The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective

by Carroll P. Kakel

By employing new 'optics' and a comparative approach, this book helps us recognize the unexpected and unsettling connections between America's 'western' empire and Nazi Germany's 'eastern' empire, linking histories previously thought of as totally unrelated and leading readers towards a deep revisioning of the 'American West' and the 'Nazi East'.

Genres: History, Germany, Nonfiction, American History, Politics, The United States Of America, European History

321 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2011

Reviews

[Randall Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

After he bought his 600th slave, Jefferson famously wrote Monroe (1801) that he wished a country “free from blot or mixture”. Surely, he didn’t mean that! Who would he have sex with? Who would do his laundry in chains? With most students taught to revere Jefferson, it’s easy to see how centuries of fawning over Jefferson spawns both Andrew Jackson and Trump. There was also a huge disagreement between our Founding Fathers: George Washington said we were a rising empire, while Madison said we were a growing empire. George chose a cooking metaphor and Madison an agricultural one, to both openly admit a future policy, not of liberty and freedom of course, but of applied racism and large-scale theft, a.k.a. empire building. Jefferson envisioned an empire so big as to one day cover all of Latin America as well. Gosh, that doesn’t sound greedy or entitled at all. Jefferson called the U.S. an “empire of liberty”; yes, taking “liberty” from natives and blacks by force and giving it only to whites presumably gives you an “empire of liberty”. He saw the land as a regenerative force; no doubt because stolen land gets enjoyed a second time by those who stole it. In his pamphlet Common Sense, Tom Paine laughably argues that England “hath stirred up the Indians and the negroes against us.” Apparently uppity colonists taking native lands, butchering native women and children while enslaving blacks, would not be enough alone to turn both targeted groups against you.

Seeing American history as “fate” or “destiny” is a great disservice, better to see it as “conscious policy and deliberate actions”. Imagine our high-school history teachers instead teaching us that the Louisiana Purchase only happened through the threat of war, Jefferson had moved troops to the border of Louisiana to provoke the French into selling. What a great deal! Well, yeah, but can’t anyone can get a great deal at gunpoint? We get Florida not because we are skilled negotiators but because after Jackson’s aggressive invasion, and British silence, Spain thought of cutting its losses. Polk wisely didn’t want a two-front conflict, and settles the Oregon boundary at the 49th parallel with Britain, to be free to bully Mexico. For Kakel, “The War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the three dozen or more Indian Wars were all imperial wars” that increased the size of the U.S..

I think the reason we were all taught only about the Louisiana Purchase was because it was the most benign of our spoils. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) shows a land purchase clearly larger than the Louisiana Purchase but it was tarnished by the illegal pretext for the Mexican War’s beginning and the war’s obvious imperial nature. Whereas the Louisiana Purchase is easily and patriotically explained by a dull teacher as, “Wow, what a great deal, Huh?!”

We were taught the two types of early Americans, the yeoman farmers and the plantation slaveholders. We were taught the slaveholders were genteel folk like in Gone with the Wind and yeoman farmers were honest clean-shaven men out of any Hollywood Western. That both groups routinely did bodily injury to innocent parties (to either control the slaves output or take Native land) was never taught to any of us. Ok, listen up. Yeomans, act the victim, go west and do unspeakable things to red people. Plantation dudes, act the victim, stay south and do unspeakable things to black people, and we will all meet at the bank. Capiche?

“The Proclamation Line of 1763 signaled the emergence of a racial frontier.” Kakel mentions what few other historians will dare mention: the post 1763 “racial war without mercy” obscured within the Revolutionary War where the majority of native victims were non-combatants. The War of Independence was basically, as Kakel tells us, fought about Indian land. After all, the Treaty of Paris (1783) doubles the size of the U.S. without causing a single history teacher to ask “Wait, where did that new land come from in those 20 short years? Was all that land purchased or basically stolen at gunpoint from Natives? What’s the real story?” Look at the Sullivan-Clinton Campaign of 1779 as a typical operation. The original settlers of the eastern United States set the settler-colonial example for the U.S. and the later wars for the American West only copied the East’s settler-colonial techniques. At the signing of the Treaty of Paris, only 1% of the colonists lived west of the Proclamation Line (illegally) but somehow that was enough white man density for the powers that signed the Treaty to give all that otherwise Indian land to the colonists for a paltry twenty years (1763-1783) of “work” fighting on native land they knew that didn’t belong to them. Imagine Native surprise after that Treaty? Wow. Some eviction notice – you made orchards and nitrogen-fixing agriculture that will last the soil for thousands of years – we’ll rip that shit out at gunpoint and turn our land into a permanent eyesore. And the punchline? No relocation costs, just hasta la vista, baby. It’s now OUR land of freedom. Kakel posits that if the Native communities had not been so decimated in population (from 5 million to 600,000), that they would have forced a far better living situation from the white invaders.

This book divides Hitler’s policy and US Indian policy into their three components: Continental Imperialism, Settler-Colonialism, and Frontier Genocide. Both early America and Nazi Germany was all about establishing a “contiguous land-based continental empire” “backed by an agrarian state ideology”. Both Jefferson and Hitler envisioned an “empire” based on agrarian ideology. In 1941, Hitler states his wish that the indigenous people of Russia should be treated like the “Red Indians” in the “American West”. Kakel is one of the few historians to mention that Living Space for white Americans and Germans meant Dying Space for Native Americans, Slavs and Jews. Luckily for the world, our Founders did feel that outright extermination of the Natives might tarnish the “honour” of the new nation.

Hitler says, “Anyone who talks about cherishing the local inhabitant and civilizing him, goes straight off to a concentration camp.” He also said, “There is only one duty: to Germanize [“the East”] by immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins. Here in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” Hitler noted that England ruled India with the “most brutal ruthlessness.” When you read about Jews being put into two lines of “fit” and “unfit”, know those lines only determined the order in which you would die. Lebensraum was coined by Friedrich Ratzel in 1901. Originally meant as his freedom in adolescent defiance to pitch a tent in his parent’s backyard for Weihnachten, Friedrich soon realized he hit gold when he redefined it to classmates as a wildly aggressive sadism/racism mix with a creamy nutty nationalist center. Note that a key element of Lebensraum is settler-colonialism. Hitler knew Germany killed 320,000 Africans in present day Namibia and Tanzania. Herero, anyone? The Nazi blueprint for the East shows the clear influence of Germany’s tandem bloodletting in Africa. Nazi elites knew a secret: War gave them the opportunity to “take relatively rigorous action without regard to world opinion.” Ordinary Germans were allowed to imagine Babi Yar, but they were never allowed to imagine Auschwitz. The Nazis, unlike us didn’t get to finish their frontier genocide. And so, in the end Kakel profoundly says the Final Solution resulted from “a confluence of roadblocks to Nazi colonial plans in the East”. Great book. The cover is amazing; it shows actual settler-colonial wagon trains both Nazi style and US frontier style.

[Andre · Rating 4 out of 5]

For some people this book could be quite infuriating, for several reasons. One among them is not simply that it does attempt, and succeeds, to compare the Nazi conquest of East Germany with that of the American invasion of the East, but you can be sure that tons of fans of Thomas Jefferson and Manifest Destiny, plus the Wild West of course, would not like this book, at all. And if this weren't all, I am sure the comparison of Andrew Jackson and Heinrich Himmler, and the similarities between "Manifest Destiny" and "Lebensraum "would sure as hell piss lots of Americans off.
Funny thing is that what the author writes about the two kinds of American imperialism in the 1830 and 1840s sounds pretty much like the two kinds of American imperialism today. Except today "soft imperialism" doesn't mean commerce and missionary but commerce and drone strikes.
However, it is not as though I believe everything in this book. I was getting more suspicious than usual regarding the author or her sources pretty early in the book. You see, if she says that anti-semitism rose to a new scale not seen elsewhere in regards to 1870s to 1918 than I contest that, as that is not true, it is true for the 1930s and 40s, but not before. Quite the contrary.
But still, I did learn new things I did not know before, and I could check them. You see, the book is right, the American declaration does refer to the "merciless Indian Savages." That is a bit of racism that is apparently omitted all the time. However the book refers to Germans of African descent in the 1920s and 30s only as Rhineland bastards, which is not correct. Plus, not all were "black", unless Algerians, Moroccans and Vietnamese are suddenly considered black in some way.
But nonetheless the author does make a compelling case. I mean even if you do adhere to the "the Holocaust is completely unique doctrine," if you read about popular American sentiments towards the Natives back then and don't see similarities to the Nazi plans for Eastern Europe and the societal and racial undesirables, then I think there is something wrong with you. The language is often eerily similar and what the Nazis did appears more and more like a "logical" extension of what had come before.
And when reading this, you would see the American war for independence and people like Jefferson and Washington with quite different eyes. Sure they seemed better when compared to Anglo-Saxon settlers but still. And the similarities in anti-Irish and anti-Indian language are eerily similar. Quite ironic that today Irish are considered universally white. Then again it is also always ironic to me, when I read how Hitler and his Nazis were seeing the Slavs as Germany's ancient enemies when in fact lots of Germans have Slavic ancestors, which is indicated not only in family names but also the names of places. In fact "Berlin" does not come from the German word for "bear" as many claim, but an old Slavic word for swamp, the suffix "-in" (ike "-ow") is also common for Slavic names, in East Germany its common.
But back to the Americas: The population explosion among the US settlers from 1700 to 1790 (from 250000 to 4 million), and considered how similar the language among the American pioneers and imperialists is to those of Nazi Germany when it comes to colonizing and settling, I think I will forever see the show "Into the West" in a new light. Furthermore, considered how long this "this land belongs to us because we know best" mentality lasted in the American westward expansion and invasion and how entrenched it is, you really have to wonder how deep it is in US society today and how far it has spread to later immigrant communities. Because I often get a "we know best so let's spread it" vibe from Americans all across the color palette.
Now, another point I would also disagree with the author is that while I agree that both Slavs and Jews were victims of colonial genocide I would not agree that only Jews were victims of industrialized genocide. At the very least a scholar would have to include Sinti and Roma under this, in their case forced emigration prior to 1939 was never even attempted. That is what is weird about this author, some things she seems to know and others not.
But with all these flaws, I would still recommend this book, as there are still so few cases, in comparison, that actually dare to compare the Nazi conquest with other cases of genocide.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quit at page 90, not what I expected. I had thought this would be the definitive case for showing (1) parallels between the removal of the American Indians and the plans for Lebensraum in Nazi Germany, and (2) the influence of American Indian removal on Hitler and the Nazis.

In some cases, it had this. But it might be a weak case. To start with the best of it, the author included some good evidence showing how Hitler admired the United States, loved American Western entertainments, and used the removal of American Indians as a way to explain what he wanted to do. That's not to say Hitler wouldn't have done the things he did without the American example. It's shown in the proper place.

In other places, it was more of a stretch. Hitler is compared to Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson is compared with Heinrich Himmler. There were some parallels (both Hitler and Jefferson idealized the farmer-settler), but I don't think the case was as strong as what the author had hoped. From my understanding of early American history, Jefferson and Jackson weren't as essential as the author made them out to be. But still, I admired her audacity to go after them.

The biggest missing piece from this book is a broader comparison. I would have liked to have seen a case that the American West and Nazi East were uniquely similar in a way that they were not similar to something like South Africa or the Spanish Empire. Instead, I was worried that I was getting an unfair comparison (this is not a direct quote, but it's something like "both Hitler and Gandhi were vegetarians!"). It was not obvious to me that the similarities between Nazi Germany and early America were crucial, unique similarities. I stopped reading the book because I felt its comparisons were too broad to be insightful.

I get the sense that this was an important book to write because it was a good starting point to start making these kinds of comparative studies. Recommended for historians of the subject who want a good starting place to work from.

[Jonathan]

This book compares the colonization of the American West with the Nazi colonization of the German East. The most interesting part of the book is not really about the policies that both of the countries put in place, but instead the ways that each of the countries mythologized or justified the colonization. How the settler colonial project in the American West or the European East was justified and narrated to the American and German publics. In the United States you have the myth of Manifest Destiny, the idea that it is the destiny of the US to stretch from coast to coast. You also have the myth of the vanishing Indian, which is the idea that there were Indians out there in the West but they have disappeared. Taken together Manifest Destiny and the vanishing Indian myth, justified genocide to your average American on the street, to the point that today most American don't even really think about the history of how the country came to be.

And in the case of Germany, for centuries, the idea of the East had this sort of special mythologized role as a place associated with the medieval Teutonic Knights, with mystery, and with adventure. In the late 1800s the idea of Lebensraum emerged, where the East became a sort of destined part of Germany, and eventually the Nazis ramped this idea up and said the East is not for all German people, it's for the Aryan people. It is their natural ecosystem that they emerged from, and in order to create, or recreate, that Aryan land we need to actually remove all the indigenous people who are there right now, forcibly. As this book points out, it may not be the case that the Nazis stole specific policy ideas from the Americans, but what they did borrow heavily is the aesthetics of the frontier. For instance the lower picture on the cover of the book might look like somewhere in Nebraska in the 1800s, but it's not. It's actually in the German East.

[Morgan]

This book's main point is to explore American and Nazi German settler colonialism from a comparative perspective, primarily by treating one at a time, with each chapter ending on a discussion on similarities and differences. Through this, it demonstrates beyond a doubt that Nazi and American imperialism were of a kind. This aspect of the book is very fruitful and interesting.

However, Kakel is not satisfied merely by proving striking parallels – as he makes clear in the introduction to this book, he wants to prove that American settler colonialism even served as a model for German settler colonialism during the Second World War. The book provides no evidence for this, however. All Kakel does in the main text is extrapolate from Nazi analogies to the history of imperialism, many of which are not even American (one frequently quoted remark by Hitler from 1941 calls Eastern Europe 'our India'). Focusing one-sidedly on occasional Nazi use of American frontier rhetoric is incredibly misleading, because as another scholar, Jens-Uwe Guettel, has pointed out, American frontier imagery was all the rage in German imperialist discourse at the time. What characterized the Nazis specifically was rather a conscious rejection of the American example (see German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States and 'The US frontier as rationale for the Nazi east?'). The Nazis presented themselves as constructing an 'anti-America' in Eastern Europe, not as imitators.

The main project of this book – to demonstrate that Nazi Germany's imperialism cannot be isolated from liberal imperialism – is an important one. However, it is not well served by fabricating stronger connections than can be found in history. The relationship between the Nazi East and the American West – and liberal imperialism in general – is much more complicated than Kakel presents it. For those interested, I have written more about it here.

[Shrike58 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read my share of accounts of the Final Solution, and the course of empire in North America, I approached this monograph with a good bit of interest. Sadly, this interest seems to have been misplaced. The main concern of the author would appear to be to sell the reader on the value of "genocide studies," as a source of insight, and then to offer an "one-hand-than-the-other" account of the dispossession of the First Nations, as compared with the development of a new German drive to the east (in the wake of the failure to carve out an empire in Africa and the Far East). While there do appear to be tidbits of information on the influence of the American experience on the Germans (what I was mostly looking for), Kakel's writing style is sufficiently prolix that I didn't feel like working that hard to tease those insights out. This is particularly since his final conclusions, that settler colonialism tends to go hand in hand with ethnic cleansing, or even out-and-out genocide, did not impress me as being especially novel. At best this is interlibrary-loan fodder that one reads because your professor made you.

Originally written: October 1, 2016.

[Ron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes a convincing case the comparison is fully warranted.

Aside from the relentless detail which demonstrates this, one thing I found fascinating was the fact Frederick Jackson Turner, he of the Frontier thesis, was in communication with Friedrich Ratzel, the German writer who, in 1906, published a book called 'Lebensraum'.

Two things are thus demonstrated: the idea of stealing vast territories in Eastern Europe to expand German and build its "character" along the lines our Frontier did for us; and two, Germans were directly inspired by Americans in the settler-colonial project of empire.

[Mason Matthews · Rating 4 out of 5]

The thesis Kakel presents in this historical comparison is groundbreaking. His argument that American continental imperialism served as an important precedent for Nazi lebensraum is well researched and defended. Although I found the text to be rather repetitive and I would have enjoyed more lengthy quotes from primary sources, the ideas in this text are groundbreaking. Perhaps equally as important as Kakel’s thesis are the many questions about the American West and Nazi East raised in this work that are worthy of future research by students in history or genocide studies programs.

[Bender · Rating 2 out of 5]

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