Annals of Anti-Americanism: The Great Amikäfer Conspiracy

Conspiracy theories in Germany and anti-Americanism go hand-in-hand and have a long tradition.  It is an article of faith among many Germans that John F. Kennedy was murdered by the CIA, that the US government orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, that the CIA somehow caused the 2010 earthquake in Haiti so that the US could "colonize" the poor nation and establish a military base from which to launch an invasion of Venezuelea. Regarding the current NSA spy scandal I read in Telepolis that the NSA spying program is run by a conspiracy of  "white east coast elites" ("weiße Ostküstenelite" - code word for "Jews") and the "white digital elite" (presumeably the "black" US president is cut out of the conspiracy.)

There are a number of America-themed conspiracies I have yet to learn about.  But I ran across an interesting one from the early days of East Germany in Anne Applebaum's 2012 book Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (review to follow).  In the summer of 1950 the potato crop in East Germany and Poland was devastated by a beetle infestation. This could only have come from the "American Imperialists" as Applebaum writes:

"Both the Polish and the German propagandists also received instructions on the conduct of the "battle against the beetle," national campaigns to rid the Polish and German potato crops of a deluge of Colorado potato beetles that invaded Central Europe that summer - a scourge that both Trybuna Ludu and Neues Deutschland blamed squarely on the Americans: U.S. pilots, they declared, had thrown thousands of the parasites down from airplanes over East Germany, which had made their way east. [ ...] The East Germans, who christened the bugs Amikäfer, meaning Ami (American) beetles, invited sympathetic foreign journalists from China, Poland Cazecholslovakia, France, and Italy to witness the damage done by Amikäfer.  Afterward, the journalists and their German colleagues signed a joint protest note: "Colorado beetles are smaller than atomic bombs, but they are also a weapon of U.S. imperialism against the peace-loving working population. We journalists who serve peace hereby condemn this new criminal method of the American warmongers."

Several years later, America was invaded by a different Käfer - this time coming from West Germany: the VW Beetle. 

Comments

[John Adams DE]

To be fair, one must admit that most of the conspiracy theories have been invented in the USA and that certain Germans are just taking advantage of that.

[David]

Well, the Truthers seem to be taken quite seriously in Germany. In the US they are just viewed as crackpots... or Ron Paul supporters.