As I’ve noted before, I live in the United States and I’m surrounded by people who really believe that their country is a beacon of hope, light, goodness, etc. to the world. To listen to the rhetoric of public figures they admire they seem to believe that America invented collective democratic self-government (Uh, no) as well as the notion that individuals possess rights that the government cannot violate (Wrong again, I’m afraid). Occasionally the overweaning collective self-regard of my fellow citizens can be the source of considerable entertainment. When they’re confronted with evidence of unseemly behavior on the part of their country, the effect can rather be like watching firecrackers go off (be sure to stand well back, though). But generally they can manage heroic ignorance of the unseemly and affect a patriotism which is a source of great meaning in their lives. It’s rare American who doesn’t think of vis country as a model the world should look to.

Non-Americans can find some interesting meaning in America too, as it happens. In 1940 and 1941, some energetic people were making plans, and they too had a model to look to. Professor Timothy Snyder explains:

After the corrupt Soviet cities were razed, German farmers would establish, in Himmler’s words, “pearls of settlement,” utopian farming communities that would produce a bounty of food for Europe. German settlements of fifteen to twenty thousand people would be surrounded by German villages within a radius of ten kilometers. The German settlers would defend Europe itself at the Ural Mountains, against the Asiatic barbarism that would be forced back to the east. Strife at civilization’s edge would test the manhood of coming generation of German settlers. Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based on exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view,”in the East a similar process will repeat itself a second time as in America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, would be Germany’s Mississippi.¹

Professor Snyder’s is hardly an isolated or eccentric interpretation of the Nazi understanding of American history. As equally-eminent historian Adam Tooze notes “The vision that inspired the German colonial project in the East had more in commonplace with the American ideology of the frontier than it did with the Middle Ages.”²

One might note many things about this project, but one detail that stands out in my memory is that one key component of it involved a deliberate plan to starve thirty million people to death over the course of the winter of 1941-2 (see Snyder, pp. 162-3 and Tooze 476-85). Colonel John Chivington could only have watched in awe had they pulled it off.

Naturally, it wasn’t just in matters of genocide that the Nazis found American antecedents and inspiration. In their earlier activity of drafting the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, they needed to resolve the question “who is a Jew?” in order that officials of the German Reich would know whom to persecute (and, ultimately, murder). Since Germany at the time had quite a few people who had both “Aryan” and Jewish forebears, the question naturally arose what percentage of Jewishness was necessary to make one a subhuman enemy of the German people. Happily for them, there were other people who had been thinking about analogous questions: the statesmen of the American south who had grappled with the question of how much black blood was enough to make a person into a outcaste. Sometimes this created contentions among the Nazis: at one point a Nazi ideologue named Achim Gercke argued that even someone one-sixteenth Jewish should be regarded as a Jew. Gercke’s argument in favor of his position appears to have been that it would be unseemly for Germany to have a less stringent standard for outcaste status than that contemplated in American antimiscegenation laws.³

Gercke was not alone in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. Germany’s highly-educated lawyers thought like him.

As trained jurists, these ethnocrats thought analogically and reasoned from precedent. Although they considered the 1928 law against venereal disease and a ban on polygamy, they ignored the antimiscegenation law passed in the German colonies in Africa between 1905 and 1907. Instead, they expressed their admiration for the United States as a model both because antimiscegenation laws and immigration quotas seemed so clear-cut and because public opinion accepted them as natural. (from Koonz, p. 176)

Yep, a real city on a hill we are.

Notes:

¹Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010. p. 160. Back to main text.

^2<Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. p. 469. Back to main text.

³Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. p. 171. Back to main text.