History

Leadership

Programs

German-American
Heritage Museum
of the USA™

Distinguished German-American of the Year™

Oral History Research Project

German-American Day

Carl Schurz Gravesite

German-American Friendship Garden

Internship + Volunteer
Opportunities

Programs

German-American Heritage Museum of the USA™

In March 2010, the German-American Heritage Foundation of the USA® (GAHF) will open the first national German-American Heritage Museum as the institution for German-American heritage and culture. The Heritage Museum will tell the story of all Americans of German-speaking ancestry and how they helped shape our great nation today. The Museum will collect, record, preserve, and exhibit this rich cultural legacy. It will be a place for continuing discussion, study, and development of ideas about German, Swiss, Austrian, and Slovakian Americans, their heritage, their values, and their future.

The museum intends to make the German-American history more readily available to broader audiences and easy to comprehend for all ages, thereby fostering mutual understanding and increasing public knowledge about the rich heritage of all Americans of German descent. Centrally located in Hockemeyer Hall in Washington, DC, the German-American Heritage Museum is not only in close proximity to the National Archives, the National Portrait Gallery and the Newseum, but also serves as a historical setting of German-American immigration itself. Built in 1888 by John Hockemeyer, a German immigrant who became a successful merchant, the townhouse is part of the Penn Quarter, a historic settlement of Germans in Washington.