My current research is a collaboration with Dr. Glenn Mitchell, Honorary Senior Fellow, History Program, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Woolongong (Australia).
We are comparing and contrasting the treatment of German immigrants during World War I in Australia and United States. In particular, we focus on German immigrants who were employed by the German metal trader company, Metallgesellschaft. These German-born traders in essence controlled the majority of the non-ferrous metal trades in the world and this came as a huge surprise to most Americans and Australians. Both countries, in reaction, wanted to cleanse their economies of this German influence. In the United States, the Alien Property Custodian, authorized through the Trading with the Enemy Act, confiscated or placed in trust the property of the subsidiaries established by these German immigrants. Since most of these immigrants had become naturalized citizens, only patents and a number of shares were liquidated and sold to American investors. The naturalized citizens were not denaturalized and remained in the United States; all remaining wealthy and successful, often establishing new metal trading companies. And the APC could claim that he had “Americanized” this sector of the economy. By contrast, in Australia, German born metal traders, even if naturalized citizens, had all their property confiscated, were interned in camps, if naturalized had that citizenship stripped from them, and were deported to Germany after the war. Here, the Prime Minister, William Morris Hughes, also insisted in cleansing the country’s economy from German influence, but he also hoped that in the process, Australia would become more important as well as more autonomous in the British empire.