other Germans being in the Black Harris party, a German at Fort Hall, and a former student friend from Jena who had been in the mountains as a trapper for six years and whom he hoped to meet at Fort Davy Crockett: "To note the metamorphosis from a jovial student at Jena into a trapper would be interesting enough in itself. The presence of S. would have afforded me pleasure far beyond this, as we had not seen each other for ten years. Unfortunately, I learned that he had gone beaver trapping and would not return before fall."

In 1843 Charles Preuss, born in Hohscheid, Waldeck, Germany, on April 30, 1803, and the official cartographer and artist for the John C. Fremont first, second, and fourth expeditions, entered Utah about September 1. Preuss, the well-known frontiersman Kit Carson, and Fremont visited the Great Salt Lake where they "ferried with our miserable rubber boat to the next island which Fremont christened Disappointment Island [now called Fremont Island] because he expected game there but did not find it."

Preuss was not overly impressed with the Salt Lake region: "Everything here looks level and white, Partly water, partly dry land. Is this the Salt Lake or not? . . . for exploring regions like this, few people and many beasts of burden to carry provisions are needed." The concern with provisions was inspired by that night's meal when, Preuss recorded, ". . . we devoured seagulls, the only thing we could shoot. How hunger makes people quiet, no cursing or laughing to be heard."

Eight months later, in May 1844, Preuss, Fremont, and Carson reentered Utah following the Old Spanish Trail into present-day Washington County and traveled north to Utah Lake where Preuss recorded a much more favorable impression of Utah Valley than that of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Turning east from Utah Valley, the Fremont expedition worked its way into the Uinta Basin and then into Brown's Hole where they intersected the Wislizenus route of five years earlier and followed it to the South Fork of the Platte, Bent's Fort, and back to Missouri.

The maps produced by Preuss for the Fremont expedition reports were the first maps of the West based on modern principles of geodesy and cartography. They were studied and used by many western pioneers, including the 1847 Mormons en route to Utah and forty-niners traveling to the California gold fields.

The next Germans to enter Utah were not adventurers witnessing the waning of the western fur trade or explorers documenting and marking the great western expanse; instead they were pioneers en route to California and the promise of a far western paradise. In 1846 Heinrich Lienhardt from the Canton of Glaurus, Switzerland, with two countrymen named Thomen and Ripstein and a man named Diel from Darmstadt and another named Zins from Lorraine, made their way to California and elected to follow the newly opened Hastings Cutoff which pushed west from Fort Bridger instead of following the traditional circuitous trail northwest to Fort Hall, then back southwest to the Humboldt River. Traveling across the Wasatch Mountains, Lienhardt and his company made their way down the boulder-strewn Weber River and into present-day Davis County where Lienhardt lamented, "If there had only been a single family of white people here, I probably would have remained. What a shame that this magnificent region was uninhabited." Stopping for a bath in the Jordan River and a swim in the Great Salt Lake, his favorable impression of Utah was evident as he wrote: "The clear, sky-blue water, the warm sunny air, the nearby high mountains . . . made an unusually friendly impression. I could have whistled and sung the entire day."

This joy was not shared by a group of Germans a few weeks behind them on the Hastings Cutoff. They included Lewis Keseberg, his wife, and two small children from Westphalia, the Wolfingers — a man and his wife — August Spitzer, Joseph Reinhardt, and Karl Burger. All members of the Donner Party, these German-born pioneers passed down Echo Canyon, up Big Mountain, across Little Mountain, and down Emigration Canyon a year before the Mormon pioneers would follow the same route into the Salt Lake Valley. After continuing across the Great Salt Lake Desert and into the snow-covered Sierra Nevadas, only three of the Germans survived the winter of 1846-47 to reach California.

The influx of German-born Mormons to Utah began with Konrad Kleinmann. Born April 19, 1815, in Bergwasser, Landau, Germany, Kleinmann was one of the original 143 Mormon pioneers to enter the Great Salt Lake Valley with Brigham Young in July 1847. After living in Salt Lake City and Lehi, Kleinmann was called to St. George to help open the Dixie Cotton Mission in 1861. He lived there until his death in 1907 at the age of 92.

Another of the early German-born converts to Mormonism was Alexander Neibaur. Born January 8, 1808, in Ehrenbreitstein, a village with an impressive fortress overlooking the junction of the Rhein and Mosel rivers at Koblenz, he was encouraged by his parents to prepare for a career as a rabbi. Instead, Neibaur attended the University of Berlin to study surgery and dentistry. Graduating before he was twenty, he moved to England where he joined the Mormon church. He left England and arrived in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841 where he set up a dental office in Brigham Young's front room and also taught German to Joseph Smith. After crossing the plains to Utah in 1848, he farmed, practised denistry, manufactured matches, and taught German classes.

After 1853 Mormon missionaries began to preach in Germany. Their efforts resulted in a continual number of converts who left the homeland for Utah. One of the first German converts to join the Mormon church was Karl G. Maeser. He was baptized in the Elbe River on October 14, 1855. An educator by training and vicedirector of the Budich Institute in Neustadt, Dresden, Maeser had talents that were quickly utilized upon his arrival in Utah on September 1, 1860. After a number of assignments to teach in Salt Lake City schools and a three-year mission back to Germany, he was called by Brigham Young in 1876 to move to Provo to establish the Brigham Young Academy. Beginning with two classes — a primary and intermediate grade — the institution founded by Maeser is known today as Brigham Young University. He was the first in a long line of Germans — both Mormon and non-Mormon — to serve Utah's institutions of higher learning. While Karl G. Maeser was pioneering the development of education in Utah, other Germanspeaking immigrants were struggling with the urgent issues of developing farms, building homes, and establishing frontier enterprises.

Mormon missionaries met with some success in Switzerland during the late 1850s and 1860s, and most of their Germanspeaking converts were touched by the desire to gather to Zion. Once in Utah three communities outside Salt Lake City — Providence, Midway, and Santa Clara — drew most of the Swiss immigrants. Swiss-born John Theurer was one of the original 1859 settlers of Providence in Cache Valley. Enthusiastic over the prospects of Providence and anxious to persuade his countrymen to settle in Cache Valley, he made several trips to Salt Lake City to meet incoming groups at the mouth of Emigration Canyon. He induced a number of the Swiss immigrants to continue north to Providence where they formed a dominant element in the community. A German-speaking Sunday School was established, a German church constructed, a German choir organized, and sauerkraut making practiced — a Providence tradition that has continued to the present.

Another favorite gathering place for Swiss immigrants was Midway. Founded in 1859 and located in the beautiful Alpine-like Heber Valley, Midway quickly attracted Swiss immigrants of the 1860s and continues to foster its Swiss heritage through its annual Swiss Day celebration and its 1941 City Hall built in a Swiss Chalet Style.

Most Swiss immigrants who had not settled in Providence or Midway by the fall of 1861 were called by Mormon leaders in October 1861 to move to Utah's Dixie in an effort to bolster the Cotton Mission. Within a few weeks, approximately forty families comprised of about eighty-five individuals found themselves on the banks of the Santa Clara River where, according to historian A. Karl Larson, "They could neither speak nor understand English, and the country they were entering was about as different from their native Switzerland as could be imagined."

These Swiss pioneers had to contend not only with a landscape accented by red instead of green, but they were newcomers and problems soon arose with the older American and Anglo settlers.

The Swiss group was principally without means, lacking plows, teams, and even some of the most elemental necessities for subduing a new land, and they had to depend upon working for those who had these things to pay for their use at brief intervals. Because of the shortage of teams and wagons, the Swiss brethren were unable to procure the proper fencing materials for their small patches of ground, and their crops, when finally growing, were subject to the depredations of the livestock belonging to the older settlers. Indeed, stock-raising was almost the major activity of the first pioneers of Santa Clara, while farming was secondary. The resultant damage to the crops of the newcomers was a great annoyance to them and could easily have led to serious trouble. For the stock were necessary to the well being of the one, and the only place where they could graze them was on the public domain; crops, on the other hand, were absolutely essential to the other, for they lacked other means of sustenance. The situation spelled trouble.

In the early 1860s food shortages plagued the Dixie settlers and especially the Swiss converts. John S. Stucki recorded that often his family's only source of food was pig weeds "cooked in water without anything more nourishing to go with them, as we had no cow, no flour, no seasoning of any kind, not even a bit of bread for the children." 10 The situation improved slightly when Stucki found work and lodging in the town of Washington with a Danish couple named Iverson.

I have never forgotten when on a Sunday morning I would go home the eleven or twelve miles to see how my folks were, and the good old lady would give me quite a big lunch of pancakes to take along for my dinner. How I used to rejoice to think that I could bring those pancakes to my little brother and sister so they could have a little better dinner on Sunday, and I could eat the pig-weeds instead of them.

But the hard times and conflicts did not last forever. A measure of prosperity was attained and spirits lifted when a Swiss band was organized in Santa Clara by George Staheli. A native of Amersville in the Canton of Thurgau, Staheli had served as a bugler in the Swiss army and played in a Swiss band which traveled all over Switzerland and across the border into Germany. After joining the Mormon church, he left Switzerland with his precious cornet and served as the camp bugler as the band of Swiss converts marched west to Salt Lake City in 1861.

Tradition holds that Brigham Young wanted George Staheli to remain in Salt Lake to teach music, but because he could not speak English and wanted to be with his friends and relatives, he elected to join the group headed south for Santa Clara. As the group made its way south from Cedar City toward St. George along the nearly impassable road, the cornet, which had been tied to a wagon, "was loosed from its moorings and went tumbling into the wheel track to be rescued only after it was smashed 'flat as a pancake' by the heavy wheels which ran over it." Staheli endured without his beloved musical instrument until about 1864 when John R. Itten, another Swiss, received ten band instruments as an inheritance. When the instruments arrived from Switzerland, Itten gave them to the community. George Staheli taught a number of men how to play the cornet, tuba, tenor horn, alto, bass, and valve trombone. Since no written music was available, he wrote music for each instrument, and in time Dixie celebrations rang with the sound of Swiss band music.

Music was not the only means to help Swiss and other settlers cope with the rigors of pioneer Dixie. Wine-making became an important industry, and one of the best known Dixie wine makers was John Naegle. Born September 14, 1825, in Albersweiler, Bavaria, Naegle immigrated to the United States with his parents in 1832. At the age of nineteen he joined the Mormon church, marched with the Mormon Battalion to California, took part in the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, and operated a successful farm and ranching enterprise in California until 1853 when he came to Utah. In 1865 he was called by Brigham Young to move to Utah's Dixie, plant vineyards, and help develop a wine industry. He established himself in Toquerville and constructed a large sandstone building as a winery and residence.

By the late 1850s a number of non-Mormon merchants began to arrive in Utah and establish businesses in Salt Lake City. Many were Jewish, most of whom were German born. They included the Auerbach brothers — David, Frederick, Samuel, and Theodore; the Ransohoff brothers — Elias and Nicholas Siegfried; the Siegel brothers — Solomon, Henry, and Joseph; the Kahn brothers — Emanuel and Samuel; and the Watters brothers, Abraham and Ichel. In Odgen early German-born merchants included Frederick J. Kiesel, Gumpert Goldberg, and the Kuhn brothers — Adam and Abraham.

When the Salt Lake Jewish community constructed the temple of congregation B'Nai Israel, Philip Meyer, a German architect, drew plans for the structure based on the Great Synagogue in Berlin. The temple was completed in 1891. Utah's German/Jewish community would play an important role in the economic, religious, educational, and political life of the state. One of its members, Simon Bamberger,born February 27, 1845, in the village of Eberstadt in Hesse- Darmstadt, served as Utah's fourth governor from 1917 until 1921.

German immigrants also played an important role in the development of mining in Utah. The mining region of Mercur was named by Arie Pinedo, a Bavarian, who discovered the Mercur lode on April 30, 1879. According to tradition, he discovered a vein of cinnabar, the principal ore in which mercury if found. Pinedo named the discovery Mercur after the German word for mercury, merkur. Unfortunately for Pinedo, he was unable to successfully extract the mercury, though he sold his claim for a reported price of $10,000 and left the area.

Even more successful was John Beck. Born in the town of Aichelberg in Wurttemberg, Germany, on March 19, 1843, John Beck became one of Utah's most successful mine owners with his celebrated Bullion-Beck mine near Eureka in the Tintic Mining District. John Beck ranks with Jesse Knight, David Eccles, and Alfred McCune as an eminently successful late nineteenth-century Mormon businessman. He had joined the Mormon church in Switzerland in 1862 and served as a missionary in Germany and Switzerland before leaving in 1864 for Utah. After his arrival, he moved to the newly established community of Richfield to farm but was forced to leave in 1866 when the town was abandoned during the Black Hawk War. He moved to Lehi where he farmed, herded sheep, cut wood, and made charcoal. In 1870 Beck purchased an interest in the Eureka Mine, spent six thousand dollars in developing the property, but lost everything through litigation. His next effort, the Bullion Beck Mine, proved a success and catapulted him into other mining investments, development of Beck's Hot Springs resort north of Salt Lake City and Saratoga Springs west of Lehi, investments in Utah's sugar beet industry, and involvement in asphalt and gilsonite.

A devoted Mormon, John Beck married five wives and returned with part of his family to Germany as a missionary in 1887. There he organized a branch of the church in Stuttgart. Beck actively promoted emigration to the United States by over two hundred German converts, providing employment in his Utah mines for the men. His efforts in this regard are reflected in the remarkable increase in the number of German-born heads of household in the Tintic Mining District — from two in 1880 to sixty-five in 1900. He was the first president of the German branch of the LDS church in Eureka and constructed and furnished, at his own expense, the first LDS church building in Eureka.

Two other sons of the German region of Wurttemberg are well-known Utah architects, Richard Karl August Kletting and Carl M. Neuhausen. Born the same year, 1858, the two men designed a host of Salt Lake City's most important public, religious, business, educational, and residential structures.

Born in Unterboihingen, Neuertingen, Wurttemberg, Germany, Richard K. A. Kletting is honored as the dean of Utah architects. His father and uncle were railroad builders throughout Germany. Writing of his early years, Kletting recalled:

. . . My constant close connection with construction camps and . . . engineers, listening to their talks of their travels and their engineering accomplishments made me more and more desirous of becoming an engineer.

From the time I was five years old, I had mostly mechanic's tools and drafting instruments for my playthings and as soon as I was able to read, I could not leave books alone. In many of the books were fine prints and illustrations of buildings, bridges, etc. which trained my eye for form and outline and was a factor in my life in later years to become an architect.

Most buildings in Wurttemberg were at that time built of stone. I was told that it would be a wise thing for me to learn how to cut soft and hard stone. Following this advice, I spent my vacation between school terms in a stone yard and gained a good knowledge of how to cut the different stones which in later years proved very useful in building the Cullen Hotel and the Deseret News Buildings. . . .

Kletting worked for a time as a draftsman in the government engineering offices on railroad construction work. Then in 1879 he journeyed to Paris and found work as a draftsman for a large French construction firm. He prepared drawings for several notable Paris buildings. His Paris work was interupted for a year's military service in the German army, and in April 1883 he left Paris for the United States. After short stays in Philadelphia and Columbus, Ohio, Kletting headed west to Denver. There, he recalled:

I was unable to get work in my line but hearing about some activity in Salt Lake City owing to the finishing of the D. & R. G. Railroad a few days before, I left immediately for Salt Lake City. The day after I arrived in Salt Lake, I was engaged by Mr. John Burton, architect, where my first job was the drawing of plans for the old University on second West Street.

In time Kletting left the employ of John Burton and opened his own office. His most famous work — the design of the Utah State Capitol — was selected from among twenty-one entries in a nationwide design contest. His numerous other designs are scattered throughout the state and Intermountain West. They include the original Saltair Pavilion; the original Salt Palace; Mclntyre Building; Lollin Building; Felt Building; New York Building; the State Mental Hospital; the Bryant, Lowell, Grant, Oquirrh, Jefferson, Riverside, Whittier, and Ensign schools; and residences for Enos Wall, Henry Dinwoody, John A. Evans, William F. Beer, George H. Dern, and Albert Fisher. Kletting's Swiss-born wife, Mary, described him as

Stern, exacting, honest but with all a good sense of humor which endeared him to young and old. He spent a great deal of time helping young students with their technical training. Soon after his arrival in Salt Lake City he opened, by request of many prominent business men, [the] first night school in the city to give instruction in geometry, algebra, languages, and science. [He] also catalogued the Salt Lake Public Library. He was always interested and worked for the preservation of the state forest and water supply. . . . [His chief hobby was] walking in the hills for relaxation and inspiration.

Richard Kletting died September 25,1943, when he was struck by an automobile.

The second German-born architect to leave a prominent mark on Salt Lake City was Carl M. Neuhausen. Born in Stuttgart, Neuhausen graduated from the Stuttgart Polytechnic School in 1878 and eight years later came to the United States. After stops in Iowa, Minnesota, and Montana, he arrived in Salt Lake City in 1892. He worked three years with Richard Kletting before opening his own office on January 1, 1895. A Catholic and member of the Knights of Columbus, Neuhausen undertook a number of major projects for Salt Lake City's Catholic community, including St. Ann's Orphanage, the Thomas Kearns Mansion, and the Cathedral of the Madeleine. He was also architect for the Orpheum Theater, known today as the Promised Valley Playhouse, and a number of private residences. He designed and built his own residence at 1265 East 100 South. Five of his buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. His career was cut short by an untimely illness to which he succumbed in 1907.

While the German Catholic community in Utah is represented by men like Neuhausen, perhaps the largest non-Mormon German group in Utah is Lutheran. Efforts toward establishment of a German Lutheran congregation in Utah were launched in September 1890 when the Reverend P. Doerr arrived in Salt Lake City and conducted services in both English and German. By March 1892 the Reverend Otto Kuhr had been assigned to work exclusively with the Germans and was holding German services in Salt Lake City and Ogden. In the summer of 1894 a frame church with brick foundation was constructed for the Salt Lake City congregation at Seventh South and Fifth West. The Lutheran congregations grew steadily, but not spectacularly, until World War I, drawing from German immigrants who found their way to Utah to seek their fortunes or recover lost health or who had become dissatisfied with the Mormon church. Though efforts were generally confined to Salt Lake City and Ogden, there were exceptions, such as the work of the Reverend William J. Lankow. In 1908 he began holding German-language services in Delta for a group of Germans who had migrated to Millard County from Colorado and Nebraska to homestead land made available under provisions of the Carey Land Act. In Delta a Sunday School was organized and worship services held in the German language until 1916. Although occasional German language services were held in Utah after the Great War, the hysteria that flourished during World War I caused Lutheran church leaders to abandon the use of German in favor of English.

The issue of Germans in America and World War I became especially significant in Utah on May 2, 1917, when public announcement was made that Fort Douglas was to be the site of one of three internment camps for German prisoners of war taken from naval vessels captured when the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917. The other two camps were located at Fort McPherson and Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia.

Work began immediately on the fifteen-acre camp located just west of the fort on ground now occupied by the University of Utah Annex parking lot and the adjacent playing field. The compound included about fifty buildings with a capacity of between 1,800 and 2,000 prisoners.

In June 1917 some 321 German prisoners arrived at Salt Lake City's Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Depot where they were met by a contingent of sixty soldiers from the prison and a throng of spectators who had come to view the German enemy firsthand. The men were from the SMS Cormoran, a German auxiliary cruiser that had been interned at Guam since December 15, 1914, when the ship entered the harbor of Apra in an unsuccessful effort to secure enough coal and provisions to reach the nearest German port in East Africa. The German sailors remained at Guam until April 1917 when they were captured by United States forces, but not before they successfully scuttled the Cormoran, preventing it from being of any use to the Americans. Sent by troop transport under the guard of fifty marines, the prisoners arrived in San Francisco on June 8 and were placed on board a special train that arrived in Salt Lake City at 1:20 A.M. on June 10. After each prisoner was thoroughly searched — a process that took the rest of the night — the heavily guarded prisoners were loaded into seven streetcars that, with an escort of automobiles, rattled up South Temple to the unfinished compound.

The next large contingent of naval prisoners arrived three months later on September 14, 1917. In included 179 men from the SMS Geier and its collier Locksun, vessels that had been in the harbor at Honolulu, Hawaii, since October 15, 1914. The sailors were taken prisoner at Hawaii in early spring 1917, held in temporary confinement at Schofield Barracks, then transported aboard the Sherman to San Francisco and by train to Salt Lake City. At the railroad station the German naval officers dined with American officers before they were taken to Fort Douglas.

Life for the German prisoners of war was occupied with construction work to finish the compound, gardening, educational classes, regular church services, moving pictures shown twice a week, theatrical performances, dances (where the men had to dance with each other), and concerts by an orchestra composed of band members of the Cormoran and Geier. A number of officers' wives had accompanied their husbands, and visits were permitted. The prisoners of war were well treated and food was plentiful. As one German sailor wrote:

Daily fresh meat, daily fresh bread and very often fresh fruits, quantities as well as qualities, leave nothing to be desired. Rations are issued us and prepared in accordance with our own tastes by our own cooks. After all there is nothing of which we could justly complain.

The 507 naval prisoners of war remained at Fort Douglas until late March 1918 when they were transported by train to Fort McPherson, Georgia, after it was decided that the Utah compound would be used exclusively for some 870 civilian enemy aliens and 200 conscientious objectors. The civilian enemy aliens were rounded up by local authorities in most western states including Texas, California, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Most were of German or Austrian birth and were interred because of obviously pro-German sympathies, membership in the Industrial Workers of the World, Socialist leanings, or other activities held to be out of the mainstream of 100 percent Americanism. The first of the enemy aliens arrived at Fort Douglas in July 1917 and the last left in May 1920. The incarceration of most was the result of a war hysteria that branded otherwise acceptable residents as traitors. Others, as in the case of the Socialists or members of the Industrial Workers of the World, were held out of intolerance for their "radical" political views.

In Utah a number of arrests occurred that were perhaps representative of those in other states. Alexander L. Lucas, age seventytwo, the supervising architect at Fort Douglas who had assisted in the building of cantonments at the fort, was arrested as an enemy alien on March 6,1918. Otto Heinrich Thomas was arrested in Ogden in July 1918. At the outbreak of World War I, Thomas had been a soldier and photographer in the Austrian army. Captured by Russian forces in the Carpathian Mountains, he was sent to Siberia after the Bolshevik takeover in 1917. He escaped by bribing a guard. Crossing the Gobi Desert, he made his way to the Pacific Ocean, caught a ship for San Francisco, and continued on to Ogden where he opened a photographic shop. A short time later he was arrested as an enemy alien for owning a motion picture camera.

Another incident involved the Reverend B. Henry Leesman, pastor of the German Evangelical St. Paul's Church in Ogden, and Augusta Minnie Deckman whose fiance, Ernest Leybold, had been arrested in Seattle and sent to Utah. Deckman followed Leybold to Salt Lake City where she enrolled at the University of Utah. In February 1918 Pastor Leesman, who traveled from Ogden to the prison camp to conduct religious services, was arrested for trying to pass a note from Deckman to Leybold. A few days later the young lady was arrested on a visit to the prison headquarters as she sorted through the prison mail in the censor's office trying to intercept a note from Leybold before it was rejected by the censor. The trap had been set by Maj. Emory S. West. Deckman was imprisoned and in May 1918, along with Pastor Leesman, tried for "smuggling information into a military prison." Both were acquitted, though Deckman was again arrested as an enemy alien and deported in 1919. Leesman was freed after a reprimand by the judge that if "he were on trial for the misuse of his holy office, the verdict might be different." The Leesman episode and the repercussions of anti-German sentiment led to the demise of the German Lutheran church in Ogden.

Anti-German sentiment was not focused solely on the prisoner of war camp. The State Textbook Commission and State Council of Defense passed resolutions calling for an end to teaching German in all schools and colleges. Responding to government pressure "that the teaching of the language would be an aid to German propaganda in America and the presentation of . . . every thing unfavorable to the German nation . . . would tend to weaken the morale of the German army," principals in the LDS church school system voted unanimously to eliminate the teaching of German for the duration of the war. This action was taken even though "a number of the school heads declared that they saw not the slightest relation betweenthe teaching of the Teutonic language in the classroom and the successful waging of the big war." 40 Nevertheless, by July 1918 sentiment against gatherings of Germans and the use of the German language reached a point where LDS church leaders decided that services for German groups in Logan and Salt Lake City should be discontinued.

Despite the obvious war hysteria in Utah, the state's Germanborn population could be thankful that anti-German sentiment did not reach the level it did in other states. This was due in no small measure to Utah's chief executive during this period, Simon Bamberger, a German by birth, who actively supported the war effort and the Liberty Bond drives, and who remained a highly respected figure in the state.

A measure of tolerance was reflected in the fact that Utah's German-language newspaper, the Salt Lake City Beobachter, was not forced to cease publication during World War I. For pre-World War II Germans in Utah, the Salt Lake City Beobachter, published weekly from August 9, 1890, to October 3, 1935, was important. The newspaper included articles on local and international political affairs, translated sermons by LDS church authorities, and carried news stories about the activities of members of the Utah German community and a great variety of organizations including the German Dramatic Society, Schiller Lodge, Goethe Lodge, Swiss Colony, Swiss Club, Gymnastic Society, Athletic Club Germania, Karl G. Maeser Society, German American Citizens League, Chemnitzer Society, Steuben Society, and many others. It also offered poetry, stories, jokes, articles on American history and government, and news from Germany, Switzerland, and sometimes Austria. Like other American weeklies, the Beobachter featured serialized novels and editorials commenting on political, social, and religious issues of the day.

Published for forty-five years, the Salt Lake City Beobachter found its way into many homes of German immigrants in the Intermountain West. It was also sent in large quantities to Europe where its distribution among Mormon converts helped, in some measure, to bridge the gulf between Utah and the far-flung German branches.

Several factors contributed to the Beobachter's demise — a decision by LDS church authorities that the newspaper was no longer needed as a bridge between Utah and the Saints in Germanspeaking countries, a declining number of local subscriptions, and concern by church authorities that the foreign-language newspaper continued to foster a cliquishness among the German immigrants that hindered them in acquiring "an American identity [rather] than a typical, restricted German identity."

After the church withdrew support for the newspaper, efforts were made to continue the Beobachter as an independent newspaper, financed by subscriptions and some support from the Democratic party. The effort was unsuccessful because of financial instability and the controversy manifest in the newspaper between supporters and opponents of Adolf Hitler and his goals for a greater Germany. At the center of the storm was Reinhold Stoof. A native of the Pflaueninsel, near Berlin, Stoof had served as editor of the Beobachter in the 1920s before leaving in 1926 to serve as the first mission president in South America. After nine years in South America, Stoof returned to the United States in 1935 and worked for a time on the Beobachter staff until his criticism of the Nazi regime led to his dismissal.

Stoof s opposition to Hitler was evident early. His mission correspondence is loaded with explanations of his hostility toward Hitler, such as the following, written to Elder Emil Schindler in 1934:

You must know why I am an opponent of Hitler. I have written it often. I despise every dictator. ... I despise every oppression of the most sacred rights of man . . . rights which the Hitler regime have brutally trampled under. I despise every persecution of an individual because of his political opinions or because he belongs to a race which is in the minority. . . . Hitler will insure that there will shortly be no more unemployment in Germany. They will all find employment. The demand for cannon fodder will be so large, that it cannot be filled.

Stoof carried his crusade against Nazism forward in the pages of the Salt Lake City Beobachter and met with some encouragement. One reader, Ewald Beckert, living in Zwickau, Germany, wrote to Stoof on September 21, 1936, declaring full support for him and proclaiming that millions of Germans were also of the same opinion. Closing his letter as "a voice from Germany," Beckert vowed that should they ever meet, "it would be a great joy to shake your hand as a courageous fighter for Truth and Justice. Your writing is only a few lines, but they tell more than an entire book."

Stoof had little tolerance for Germans living in America who trumpeted praise for Hitler. Attacking one Beobachter writer who proclaimed that "Hitler and the whole German people follow the banner of liberty, morality and virtue," Stoof lashed out with his own statement of loyalty to Germany and the United States.

I wonder why he and others who sing loudly, not beautifully, Hitler's praise, are still in this country. Why don't they want to enjoy the blessings of the Third Reich over there? Why revive them secondhanded here? You all who cannot appreciate the blessings of this free and great country; you who adore a dictatorship, entirely opposed to the great ideals of the U.S.A. Constitution; you who think that freedom has its abode in Germany, please, go there, go to day! You are not worthy to live under the star-spangled banner, in the land of the free and the brave.

I love truly my fatherland and want to see it, therefore, in her glory as a free country, a light to the world, as it had been once, but you hate your fatherland, without knowing it, for you cry "Heil" to a tyrant apparently appointed by destiny to kill the last spark of freedom in Germany.

On two occasions in the summer of 1936 letters from Stoof were published in the Deseret News declaring that the majority of Utah Germans did not support Hitler and that the German people were being denied religious freedom by the Nazi regime. 47 Though quite mild compared to Stoof s other writings, these two letters continued to fan the flames of controversy and led Richard P. Lyman, who was preparing to leave Salt Lake City to take over as president of the European Mission, to discourage Stoof from writing further letters and the Deseret News from publishing them. With concern for what effect the letters might have on relations between the church and the Nazi government, Lyman wrote to Stoof on August 28, 1936:

I am sure that these articles of yours will make my work and the work of other missionaries in Germany exceedingly difficult if these sentiments in print get into the hands of those who are opposed to us and to our doctrines and our teachings over in Germany.

I am sending this with the hope that in the future you will not put views of this kind in print while I am on duty to carry the Gospel to the great German people. I have already drawn this to the attention of the city editor of the Deseret News and am sending him a copy of this letter.

With little apparent support from LDS church authorities for his anti-Hitler crusade, Stoof turned to Rabbi Samuel H. Gordon of Salt Lake City for help in publishing an article in German "to show the German people of this city and its environments, who are mostly L.D.S. Church members, that the dictatorship in Germany with all its evil actions and consequences, especially in regard to its attitudes towards the Jews, is in strict contradiction to the teachings of Mormonism." Nothing came of the proposed article as a personal tragedy — the death of his wife Ella in January 1937 — forced Reinhold Stoof to give full attention to earning a living and caring for his seven motherless children.

Stoof s efforts to dramatize the plight of Germany's Jews would have found strong support from Sigmund and Emma Helwing. They were two of the thousands of Europeans who fled their homeland in the 1930s in fear of the Nazis. In 1940 the Helwings arrived in Utah. Before leaving Austria, they had enjoyed an upper-class standard of living. Emma Kofler was born in 1893 on a huge country estate in the Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had spent her summers traveling to resorts like Ems on the Rhine River and Bad Reichenhall in Bavaria where she became friends with members of the high German aristocracy, including the family of Kaiser Wilhelm. In 1920 she married Sigmund Helwing, a recent graduate of the University of Vienna who held an important position in a Viennese bank. For eighteen years they enjoyed frequent vacations in almost every European country and collected valuable art and other treasures. Then in March 1938 Austria was annexed by Germany.

For the Helwings the next nine months were filled with indescribable fear and terror as the Nazi persecution of the Jews steadily increased in scope and intensity. On one occasion, while visiting their aunt's family, Emma recalled:

. . . the pest knocked at our door and took the whole family away because they were Polish subjects. They left the two of us unharmed in the apartment, since we were Austrian citizens. If there ever was a nightmarish night — for us this was it. We did not sleep a wink but were sitting and waiting in anguish and grief. At dawn uncle came back; he was limping after a leg fracture which never healed perfectly. . . . Aunt Eva, Genia, Henry and William stayed in the city jail for another two days. We were broken in spirit, knowing what our dear friends had to go through. They were dismissed after having signed a pledge to leave Vienna very soon. I shall never forget the hour when they finally came home. We all cried and felt lost not knowing what the next hour will bring.

The Helwings were more fortunate than their family and other Jewish acquaintances: "The superintendent in our house on Elizabethstrasse, was my housekeeper and deeply devoted to us — so that she never let any harm happen to us. She was the living proof that one cannot condemn an entire nation." They were also fortunate in being able to secure permission to leave the country, obtain an entrance visa to the only port open to them, Shanghai, and book passage on the luxury Italian steamer Conte Rosso. Two tickets had been returned to the travel office just as Sigmund began his quest for the means to escape their beloved Vienna.

Leaving Vienna by train for the Adriatic coast on December 4, 1938, the Helwings sailed from Trieste on December 6 and after a twenty-five-day voyage reached Shanghai. In Shanghai they were employed making buttons. With the meager income from the buttons and by selling possessions they had brought from Austria, they existed until September 1940 when they obtained American visas. Tickets for passage to San Francisco on board the Japanese liner Assama Maru were purchased with "a beautiful sterling set of flatware for 12, complete with all imaginable extras."

In San Francisco they were met by representatives of the Council of Jewish Women who arranged for them to continue on to Salt Lake City where they were assisted by the Jewish community in beginning their new life in America. Sigmund secured a position as an accountant and accepted a job for Emma as janitress for the office. Recalling her first job in America, Emma wrote:

We both could not sleep that night for happiness.

Next morning Kotek [her pet name for Sigmund] started at nine a.m. and I at five p.m. How big was my surprise when I learned, that two stories were assigned to me with fifty-two rooms and two huge halls to clean. I was determined not to turn it down. I was instructed by the Superintendent about my duties and worked until about eleven p.m. with the understanding that I have to come back to dust at six a.m. until nine a.m.

That night before I could not sleep for happiness, this night I was aching all over, so that I did not sleep a wink. At six sharp I was at my job again. Kotek used to help me, after his work was over, to empty heavy waste-baskets. . . . My hands were swollen and also the feet. The eyes were deep in the sockets ... it never entered my European mind that I ever could do such a job! For our Viennese ten-room office, we had three women and still thought that they were working very hard.

Despite the difficult beginnings, adjustments were made. Emma was soon able to give up her job as a janitress and devote her time to many community service and charitable undertakings, including the Red Cross, Community Chest, polio, heart, and cancer drives. During World War II, she recalled:

I was also very active in the U.S.O. I became a perfect short order cook, malted drinks mixer, and a skilled waitress. When a separate U.S.O. for colored personnel of the armed forces was formed, I preferred to work for them. I felt highly rewarded by the appreciation the boys and girls showed me for being attentive and polite to them. This was. . . the only place they could get meals. They often told me their woe about not being admitted to any restaurant in town. I felt ashamed and bewildered that such things happen in a democracy, which in my estimation should be a beacon of light and justice to the entire world.

Even with its shortcomings, Utah, for the Helwings, proved a return to the security and happiness, if not financial status, of their pre-Nazi Austria.

We loved Salt Lake City from the first minute we saw it. . . . The canyons are very lovely and one, the Memory Grove, is within walking distance. On Sundays we hiked to the Rotary Park about 7 x h miles one way and always enjoyed it. When people heard about it they did not believe their ears. Almost everybody rich or poor, owns a car and so they almost forgot the use of their legs. . . . People in humble walks of life, drove up to the park in their own cars packed with the best food, cooked in the fire-places, provided by the city, and enjoyed themselves like only rich people in Europe could afford to. We often wondered whether they appreciated the bounty this wonderful country offered them — we had the definite impression they took it for granted!

Another group who seemed to appreciate America were the German prisoners of war, most of whom were captured during the North Africa campaigns. In Utah they were interred in base camps at Clearfield, Fort Douglas, Hill Field, Tooele, the Utah Army Service Forces Depot in Ogden, and the Deseret Chemical Warfare Depot, and in branch camps at Logan, Orem, Salina, Tremonton, Dugway Proving Ground, and the Bushnell General Hospital in Brigham City. In accordance with international law the prisoners were required to work but not in military activities or in the production of war materials. Many German prisoners were employed by local farmers under a contract arrangement with the government. Farmers agreed to pay the minimum wage for the prisoner's labor, about $2.20 a day. Of this amount the prisoners received 80 cents a day to spend as they wished, and the balance was retained by the government to help cover housing and food expenses. This program stimulated many friendships between German prisoners of war and the farmers for whom they worked.

Several prisoners elected to return to the United States to live after emigration from Germany was permitted in the late 1940s and 1950s. In retrospect, the German prisoners of war in Utah were very fortunate. They were spared the continual threat of death and injury that had accompanied them as combat soldiers before their capture. They escaped the chaos, bombings, and food shortages in Europe, and they eluded capture by the Russians and their infamous prisoner of war camps. In Utah, the German prisoners were well fed and well housed, given opportunities for educational and recreational persuits, received without hostility by most Utahns, and, given their status as POWs, enjoyed a relatively significant level of freedom. However, one event, the killing and wounding of twentynine prisoners of war at Salina on July 8, 1945, clouded what was otherwise a generally positive assessment of the sojourn of German POWs in Utah.

Just after midnight on July 8, 1945, Pfc. Clarence V. Bertucci opened fire on the sleeping prisoners with a 30-caliber machine gun from his guard tower on the west end of the Salina prison camp. Thirty of the forty-three tents were struck by bullets before Bertucci was subdued while reloading his weapon. Five prisoners were killed outright, two died in the Salina hospital, and one five days later in the Kearns hospital. Twenty-one prisoners were wounded by the flying bullets. Bertucci offered no explanation for his actions beyond the fact that he did not like Germans and on previous occasions had felt a compulsion to turn his machine gun on them. The residents of Salina reacted first in bewilderment, then with compassion for the dead and wounded prisoners, and finally with resentment against the guard whose cold-blooded action had come two months after the collapse and surrender of Germany.

As the United States entered World War II Germans living in Utah were subject to some restrictions and lived cautiously, though the intensity of the World War I anti-German hysteria was not repeated. However, the German LDS Organization was considered a political liability by Mormon church leaders during World War II and disbanded. J. Peter Loscher, who was president of the organization at the time, wrote of the experience:

All foreign church organizations . . . were discontinued at the request of the presiding brethren when the U.S. entered the war. The F.B.I, questioned many of our foreign born people and several ardent defenders of the Third Reich, such as Willy Renkel and a few others were put in concentration camps. . . . war brings hate and suspicion to otherwise very decent people.

This wartime hatred was manifest in the schools as Americanborn children of German parents were taunted because of their ancestry. 50 Sometimes potential conflict was handled with great diplomacy. Viennese-born Professor Phila Heimann described an incident when her daughter was outside playing with the neighborhood children, one of whom was Richard Cracroft, now dean of humanities at Brigham Young University. Professor Heimann recalled:

. . . He was two or three years older than my daughter and he was a very patriotic young American. His brother was fighting in the war, and every morning he marched up and down the street with an American flag singing from the Halls of Montezuma. My daughter was outside playing, and I came out and she came and talked German to me. The boy came and asked, "What is she talking?" I could think it quicker than I can say it now, but I thought, "Oh boy, if I tell that boy German, he doesn't know any better. Everything that is German is wicked. Hitler is German and he is wicked." I was afraid the boy would be mean to my girl. For a moment I thought French, then I thought no, perhaps one of the mothers had some high school French, and I would be a liar. So I said, "Oh, she speaks Austrian." He was impressed as he said, "Oh, Betty Heimann is smart. She can speak Austrian and English.

But living cautiously in a country at war with the homeland was only half of the story. Concern about relatives and friends in Europe caused great anxiety among Utah's German community. Between 1939 and 1946 there was no contact or correspondence between America and Germany. At war's end, after months of newspaper reports of staggering military casualities, incomprehensible civilian losses through the Allied bombing of German cities, and accounts of severe food shortages, Utah's German community waited anxiously for news from abroad. Few were spared the sorrow of belated mourning for a brother who fell in combat, a mother killed during one of the night bombing raids, or a father who survived the war only to contact typhus or another disease and die.

But for the survivors, Utahns reacted with great compassion and humanity by sending thousands of packages to Europe. The LDS church sent thousands of tons of food and clothing through its welfare program. The German LDS Organization, which was reestablished after the war, sent large amounts of food. Individuals, using their own resources, sent hundreds of packages to friends and relatives. One 1927 immigrant from Germany mailed twenty packages every three weeks and by the end of 1949 had sent a total of 468 food and clothing packages to his friends.

Assistance with food and clothing was soon followed by help to secure emigration for friends and relatives from war-torn Germany to Utah. These post-World War II immigrants arrived in Utah in a whirl of emotions — excitement, bewilderment, anxiety about the future and not being a burden to family or friends, and fatigue from the long trip. They realized that entry into the Salt Lake Valley was, in no uncertain terms, a new birth into a new world. It was the beginning of a new life.

Most immigrants were met at the points of debarkation by family or friends. Then, as now, travelers had to contend with unexpected problems. Typical is the account of Jonny Schlact, who at the age of fifty arrived in Salt Lake City on May 22, 1952, with his wife and children. Traveling by Greyhound bus from New York City, they arrived in Salt Lake City twelve hours before anyone expected them because of a mix-up in the bus schedule. His son, who had immigrated earlier, had an apartment on Eleventh East and Second South which he had vacated for his parents, moving himself into another apartment on Indiana Avenue. Making their way to the latter, Jonny left his family there and took the city bus to Rose Park where his son was building houses. Following directions, Jonny got off the bus in Rose Park and started up a street. He was observed nearing the construction site by a man who said to the younger Schlact, "If I am not mistaken, that man looks like he must be your father." So the premature reunion took place on a Rose Park building site, and Jonny Schlact's son honored the occasion by taking the rest of the day off from work.

For German immigrants to Utah, perhaps the most important group outside the family was the German LDS Organization. Prior to its disbandment in 1963 this organization held monthly meetings in the Assembly Hall on Temple Square where new immigrants were introduced into the Utah German community; friends from Europe became reacquainted; recruits for the German chorus, German theater, and German soccer teams were found; and young men and women met.

The German LDS Organization paid great attention to the welfare of German immigrants. Its leaders approached Salt Lake City employers with the message that they were anxious to provide qualified workers for any positions that were open. When German workers were mistreated by employers, organization leaders intervened in behalf of their countrymen. Representative of this activity is the example recorded by organization secretary Gerald Wanke:

Herr Hellwing has developed an occupational disease while working in the soap factory. We will try to find other work for him. In the three months he has worked there he has not received any pay, except for some groceries. That should be investigated. Brother Tschaggeny will undertake it.

On another occasion the Western Savings and Loan Company contacted the German LDS Organization presidency when a German immigrant stood to lose his house if he did not pay at least the interest owed. Again, the organization interceded in behalf of the German, contacting him, his ward bishop, and the loan company to deal with the problem.

Such assistance was not confined to German members of the Mormon church alone. When the organization presidency learned that Elisabeth Carlson, a member of the Lutheran church, had a serious eye disease, they helped send her to San Francisco for special treatment, arranged for payment of the apartment rent when she returned for convalescence in Salt Lake City, took up a collection to help pay for her return to Germany where she could receive the treatment she needed and would be more comfortable, and contacted her mother and sister in Germany about her condition.

Finally, the organization worked closely with the German consul's office in San Francisco in looking after the welfare of German citizens in Utah, providing information needed by the consulate, and, at the request of the consul, placing a wreath in the Fort Douglas cemetery on Memorial Day for the German prisoners of war buried there.

Nevertheless, the German LDS Organization was a subject of concern for certain LDS church authorities. Some felt that it fostered Old World ties, traditions, and acquaintances that hindered Germans from integrating fully into Utah society. Concern was also expressed that the monthly meetings held on Temple Square, the showplace for Mormonism, created a poor impression of the church for American visitors. Immigrants, often clad in threadbare suits or out-of-fashion European and second-hand American clothing, chattering away in German, and obviously different in mannerisms and customs from the Utah brethren, were not considered by many to convey the proper image of the church.

When leaders of the German LDS Organization were asked to look for another meeting place away from Temple Square, they were unable to find any LDS buildings large enough to accommodate the two to three thousand who regularly attended monthly meetings. Then the minister of the Baptist church on Thirteenth East and Eighth South invited the organization to use his church free of charge. Faced with the prospect of Mormons meeting in a Baptist church, LDS authorities allowed the monthly Assembly Hall meetings to continue.

A second point of contention between the German LDS Organization and church authorities came over the construction of an old folks home for elderly German immigrants. Through the sponsorship of semi-monthly German films and other fund-raising activities, the organization accumulated sufficient funds to purchase materials for the facility. With promises of donated labor, a parcel of land, and a set of donated architectural drawings for the structure, there was strong support for the proposal within the German LDS community. 65 However, the project was scuttled by church authorities concerned about the precedent a home restricted to only German-speaking members would set by operating outside the established church organization, competing with private nursing homes, and possibly prolonging the assimilation of Germanspeaking members into the mainstream of Utah Mormonism. Counseled to abandon the project and donate the money for the project to the church missionary program, leaders of the German LDS Organization reluctantly, but dutifully, followed the advice of their superiors.

In 1963 the German LDS Organization was dissolved and a German LDS ward reestablished for the older immigrants who had not learned English and for recently arrived immigrants who wished to attend church services conducted in their native language. The German ward and German-language temple sessions have been a vital part of the New World experience for many German-born converts to the LDS church.

Most immigrants came to Utah as trained workers or professionals. Some were able to resume their professions here in Utah.

For example, Hans Heuttlinger, trained as a stone sculptor in Baden Wurttemberg, arrived in Salt Lake City in 1958 and was immediately employed by the Walker Monument Company. Others, trained as painters, carpenters, and builders, were able to find work in which they could use their skills. But for most, immigration to Utah required accepting menial jobs far below their qualifications and abilities.

The experience of Reinhold Stoof is representative, if not typical. Trained as a teacher in Germany, he came to Utah in 1923. His firstjob, as an elevator operator, lasted only one hour. He then found work as a baker's helper and later as a worker in the Oregon Short Line freight depot. He returned to the bakery as an office helper and worked there until he was employed as editor of the Salt Lake City Beobachter. After serving as the first LDS mission president to South America from 1926 to 1935, he returned to Utah in the midst of the Great Depression, when work was very difficult to find, and was forced to accept donations and help from friends. In a letter to his sister Liese Schultze, living in Potsdam in 1946, Stoof recounted his employment history with interesting insights into labor practices during the 1940s:

Since May 15, 1944 I have worked in a shipping business. ... In English I am called a shipping clerk. The word is hard to translate. I have to take care of everything that has to do with the receiving and shipping of goods. Every minute of the eight and a half hours is filled. It seems that they are not satisfied with me. A half a day each week we have free, or better said, we should have free. Often it is not. For example when there is a lot of work that cannot be put off or when I don't have a helper, which happens quite often because Americans don't like to stay very long in one place. The last years have been a time of change for me with my work. In 1943 I gave up my night work [he was employed as a night watchman] because the employment situation became better, a consequence of the war. For a half a year I worked as a salesman in a large warehouse with paint and handtools until a new director came "who knew not Joseph," as the Bible says. The cost of employing men was too expensive for him, so he tried it with girls, but they left him one after another. No wonder, they did not like to carry the large gallons of paint. My section leader, earlier a German missionary, was so upset that he resigned at the first opportunity. I tried to work with freight by the railroad. In 1923 I had done this kind of work, and then it was not very hard. I took the job because they needed good help. But the body was unable to do what it once could. After two weeks I quit. I tried to be a handy man "Mann fuer alles" in a large meeting house of the church, known as a ward chapel. The bishop of the ward honored me with the high sounding name "Superintendent of the Meeting House." With that job there were a great many responsibilities and difficulties that were impossible to cover. After a month I quit. On the first morning of looking for work, I followed an ad to a shipping business where the director immediately introduced himself as a former neighbor. He lived in a neighboring house in 1924. I started work that same afternoon and have been there until the present.

For many German-speaking immigrants, ties with the homeland have been maintained by involvement with German and Swiss organizations such as the Chemenitzer Verein, the German Chorus Harmonie, the Swiss Chorus Edelweiss, the sports clubs Alemenia, Germania, and Berlin, a German-language hour radio program, German movies shown in the Richy Theater, German delicatessens, and visits to the homeland.

One of the most interesting Salt Lake City ties to Germany is through the German theater operated by Siegfried and Lotte Guertler. Trained as actors in Germany, the Guertlers immigrated to Utah from Hamburg in 1952 with twenty-seven of their twentynine suitcases loaded with scripts and books. Though the emigration from Germany was done with the know ledge that there would be no hope of finding employment as actors, they came with the intent of recruiting a cadre of German actors to rehearse and produce plays as an avocation. Two months after their arrival in Salt Lake City the first performance was given — three one-act plays by Berthold Brecht and Wolfgang Borchert — in the home of the Guertlers' friend from Hamburg, Gustav Lassig. Later performances were staged in the University Ward and the Twenty-seventh Ward in Salt Lake City until the Guertlers purchased their present home in 1962. They renovated the house to include a small fifty-person-capacity theater and have staged plays there for the last twenty-two years.

Much more of the German immigrant experience in Utah remains to be documented and told. Of necessity this overview has highlighted only a few aspects of the experience while ignoring many others. Many aspects of the experience were common to most German-speaking immigrants — problems with the language, little money, the lack of employment commensurate with their Old World training, the impact of World War II, and the involvement with German organizations. However, there was and is much about the Utah experience that is unique to each individual immigrant. The availability of more personal histories, oral history interviews, diaries, journals, letters, and other documents will help to fill in the total picture while allowing the historian to see the individual as a unique part of the aggregate immigration experience.

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