Indian reservations inspired Nazi concentration camps

by Raffaella Milandri ©

America’s ability to maintain an air of rugged innocence in the wake of the mass deaths of Native Americans apparently struck Hitler as an example to emulate. In 1928, Hitler observed approvingly that white settlers in America had “reduced the millions of Native Americans to a few hundred thousand”. “Illusion is the most tenacious weed in the collective consciousness: history teaches, but has no schoolchildren”, said Antonio Gramsci. He was right, history has no schoolchildren who acquire positive lessons but, as we shall see, it is the negative and tragic inspirations, instead, that are often taken up, replicated and “implemented”. According to many scholars, this is the case with the treatment of Native Americans and, in general, US racial laws, including the Jim Crow Laws, which would then have influenced the Nazi regime in formulating the Nuremberg Laws of September 1935.

Let us see how.

First of all, it is necessary to mention the broad eugenics movement, which began in the late 19th century, emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia (countries coincidentally in the hands of colonialists), and most European countries (such as Sweden and Germany). The eugenic, racist policies were aimed at improving the quality of the genetic heritage of their populations and were adhered to by eminent figures such as Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Supremacy in such policies rested with the United States, as James Q. Whitman, professor at Yale Law School: “At the beginning of the 20th century, America was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world”. It is important to remember how today, even in the latest 2020 census, the US population has been divided into Black or African American, Black or African American, Asian, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, American Indian and Alaskan, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander, Some Other Race, other races, and finally Two or more Races. The maniacal care with which the ‘races’ are reported speaks volumes about a mentality heir to the famous Jim Crow Laws, an inhuman abomination of racial discrimination, which I will not dwell on in this article.

Whitman methodically explores how the Nazis drew inspiration from late 19th and early 20th century American racism to perpetrate their racial plans. He notes that, in “Mein Kampf”, Hitler praised America as the only state that had made progress towards a primarily racial conception of citizenship by “excluding certain races from naturalisation”. When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalisation, he had in mind the US Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and excluded some nationality and ethnicity altogether. To Nazi observers, this was proof that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality. The US Immigration Act played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, as quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America. Whitman’s 2017 book “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” has received wide acclaim in academia, becoming a landmark and clearing the way for a series of articles in prestigious newspapers and journals. Whitman demonstrates the extent to which US race laws, as we have said, influenced the Nazi regime in the formulation of the Nuremberg Laws. Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model”, with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi racial laws, joins earlier studies such as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East”, a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection”, which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thought.

“Racial Law in the United States”, a 1936 study by German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempted to resolve inconsistencies in the legal status of non-white Americans. Krieger concluded that the entire apparatus was hopelessly opaque, hiding racist objectives behind convoluted justifications. Why not simply say what is meant? This was one of the main differences between American and German racism. The American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were so widespread that F. Scott Fitzgerald presented them in “The Great Gatsby”.

Let’s look at a few points.

In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory laws inspired by American laws: the Reich Citizenship Law, Reich Citizenship Law, and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour. Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws and laid the legal foundation for the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust and World War II. But, as we said, when the Nazis decided to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they did not just come up with ideas out of thin air. They had carefully studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, that country was the United States. In particular, the Nazis admired Jim Crow laws that discriminated against black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and discussed whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany. Says Whitman: “One of the most striking Nazi views was that Jim Crow was a suitable racist programme in the United States, because black Americans were already oppressed and poor. But in Germany, on the contrary, where Jews, according to the Nazis, were rich and powerful, harsher measures were needed”. For this reason, the Nazis were more interested in the way the United States had treated Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens living in the United States or its territories.

The laws against mixed marriages: “America had, by a wide margin, the strictest law of its kind”, says Whitman. They prohibited interracial marriages in thirty of the forty-eight states. “In particular, some state laws threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriages. This was something the radical Nazis were very keen to do in Germany as well”. The idea of banning marriages between Jews and Aryans presented the Nazis with a dilemma: how would they work out who was Jewish and who was not? After all, racial and ethnic categories had been socially constructed and interracial relationships produced children who did not fit neatly into one box.

Once again, the Nazis looked to America.

There was a great deal of American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which race. The controversial US one-drop (blood) rules stated that anyone of black ancestry was legally black and could not marry a white person. The laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American in order to prevent these groups from marrying whites (only Virginia had a ‘Pocahontas Exception’ for prominent white families who claimed descent from Pocahontas). The Nuremberg Laws also created a system to determine who belonged to which group, allowing the Nazis to criminalise marriage and sex between Jews and Aryans. Rather than adopting the “one-drop rule”, the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents. Which means, Whitman notes, “that American racial classification law was far stricter than anything the Nazis themselves were prepared to introduce in Germany”.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Nazis were not uniformly condemned in the United States before the country entered the war. In the early 1930s, American eugenicists embraced Nazi ideas of racial purity and republished their propaganda.

California’s forced sterilisation programme apparently inspired the Nazi sterilisation law of 1934. The first German eugenics movement was led by Wilhelm Schallmayer and Alfred Ploetz. Henry Friedlander wrote that although the German and American eugenics movements were similar, the German movement was more centralised and did not contain as many different ideas as the American movement. Unlike the American movement, the German Society for Racial Hygiene represented all eugenicists. Historian Edwin Black wrote that after the eugenics movement had established itself in the United States, it had spread to Germany. Californian eugenicists began promoting eugenics and sterilisation abroad to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forced sterilisation than all other US states combined. The forced sterilisation programme devised by the Nazis was partly inspired by that of California, which severely affected, among others, Native Americans.

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people a month were being forcibly sterilised, California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe boasted to a colleague: “It will interest you to know that our work played an important part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals behind Hitler in this epoch-making programme. Everywhere I have perceived that their opinions have been enormously stimulated by American thought…. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, which is that it really did move a big government of 60 million people into action” (taken from “Eugenics and the Nazis, the California connection”, article by Edwin Black    https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php ).

US eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin in 1934 was invited to an awards ceremony at the University of Heidelberg in Germany to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the “science of racial cleansing”. Due to financial constraints, Laughlin attended the ceremony and withdrew it from the Rockefeller Institute. He later proudly shared the award with his colleagues, stating that he felt it symbolised ‘the common understanding of German and American scientists about the nature of eugenics’ (Lombardo, P. A., 2008, Three generations, no imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell, Johns Hopkins University Press).

We come to another “inspiration” of US origin. In 1924, the first gas chamber execution took place in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigant agent Zyklon-B, licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I.G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent, but proved impractical. However, Zyklon-B was used to disinfect immigrants crossing 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 equipped with a chute that allowed the balls of poison to be dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained: “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid into a tube is easier on the nerves, it is like watering flowers”. The same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to “relieve the stress” of the SS guards. (For more: https://theweek.com/world-news/35581/how-america-inspired-third-reich)

Concentration camps: “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany”, Hitler said in 1941. “It is the British who are their inventors, who use this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations”. The British had run camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out. Party propagandists similarly emphasised the suffering of the Native Americans. The Nazis were certainly not wrong in citing American precedents. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” the Native Americans.  Canadian author Baron Alexander Deschauer, writing for the Mirror Online, said his 2017 book Canada’s Concentration Camps exposes the similarities between Hitler’s Nazi camps and Indian reservations. “It is this idea of containing people, erasing their identities by replacing their names with numbers, and breaking their spirit with beatings if they do not abide by the rules that can be seen in the terrible concentration camps created later under the Nazi regime”, he writes.

Is it possible that a regime known for its clinical barbarism was inspired by a country like Canada, better known for its cornfields, Rocky Mountains and unlimited opportunities? Deschauer argues that Hitler fused his vision of the Third Reich with the “cowboys and Indians” conflict to which he was attracted. Like millions of other Germans, he loved Karl May’s adventure stories and kept the entire collection in his bedroom. He was particularly interested in the camps, which in the United States and Canada were known as Indian reservations. Deschauer writes: “It is not clear whether Hitler drew direct inspiration from the Canadian or US system, but his methodology was very similar. The US government had set up concentration camps as early as 1838; the use of this method became prevalent from the 1860s as the borders of the United States moved westward’. The US and Canadian governments referred to these concentration camps as “Indian reservations”, but there were also Indian residential schools, which were often forced labour camps. “While the Nazi camps lasted little more than a decade, the Canadian camps continued for almost 150 years”, says Deschauer.

Gilles Petiquay, a Canadian native, recounted how each pupil at the Pointe Bleus school he attended was assigned a number. “I remember the first number I had in residential school was 95”, he said. “I had that number – 95 – for one year. The second number was number 4. I had it for a longer period. The third number was 56. I also had that for a long time. We walked with the number on us”.

“The Nazis understood the role of their camps. On the surface, they provided a source of free labour, available subjects for their medical experiments and a place to put dissidents without killing them outright, at least initially”, Deschauer said. The Nazi camps ensured that all able-bodied bodies were put to work, producing toys, shoes and ammunition. This was a key component of Hitler’s strategy. His war was total: cultural, physical and emotional. His goal was to cleanse Germany and the world of undesirable people (from Jews to Gypsies) and undesirable cultures. As unwanted, and strongly, were the Native Americans.

Let us return to Karl May and the German romanticisation of Native Americans. Hartmut Lutz coined the term Indianthusiasm (Indian enthusiasm) for this phenomenon, on which I refer those who wish to read more at this link:

https://is.muni.cz/th/u3xbw/German_Indian_Enthusiasts.pdf .

I will mention a subject unknown to most: the plan that affected the Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ – failed – plans was to give honorary Aryan status to the Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rebel against their oppressors. Hitler’s promise, propagated in the United States by various exponents, including Elwood A. Towner, a strange character who had given himself the name Red Cloud, and who dressed as a Native American, complete with feathered headdress, was to give Aryan citizenship to the Native Americans, whose culture he admired, and to return their stolen lands to them. But the plan failed and, as we know, the Native Americans fought in the US army and beyond: through code-talkers – Navajo and others – and the use of native languages as code, they were instrumental in the US victory. In May 1933, Heinz Spanknöbel received authority from Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer, to form an official American branch of the Nazi Party. The branch was known as the Friends of the New Germany in the United States. The Nazi Party referred to it as the National Socialist German Workers Party of the United States.                           The Spanknöbel organisation was openly pro-Nazi but was short-lived. However, it seems that Nazi and neo-Nazi currents have always hovered in the United States, as in other countries. 

Neo-Nazism emerged as an ideology during the late 1970s, seeking to use its ideology to promote hatred and white supremacy, and to attack racial and ethnic minorities. It is a global phenomenon with organised representation in many countries and international networks. It borrows elements from Nazi doctrine, including ultra-nationalism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-communism. Organisations such as the American Nazi Party, the National Alliance and the White Aryan Resistance were formed in the second half of the last century. The National Alliance, founded in the 1970s by William Luther Pierce, was the largest and most active neo-Nazi group in the United States in the 1990s. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the National Alliance lost most of its members by 2020, but is still present in the United States. Other groups, such as Atomwaffen Division and the Aryan Nations, described by the FBI as a “terrorist threat” and by the RAND Corporation as the “first truly nationwide terrorist network” have taken its place. American neo-Nazi groups have moved towards a more decentralised organisation and online social networks with a terrorist focus. Because of white supremacist ideals, it is not excluded – but so far no one has spoken openly about it – that some of their exponents are involved in cases of MMIP, Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, one of the plagues afflicting the Native American community: Native women, children and men who disappear and are found lifeless.

Recommended reading:

“La mia Tribù. Autentiche storie di Indiani d’America” (My Tribe. Authentic stories of American Indians), Raffaella Milandri, Mauna Kea Edizioni 2020.

Published originally in Italian in The AntiDiplomatico, 5 June 2024

Rubrica Nativi di Raffaella Milandri

https://www.lantidiplomatico.it/news-nativi/53237/