How American Racism Influenced Hitler
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.
Trump Anyone? Denying "living space" to new migrants, anyone?
Among recent books on Nazism, the one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitmans Hitlers American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He notes that, in Mein Kampf, Hitler praises America as the one state that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by excluding certain races from naturalization.
And it goes on and on.