The interior view of a saloon following a riot at the Riverside Hotel in Calgary on Feb.10, 1916. The riot was supposedly started because the owner was German.

PHOTO: Handout photo, W.J. Oliver/Glenbow Archives The interior view of a saloon following a riot at the Riverside Hotel in Calgary on Feb.10, 1916. The riot was supposedly started because the owner was German.

It was swift, destructive and intimidating.

A mob of 1,500 stormed the Riverside Hotel on Feb. 11, 1916, trashing a two-storey building in the heart of Calgary’s Germantown.

Led by soldiers, the group took just 20 minutes to overturn tables, shatter counters and leave pipes hanging offthe walls.

“Within half an hour, the whole building was completely gutted, not a single room escaping,” reads the next day’s Calgary Daily Herald. The soldiers looted the bar and smashed light fixtures, telling the paper it was all because the establishment located just north of the Langevin Bridge was “owned by a German.”

It wasn’t. From the onset of the First World War, Canadians of Germanic origin faced discrimination from the government and the public. It started with a rollback of civil rights when the War Measures Act was brought in within weeks. People from Germany, Austria, Hungary and Ukraine were deemed “enemy aliens,” even if they were naturalized citizens. They had to carry identification cards and were forbidden to join socialist movements, leave Canada without a permit or possess firearms. Immigration to Canada from the four countries was suspended entirely, and those granted citizenship after 1902 had their status revoked.

Despite the mandatory registration, governments and media initially discouraged the public from linking German-Canadians with the war. “Very large proportions of Canadians of German ancestry have no sympathy with the Kaiser in the present war,” read an Edmonton Journal editorial, saying its readers “should not view with suspicion Canadians with German names.”

That didn’t last long. In December 1915, reports surfaced of a German spy arrested in Lethbridge who was plotting to blow up a Canadian Pacific Railway bridge. A similar case was reported in Vancouver; the veracity of both reports remains unclear. Two months later, at the time of the Riverside Hotel riot, rumours circulated of Germans bombing the federal Parliament buildings, and even an imminent invasion.

The day of the riot, Calgary’s city council voted to have all the people who had been born in enemy countries “immediately discharged from the city service” and replaced with returned soldiers. “Some of the soldiers were contemplating an attack on the street railway because of the employment of alien enemies,” police told the Herald.

“Early in 1916 the war was dragging on, and all the Canadians were getting killed,” Prokop says. “The persecution and discrimination that took place came to a head.”

Hundreds of soldiers in Calgary wrecked a downtown restaurant after rumours the owner had fired a returning soldier to hire an Austrian immigrant. The next day, a soldierled group turned its attention to the Riverside Hotel. After trashing that, the drunken horde rushed to two German-owned restaurants, a brewery and finally the Palliser Hotel. “For over a couple of hours, a veritable reign of terror prevailed,” stated the Herald. Pickets of citizens and police prevented these buildings from a similar fate.

“It was a hysterical reaction to the war, but it’s understandable in some ways,” says Manfred Prokop, a retired University of Alberta linguist who has authored a history of German-origin settlers in Alberta. “Our soldiers fight them over there; they’re here among us and we’re supposed to tolerate them?” Prokop explained.

Only 10 per cent of Germans in Alberta originated from Germany – most were farming families who had lived for generations in Russia or Ukraine.

“They had no allegiance to the Kaiser and would not have co-operated with the Kaiser,” Prokop says. “So it was a big surprise to them that the public could see a spy just around the corner.”

The animosity against what was Canada’s third-largest ethnic group saw Calgary’s Berlin and Dresden streets changed to 2nd and 6th streets N.E. Towns across southern Alberta changed names, with Wittenberg becoming Leedale, Griesbach morphing to Carseland and Carlstadt replaced with Alderson. Kitchener, Ont., famously replaced the original name of Berlin in 1916, some 60 years after its founding.

Hutterites were especially loathed for practicing an antiwar religion with German-language services at a time of nationalist fervour. Most didn’t pay taxes and lived in separate communes, prompting a freeloader stereotype in cartoons.

Across Canada, some 8,579 enemy aliens – most of German origin via Ukraine – were sent to internment or work camps. Many were unemployed people the government feared could join radical movements. One camp laid much of the foundation for BanffNational Park.

Prokop says Canadians aren’t as familiar with this internment relative to that of Japanese-Canadians because of its comparatively small size and shorter time frame, and a reluctance of survivors to become political.

“The Germans never really wanted to, or dared to, ask for any compensation,” Prokops says. “When two world wars were caused by someone from where you came from, or the place you’re associated with, you feel very intimidated. You don’t want to cause any problems.”

For Prokop, discrimination during the war holds a lesson for modernday conflicts.

“There is a danger of overreaction, of going too far, of raising sentiments that are very hard to put back into a bottle,” he says. “You can’t paint so many different people with the same brush.”