Abstract
In private conversations during the Second World War, German leader Adolf Hitler frequently compared the German war for Lebensraum (living space) in ‘the East’ to the colonial wars waged by the nineteenth century’s Euro-American great powers. The Slavic world, he believed, had to be conquered and colonized and its population vanquished. Completion of this ‘colonizing mission’ inevitably demanded the destruction of the ‘natives’, as a result of methods similar to those used in the conquest of the ‘American West’. In a monologue to his close associates, Hitler declared, ‘There is only one duty: to Germanize [“the East”] by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins.’ He also compared the quelling of partisan resistance in the ‘Wild East’ to ‘the struggle in North America against the Red Indians’.1 According to his understanding, the American ‘Nordics’ had colonized ‘the West’ after they had ‘shot down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand’.2 ‘Here in the [E]ast’, Hitler predicted, ‘a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.’3
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Notes
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© 2011 Carroll P. Kakel, III
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Kakel, C.P. (2011). Introduction. In: The American West and the Nazi East. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307063_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230307063_1
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