Although Germans prospered in Russia and kept their culture alive there for over one-hundred years, my Russian-German ancestors, once in America, assimilated quickly to the American lifestyle, as most Germans living in America during World War I and World War II did.  German immigrants, more specifically Russian-German immigrants such as my ancestors, held onto their culture much tighter than any other group of people at any time in the history of America.  Their intent was to become naturalized Americans, as indeed most of them did, and then to continue with their culture and their language.  However, English was necessary in America and World War I and World War II with Germany ultimately stopped the German Americans from continuing to act "German".  Thus their assimilation was drastically sped up and today, although nearly one-quarter of the people in America can trace part of their ancestry to Germany, there are only hints of what once was the powerful culture of the Russian-Germans in the United States (Ross 201).  My Fischer family heritage is an example of this loss of Russian-German culture. 
      In order to understand how and why my ancestors and other Russian-Germans were able to live in Russia without assimilating but became quickly Americanized once in the United States, it is important to look at the history of these people.  In 1762 Catherine the Great, a German who became the Russian Czarina, issued a Manifesto which invited Western Europeans, especially Germans, to settle in Russia.  Catherine wanted to "turn the vast steppes of the Ukraine into the breadbasket of the world, but to do this she needed good farmers to teach her backward serfs by example.  She remembered the hard-working peasants in the Germany of her youth, and realized they were the people she needed" (Goertz 26-27).  Catherine offered the Germans free land (160 acres to each family), tax exemption, interest-free loans, military exemption, and total autonomy in local government, churches, and schools (Goertz 27).  The response was overwhelming:  there were about 3,300 families that took the trek east to Russia (Goertz 22).  It seemed that the Germans would not stop coming.
     However, it was not until "Alexander I reissued the Manifesto of Catherine II, prompting another wave of migration, primarily into South Russia," that my ancestors migrated to the steppes of Russia in 1832 (Frequently).  According to a compilation of stories about my Fischer ancestors which my relatives Wilbert and Betty Fischer put together, that year my ancestors packed up everything they owned in a wagon and followed the Danube River to Russia.  They settled in the Bergdorf Colony in Southern Russia, by Odessa on the Black Sea (2).  They were escaping the terrible conditions peasants endured in Germany.  There "they were forced to pay confiscatory taxes to support the pleasures of the nobility," and their sons were recruited for war as well as to be rented out to foreign governments as mercenaries (Goertz 21).  By the end of the 19^th century there were approximately 1.8 million Germans living in Russia (Frequently).  There they lived in thriving villages. 
      The German people lived in Russia for one-hundred years "without becoming assimilated.  They had prospered with special privileges not granted native Russians, and many had become elitists."  (Goertz 29)  The Russians and the Germans each spoke their own language and attended their own churches, and it was thought that the culture of the Germans was superior to that of the Russians.  During those one-hundred years the Russians had grown hostile towards the Germans who had invaded their land and gained special privileges which they were not entitled to.  (Chittick).  However, this all came to an end on June 4, 1871, when Alexander II repealed those privileges given to the Germans in Russia.  The German colonists "were reduced to the level of the Russian peasants and under the same laws and obligations to which they were subject" (Miller).  The entire German population in Russia threatened to move and Alexander, shocked at this, sent General von Todleben to persuade them to stay.  He successfully convinced 1.75 million Germans to remain in Russia, but some did leave, many ending up in Pennsylvania.  By historical coincidence, just prior to this, in 1862, the Homestead Act was passed in the United States.  It "offered 160 acres of free land to any immigrant who indicated willingness to become an American citizen."  (Goertz 29-30)  In 1872 the railroad reached the Dakota Territory in the United States and the first Germans from Russia migrated there.  My ancestors were among the many Germans to stay in Russia. 
      At this time, however, conditions for those in Russia continued to worsen since the Russian people had a great distaste for the Germans in their country.  But then, in 1874, the Czar's army began to draft the sons of the German colonists.  (Miller).  One of the reasons that Germans had emigrated to Russia had been that their sons were being drafted into the army there, and now the exact same thing was beginning to happen to them in Russia.  In 1883, Christian Fischer, the brother of my great-great grandfather Jacob Fischer, became one of those drafted into the Czar's Army.  Fischer himself said in an interview that his "experience as a young man in Russia was somewhat different from that of the average German pioneer who emigrated to the Dakotas.  Most left Russia to avoid military conscription" whereas he left Russia after serving his time in the Czar's army (Fischer Arends 57).  While serving in the Army for a period of five years, he received a letter from one of his friends who had gone to America.  He told Christian to hurry to the Dakota Territory because the railroad had just reached the region and 'there will be a big city established' (Fischer 29).  This city Christian's friend spoke of was Eureka, South Dakota.  At the time it was a thriving city but today it is just a small town.  Since the railroad stopped at Eureka, all of the farmers around and to the west of Eureka brought their wheat there to be sent out on the railroad.  The railroad had a hard time keeping up with all of the wheat.  This lasted until the mid 1890's when the railroad began to grow to the west.  So Christian went to Eureka in 1889, became very successful due to the wheat boom, and then wrote letters to his family back in Russia, telling them to come to the Dakota Territory. 
     It took some persuading, but my great-great grandfather Jacob finally came to America in 1903 with his family.  They built a sod house in the Greenway, South Dakota area, near Eureka.  However, at this time the wheat boom was over and immigrants were no longer able to file for free land, so Jacob Sr. and his family struggled to survive.  "Many times the 5 year Jacob [Jacob Sr.'s son] would cry and ask his mother why they had come only to be hungry and maybe starve to death."  (Fischer 81)  Through a bank loan they bought land, and with much hard work and by putting their faith in God, they finally were able to settle down just southwest of Ashley, North Dakota sometime before 1920 (Fischer 82).  However, "Because of the requirements of the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862, the German-Russians who took up homesteads in the United States were required to live on their 160-acre farms.  They could not live in villages or colonies as they had in Russia" (Miller).  Although this act did not directly apply to my ancestors since they arrived after the Homestead Act was no longer applicable, all of the other farmers did not live in villages.  This meant that they could not live in a village either.  Therefore they were forced to struggle with their small farm on their own. 
     The Great Plains proved to be the favorite place for Germans to settle in America.  The area that my ancestors settled in is where the most Russian-Germans settled in the United States.  This could very well be due to the many similarities between Russia and the northern Great Plains states of Nebraska and the Dakotas.  For instance, Russia and the Great Plains both have extreme temperatures and similar thunderstorms, and the loess soil (fine-grain deposit of clay and silt) of the Great Plains is quite similar to the chernozem (black dirt) of the steppes of Russia.  In addition to this, most Germans from Russia brought Russian wheat and plants to America when they migrated and these Russian crops and plants proved to grow extremely well on the Great Plains.  Because the conditions of the Great Plains and the Russian steppes where these Germans had previously lived were so similar they were able to farm the land of the Great Plains (Frazier 188).  Many others were not able to do that because they did not have previous farm experience on land like that of the Great Plains. 
      Once in America, "The Black Sea Germans in the course of years, almost without exception, became American citizens" (Sallet 107).  This was reflected in my ancestors who, according to Elouise Kelle, a former Fischer whose father was a child when brought to America, taught themselves English and prided themselves on becoming more American.  They were Americanized rather quickly.  Most Germans from Russia wanted to become naturalized citizens in America, which my ancestors did, but, as one Russian German put it, "we will remain of German lineage, and will not neglect our German mother tongue, and intend to cultivate it with our children" (Sallet 107).  Unfortunately, the poor school facilities in the American mid-West at the time made it difficult for the children to learn German.  Those who did learn German were taught by their parents or grand-parents. "Americanizing factors were many.  A potent factor has been declared to have been the widespread employment of German girls as domestic servants in American homes, and in both business and politics Americanization was obviously a big advantage" (Hawgood 37).  Americans preferred to have people working for them who could speak English so that they were able to understand them.  Therefore Germans began to learn English in order to survive, though it was not their language of choice.
      Although Russian-Germans held onto their culture very tightly, they were eager to become Americanized in small ways.  They allowed their names to be changed.  "Jakob became Jake, Johann turned to John, and David to Dave” (Sallet 106).  Some of my relatives were named Johannes.  Once in America they were known as John.  These Black Sea Germans also seemed very excited with the American holidays, especially the Fourth of July.  All Russian Germans quickly accepted the Fourth of July and loved to put on big festivals to celebrate this national holiday (Sallet 107).   
     For a while America greeted Germans with great pleasure, for they believed them to be very hard-working people.  The Burlington Railroad only printed advertisements for America in the German language because they were eager for Germans to immigrate there (Frazier 71).  However, when World War I began, the American people’s views on the Germans in America changed drastically.  "During World War I and World War II there was a great deal of animosity towards German immigrants and German-speaking immigrants in this country."  (Frequently).  William G. Ross states in his book Forging New Freedoms: Nativism, Education, and the Constitution, 1917-1927 that when America declared war on Germany in 1914 the process of assimilation for Germans in America was drastically sped up.  They had hoped to "remain authentically German" and at the same time to become "fully American" (37).  However, this was no longer an option for them. 
     During World War I Americans saw a lot of propaganda which showed the exaggerated cruelty of the Germans and denounced all Germans.  "Anti-German hysteria spread rapidly.  The animosity soon was directed not merely against Germans and German-American opponents of the war, but against all German Americans who retained a visible ethnicity" (Ross 37).  Any type of German was suspected of being even slightly loyal to Germany and, although it was not prevalent throughout all of the United States, the German-American community as a whole generally dealt with much persecution (Luebke, Germans 52).  In reality, the large majority of German Americans during World War I sided with the United States.  The anti-Germanism became so extreme, however, that all things German had their names changed.  For instance an article from the online North Dakota State University Libraries states this:
     [Hamburgers] were renamed 'liberty sandwiches' and sauerkraut became 'liberty cabbage'.  Children no longer contracted 'German' measles, but the more virulent 'liberty' strain of the disease.  Dachshunds, by an accelerated process of selective breeding, became 'liberty pups,' that is for those unpatriotic enough to own one.  In North Dakota, some little thought was given to changing the name of the capital city.  'Bismarck' was unacceptable to many, because it conjured up images of Teutonism and Blood and Iron (Iseminger).
     The American government was clearly taking the issue of anti-Germanism to a ridiculous level.  They were taking anything and everything in the United States that might make one think of Germany in even a decent light and making it patriotic.  In this way America was trying to show Germans in America that they did not belong there unless they too became Americanized.  
     The National Security League and the American Defense League both intensified the anti-Germanism hysteria by discreetly attacking German-American churches, schools, societies, and newspapers.  They widely claimed in newspapers that German-Americans were planning a "worldwide Teutonic conspiracy" (Luebke, Germans 35).  German books were burned all over the country and in South Dakota they were thrown into the Missouri River.  Symphony orchestras could no longer play music by German composers, and universities began to revoke degrees earned by Germans (Iseminger).  Often times Germans were beaten and/or tarred and feathered.  Some of their churches were burned down and "many persons alleged that German-language schools tried to instill in their students a loyalty toward Germany and an admiration for autocracy" (Ross 47).  It was believed that public schools were supposed "to create a common culture and to eradicate distinctions among Americans," and that allowing German to be taught in schools was accomplishing the opposite of that.  More and more Americans became opposed to the teaching of foreign languages in their schools and many states, including the Dakotas, had early on "enacted statutes that required the exclusive use of English in the public schools" (Ross 22).  From Kansas to Canada (where Germans from Russia immigrated to) people were being punished harshly for speaking German or for helping Germans.  In Dawson County, Montana, for example, the Reverend Franz was lynched in 1918 for preaching in German to his small congregation of Germans from Russia (Goertz 19).  The Germans were very much aggravated by all of this, especially the laws prohibiting them to speak their native language, but they had very great respect for any "State" system, and so they learned to accept it (Hawgood 39).  The German-Americans realized that in order to survive they were going to have to become Americanized.  "A definite and final choice had now to be made.  One could be a German or an American, and to be the former was to be, in 1917 and 1918, an enemy of the country in which one had been born" (Hawgood 198).  Most chose to be American, for, as the scholar Frederick C. Luebke stated in his article entitled "Ethnic Group Settlement on the Great Plains", they realized that if they wanted to succeed in America it was necessary for them "to conform to certain basic standards of behavior" (424).  And indeed, most of those who ended up succeeding had consented to becoming Americanized.    
     My Fischer ancestors lived in and around Ashley, North Dakota.  This was a very Russian-German area, and so they, as a German community, were buffered against the persecution better than most Russian-Germans would have been.  According to Ross, "The concentration of German Americans in the Middle West enabled Germans there to hold fast to their ethnic traditions more effectively than did their counterparts elsewhere" (42).  However, this does not mean that they were not affected by the anti-German hysteria.  Since they lived in North Dakota, they had to deal with the laws prohibiting the German language.  My mother, Crystal Larson, a Fischer relative, said in an interview that they saw the anti-German propaganda, were forced to watch many of their German books burnt to ashes or thrown into rivers, and surely heard the awful stories of the persecution Russian-Germans were faced with who did not live in predominantly German communities.  They seemed to be a group of people who were able to move about as they wished.  According to the scholar Tony Waters, "when the mobility of individuals was insured through secure individual land titles (as opposed to no titles or group titles), Germans have typically assimilated with host populations" (Waters 516).  Although my relatives were not in the midst of the worst of the anti-German hysteria, they too became assimilated into America. 
     In the wake of all of this the children of these people seemed ashamed to be German.  And so they rejected the German language and culture that their parents tried to teach them.  My grandfather, James Weisser, the son of Germans, is a perfect example of this.  According to my mother who is one of his eight children, he would not eat German food when my grandmother prepared it.  My mother said that he always seemed ashamed to be of German ancestry and did not want anything to do with it, even though he grew up in the predominantly German community of Eureka, South Dakota.  Richard Sallet commented that "Usually the parents speak to their children in German and they respond in English.  They do this consciously for, possessed by inferiority complexes, they consider everything German to be inferior.  The old people will take their German world with them to the grave.  The young will live in an American World" (108).  Many German children growing up in the 1930's and 1940's were embarrassed to be associated with their heritage and therefore did all they could to avoid it.    
     After World War I was over, the Red Scare came into play.  This "was partly an exaggeration of wartime passions" and brought further hostility towards the Russian-Germans, along with the continued assimilation of those immigrants (Coben 59). As John Hawgood, a scholar of German-American ethnicity observed, after World War I "Americanized German Protestants were prone to leave the Evangelical and Lutheran Churches and join American churches such as the Baptist, the Congregational, and the Presbyterian..." (39-40). The Fischer family seems to fit into this generalization as they had been Lutheran before coming to the Dakotas.  However, in the United States they joined the Johannesthal Baptist Church near where they lived in North Dakota.  "...both Jacob and Christina (Fischer) were baptized by Rev. Dobrovolny on April 4, 1920," marking their decision to change from their Lutheran religion to the Baptist faith (Fischer 82).  Many other Russian-Germans did the same.
     By the time America entered World War II in 1941 repression of the German-Americans was no longer an issue.  Most German-Americans did not concern themselves with their German culture any longer for they were all "various in economic status, religious belief, and even in language and culture" and found other issues to be more important than that of their ethnic identities.  "Church Germans, for example, abandoned ethnicity at an accelerated pace during the 1920's and 1930's" (Luebke, Germans 73).  Their faith had become much more important to them than their culture and ethnicity.   
     After World War I it can be seen that my Fischer ancestors were becoming fully Americanized.  For instance, the German people followed the custom of giving the first born son the name of the father.  However, among my ancestors this practice seemed to have stopped with my great-grandfather, Christian Fischer, who, in 1930, named his first born son Leo (Fischer 97).  He was among a multitude of Germans who did the same in America.  
     One change from Christian's generation to that of my grandparents seems to be one of great significance.  Christian Fischer and his wife Martha lived on a farm near families that the Fischers had migrated with from Germany to Russia to America.  It was very common for groups of families to stay together like this.  Because of this my great-grandparents lived in a very German area.  However, when my grandparents were married my grandpa's father found land for them that was not in a predominantly German area.  This was because it was more important that my grandfather become successful than live in a German area, and to become successful it is necessary for a farmer to have plenty of room to grow.  This would not be possible around the German areas where all of the land was already taken (Larson).  Therefore my mother and her family grew up in an area of people from several different ethnic groups whereas my ancestors lived in the midst of Russian-German families where the culture was strong.  This became the case with the ancestors of many Russian-Germans.
     Another sign of my family's Americanization is the loss of the German language.  Since the language was banned during World War I it has not become prominent again.  Occasionally one can hear sermons in German at certain Sunday school services (Sallet 108).  However, the language was not passed from generation to generation very well.  My mother told me that when she was growing up in South Dakota she would often hear her mother speaking German on the phone to my great-grandmother.  My mom decided to take a year or two of German so she could understand what her mother and grandmother were saying over the phone.  However, her German class did not help her at all due to the fact that the Germans in Russia had lost all contact with Germany and therefore "their language was not subject to the same influences as other German speakers and was more or less isolated, resulting in a dialect that has survived for more than 200 years" (Frequently 6-7).  This German dialect of the Russian-Germans was not passed down to my mother and her brothers and sisters and so, in my family, has died with my grandmother and great-grandmother.  None of my aunts and uncles had been interested in learning the language themselves for there was no need.  
     Communities of German-Americans are very rare to find today.  "It is easy to forget that German Americans not so very long ago constituted a politically potent and culturally aggressive community that was envied, feared, and resented by many Anglo-Americans" (Ross 201-202).  In my family, it is not easy to tell that we are of German heritage unless you go to one of our family get-togethers.  There you may notice the German food such as kuegen and halupsy which my aunts are sure to make for such an occasion.  And sometimes my mom will use the few German words that she remembers, but this is as much evidence as one can find of our German heritage (Larson).  It is this way with most families today who come from German lineage. 
     The Germans did not assimilate while in Russia "because of the language barrier, separate churches, and the aggressive feelings Russian neighbors developed against the German colonies because of the exemptions the government had given these immigrants" (Chittick).  These huge distinctions between the two groups of people separated them and the Germans became a very close-knit group hardly affected by Russian culture.  But in America "Clannish isolation was swept away by intermarriage, education, the outmigration of the young, and the loss of the German language," which was caused by the desire to succeed in America and by two wars with Germany and the suspicion and hostility towards Germans that came with those wars (Goertz 32).  Therefore, German Russians in America became Americanized quite rapidly and today their culture has almost completely disappeared.