among Native peoples included direct killing, other traumatizing violence prominently including rape, the burning of towns and crops, forcible deportation, and the intentional and non-intentional spreading of diseases and of alcoholism to weakened populations. Ostler writes that the most recent scholarship finds the devastation caused by European diseases resulted less from Native Americans’ lack of immunity, and more from the weakness and starvation created by the violent destruction of their homes.
The American War for Independence (for the independence of one elite from another at the expense of native and enslaved people) involved more destructive assaults on Native Americans than had the preceding wars in which George Washington had acquired the name Town Destroyer. The outcome of the war was even worse news. Assaults on native peoples would come from the U.S. government, state governments, and ordinary people. Settlers would push the conflicts forward, and in settled parts of the East where Native Americans remained, individuals would steal their land, kill, and harass them. There were groups like the Quakers who dealt much less cruelly with indigenous people. There were ebbs and flows, and every nation has a different story. But fundamentally, the United States intended to get rid of Native Americans and got rid of many of them and took most of the land they lived on.
The Nazis, and pre-Nazi Germans, were impressed. The Nazis, as we have seen, resorted to mass murder when mass expulsion didn’t work. But they had resorted to mass expulsion only after successfully driving large numbers of Jews to voluntarily flee. Those who didn’t voluntarily flee the Reich could be driven into ghettos, starved, and made ill. They could be manipulated with false promises. They could be made to look like wild beasts. Non-Jews could be ordered to ride on Jews in the street as though they were horses, much as Native Americans in California could be made to eat from troughs like pigs.141 Once a population had been dehumanized and demonized, riots and lynchings could be set loose upon them.
In a 2020 article about the removal of a Teddy Roosevelt statue in New York, Jon Schwarz wrote:
“In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.’ In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to ‘Europeanize’ Russia. It wasn’t just Germans who would do this, he said, but Scandinavians and Americans, ‘all those who have a feeling for Europe.’ The most important thing was to ‘look upon the natives as Redskins.’”142
Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2018: “The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had ‘gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.’ When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind. . . . His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration camps, and in 1923 he contemplated—and, for the moment, rejected—the idea of killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with them.”143
That is the syllogism of Manifest Destiny. In 2011, Carroll P. Kakel published The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. Kakel finds that Hitler frequently compared his war for Lebensraum with nineteenth century wars waged by the United States. He believed his mission inevitably destined the Slavic and Jewish peoples, or “natives,” to destruction along the lines of what had been done to the Native Americans. “A similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America,” he said of what Nazis called “the German East” or “the Wild East,” meaning the eastern provinces of Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.144
While there were numerous models of imperialist, colonialist, and genocidal campaigns by European nations that could inspire, and did inspire Hitler, it was the U.S. campaign against its natives that provided the clearest model, in Kakel’s view, of what Hannah Arendt later called “continental imperialism,” meaning expansion into lands adjacent to the imperial homeland, not across distant seas and continents. This sort of imperialism required extreme race hatred. Kakel finds virtually identical language to that of the Nazis in U.S. justifications of westward expansion for “living space” for “white” settlers “cleansing” the territory. The Nazis spoke of “massacres” and colonial “settlement” of the “Wild East” by “Aryans.”
Friedrich Ratzel, the Social Darwinist who coined the term Lebensraum, published a book by that title in 1901, and promoted eastward settler-colonialism, citing the North American example, as well as the examples of southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Ratzel had traveled to the United States and was not only inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of U.S. history, but corresponded with Turner and U.S. historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, as well as Halford Mackinder in Great Britain and Rudolf Kjellén in Sweden. Lebensraum was part of German imperialist thinking from the 1890s on, and in other languages part of Euro-American imperialist thinking for longer than that. Kakel finds striking parallels and roots in many U.S. authors, most notably Thomas Jefferson, whose idyllic, agrarian, genocidal vision of expansion shows up in Hitler.
Karl Haushofer, the son of a colleague of Ratzel, became a leading proponent of Lebensraum. In 1924, he visited Hitler in prison numerous times to educate him. The results show up in Mein Kampf. After 1933, Haushofer worked for the Nazis, devising pseudo-scientific slogans. Kakel explains:
“In Mein Kampf, Hitler invoked the American conquest of ‘the West’ as a model for Nazi continental territorial expansion in ‘the East.’ In his view, the Nazis must lead the German people ‘from its present restricted living space to new land and soil’; this was necessary to free [Germany] from danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation’. As an example, Hitler looked to ‘the American Union which possesses its own [land] base in its own continent’; from this continental land base, he continued, ‘comes the immense inner strength of this state’. As the ‘Aryans’ of the American continent cleared the ‘wild soil’ and made a ‘stand against the natives’, he noted, ‘more and more [white] settlements sprang up in the land’. Germans should look to this historical experience for ‘proof’, since its population of ‘largely Germanic elements mixed little with lower colored peoples’.”145
Hitler’s understanding of the North American genocide was dependent both on its celebration in popular novels and on the racist theories of the eugenicists. In a speech on May 1, 1939, Hitler declared that the “Anglo-Saxon” was “nothing other than a branch of our German Volk,” and that it was a “tiny Anglo-Saxon tribe [which] set out from Europe, conquered England, and later helped to develop the American continent.”146
This racist theory had earlier been developed in the United States. The “Aryans” had supposedly come from the Middle East to Germany and from there to England in the form of the Anglo-Saxons. America’s Manifest Destiny was understood by many in the United States as thus being global in scope. In one vision, the Anglo-Saxons had come west to the New World, would move west to the Pacific (slaughtering/benefitting anyone in the way) and proceed west through the Pacific and Asia, coming full-circle to the supposed birthplace of the “race” near an area that some in Washington D.C. still obsess over to this day, a nation whose name derives from Aryan: Iran.147
A believer in this theory, Teddy Roosevelt, played dress-up in Brooks Brothers-designed uniforms not just as politics, but also to model a superior racial specimen eager for war. The same racist theories maintained that the process of warmaking and conquering was necessary for the health of the race. When the Aryans had reached the Pacific, the mission had to continue,
