A brief history of the German American Police Association in Chicago from its inception in 1975 to the present!

The sur names many of us bear today, of course, have been passed on down to us through the generations. They, perhaps, more than anything else, indicate where we or our ancestors came from. Although the roots of their original forms date back to ancient Germanic times, the development of their final forms were generally not fixed until the 17th century and onwards after Gutenberg's press and Martin Luther's bible set the grammatical standards that evolved into the modern German language. 

Who are the Germans, where did they (we) come from and how did our ancient ancestors come to settle in western central Europe?

German tribes annihilate three Roman legions under Varus, decisively halting Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus' further encroachment into German lands east of the Rhine and north of the Danube!

For many barbarian German tribesmen, Christianity was a "Roman" thing and most had little interest. It was not only German reluctance, the Church also appeared hesitant because the Roman world generally considered the Germans as incapable of having souls to convert.  

The Christianization of the pagan, barbarian German tribes was long and gradual, but this man's man, missionary and martyr set its definitive course during the 8th century!

Aka Charlemagne, the Father of Europe, Karl was, in fact, a German and as King of the Franks, a West German tribe, took control of the former Western Roman Empire and reinstituted it as the Holy Roman Empire in 800 A.D.!

A chivalric order of warrior/monks incepted in 1198 during the Third Crusade via the spiritual authority of Pope Celestine in order to protect and provide for German pilgrims and Christendom's holdings in the Holy Land. It was from their crusades in the pagan lands they conquered along the Baltic coast in present day Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and northwest Poland during the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, however, that the Teutonic Knights' renown (and notoriety) would be heralded. It was from the Order's holdings in the Baltics that the Kingdom of Prussia would come into existence. It is also from the Teutonic Knights' battle standard, a black cross against a white background, that the famed military decoration known as the Iron Cross originated and still survives today as the emblem of the German Armed Forces (Bundeswehr).

Our ancestors, their blood running through our veins, survived an unprecedented, devastating epidemic which wiped out 1/4 to 1/3 of Europe's entire population in only 4 short years during the mid 14th century!

In 1507 this German priest/geographer created the most detailed map of the world that was known at the time which included a previously uncharted land mass lying between Europe and Asia though separated by huge ocean expanses. Waldseemuller named this land mass America on behalf of Amerigo Vespucci, the Italian navigator from whose nautical surveys his map was drawn. Just about all of the original copies of Waldseemuller's 12 panel wall map of the world were considered lost until one resurfaced in a castle in southwestern Germany in 1901. In 2001 this copy was purchased by the US Library of Congress for $10 million dollars!

The legacy of the 1735 Zenger trial resides in the constitutionalized principle that every American's right to free speech rests upon the individual's right to crtiticize his government. American ideals of free speech and a free press were forged out of the grievances the colonists had with the Crown's magistrates in the years preceding the War of Independence. 

Casper Lauer, a German immigrant and the first Chicago police officer slain in the line of duty in 1854, has his star inducted in the Chicago Police Department's Star Case at CPD HQ!

The Chicago Police Memorial Fund, GAPA Chicago, Casper Lauer's descendants, CPD Superintendent Terry Hillard and the Pipes & Drums of the Chicago Police Department dedicate Casper Lauer's new headstone at the site of his grave in St. Boniface German Catholic Cemetery!

Behind the material veneer of the world in which we live and work, a spiritual battle between good and evil is raging, as it always has since God created man. Police officers are the frontliners in this war, and as much as police officers may think they need pay raises, promotions and more days off in fighting it, they may need much, much more, spiritual fortification! Along with their body armor, police officers must also put on their spiritual armor (prayer) daily and without hesitation. St. Michael and our guardian angels are always ready to go lights and sirens for us when our soul's (and others') survival demands it!

Surely a time of mixed emotions for those police officers working the streets on this most cherished of holidays, and a tinge of sadness for our familes as well. For while most families will be sharing Christmas with each other, many of Chicago's patrol officers will be sharing it with those for whom the spirit of Christmas seems to have forsaken!

This German wiseman knew that man's most prized possession was his soul, and that your soul was all you take with you out of this world and into the next, whether it be saved or damned!

Citations of Civil War Congressional Medal of Honor Recipients who were born in Germany!

Of the 428 Congressional Medals of Honor awarded to the United States Army during the Indian

campaigns from 1865 to 1898, 30 went to these US cavalrymen who were born in Germany!

This German immigrant, Civil War veteran and US Cavalry Scout fought in more Indian campaigns (the Apache wars of the Southwest) than Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger all together! Charlton Heston played him in Arrowhead and Robert Duvall in The Legend of Geronimo!

Reflections of some of our German immigrant forebears in 1909 as they compare their early experiences in Chicago with the lives they left behind in Germany.

It may never happen again, but it did in 1907!

The huge influx of German immigrants (some of our grandparents and great  grandparents) into the United States during the last half of the 19th and early 20th centuries presented a "German Problem" to the Anglo-American staus quo: Just who were these Germans and their "Kultur" and what threat were they to Anglo-American hegemony in America, and what would it take to "Americanize" them in a manner suitable to Anglo-American sensibilities?!

Despite their social, religious and political differences, Chicago's Germans unite and then rally to defeat a proposed "Anti-Saloon" ordinance during the Spring elections of 1910. Includes a stirring editorial from the March 23, 1910 edition of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. . . .

A tale that unravels the mystery behind one of the most controversial episodes in American history, as well as one which sounded the death knell of a once proud, pre WWI German American consciousness that saw its demise in the midst of circumstances beyond its control!

Secret alliances, exaggerated national pride, economic rivalries and failed diplomacy, etc., by their respective governments whether in Germany, Great Britain, or France had, by Christmas Eve 1914, bogged down much of the full flower of western European manhood deep into the stinking, muddy quagmire of trench warfare along a 300 mile wide western front that extended from the Belgian/French coast on the English Channel to the Swiss border on the south. Certainly not the glory many of them had perhaps envisioned the previous August when this most unnecessary war had commenced. The war was only in its early innings though, and each side was still fully convinced that victory would be theirs' once the next Spring's offensives were launched. Thus the Allied and German frontliners were only beginning to hate each other when in the early evening hours of Christmas Eve, His most Holy Spirit began to seep through the muck, mire and misery. . . .

Part II: When a British ocean liner, the Lusitania, went down in 1915 with the loss of 1,198 lives including 128 Americans after being torpedoed by a German U boat in the Irish Sea, the entire nation erupted in a frenzied uproar, and Chicago’s Germans were further forced onto the defensive. Most, it seemed, were cognizant by now that arguing the German side of any issue concerning the war had become futile, especially now that American lives had been sacrificed. It was only too apparent by now that American bankers were financing the Allied war effort. Furthermore, the US government was allowing the British navy to blockade German and other neutral trade to the United States, while at the same time permitting trade and monetary support by American manufacturers to the Allies to circumvent the spirit of “Wilsonian neutrality.

Part Three: Once the United States entered the war in April of 1917, the pent up tension of “neutrality” exploded on the home front as Chicago and the rest of the nation prepared for war. ‘Hunting the Hun’ became pastime. The propaganda of hate was on. Chicago was doing her part as a great American city that never failed in a national crisis, but it was not enough for those beating the war tom toms and repeating the stories of German atrocities in Belgium. Pictures that chanced to put the German people in a favorable light were ordered off the screen. .  . 

Part One: Prelude to a Rumble! As developments in the Amphitheater exposed the internal dissensions within the Democratic Party itself, the drama on the streets revealed the cultural/class divide of an America that was beside itself in coming to grips with not only the war in Vietnam, but the Civil Rights Movement, the sexual revolution and the increasing alienation and use of illegal, mind altering drugs by their youth.

Part Two: Let's Get It On! The street confrontations between the Chicago Police Department and the New Left and Yippie protesters. Who provoked whom?

Conclusion: America weighs in over the provocation, confrontation and response of Mayor Daley and the Chicago Police Department during the DNC at the ballot box and elsewhere. . .

019 District (Belmont) patrol officer, riding solo, finds himself in gun battle after picking up the chase of two armed robbers until they crash land and flee on foot.

Undercover operation in Rodgers Park turns hot for 024 District Tactical officer!

After chasing  fleeing carjackers into an alley, 017 District (Albany Park) patrol officer finds himself in a desparate firefight.

Ex Marine, 017 (Albany Park) patrol officer working CTA Special Employment on near North Side severely wounds a man who only minutes before shot his wife to death on the street!

025 (Grand-Central) patrol officer responding to the building where another police officer had been shot and killed shortly before, engages (with other responding officers) in a deadly gun battle with the offender.

As only the first son of  a German farmer could hope to inherit the family Hof, and land became as hard to come by as military service was as hard to avoid, during the economic downturns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many of rural Germany's 2nd, 3rd & 4th, etc. sons emigrated to America in search of a grubstake to call their own. Many of us are their grandchildren or great grandchildren!

Can one be proud of their heritage? To what degree! Pope Benedict XVI lends his counsel!

The 19th Century visions of this German nun inspired Mel Gibson's blockbuster, yet controversial, film, The Passion of Jesus Christ!

The pc media may seem astonished if not oblivious, but German Americans still remain (gasp!) the largest ethnic group in these here United States of America!

Hasn't it been yet learned from the godless Communist and Nazi disasters of the last century that man left to his own devices, sooner or later, self destructs?

Despite Hitler's snub of refusing to congratulate track star Jesse Owens, the German masses responded to their hearts and their own innate sense of fair play and considered "Yesse Ohvens" the hero of Berlin!

Schmeling's fame, if not notoriety for some, came to him primarily for his two fights against Joe Louis in 1936, and, especially, 1938, in which he was portrayed in the American media as Adolf Hitler's "Nazi Superman."  Schmeling proved, however, despite circumstances on both sides of the Atlantic beyond his control, to be very much his own man not only then but throughout his long life!

Schmeling, despite his prowess in the ring, fought off attempts of becoming a pawn of both the Nazi regime and American boxing interests. The Nazis rewarded Schmeling by drafting him at age 35 into the Wehrmacht's paratroopers, though his comrades were almost half his age. His American detractors speculated for the rest of his life as to what extent he was a Nazi if he was at all. However, in 1989 he was made an Honorary Citizen of Las Vegas when the owner of the now former Sands Hotel, Henri Lewin, revealed that not only did Schmeling hide him and his brother Werner during the Kristallnacht outrages in Berlin in November of 1938 (six months after the Louis fight) but helped to smuggle them out of Germany!

Hartmann shot down 352 aircraft on the Eastern Front as a Luftwaffe pilot in WWII, but he revealed the true measure of his soul during the 10 years he survived in Soviet captivity!

Austria was the only land the Communist super power that was the Soviet Union ever agreed to return its sovreignty to during the entire Cold war! What really caused the Red Army to withdraw from Austria during the darkest years of the Cold War in 1955?

Is there a relationship between the Nazi euthanasia programs of the '30s and the assisted suicide movement that is developing in the West?

The early life of this Bavarian peasant who subsisted entirely without food and water for 35 years, from 1927 to 1962, and nourished only by the Holy Eucharist bore the stigmata (wounds) of Christ. These not so natural facts were substantiated by medical experts, some of whom were also astonished that after one prolonged period of observation, Therese didn't have the least bit of body waste--stool, urine or excretions of any kind--to examine!

International recognition of Therese Neumann's stigmata as well as accounts of her supernatural visions, bi-locations and expiatory suffering for the miraculous cures of others  drew its share of skeptics but not among the Nazis in her own native land. Before and during the war, the Nazi press banned all references to her, except when it once falsely reported that she was a Hitlerite herself and in another instance it stated that she was dead. In fact, the Gestapo murdered two of her non-clerical chroniclers, journalists Fritz Gerlich and Friedrich Ritter von Lama, and the SS shelled her home in Konnersreuth, Bavaria when nobody in the village would turn her in. Also not included among the skeptics were over 12,000 American GIs who visited her at the end of WWII and throughout the postwar occupation, including one GAPA member's father-in-law!

Significant lifestyle changes hailed as progress a generation ago in the West are now being questioned if not re-examined in light of the fact that the so called "sexual liberation" unleashed in the 1960s and 1970s has for all too many "baby boomers" and "Gen Xers" led to an unprecedented need for two income families who now struggle to buy homes and have children. The result: low birthrates across the Western world that will dramatically decrease their populations by the end of this century!

The American Dream begins and ends with a job that can support a marriage, a family, a home and an education for the kids as well as providing paid holidays, vacations, health insurance and retirement security. The traditional path to the American Dream has been higher education, but the skyrocketing costs at colleges and universities across the land are forcing young Americans today to take on such debt via student loans that they may may be undermining, if not sacrificing, their future financial ability to get married, buy homes and have families.

The West is lurching through a collective guilt trip, suffering through a crisis of cultural self-confidence. . . . its sense of its own tradition has been rocked hard, and the Christian banner under which it flew, thoroughly shredded. . . . Pope Benedict XVI relates, "Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred, we will deny the identity of Europe. . . . There is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West."

In an age of moral relativism, rampant secularism, mindless consumerism, a seemingly unending battle against global terrorism, increasing economic insecurity in our domestic as well as the global markets and declining marriage and birth rates, etc., in what  may modern man place his hope? Josef Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, illuminates what real hope to Christians is, no matter what trying circumstances they may ever find themselves or the state of the world in, and on what it is, ultimately based.

With the American economy in a downward spiral for the last several months, fears of the potential for rampant inflation are causing some to recall the hyper inflation that devastated the Weimar Republic in Germany in the aftermath of World War One; a dire economic situation many historians agree left Germany ripe for the Nazis or quite possibly the Communists during the early 1920s. This also marks a time in which many of our German parents, grandparents or great grandparents fled Weimar as economic refugees by immigrating to the United States years before Hitler even came to power.