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Benjamin Franklin had it wrong in 1751 when he fretted that Germans in Pennsylvania whom he reviled as “Palatine boors ... will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs.”

Writing 25 years before the Declaration of Independence, in a treatise on the demographics of the Pennsylvania colony, Benjamin Franklin expressed his worries about the arrival of Spaniards, Italians, Russians, Swedes, and the French, people who possessed what he called “a swarthy Complexion”; he complained that Germans were becoming so numerous that they threatened to “Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them.”

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens,” wrote Franklin, “who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of us Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language and Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion?”

The Nazi occupiers intended to destroy Poland as a nation, to Germanize a large chunk of the country and to turn the rest of it into a German agricultural colony.

She would soon Germanize her name to Melania Knauss and become an international model.