The Hitler Vortex - How American Racism Influenced Nazi Thought
by Alex Ross
"History teaches, but has no
pupils," the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote. That line comes to
mind when I browse in the history section of a bookstore. An adage in
publishing is that you can never go wrong with books about Lincoln, Hitler, and
dogs; an alternative version names golfing, Nazis, and cats. In Germany, it's
said that the only surefire magazine covers are ones that feature Hitler or
sex. Whatever the formula, Hitler and Nazism prop up the publishing business:
hundreds of titles appear each year, and the total number runs well into the
tens of thousands. On store shelves, they stare out at you by the dozens, their
spines steeped in the black-white-and-red of the Nazi flag, their titles
barking in Gothic type, their covers studded with swastikas. The back catalogue
includes "I Was Hitler's Pilot," "I Was Hitler's
Chauffeur," "I Was Hitler's Doctor,"" Hitler, My
Neighbor," "Hitler Was My Friend," "He Was My Chief,"
and "Hitler Is No Fool." Books have been written about Hitler's
youth, his years in Vienna and Munich, his service in the First World War, his
assumption of power, his library, his taste in art, his love of film, his
relations with women, and his predilections in interior design ("Hitler at
Home").
Why do these books pile up in such
unreadable numbers? This may seem a perverse question. The Holocaust is the
greatest crime in history, one that people remain desperate to understand.
Germany's plunge from the heights of civilization to the depths of barbarism is
an everlasting shock. Still, these swastika covers trade all too frankly on
Hitler's undeniable flair for graphic design. (The Nazi flag was apparently his
creation-finalized after "innumerable attempts," according to
"Mein Kampf") Susan Sontag, in her 1975 essay "Fascinating
Fascism," declared that the appeal of Nazi iconography had become erotic,
not only in S&M circles but also in the wider culture. It was, Sontag
wrote, a "response to an oppressive freedom of choice in sex (and,
possibly, in other matters), to an unbearable degree of individuality."
Neo-Nazi movements have almost certainly fed on the perpetuation of Hitler's
negative mystique.
Americans have an especially
insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows,
documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War
console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when
the United States was the world's goodhearted superpower, riding to the rescue
of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie
continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were
imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting
technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler's darkest imaginings. The
Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood
production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler
devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler
remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had "gunned down the
millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.
"When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for "living
space" in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.
Among recent books on Nazism, the
one that may prove most disquieting for American readers is James Q. Whitman's"Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi RaceLaw" (Princeton). On the cover, the inevitable swastika is flanked
by two red stars. Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis took inspiration
from American racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He
notes that, in "Mein Kampf," Hitler praises America as the one state
that has made progress toward a primarily racial conception of citizenship, by
"excluding certain races from naturalization." Whitman writes that
the discussion of such influences is almost taboo, because the crimes of the Third
Reich are commonly defined as "the nefandum,
the unspeakable descent into what we often call 'radical evil."' But the
kind of genocidal hatred that erupted in Germany had been seen before and has
been seen since. Only by stripping away its national regalia and comprehending
its essential human form do we have any hope of vanquishing it.
The vast literature on Hitler and
Nazism keeps circling around a few enduring questions. The first is
biographical: How did an Austrian watercolor painter turned military orderly
emerge as a far-right German rabble-rouser after the First World War? The second is sociopolitical: How did a
civilized society come to embrace Hitler's extreme ideas? The third has to do
with the intersection of man and regime: To what extent was Hitler in control
of the apparatus of the Third Reich? All these questions point to the central
enigma of the Holocaust, which has variously been interpreted as a premeditated
action and as a barbaric improvisation. In our current age of unapologetic
racism and resurgent authoritarianism, the mechanics of Hitler's rise are a
particularly pressing matter. For dismantlers of democracy, there is no better
exemplar.
Since 1945, the historiography of
Nazism has undergone several broad transformations, reflecting political
pressures both within Germany and abroad. In the early Cold War period, the
emergence of West Germany as a bulwark against the Soviet menace tended to
discourage a closer interrogation of German cultural values. The first big
postwar biography of Hitler, by the British historian Alan Bullock, published
in 1952, depicted him as a charlatan, a manipulator, an "opportunist
entirely without principle." German thinkers often skirted the issue of
Hitler, preferring systemic explanations. Hannah Arendt's "The Origins ofTotalitarianism" suggested that dictatorial energies draw on the
loneliness of the modern subject.
In the sixties and seventies, as
Cold War Realpolitik receded and the full horror of the Holocaust sank in, many
historians adopted what is known as the Sonderweg
thesis - the idea that Germany had followed a "special path" in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, different from that of other Western
nations. In this reading, the Germany of the Wilhelmine period had failed to develop
along healthy liberal democratic lines; the inability to modernize politically
prepared the ground for Nazism. In Germany, left-oriented scholars like Hans
Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective
responsibility; to focus on Hitler was an evasion, the argument went, implying
that Nazism was something that he did to us. Mommsen outlined a
"cumulative radicalization' of the Nazi state in which Hitler functioned
as a "weak dictator," ceding policy-making to competing bureaucratic
agencies. Abroad, the Sonderweg
theory took on a punitive edge, indicting all of German history and culture. William Manchester's 1968 book,"The Arms of Krupp," ends with a lurid image of "the
first grim Aryan savage crouched in his garment of coarse skins, his crude
javelin poised, tense and alert, cloaked by night and fog, ready; waiting; and
waiting."
The Sonderweg argument was attacked on multiple fronts. In what became
known as the Historikerstreit
("Historians' Dispute"), right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that
the nation end its ritual self-flagellation: they reframed Nazism as a reaction
to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. Joachim
Fest, who had published the first big German language biography of Hitler, also
stood apart from the Sonderweg
school. By portraying the Fuhrer as an all-dominating, quasi-demonic figure,
Fest effectively placed less blame on the Weimar Republic conservatives who put
Hitler in office. More dubious readings presented Hitlerism as an experiment
that modernized Germany and then went awry. Such ideas have lost ground in
Germany, at least for now: in mainstream discourse there, it is axiomatic to
accept responsibility for the Nazi terror.
Outside Germany, many critiques of
the Sonderweg thesis came from the
left. The British scholars GeoffEley and David Blackbourn, in their 1984 book "The Peculiarities of GermanHistory," questioned the "tyranny of hindsight"-the
lordly perspective that reduces a complex, contingent sequence of events to an
irreversible progression. In the allegedly backward Kaiserreich, Eley and
Blackbourn saw various liberalizing forces in motion: housing reform,
public-health initiatives, an emboldened press. It was a society riddled with
anti-Semitism, yet it witnessed no upheaval on the scale of the Dreyfus Affair
or the Tiszaeszlar blood-libel affair in Hungary. Eley and Blackbourn also
questioned whether elitist, imperialist Britain should be held up as the modern
paragon. The Sonderweg narrative could become an exculpatory fairy tale for
other nations: we may make mistakes, but we will never be as bad as the
Germans.
Ian Kershaw's monumental two volume biography (1998-2000)
found a plausible middle ground between "strong" and "weak"
images of Hitler in power. With his nocturnal schedule, his dislike of
paperwork, and his aversion to dialogue, Hitler was an eccentric executive, to
say the least. To make sense of a dictatorship in which the dictator was
intermittently absent, Kershaw expounded the concept of "working towards
the Fuhrer": when explicit direction from Hitler was lacking, Nazi
functionaries guessed at what he wanted, and often further radicalized his
policies. Even as debates about the nature of Hitler's leadership go back and
forth, scholars largely agree that his ideology was more or less fixed from the
mid-twenties onward. His two abiding obsessions were violent anti-Semitism and
Lebensraum. As early as 1921, he spoke of confining Jews to concentration
camps, and in 1923 he contemplated- and, for the moment, rejected- the idea of
killing the entire Jewish population. The Holocaust was the result of a hideous
syllogism: if Germany were to expand into the East, where millions of Jews
lived, those Jews would have to vanish, because Germans could not coexist with
them.
People have been trying to fathom
Hitler's psyche for nearly a century. Ron Rosenbaum, in his 1998 book "ExplainingHitler," gives a tour of the more outré theories. It has been
suggested, variously, that the key to understanding Hitler is the fact that he
had an abusive father; that he was too close to his mother; that he had a
Jewish grandfather; that he had encephalitis; that he contracted syphilis from
a Jewish prostitute; that he blamed a Jewish doctor for his mother's death;
that he was missing a testicle; that he underwent a wayward hypnosis treatment;
that he was gay; that he harbored coprophilic fantasies about his niece; that
he was addled by drugs; or-a personal favorite- that his anti-Semitism was
triggered by briefly attending school with Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Linz. At the
root of this speculative mania is what Rosenbaum calls the "lost
safe-deposit box" mentality: with sufficient sleuthing, the mystery can be
solved in one Sherlockian stroke.
Academic historians, by contrast,
often portray Hitler as a cipher, a nobody. Kershaw has called him a "man
without qualities." Volker Ullrich, a German author and journalist long
associated with the weekly Die Zeit,
felt the need for a biography that paid more heed to Hitler's private life. The
first volume, "Hitler:Ascent 1889-1939," was published by Knopf in 2016, in a fluid
translation by Jefferson Chase. Ullrich's Hitler is no tyrant-sorcerer who
leads an innocent Germany astray; he is a chameleon, acutely conscious of the
image he projects. "The putative void was part of Hitler's persona, a
means of concealing his personal life and presenting himself as a politician
who completely identified with his role as leader," Ullrich writes. Hitler
could pose as a cultured gentleman at Munich salons, as a pistol-waving thug at
the beer hall, and as a bohemian in the company of singers and actors. He had
an exceptional memory that allowed him to assume an air of superficial mastery.
His certitude faltered, however, in the presence of women: Ullrich depicts
Hitler's love life as a series of largely unfulfilled fixations. It goes
without saying that he was an extreme narcissist lacking in empathy. Much has
been made of his love of dogs, but he was cruel to them.
From adolescence onward, Hitler was
a dreamer and a loner. Averse to joining groups, much less leading them, he
immersed himself in books, music, and art. His ambition to become a painter was
hampered by a limited technique and by a telling want of feeling for human
figures. When he moved to Vienna, in 1908, he slipped toward the social
margins, residing briefly in a homeless shelter and then in a men's home. In
Munich, where he moved in 1913, he eked out a living as an artist and otherwise
spent his days in museums and his nights at the opera. He was steeped in
Wagner, though he had little apparent grasp of the composer's psychological
intricacies and ambiguities. A sharp portrait of the young Hitler can be found
in Thomas Mann's startling essay "Bruder Hitler," the English version
of which appeared in Esquire in 1939, under the title "That Man Is My
Brother." Aligning Hitler's experience with his own, Mann wrote of a
"basic arrogance, the basic feeling of being too good for any reasonable,
honorable activity-based on what? A vague notion of being reserved for
something else, something quite indeterminate, which, if it were named, would
cause people to break out laughing."
The claims of "Mein
Kampf" notwithstanding, there is no clear evidence that Hitler harbored
strongly anti-Semitic views in his youth or in early adulthood. Indeed, he
seems to have had friendly relations with several Jews in Vienna and Munich.
This does not mean that he was free of commonplace anti-Jewish prejudice.
Certainly, he was a fervent German nationalist. When the First World War
commenced, in 1914, he volunteered for the German Army, and acquitted himself
well as a soldier. For most of the war, he served as a dispatch runner for his
regiment's commanders. The first trace of a swing to the right comes in a
letter from 1915, in which Hitler expressed the hope that the war would bring
an end to Germany's "inner internationalism."
The historian Thomas Weber, who recountedHitler's soldier years in the 2010 book "Hitler's First War," has nowwritten "Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi" (Basic), a
study of the postwar metamorphosis. Significantly, Hitler remained in the Army
after the Armistice; disgruntled nationalist soldiers tended to join
paramilitary groups. Because the Social Democratic parties were dominant at the
founding of the Weimar Republic, Hitler was representing a leftist government.
He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. It is doubtful,
though, that he had active sympathies for the left; he probably stayed in the
Army because, as Weber writes, it "provided a raison d'etre for his
existence." As late as his thirtieth birthday, in April, 1919, there was
no sign of the Fuhrer-to-be.
The unprecedented anarchy of
postwar Bavaria helps explain what happened next. Street killings were routine;
politicians were assassinated on an almost weekly basis. The left was blamed
for the chaos, and anti-Semitism escalated for the same reason: several
prominent leaders of the left were Jewish. Then came the Treaty of Versailles,
which was signed in June, 1919. Robert Gerwarth, in "The Vanquished: Why the First World WarFailed to End" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), emphasizes the
whiplash effect that the treaty had on the defeated Central Powers. As Gerwarth
writes, German and Austrian politicians believed that they had "broken
with the autocratic traditions of the past, thus fulfilling the key criteria of
Wilson's Fourteen Points for a 'just peace.' "The harshness of the terms
of Versailles belied that idealistic rhetoric.
The day after Germany ratified the
treaty, Hitler began attending Army propaganda classes aimed at repressing
revolutionary tendencies. These infused him with hard-core anti-capitalist and
anti-Semitic ideas. The officer in charge of the program was a tragic figure
named Karl Mayr, who later forsook the right wing for the left; he died in
Buchenwald, in 1945. Mayr described Hitler as a "tired stray dog looking
for a master." Having noticed Hitler's gift for public speaking, Mayr
installed him as a lecturer and sent him out to observe political activities in
Munich. In September, 1919, Hitler came across the German Workers' Party, a
tiny fringe faction. He spoke up at one of its meetings and joined its ranks.
Within a few months, he had become the leading orator of the group, which was
renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
If Hitler's radicalization occurred
as rapidly as this-and not all historians agree that it did-the progression
bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the
news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist
videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook. But Hitler's
embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself
historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that
rhetoric into mainstream discourse. Peter Longerich's "Hitler: Biographie," a
thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent
picture of Hitler's skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist. Even those
who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him. He would begin quietly,
almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense. He amused the
crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations. The musical structure
was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage. Longerich writes, "It was
this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at
the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his
audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity."
Above all, Hitler knew how to
project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would
penetrate the white noise of politics. He fostered the production of catchy
graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film. Meanwhile,
squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very
disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure. His most adroit feat came after the
failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career.
At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a
simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny. In prison, he wrote the first
part of "Mein Kampf," in which he completed the construction of his
world view.
To many liberal-minded Germans of
the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to
represent a serious threat. The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the
middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low
single-digit figures. The economic misery of the late twenties and early
tl1irties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized. Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizesthis dismal period in "The Death of Democracy: Hitler's Rise to Power andthe Downfall of the Weimar Republic" (Henry Holt). Conservatives
made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the
populace. They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional
governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state. The left, meanwhile,
was divided against itself. At Stalin's urging, many Communists viewed the
Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy-the "social fascists. "The
media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers
were losing circulation. Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to
correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as
Heiden wrote, "the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and
definitely forgotten again."
Hett refrains from poking the
reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was
doing when he left the word "German" out of his title. On the book's
final page, he lays his cards on the table: "Thinking about the end of Weimar
democracy in this way-as the result of a large protest movement colliding with
complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to
aggressive mythmaking and irrationality-strips away the exotic and foreign look
of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing
looks close and familiar." Yes, it does.
What set Hitler apart from most
authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an
artist-genius who used politics as his metier. It is a mistake to call him a
failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other
means. This is the focus of WolframPyta's "Hitler: Der Kiinstler als Politiker und Feldherr"("The Artist as Politician and Commander"), one of the most striking
recent additions to the literature. Although the aestheticizing of politics is
hardly a new topic-Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as
did Mann - Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler
debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent
leader hovering above the fray. Goebbels's propaganda harped on this motif; his
diaries imply that he believed it. "Adolf Hitler, I love you because you
are both great and simple," he wrote.
The true artist does not compromise.
Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible. Such is the tenor of
Hitler's infamous "prophecy" of the destruction of the European Jews,
in 1939: "I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at.
... I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now
choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again-if the
international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in
plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be
the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the
annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe." Scholars have long debated
when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made. Most now believe
that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both
from above and from below. Yet no order was really necessary. Hitler's
"prophecy" was itself an oblique command. In the summer of 1941, as
hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion
of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was
being fulfilled in an "almost uncanny" fashion. This is the language
of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece. Such intellectual atrocities led
Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is
barbaric.
Hitler and Goebbels were the first
relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence.
"Concentration camps were not invented in Germany," Hitler said in
1941. "It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution
to gradually break the backs of other nations." The British had operated
camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly
highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin's slaughter in the
Soviet Union. In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest
massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than
twenty thousand Poles. (Goebbels wanted to show footage of the mass graves, but
generals overruled him.) Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today,
alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.
The magnitude of the abomination
almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror. Yet
the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions - lines of influence,
circles of complicity, moments of congruence. Hitler's "scientific anti-Semitism,"
as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and
anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus
Affair. The British Empire was Hitler's ideal image of a master race in
dominant repose. "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," a Russian
forgery from around 1900, fueled the Nazis' paranoia. The Armenian genocide of
1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about
the fate of the Jews. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler
spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, "Who, after all, is
today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?" The Nazis found
collaborators in almost every country that they invaded. In one Lithuanian
town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to
death. He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an
accordion. German soldiers looked on, taking photographs.
The mass killings by Stalin and
Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to
the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge. Large-scale deportations of Jews
from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin's deportation of the
Volga Germans. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust,
thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could
be left to die in the Gulag. The most dangerous claim made by right-wing
historians during the Historikerstreit
was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to
some degree excusable. One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in
view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side. This
was the achievement of TimothySnyder's profoundly disturbing 2010 book, "Bloodlands," which
seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave
of slaughter.
As for Hitler and America, the
issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Whitman's
"Hitler's American Model," with its comparative analysis of American
and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel's "The American West and the NaziEast," a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and
Lebensraum; and Stefan Kiihl's "The Nazi Connection," which describes
the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking. This literature
is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a
necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has
exemplified.
The Nazis were not wrong to cite
American precedents. Enslavement of African-Americans was written into the U.S.
Constitution. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to "eliminate" or
"extirpate" Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote,
"Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the
only resort left for the protection of life and property." General Philip
Sheridan spoke of "annihilation, obliteration, and complete destruction. "To
be sure, others promoted more peaceful-albeit still repressive-policies. The
historian Edward B.Westermann, in "Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars"(Oklahoma), concludes 'that, because federal policy never officially mandated
the "physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or
characteristics," this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah. The
fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S.
territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.
America's knack for maintaining an
air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example
to be emulated. He made frequent mention of the American West in the early
months of the Soviet invasion. The Volga would be "our Mississippi,"
he said. "Europe-and not America will be the land of unlimited
possibilities." Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer
farmer soldier families. Autobahns would cut through fields of grain. The
present occupants of those lands-tens of millions of them-would be starved to
death. At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook
of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans. One of Goebbels's
less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American
tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.
Jim Crow laws in the American South
served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense. Scholars have long been aware
that Hitler's regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have
tended to see this as a public relations strategy-an "everybody does it "justification
for Nazi policies. Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had
been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in
hefty tomes in Fraktur type. "Race Law in the United States," a 1936
study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out
inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans. Krieger concludes
that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind
contorted justifications. Why not simply say what one means? This was a major
difference between American and German racism.
American eugenicists made no secret
of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featuredthem in "The Great Gatsby." (The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having
evidently read Lothrop Stoddard's 1920 tract "The Rising Tide of Color
Against White World-Supremacy," says, "The idea is if we don’t look
out the white race will be will be utterly submerged.") California's
sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934.
There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American
and German technologies of death. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber
took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott
Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon- B, which was licensed to
American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a
lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to
disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso-a practice that did
not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version
of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a
chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the
device, explained, "Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring
acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers. "Much
the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.
When Hitler praised American
restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924,
which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. For Nazi
observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction,
despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The Immigration Act, too, played
a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of
Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. In 1938,
President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of
European refugees; this was held in Evian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive
change resulted. The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it
"astounding" that other countries would decry Germany's treatment of Jews
and then decline to admit them.
Hundreds of thousands of Americans
died fighting Nazi Germany. Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward
Holocaust survivors. General George Patton criticized do-gooders who
"believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and
this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals." Leading
Nazi scientists had it better. Brian Crim's "Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the NationalSecurity State" (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of
Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program. When Braun was
captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy
of the American military industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a
high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace. He was able to
reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor. Records
were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered
"demoralizing"); immigration was expedited. J. Edgar Hoover became concerned
that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many
questions about the scientists' backgrounds. Senator Styles Bridges proposed
that the State Department needed a "first class cyanide fumigating
job."
These chilling points of contact
are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism. But they tell us
rather more about modern America. Like a colored dye coursing through the
bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness. The
spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter.
As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle
for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever
more inflammatory material. She writes, "Given its billion or so users,
You Tube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st
century. "When I did a search for "Hitler" on You Tube the other
day, I was first shown a video labelled "Best Hitler Documentary in
COLOR!" - the British production "Hitler in Color." A pro-Hitler
remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was
viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.
In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that
Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler's speeches by his bed. When Trump was
asked about it, he said, "If I had these speeches, and I am not saying
that I do, I would never read them." Since Trump entered politics, he has
repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis. Although some
resemblances can be found at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler's
strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are
cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard-the differences are
obvious and stark. For one thing, Hitler had more discipline. What is worth
pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler's malign skill might more effectively
exploit flaws in American democracy. He would certainly have at his disposal
craven rightwing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Bruning,
Papen, and Schleicher. He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in
inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.
The artist-politician of the future
will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche. He is more likely to
take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture. The archetype
of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a
familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the
adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a
magic weapon might banish the spell. With one stroke, the inconspicuous
outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against
pure evil. For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of
embellishing everyday life. One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who
has a "vague notion of being reserved for something else," may
attempt to turn metaphor into reality. He might be out there now, cloaked by
the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.
The New Yorker, April 30, 2018.
