Historian says California needs to drop the name of Hindenburg from a local park where Nazi sympathizers once held rallies

I am a German-American and Southern California native. While other kids watched Saturday morning cartoons, my German-born mother sent me to German school, where I learned how to build extremely long sentences with verbs placed at the end. I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales — not the watered-down Disney versions — but the crazy originals in which Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their heels to fit into the glass slipper. I liked being a German-American kid in Southern California, and I am now a professor of German history at Cal State Fullerton. But when I learned that a German American organization had recently erected a sign in a part of Crescenta Valley Park welcoming visitors to “Hindenburg Park” in gothic German script, I couldn’t help but cringe.

This new marker isn’t something that should be celebrated.

The portion of Crescenta Valley Park in question used to be privately owned by the German American League from the mid-1920s to the 1950s. The organization named its land for former German President Paul von Hindenburg after his death in 1934. In the mid-1950s, Los Angeles County purchased the land and incorporated it into Crescenta Valley Park. The name “Hindenburg Park” then existed only unofficially among locals old enough to remember. In 1992, after a grassroots effort by a German American organization known as the Tricentennial Foundation, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors rededicated that part of the park as “Hindenburg Park.” Small markers referencing Hindenburg Park existed, but nothing as prominent as the new sign erected last month.

The Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, which has protested the sign, correctly points out that the name Hindenburg evokes painful memories of the Nazis’ Third Reich. The Tricentennial Foundation claims that it is merely preserving the site’s historical name, and they downplay Hindenburg’s connections to Nazism.

This is selective memory at best.  ...