The age of the internet has brought us many new words and expressions, one of them being "Godwin's Law." This law asserts that as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison with Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
source: YouTube
Lucky then that this isn't a discussion. This short post will compare America's "Manifest Destiny," the widely held cultural belief in the 19th-century United States that American settlers were destined to expand across North America, and Adolf Hitler's dream of expanding the German nation to the east. There's an interesting juxtaposition between these two ideologies, where the American settlers moved their frontier to the west, and the Nazis tried to move their frontier to the east. But both had the same end goal: create more space, annex more land for their respective peoples. A little known fact about the holocaust is that it began as an attempt to imitate the American strategy of expansion, which involved the mass murder of the indigenous people who stood in their way. The Nazi experiment headed by Hitler, Hess and Himmler was an attempt to copy the settler colonialism pioneered in America.
Let me stress that the practice of these similar theoretical foundations turned out completely different. The first and most notable difference is one of severity; no matter how similar the ideas, it should be clear to everyone that the German incarnation was much, much worse with many more deaths and atrocities, even though it lasted only 6 years compared to the full century it took the American settlers to reach the west coast. Also, the American version was much more realistic, as there were an estimated 750,000 Indians divided into small and often competing tribes, where the Nazis had to overcome actual nations with protected borders and many millions of inhabitants. Another very important distinction is that the hate towards Slavs, Gypsies and Jews was based mostly on conspiratorial thinking, where the Americans started out with a policy of assimilation instead of mass murder only. And lastly, the German attempt failed in the end, something we can all be grateful for.
Nevertheless, the similarities are striking, to the point even that Hitler spoke of "the wild east," a direct comparison to "the wild west." From a book review of "Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars - Comparing Genocide and Conquest":
The Fuhrer derived inspiration from his reading of American history, as the violent removal campaigns against the “Red Indians” paralleled his own quest for lebensraum at the expense of the untermenschen of Eastern Europe. Just as the Americans had built a powerful empire by removing the “Redskins”, Hitler would do the same by removing the Slavs, with the added fanatical flourish of exterminating the Jews.
There are many more similarities, like the the fact that racism and the staunch belief in the superiority of the conquering people played a key role in both cases, and the fact that the conquered peoples had no rights, weren't granted citizenship no matter how well assimilated they were. But what's most striking, for me at least, is that Adolf Hitler literally tried to copy the blueprint of the European settlers in the "New World," and that much of his inspiration came from reading stories about "the wild west," like the works of Karl May, a German writer that's best known for his 19th century novels of fictitious travels and adventures, set in the American Old West with Winnetou and Old Shatterhand as main protagonists. Really, both histories are remarkable, especially when compared to each other, so please watch the below linked two hour deep-dive into the ways the USA Inspired the Nazis...
How the USA Inspired the Nazis - From Manifest Destiny to Lebensraum
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