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, not just to fulfill a prophecy or to open markets or to win elections, but so that the race might not degenerate in the dangerous luxury of peace. General Douglas MacArthur, years later, would attack WWI veterans with chemical weapons in the streets of Washington where they were demanding bonus pay148, take part (according to the Congressional testimony of Smedley Butler) in planning a coup against Franklin Roosevelt149, be removed as army chief of staff by President Roosevelt and sent off to the Philippines150, allow the destruction of U.S. airplanes in the Philippines by the Japanese on the original “Pearl Harbor Day,”151 effectively rule over Japan152, help provoke and escalate a war in Korea153, and get fired by President Truman. That MacArthur’s father, General Arthur MacArthur, was himself, for a time, the ruler of the Philippines, and explained to a U.S. Senate committee:
“Many thousands of years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary basis of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere. As to why the United States was in the Philippines , the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific — that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race.”154
In a 1910 lecture at Oxford, Teddy Roosevelt argued that recent white gains might be more temporary than those of the past, because modern Anglo-Saxons had allowed captive races to (partially) survive, whereas “all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent . . . the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples.” Roosevelt praised this as “ethnic conquest.”155
Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, after delicately pointing out the painfully obvious fact that no two events are identical, traces the Nazi genocide to some of its sources in the past exterminations that Teddy Roosevelt so admired. These include the German extermination of the Herero people in southwest Africa (Namibia) when Hitler was a child, as well as various exterminations of peoples by the British, French, and Americans, all justified by what Lindqvist says was a mainstream European belief in the early twentieth century that the inferior “races” of the world were doomed to go extinct, as predicted in 1871 in The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.156
Europeans massacred non-European peoples, not just in North America, but also in the Congo, in South Africa, in the South Sea Islands, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Argentina. The Guanches of the Canary Islands were wiped out. The people of Tasmania were wiped out. The last Tasmanian died in 1876, and her skeleton is displayed in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart. In 2020, statues of King Leopold of Belgium are being vandalized and removed. What he did to the people of the Congo is an acceptable topic of conversation today, even if its connection to a common pattern that includes Nazism is still taboo.
Carl Peters, German commissioner of an East Africa colony, brutally slaughtered the people who lived there. In 1897, he was brought to court in Berlin following his murder of a black mistress. “What was actually being condemned,” writes Lindqvist, “was not the murder but the sexual relationship. The innumerable murders Peters had committed during the conquest of the German East Africa colony were considered quite natural and went unpunished.”
The dominant model of overseas exterminations came from the British empire. Germany was not uninfluenced. “As lecturer in German at Glasgow (1890-1900),” writes Lindqvist, “Alexander Tille became familiar with British imperial ideology. He ‘Germanized’ it by linking Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories to Nietzsche’s superman morality into a new ‘evolutionary ethic’. . . . In Southwest Africa in 1904, the Germans demonstrated that they too had mastered an art that Americans, British, and other Europeans had exercised all through the nineteenth century -- the art of hastening the extermination of a people of ‘inferior culture’. . . . The Hereroes were not particularly warlike. Their leader, Samuel Maherero, over two decades had signed one treaty after another with the Germans and ceded large areas of land to avoid war. But just as the Americans did not feel themselves bound by their treaties with the Indians, equally, the Germans did not think that as a higher race they had any need to abide by treaties they made with the natives.”
Hitler and his fellow Nazis referred to Ukrainian peoples as “Indians.” On September 18, 1941, Hitler proposed, presumably jokingly, to send to Ukraine “kerchiefs, glass beads, and other things colonial peoples like.”157 He wasn't joking about devaluing those people. Hitler made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion, according to Alex Ross. “The Volga would be ‘our Mississippi,’ he said. Europe -- and not America -- will be the land of unlimited possibilities. Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The present occupants of those lands -- tens of millions of them -- would be starved to death.”158
Leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler described eastern Lebensraum as “black earth that could be a paradise, a California of Europe.” A German newspaper headline during the war read “Go East, Young Man!”159
How the Nazis treated prisoners of war depended