Years later I heard a very similar take from a Swedish engineer. Hearing essentially the same thing from two widely separated sources gave it some credence in my mind.
The source you cited says:
"Sometimes a local official chose to assign an unpleasant name. Some people were named Rindkopf (cow's head) or Faulpelz (putrid or lazy hide) or worse because the official felt like playing a joke or didn’t like the person."
This lends some very minimal support to what I was told way back when.
Perhaps some FReeper can chip in with more information here?
BTW, your source also says:
"There is a generally held belief that immigration officers in America arbitrarily assigned names to immigrants. Apparently that is not so. They might have changed spellings to make them more like the English manner of spelling or pronouncing or sometimes shortened them but they did not create totally new names."
I went to HS with a cutie named Katie Anderson. I was astonished when her wedding started to turn into a big Greek festival, she explained that she was full blooded Greek, and that Anderson was the name they gave her family at Ellis Island, because the immigration official thought that [something starting with An- (or Andro?) and going on from there with something very long and nearly totally unpronounceable] wasn't a good name.
He didn't quite create a name out of whole cloth, but he didn't just shorten a long name either!
I know the immigration officers changed names and spellings. I have cousins who spell their name differently than I do because the officials who filled out the papers of the two original cousins who came here with different spellings of the same name, and the immigrants were afraid to complain, so they just kept their “new” names. Same thing happened on my Mother’s side. Her ancestor was an indentured servant, and when he completed his servitude, his “master” gave him somebody else’s papers with the wrong name on them, so he just kept that name.