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Jeffrey Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. His 2019 book, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of, as well as the popular conception of, genocide.¹⁴⁰

In Ostler’s account, the U.S. government had a clear policy from the start, not just in 1830, of moving Native Americans west of the Mississippi, and enacted that policy. Yet, between the 1780s and 1830, the population of Native Americans east of the Mississippi increased. The formalized and accelerated policy of removal put in place in 1830 was driven by greed for land and racist hatred, not by any humanitarian impulse to help native peoples survive by moving them to better locations where they wouldn’t supposedly face inevitable demise. They would have survived better if left alone, rather than being forced on difficult journeys into already occupied lands and lands without the means to sustain them.

Greed for land -- or what might be called Lebensraum -- really seems to have been the dominant motivation. Smaller groups of Native Americans in the East not occupying highly desirable territory were allowed to remain, and in some cases have remained to this day. Others that put up too great a fight were allowed to remain for a time. Others that adopted European ways of agriculture and all the trappings of what was called “civilization” (including slavery) were allowed to remain until their land became too desirable. The supposed failure of native nations to become “civilized” seems to have no more basis in reality as a motivation for expelling them than does their supposed dying out. Neither does the supposed need to make peace among them. Nations fought each other as they were driven into each other’s territories by the U.S. settler colonists.

The United States did sometimes make peace between warring nations, but only when it served some purpose, such as facilitating the displacement of more people into their land. The work of empire was not the work of brute force alone. Much “diplomacy” was needed. Treaties had to be secretly made with minority groups within native nations. Treaties had to be secretly worded to mean the opposite of what it appeared. Leaders had to be bribed or coaxed into meeting, and then captured or killed. Carrots and sticks had to be applied until people “voluntarily” chose to abandon their homes. Propaganda had to be developed to whitewash atrocities.

There was plenty of brute force. Ostler shows that U.S. officials developed the policy that “wars of extermination” were “not only necessary, but ethical and legal.” Causes of decline among Native peoples included direct killing, other traumatizing violence prominently including rape, the burning of towns and crops, forcible deportation, and the intentional and non-intentional spreading of diseases and of alcoholism to weakened populations. Ostler writes that the most recent scholarship finds the devastation caused by European diseases resulted less from Native Americans’ lack of immunity, and more from the weakness and starvation created by the violent destruction of their homes.

The American War for Independence (for the independence of one elite from another at the expense of native and enslaved people) involved more destructive assaults on Native Americans than had the preceding wars in which George Washington had acquired the name Town Destroyer. The outcome of the war was even worse news. Assaults on native peoples would come from the U.S. government, state governments, and ordinary people. Settlers would push the conflicts forward, and in settled parts of the East where Native Americans remained, individuals would steal their land, kill, and harass them. There were groups like the Quakers who dealt much less cruelly with indigenous people. There were ebbs and flows, and every nation has a different story. But fundamentally, the United States intended to get rid of Native Americans and got rid of many of them and took most of the land they lived on.

The Nazis, and pre-Nazi Germans, were impressed. The Nazis, as we have seen, resorted to mass murder when mass expulsion didn’t work. But they had resorted to mass expulsion only after successfully driving large numbers of Jews to voluntarily flee. Those who didn’t voluntarily flee the Reich could be driven into ghettos, starved, and made ill. They could be manipulated with false promises. They could be made to look like wild beasts. Non-Jews could be ordered to ride on Jews in the street as though they were horses, much as Native Americans in California could be made to eat from troughs like pigs.¹⁴¹ Once a population had been dehumanized and demonized, riots and lynchings could be set loose upon them.

In a 2020 article about the removal of a Teddy Roosevelt statue in New York, Jon Schwarz wrote:

“In a 1928 speech, Adolf Hitler was already speaking approvingly of how Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousands, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.’ In 1941, Hitler told confidants of his plans to ‘Europeanize’ Russia. It wasn’t just Germans who would do this, he said, but Scandinavians and Americans, ‘all those who have a feeling for Europe.’ The most important thing was to ‘look upon the natives as Redskins.’”¹⁴²

Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2018: “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. . . . 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.”¹⁴³

That is the syllogism of Manifest Destiny. In 2011, Carroll P. Kakel published The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective. Kakel finds that Hitler frequently compared his war for Lebensraum with nineteenth century wars waged by the United States. He believed his mission inevitably destined the Slavic and Jewish peoples, or “natives,” to destruction along the lines of what had been done to the Native Americans. “A similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America,” he said of what Nazis called “the German East” or “the Wild East,” meaning the eastern provinces of Germany, Poland, the Baltic States, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.¹⁴⁴

While there were numerous models of imperialist, colonialist, and genocidal campaigns by European nations that could inspire, and did inspire Hitler, it was the U.S. campaign against its natives that provided the clearest model, in Kakel’s view, of what Hannah Arendt later called “continental imperialism,” meaning expansion into lands adjacent to the imperial homeland, not across distant seas and continents. This sort of imperialism required extreme race hatred. Kakel finds virtually identical language to that of the Nazis in U.S. justifications of westward expansion for “living space” for “white” settlers “cleansing” the territory. The Nazis spoke of “massacres” and colonial “settlement” of the “Wild East” by “Aryans.”

Friedrich Ratzel, the Social Darwinist who coined the term Lebensraum, published a book by that title in 1901, and promoted eastward settler-colonialism, citing the North American example, as well as the examples of southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand. Ratzel had traveled to the United States and was not only inspired by Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis” of U.S. history, but corresponded with Turner and U.S. historian Alfred Thayer Mahan, as well as Halford Mackinder in Great Britain and Rudolf Kjellén in Sweden. Lebensraum was part of German imperialist thinking from the 1890s on, and in other languages part of Euro-American imperialist thinking for longer than that. Kakel finds striking parallels and roots in many U.S. authors, most notably Thomas Jefferson, whose idyllic, agrarian, genocidal vision of expansion shows up in Hitler.

Karl Haushofer, the son of a colleague of Ratzel, became a leading proponent of Lebensraum. In 1924, he visited Hitler in prison numerous times to educate him. The results show up in Mein Kampf. After 1933, Haushofer worked for the Nazis, devising pseudo-scientific slogans. Kakel explains:

“In Mein Kampf, Hitler invoked the American conquest of ‘the West’ as a model for Nazi continental territorial expansion in ‘the East.’ In his view, the Nazis must lead the German people ‘from its present restricted living space to new land and soil’; this was necessary to free [Germany] from danger of vanishing from the earth or of serving others as a slave nation’. As an example, Hitler looked to ‘the American Union which possesses its own [land] base in its own continent’; from this continental land base, he continued, ‘comes the immense inner strength of this state’. As the ‘Aryans’ of the American continent cleared the ‘wild soil’ and made a ‘stand against the natives’, he noted, ‘more and more [white] settlements sprang up in the land’. Germans should look to this historical experience for ‘proof’, since its population of ‘largely Germanic elements mixed little with lower colored peoples’.”¹⁴⁵

Hitler’s understanding of the North American genocide was dependent both on its celebration in popular novels and on the racist theories of the eugenicists. In a speech on May 1, 1939, Hitler declared that the “Anglo-Saxon” was “nothing other than a branch of our German Volk,” and that it was a “tiny Anglo-Saxon tribe [which] set out from Europe, conquered England, and later helped to develop the American continent.”¹⁴⁶

This racist theory had earlier been developed in the United States. The “Aryans” had supposedly come from the Middle East to Germany and from there to England in the form of the Anglo-Saxons. America’s Manifest Destiny was understood by many in the United States as thus being global in scope. In one vision, the Anglo-Saxons had come west to the New World, would move west to the Pacific (slaughtering/benefitting anyone in the way) and proceed west through the Pacific and Asia, coming full-circle to the supposed birthplace of the “race” near an area that some in Washington D.C. still obsess over to this day, a nation whose name derives from Aryan: Iran.¹⁴⁷

A believer in this theory, Teddy Roosevelt, played dress-up in Brooks Brothers-designed uniforms not just as politics, but also to model a superior racial specimen eager for war. The same racist theories maintained that the process of warmaking and conquering was necessary for the health of the race. When the Aryans had reached the Pacific, the mission had to continue, not just to fulfill a prophecy or to open markets or to win elections, but so that the race might not degenerate in the dangerous luxury of peace. General Douglas MacArthur, years later, would attack WWI veterans with chemical weapons in the streets of Washington where they were demanding bonus pay¹⁴⁸, take part (according to the Congressional testimony of Smedley Butler) in planning a coup against Franklin Roosevelt¹⁴⁹, be removed as army chief of staff by President Roosevelt and sent off to the Philippines¹⁵⁰, allow the destruction of U.S. airplanes in the Philippines by the Japanese on the original “Pearl Harbor Day,”¹⁵¹ effectively rule over Japan¹⁵², help provoke and escalate a war in Korea¹⁵³, and get fired by President Truman. That MacArthur’s father, General Arthur MacArthur, was himself, for a time, the ruler of the Philippines, and explained to a U.S. Senate committee:

“Many thousands of years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary basis of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere. As to why the United States was in the Philippines , the broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific — that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race.”¹⁵⁴

In a 1910 lecture at Oxford, Teddy Roosevelt argued that recent white gains might be more temporary than those of the past, because modern Anglo-Saxons had allowed captive races to (partially) survive, whereas “all of the world achievements worth remembering are to be credited to the people of European descent . . . the intrusive people having either exterminated or driven out the conquered peoples.” Roosevelt praised this as “ethnic conquest.”¹⁵⁵

Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide, after delicately pointing out the painfully obvious fact that no two events are identical, traces the Nazi genocide to some of its sources in the past exterminations that Teddy Roosevelt so admired. These include the German extermination of the Herero people in southwest Africa (Namibia) when Hitler was a child, as well as various exterminations of peoples by the British, French, and Americans, all justified by what Lindqvist says was a mainstream European belief in the early twentieth century that the inferior “races” of the world were doomed to go extinct, as predicted in 1871 in The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.¹⁵⁶

Europeans massacred non-European peoples, not just in North America, but also in the Congo, in South Africa, in the South Sea Islands, in Australia, in New Zealand, in Argentina. The Guanches of the Canary Islands were wiped out. The people of Tasmania were wiped out. The last Tasmanian died in 1876, and her skeleton is displayed in the Tasmanian Museum in Hobart. In 2020, statues of King Leopold of Belgium are being vandalized and removed. What he did to the people of the Congo is an acceptable topic of conversation today, even if its connection to a common pattern that includes Nazism is still taboo.

Carl Peters, German commissioner of an East Africa colony, brutally slaughtered the people who lived there. In 1897, he was brought to court in Berlin following his murder of a black mistress. “What was actually being condemned,” writes Lindqvist, “was not the murder but the sexual relationship. The innumerable murders Peters had committed during the conquest of the German East Africa colony were considered quite natural and went unpunished.”

The dominant model of overseas exterminations came from the British empire. Germany was not uninfluenced. “As lecturer in German at Glasgow (1890-1900),” writes Lindqvist, “Alexander Tille became familiar with British imperial ideology. He ‘Germanized’ it by linking Darwin’s and Spencer’s theories to Nietzsche’s superman morality into a new ‘evolutionary ethic’. . . . In Southwest Africa in 1904, the Germans demonstrated that they too had mastered an art that Americans, British, and other Europeans had exercised all through the nineteenth century -- the art of hastening the extermination of a people of ‘inferior culture’. . . . The Hereroes were not particularly warlike. Their leader, Samuel Maherero, over two decades had signed one treaty after another with the Germans and ceded large areas of land to avoid war. But just as the Americans did not feel themselves bound by their treaties with the Indians, equally, the Germans did not think that as a higher race they had any need to abide by treaties they made with the natives.”

Hitler and his fellow Nazis referred to Ukrainian peoples as “Indians.” On September 18, 1941, Hitler proposed, presumably jokingly, to send to Ukraine “kerchiefs, glass beads, and other things colonial peoples like.”¹⁵⁷ He wasn't joking about devaluing those people. Hitler made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion, according to Alex Ross. “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.”¹⁵⁸

Leading Nazi Heinrich Himmler described eastern Lebensraum as “black earth that could be a paradise, a California of Europe.” A German newspaper headline during the war read “Go East, Young Man!”¹⁵⁹

How the Nazis treated prisoners of war depended on who those prisoners were. Only 3.5% of English and American prisoners of the Nazis died in captivity, compared to 57% of Soviet prisoners of war.¹⁶⁰

On October 21, 1939, the New York Times reported that 2,000 Viennese Jews were on their way to a “reservation” near Lublin, in Poland. “They left here aboard special trains last night for their new and permanent homes in an area described as being similar to an American Indian reservation. It was understood that this was the first of a series of mass migrations that eventually may include all Austrian, or perhaps all German Jews.”¹⁶¹

The reason that concentration camps were described as being similar to American Indian reservations was not that they were identical or served the same purpose, but that they were similar and were inspired by them. It was Spain, in Cuba, that had first used something it called concentration camps. The United States had condemned that outrage and then duplicated it in the Philippines. Britain and Germany had used similar camps under similar names in Africa.¹⁶² Hitler was aware of all of these precedents.

Some 50 to 60 million indigenous people were killed -- intentionally or by disease (or by intentional deprivation combined with disease) in the Americas. Some 10 to 12 million of those were north of Mexico. And this was over a comparatively very long period of time.¹⁶³

Some 70 to 85 million people were killed worldwide in WWII. Of that total, 19 to 28 million deaths were due to disease or famine. Also of the same total, 50 to 55 million were civilians. Of the military deaths, some 5 million were prisoners of war. Still from within the same total, 20 to 27 million of the dead were from the Soviet Union, 15 to 20 million from China, 6.9 to 7.4 million from Germany, 5.9 to 6 million from Poland, 3 to 4 million from the Dutch East Indies, 2.5 to 3.1 million from Japan, 2.2 to 3 million from India, 1 to 1.7 million from Yugoslavia, 1 to 2.2 million from French Indochina, 0.6 million from France, 0.5 million from the Philippines, 0.5 to 0.8 million from Greece, 0.5 million from Romania, 0.4 to 0.5 million from Italy, 0.4 to 0.5 million from Korea, and 0.4 million from each of Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States.¹⁶⁴

Some 6 million Jews were killed, many of them in death camps, by the Nazi Holocaust. An equal or even greater number of non-Jews were similarly killed in the camps or by execution or deliberate famine, including Roma, homosexuals, the handicapped, political opponents, religious dissenters, and others. Millions more were killed as part of a racially-motivated war, including Soviet and Polish civilians and prisoners of war.¹⁶⁵

Some 5 to 8 million died of violence or disease (or deprivation combined with disease) in the Congo under the rule of Belgium, 1885 to 1908.¹⁶⁶

Some 2.7 to 5.4 million died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a result of the Second Congo War (1998 to 2008).¹⁶⁷

Some 1 million were killed by the 2003-begun war on Iraq.¹⁶⁸

Some 34,000 to 110,000 people were murdered in the Herero and Namaqua genocide.¹⁶⁹

Some 480,000 to 600,000 people were murdered in the Dzungar genocide.¹⁷⁰

Some 3.8 million died violent war deaths in the U.S. war on Vietnam, not counting the dead in Laos or Cambodia.¹⁷¹

Some 0.4 to 1.5 million were killed or expelled in the Circassian genocide.¹⁷²

Some 450,000 to 750,000 died in the Greek genocide.¹⁷³

Some 1.5 million were killed in the Armenian genocide.¹⁷⁴

Some 1.5 to 2 million died in the Cambodian genocide.¹⁷⁵

Some 390,000 died, 380,000 of them on the Ethiopian side, when Mussolini’s Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, yet not a single person at one of my events has ever asked “But what about Mussolini?”¹⁷⁶

This is a small sampling. We could add other types of horrors to it.

As of this writing, some 0.7 million people, and rising fast, have died from coronavirus.

Those who die from poverty on a wealthy planet dwarf all of these numbers. According to UNICEF, 291 million children under age 15 died from preventable causes between 1990 and 2018.¹⁷⁷

How do we compare such horrors?

I’m not sure why that has to be a difficult question, why the very question should offend us or threaten our sense of identity. We compare various horrors by looking at all the similarities and differences among them. Ignoring some atrocities does not help us better appreciate others.

While no two horrors are the same, some came before others and set precedents. Hitler believed the world’s failure to seriously protest the Armenian genocide gave him license to commit his own.¹⁷⁸

While genocide in Western Europe was unusual, genocide committed by Western Europeans was not. Prior to “settling” the United States, some of the early settlers had previously “settled” Ireland, where the British had paid rewards for Irish heads and body parts, just as they later would for Native American scalps.¹⁷⁹

Hitler’s war on the Slavic East was planned to violently kill and starve vast numbers of people. It did kill many more people than were killed in the Holocaust. The war, considering all sides, killed several times what the Holocaust killed, and killed mostly civilians. Most of the members of the militaries killed on all sides were low ranking draftees.

Why in current U.S. culture is the immediate go-to example of evil “Hitler” or “the Holocaust”? I mean, why isn't that one of dozens of possibilities? Why is it almost always the one and only example of ultimate evil? Why, for that matter, is there a U.S. Holocaust Museum featuring a Holocaust in Germany, and the more recently built Washington, D.C., museums of “The American Indian” and “African American History and Culture,” but no museum of U.S. Genocide and Slavery? Is it “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention U.S. slavery in the same sentence with the Holocaust? Why? Isn’t it exactly as nonsensical to claim that it is “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention the Holocaust in the same sentence with U.S. slavery? Aren’t both things hideous enough to demand respect for irrational attitudes toward them?

Isn’t the current U.S. practice of separating immigrant families and locking up children in cages, or the sheriff in Texas who recently set up what he called a concentration camp for Latinos and was pardoned for his crimes by President Donald Trump, combined with centuries of similar precedents reason enough to not always -- perhaps just sometimes -- reach over to Germany to find an example of evil public policy?

WWII had long precedents but occurred in just a handful of years. It is, as a chapter yet to come will establish, the worst thing that humanity has done to itself and the earth in any short period of time. Probably just the European or Pacific half of it alone would also meet that threshold. But WWII was committed by numerous nations and was much larger than the Holocaust.

How necessary was the developed Euro-American model of racist extermination to the development of Nazism and to the ability of the Nazis to justify their statements and attract more followers? Well, we can’t run an experiment in which Europeans don’t assault the globe, in order to see whether Germany still invades Poland. But I think the preceding pages have shown the connections between Nazism and what came before it to have been critical to its creation. The next chapter covers some additional things without which WWII could not have happened: raw materials, war supplies, and money.