hitler’s inspiration and guide, the native american holocaust - mandelbaum

7/28/2019 Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide, The Native American Holocaust - Mandelbaum

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During the film I learned about something that shook me to my core that I had not

heard before. I learned that the genocidal mentality and actions of the U.S. policy

makers would find similar expression years later when the Nazis, under Hitler, studied

the plans of Bosque Redondo to design the concentration camps for Jews.



As John Toland notes in his book Adolf Hitler (pg. 202):

Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed

much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired

the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and

often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation

and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.

He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to

epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the

reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians

over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination.

Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian

nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time

Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where

their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.

David A. Meier notes in his book Hitler's Rise to Power:

His favorite game to play outside was cowboys and Indians. Tales of the American West

were very popular among boys in Austria and Germany. Books by James Fenimore

Cooper and especially German writer Karl May were eagerly read and re-enacted. May,

who had never been to America, invented a hero named Old Shatterhand, a white man

who always won his battles with Native Americans, defeating his enemies through sheer

will power and bravery. Young Hitler read and reread every one of May's books about

Old Shatterhand, totaling more than 70 novels. He continued to read them even asFührer. During the German attack on the Soviet Union he sometimes referred to the

Russians as Redskins and ordered his officers to carry May's books about fighting.

Parallels

Some of the parallels include the death marches when the Nazis forced hundreds of

thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and prisoner of war camps near

the eastern front to camps inside Germany away from front lines and allied forces. I

saw an image from May 11, 1945, where German civilians were walking past bodies of

30 Jewish women starved to death by German SS troops in a 300-mile march acrossCzechoslovakia. It made me think about how The Long Walk of the Navajo was also

300-miles, and many of the Native Americans died of starvation.

I thought about how the Nazis were burning Jewish books and burying bodies in mass

graves, and the parallels of how Indian cultures were also erased, libraries of oral

tradition functionally burned, and many were buried in mass graves under bibles.



Map of the Long Walk:

We must listen…

We don’t talk about the correlation as much as we should between the Native American

Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust. I often hear people dismiss the correlationbetween the suffering of our people and that of others. They felt that there is no

comparison between the magnitude of horror and death that happened during the

Jewish holocaust. I am by no means saying that the Jewish Holocaust was not one of

humanity's darkest hours, but I believe that we must put down our measuring stick of

who had it worse. I've witnessed this attitude within many different cultures. Although

not always, when I hear people say “ours was worse than theirs,” I see it as ultimately

a lack of empathy and an attitude of indifference towards a grouping of people who

have suffered from the same evilness that Hitler was fueled by. And like Elie Wiesel

said, “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” These conversations of “ours isworse than theirs” in regards to any grouping of people who have suffered from such

evilness, MUST stop.

Open discussions about the Native American Holocaust need to happen, so that we may

understand the very blueprint of Hitler’s reign. To truly achieve “Never Again” we must

hear the stories of others who have also endured humanity's darkest times, especially in

the land in which we reside.



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hitler’s inspiration and guide, the native american holocaust - mandelbaum

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