General Discussion

G_j

(40,372 posts) Wed Jun 20, 2018, 07:10 AM Jun 2018

Did President Trump's Grandfather Beg the Government of Bavaria Not to Deport Him?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trumps-grandfather-bavaria-deport/

On 1 March 2017, Harper’s magazine published a translation of a letter written by President Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria, in which he pled (unsuccessfully) for the Prince regent to reconsider his family’s deportation.

The letter was found in a local German archive and was first published in the German newspaper Bild on 21 November 2016. The Associated Press confirmed the story in a bulletin posted that same day:

Bild newspaper printed the 1905 letter located by an historian, in which Friedrich Trump wrote Bavarian Prince Luitpold begging the “well-loved, noble, wise and just” leader not to deport him. Luitpold rejected the “most subservient request.”

Trump’s grandfather was born in Kallstadt, then part of Bavaria, and immigrated to the U.S. as a teenager without performing his military service. It was after he’d made his fortune there and tried to resettle in Germany that he was ordered expelled, and returned to the U.S.

Many news outlets have suggested that Friedrich’s arguments appear similar to contemporary ones raised by those who fear deportation under President Trump’s orders or oppose his immigration policies, including this passage:

We were confronted all at once, as if by a lightning strike from fair skies, with the news that the High Royal State Ministry had decided that we must leave our residence in the Kingdom of Bavaria. We were paralyzed with fright; our happy family life was tarnished. My wife has been overcome by anxiety, and my lovely child has become sick.

Why should we be deported? This is very, very hard for a family. What will our fellow citizens think if honest subjects are faced with such a decree — not to mention the great material losses it would incur. I would like to become a Bavarian citizen again.