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[Piecake]

The U.S. is not alone, however, in whitewashing its encounters with Native Americans. Most remarkably, perhaps, the ethnic cleansing of the “Wild West” has long been an exotic theme in Germany for more than a century thanks largely to the novels of a very strange man named Karl May—which were beloved by none other than Hitler.

Aping the horrific beliefs of American Manifest Destiny, which saw the “Anglo-Saxon race” push its frontier all the way to the Philippines, May imagined indigenous Americans as romantically—and inevitably—doomed, with Winnetou’s nobility passing away irrevocably.

In 1893, at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin famously lectured on settlers killing Indians across the United States as they extended an ever-westward American frontier and how that frontier was coming to an end. He was in touch with Friedrich Ratzel, the German historian who coined the terms Biogeographie and Lebensraum This was to be continental expansion and ethnic cleansing of “lesser” peoples.

Lebensraum was explicitly Turner’s idea of an American-defining Western frontier transposed to a German-defining East in Poland and Russia. As Turner reciprocally put it, “American colonization [of the West] has become the mother of German colonial policy.”

The Karl May novels had long possessed Hitler’s imagination. As he recounts in Table Talk, I’ve just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were republished. I owe him my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying-glass…The first book of his I read was The Ride Through the Desert. I was carried away by it. And I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling-off in my school reports.

As Fuehrer, Hitler kept the whole collection of May’s works in his bedroom, and they inspired his ideas about the frontier. To Hitler, Lebensraum meant settlement and bread: “For a man of the soil, the finest country is the one that yields the finest crops. In twenty years’ time, European emigration will no longer be directed towards America, but eastwards.”

Of Ukrainians, Hitler insisted, “There’s only one duty: to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.”

Astonishingly, Hitler’s idea of settling the eastern European frontier even came decked out in the clichés of Western conquest: “We’ll supply the Ukranians with scarves, glass beads, and everything that colonial peoples like.”

To justify the slaughter of Poles, Hitler conjured North America: “I don’t see why a German who eats a piece of bread should torment himself with the idea that the soil that produces this bread has been won by the sword. When we eat wheat from Canada, we don’t think about the despoiled Indians.”

But the driving idea behind Hitler’s conception of Social Darwinism was the extermination of American Indians in the “Wild West.” And the vehicle for this was Karl May’s fantasy novels. When Hitler went to celebrate at May’s gravesite in Radebeul, he discovered that May’s best friend, buried next to him, was Jewish. The Nazis dug up that corpse.

American scholars, diplomats, and politicians did not read Hitler or put out of their minds any mention of Indians. They did not notice the Karl May craze in Germany, much less connect it, as Europeans do, to Hitler: there was, despite Indians dancing on the German screen, no “Wild East.” They “forgot” all this because settler-genocide was too close to home.

And in Israel, the idea of settler-colonialism, including comparison of Palestinians to American Indians, also seized the imagination of leaders. They do not know—I speak here as a Jew—the close connection to this central Nazi idea and World War II.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/21/these-wild-west-novels-inspired-hitler.html

Really interesting read. I definitely recommend reading the whole thing

 

[pa22word]

Yeah this is pretty common knowledge to people who've read a bit about Hitler and the Nazi ideology. Anyone have that picture of the modern day german bar thing where they dress up as cowboys and have the confederate flag in the backdrop? Every time I see that I get shivers.

 

[CarpeDeezNutz]

Yeah this is pretty common knowledge to people who've read a bit about Hitler and the Nazi ideology. Anyone have that picture of the modern day german bar thing where they dress up as cowboys and have the confederate flag in the backdrop? Every time I see that I get shivers.

Wut?


Never seen that one.

 

[pa22word]

Wut?


Never seen that one.

First time I saw it was on here, ironically. Used it in a paper I wrote about Nazi's back in college. Can't seem to find it now, though. I know they didn't mean anything by it and probably had no idea what it meant other than it was in the good, the bad, and the ugly for a bit, but the imagery is straight up haunting.