Dave Lange’s moving editorial which was featured in the Plain Dealer, from November 12, 2018, and U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown’s letter in recognition of Dave’s and his father’s military service:

Remembering My Father’s Service and a Time When German-Americans Were Targeted In America

Dave Lange, Guest Columnist

MALVERN, Ohio — In late October 1990, I wrote a eulogy to my father, Charles M. Lange, who had just died at the not-so-old age of 71. I titled it, “Veterans Day tribute has to run early.”

Forty-five years earlier, he was an infantryman with the famed Rainbow Division that fought in the Battle of the Bulge, overcame the mighty German 6th Mountain Division, pushed through Nazi strongholds and finally liberated the Dachau concentration camp.

Along the way, my dad was sidetracked by severe frostbite. Despite unrelenting torment to his lower legs, he returned to the front lines and was awarded a Bronze Star.

The pain never left him. He endured it for 37 years on the floors of an Allegheny Valley Alcoa mill and Ford Motor Co.’s Cleveland Stamping Plant, often for 60-hour weeks, to pay the mortgage and put food on our table. Soon after his retirement in 1983, one of his circulation-deprived legs was taken above the knee by a surgeon’s saw. Subsequent surgeries salvaged the other leg and kept him alive until his overburdened heart couldn’t take it anymore.

But Charlie Lange was a lucky man.

He was born to an unmarried mother in the spring of 1919 in a small town near Essen, Germany. The country of his birth was physically shattered by war, its economy in ruins, 10 percent of its territory extracted by conquering allies and food shortages so bad that its inhabitants ate dogs, crows, zoo animals and rodents.

With a bit of good fortune, his mother found a husband, Carl Gustav Lange, whose uncle had emigrated to the United States prior to World War I. With cheap labor in demand by American factories after the war, Gus Lange also found work in the western Pennsylvania mills and saved enough money to send for the scrounging wife, stepson and baby daughter he had left behind.

America never was overly welcoming to immigrants, certainly not aliens from a foreign adversary.

During World War I, German books were burned, Lutheran schools were labeled as subversive and German-Americans were taken to internment camps, tortured and even lynched, “patriot murder,” as the defense attorney in an Illinois acquitting court called it. Hearst newspapers reported “that the modern German population was actually descended from Asiatic barbarians.” Intolerance directed at German-Americans was justified by The Washington Post, which said, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.” President Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information depicted Germans as savages and called them the Huns.

Even so, the 1930 U.S. Census counted more than 1.6 million German-born immigrants, second only to about 1.8 million Italians. My grandparents, father and aunt were among them.

Thankfully, my father was on the right side of World War II. His designation as a rifleman and interpreter played a role in defeating the right-wing scourge of Nazism that was determined to eradicate Jews, especially, but also communists, socialists, religious minorities, homosexuals and invalids from the face of the Earth. After it was over, thankfully, my dad was able to rescue my mother, another German refugee, from the rubble of World War II.

I’m a first-generation American. Like my father before me, I’m a lucky man. I, too, am proud to have served my country in the military.

I am cognizant of my ethnic and immigrant history. But, unlike many of today’s immigrants, because of my race and my religion, I’m not treated like a savage, barbarian or Hun.

Unlike the parents of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, a Muslim immigrant who died heroically in Iraq, I’m not ridiculed by a president who dodged the draft during my war. Unlike disabled Army veteran Ricardo Pineda, I did not suffer worry about the threatened deportation of my wife to Mexico by a heartless regime.

On this Veterans Day, I pray for fellow Americans like them.