Carroll P. Kakel,III,The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective

Carroll P. Kakel, III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; 299 pp.; US$80.00; ISBN 9780230275157

It is widely acknowledged that Nazi Germany’s aspiration to continental ‘living space’ looked to past empires as models, among them imperial Rome, the British Empire, and especially the conquest of the American West. As the Führer monitored the progress of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the fall of 1941, he remarked that Germany had but one obligation as it expanded its territory further east, ‘to Germanize this country by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins’. ¹ Evoking the colonization of the American West was by no means an isolated comment either for Hitler or for other prominent Nazi leaders. Nor would George Washington or Thomas Jefferson have been stunned or outraged by Hitler’s callousness toward the indigenous peoples who stood in the way of acquiring living space for Germans.

Pushing off from Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the messianic and racist core of continental imperialism, Carroll Kakel offers the first sustained, book-length comparison of the American West and the Nazi East. Kakel finds in these episodes, long studied apart from the broader history of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, ‘disquieting underlying patterns of empirical similarity’ (213), patterns that he illuminates through the optics of transnational colonialism and genocide studies. The American West and Nazi East amounted to ‘violent national projects of territorial expansion, racial cleansing, and settler colonization’ (4), which simultaneously marginalized out-groups in their metropoles, while removing or killing indigenous peoples in their colonialized spaces. To be sure, the author notes, there were differences as well as similarities between the two projects. Yet the commonalities that Kakel identifies across space and time, which emerged during the acceleration of European expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, might unsettle those who stress the uniqueness of the Holocaust, or those who cannot bring themselves to recognize that genocidal violence was intrinsic to the foundation and expansion of the United States.

The differences that Kakel identifies lie primarily in the varying sequences and pace of expansionism. The American surge westward after the Revolution took a little over a century, while Nazi Germany sought its living space over a brief period (roughly four or five years between the invasion of Poland and the Soviet counterattack after Stalingrad) in conditions of total war. Thus in the American case, diseases that preceded the arrival of settlers often weakened native peoples sufficiently to enable colonization. On the other hand, the military needed to ‘pacify’ the more densely populated East before settlement could occur. Military setbacks and too few ethnic German settlers defeated Nazi attempts at colonization, while high fertility rates and millions of land-hungry immigrants (backed up by generous federal assistance) ensured the success of the American colonization of the West. The United States could deny Indians American citizenship from its beginnings, while Nazi Germany had to remove citizenship from the Reich’s citizens that it labeled as ‘undesirable’. Finally, the scale of violence in the Nazi East was significantly greater and more systematic, the consequence of total war and the larger numbers of indigenes. Nevertheless, clear evidence that the Nazi regime followed the American model and the striking similarities between the two cases outweigh the differences. National governments and political elites, inspired by a messianic and racially defined land hunger that was considered central to the nation’s survival, committed enormous resources to settler colonialism. In the process they garnered the support of countless agents in the field, who, acting from a variety of motivations, sought to benefit themselves. Racism and utopianism entailed what was euphemistically termed the ‘displacement’ of indigenous peoples to the benefit of settlers, and in both cases the possibility of genocide implicit in ethnic cleansing was realized.

Despite the absence of German-language sources (the author relies on English translations of works originally in German to complement his English bibliography) and a thematic organization that, while appropriate to the Kakel’s comparative methodology, results in occasional repetition, The American West and Nazi East succeeds in its task. Kakel marshals a wealth of detail to support his argument and challenge his target audience (undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars) to reconsider their preconceptions. His adoption of the optics of genocide and settler colonialism is effective in confronting the exceptionalisms that have straitjacketed scholarship on American expansionism and the Third Reich, although the implications of much recent scholarship in the German history field, especially that documenting transnational exchange between Germany and the United States, would likely support him. American expansionism, inspired initially by the British conquest of Ireland and Puritan ‘chosenness’, belongs at least as much to the larger history of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide as it does to the nationalist peculiarities of the American experience. The Holocaust, as Kakel acknowledges, was novel in its industrialized killing, which Nazi leaders adopted to remedy the squeamishness arising from face-to-face killings, and, unlike the American conquest of the West, where the assimilation of Indians was coercively pursued, the Third Reich believed the Jews to be unassimilable. Nevertheless, the Judeocide amounted to an extreme variant of earlier practices (which Nazi leaders continuously reflected on and adapted to their own agendas) made even more radical in the context of total war. In its detailed and nuanced discussion of two episodes of settler colonialism, Kakel’s book is a fine example of what comparative genocide studies can accomplish.

Shelley Baranowski

University of Akron