A Malleable Identity: The Immigration of Ethnic Germans to North America, 1947-1957
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a comparative study of ethnic German Mennonites and ethnic Germans of other faiths from Chortitza, their experiences during World War II, and their immigration between 1947 and 1957. This research explains why some World War II refugees immigrated to the United States whereas others went to Canada. Employing the ethnic German settlement of Chortitza in Ukraine as a case study shows that religious and ethnic identity played a determining factor in immigration. In 1942, Chortitza's inhabitants were eighty percent Mennonite and twenty percent Lutheran, Catholic, or Seventh-day Adventist. After arriving in Germany toward the end of World War II as a result of resettlement and flight, those whom the Soviet Union did not repatriate were eager to immigrate to North America, or even South America if all else failed. Ethnic Germans did not qualify for immigration as Displaced Persons. Displaced Persons were citizens of Allied countries or those who had been forcibly removed from their homes during World War II. Therefore, Mennonite ethnic Germans from Chortitza claimed a Dutch rather than ethnic German identity, pointing back to their Anabaptist faith's origins in the sixteenth century. Religiously affiliated U.S. organizations like the Mennonite Central Committee argued for their constituents' eligibility as Displaced Persons by exerting pressure on the International Refugee Organization, lobbying governments, and forming relationships with U.S. State Department and immigration officials. Organizations helped determine the destinations of ethnic German immigrants based on immigration networks and organizations' histories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".