this happened to my grandpa and his family
they emigrated from baden in 1912, to escape the kaiser. ironically, that is my mom’s maiden name.
so, you can imagine the treatment his family received during the WW1 period of US involvement.
that said, he was a patriotic american, and never held it against anyone. he was glad to be an American.
I am very sorry to hear that.
My grandfather had a brother who moves to the USA long before my grandfather did (which was just one the eve of WWII). He (my great uncle) was also Jewish of most-recent-German-origin.
He had kind of warned my grandfather off from the USA due to problems being German (rather than problems being Jewish). He had a successful bakery in NYC most of his life, dying not too long ago.
Ironic.
That said, my grandfather never felt comfortable in the USA and promptly made aliyah to Israel when he could, shortly after serving the USA in WWII — mainly as a translator (he could speak English/German/Polish/French/Yiddish/Hebrew, all fluently). He basically followed around a general the entire war.
I had a couple of college classes (big lecture hall, hundreds present) where the roll was actually read the first couple of sessions of the term. When they got to one fellow student and like all of us we all just heard the last name, “Hittler”, laughter followed. That’s a moniker I’d definitely drop, had I been him, just too much of a burden, irrespective of the lack of any real connection to A-dolt. It’s not as if immigrants and others haven’t changed the family name. Some of those long German names got shortened, and diificult to pronounce names of other nationalities got Anglicized.