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

In The Winning of the American West, Theodore Roosevelt described the racial conflict between White Europeans and native American Indians as “the spread of the English-speaking people over the world’s waste space,” and “the most striking feature of the world’s history.” Brushing aside the moral qualms some felt, the future president observed that only a “warped, perverse, and silly morality” would condemn the conquest of the West. He did not have much to worry about because few contemporary Americans condemned the means employed against the Indians: stripping them of their ancestral lands, hounding them from one “inviolable” territory to another, massacring thousands, forcing children to undergo “Americanization,” and herding people into barren reservations.

What most Americans thought then and what they think now is not the same. Perceptions have changed, notably among contemporary historians. What Roosevelt called “waste space” were really sovereign Indian territories stolen by White settlers who committed terrible atrocities on the frontier, aided and abetted by their government; there was little glorious in this project of ethnic cleansing, ghettoization, and extermination. The implication is clear enough: the time has come to address this story as a tragedy, a blot on the conscience of America. The book under review belongs to this contemporary genre because it offers different “optics,” in this sense not very differently from other recent works. What makes Carroll Kakel’s work more radical is that it places a “genocidal colonial project” in historical perspective by comparing it to what he represents as the Nazis’ racial and spatial genocide against Jews, Slavs, and others during World War II. The title itself is likely to provoke objections from American historians, and Frederick Jackson Turner might turn over in his grave. Kakel acknowledges as much, but insists on recognition that genocide played a major role in the winning of the West (p. 179).

Kakel’s “new optics” changes the angle of vision for looking at transnational conquests. The author sees imperialism as the main organizing principle of the modern world, adding that it was always closely linked to “space and race.” Although his analysis suffers from heavy academic jargon (the book grew out of his doctoral thesis), his case emerges clear: imperialist conquests involve lethal consequences for the conquered, especially if the conquerors are motivated by ethnocentric or racist prejudices, for example fantasies of “Manifest Destiny” or “Aryan” superiority.

Can Hitler’s fantasy of Lebensraum in the East be compared to Jefferson’s vision of a virtuous Republic stretching from sea to sea? The author does not consider the two visions equivalent, but he does contend that in practice both projects led to genocide. He even cites the Declaration of Independence and Jefferson’s remark that Indians were “merciless savages”—without, however, noting that Jefferson made this remark as part of his long list of abuses that George III had practiced against the colonists. One of these was inciting Indians against colonial settlements, sometimes involving the butchery of women and children along with the men. But if the author thinks that spokesmen of Manifest Destiny did not differ substantially from their counterparts in the Kaiserreich (let alone in Weimar and Nazi Germany), he should re-read the contemporary rants of pan-Germanists, völkisch nationalists, eugenicists, and occult mystics. And yet, Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels all rationalized their project of eastward expansion as a German version of the conquest of the American West. Hitler was an avid reader of Karl May, the popular German author who wrote about the American West. On the other hand, May admired the virtuous Indians, romanticizing them in the heroic figure of the Apache chieftain Winnitou, who teams up with the German-American trapper Shatterhand to keep peace on the frontier by fighting greedy land speculators and railroad trusts. Nevertheless, Hitler saw in May’s novels something different from what other fans took away, having little use...