Immediately after his rise to power, Hitler made sure that he clarified the distinction, even on a juridical level, between the position of the Aryans and those of the Jews and the few mulattos who still lived in Germany (at the end of the First World War, coloured troops belonging to the French army had taken part in the occupation of the country). In other words, a major aspect of the Nazi programme was that of building a racial state. And what were, at the time, the possible models for a racial state? Even more so than South Africa, the first example was the Southern United States. Still in 1937, Alfred Rosenberg made explicit reference to South Africa: it was well that it remain “in the hands of northerners” and whites (thanks to appropriate “laws” not only against “Indians,” but also “blacks, mulattos, and Jews”), and it should serve as a “solid bulwark” against the menace of a “black awakening.” However, the main point of reference was represented by the United States, this “wonderful country of the future,” which had the merit of formulating the well-thought-out “new idea of a racial State,” an idea that should now be put into practice, “with youthful vigour,” by expelling and deporting “the blacks and the yellows.” We only need to take a look at the Nuremberg legislation to recognise analogies with the situation that was taking place on the other side of the Atlantic: clearly, in Germany, it was first of all Germans of Jewish descent that occupied the place of African-Americans. “In the United States” — Rosenberg writes in 1937 — “the Negro question is on top of all crucial questions”; and once the absurd principle of equality has been eliminated concerning the blacks, there is no reason why they should not reach “the same resolution for the yellows and Jews, as well.” Even for his plan to build a German continental empire, Hitler had in mind the United States model, which he praised for its “extraordinary inner strength.” Germany was called upon to follow this example, expanding to Eastern Europe as to a sort of Far West and treating the “indigenous people” in the same way as the “redskins” were treated.
We come to the same conclusion if we examine eugenics. As is well known, with regard to this ‘new science, the Third Reich was indebted to the United States, where eugenics, which was invented during the second half of the nineteenth century by Francis Galton (a cousin of Darwin’s), became very popular. Well before Hitler’s rise to power, on the eve of the First World War, a book was published in Munich, Die Rassenhygiene in den Vereinisten Staaten von Nordamerika (Racial Hygiene in the United States of North America), which, already in its title, pointed to the United States as a model for “racial hygiene.” The author, Géza von Hoffmann, vice-consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Chicago, extolled the US for the “lucidity” and “pure practical reason” it had demonstrated in confronting, with the necessary energy, a very important problem that was instead so often ignored: to violate the laws that forbid sexual intercourse and interracial marriages could be punished with up to ten years in prison, and not only the people responsible for the act, but also their accomplices, could be condemned.
Even after the Nazi rise to power, the ideologues and “scientists” of race continued to claim that “Germany, too, has much to learn from the measures adopted by the North-Americans: they know what they are doing.” It should be added that this was not a unilateral relationship. After Hitler’s rise to power, the most radical followers of the American eugenic movement looked up to the Third Reich as a model, and even travelled there on an ideological and research pilgrimage.
It is now necessary to ask ourselves a question: Why, in order to define the Nazi régime, should the argument regarding the one-party dictatorship be more valid than that of racial and eugenic ideology and practice? It is precisely from this sphere that the central categories and key terminology of the Nazi discourse derived. This is the case with Rassenhygiene, which is essentially the German translation of eugenics, the new science invented in England and successfully exported to the United States. But there are even more sensational examples. Rosenberg expressed his admiration for the American author Lothrop Stoddard, credited with coining the term Untermensch, which already in 1925 stood out as the subtitle of the German translation of his book, The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, published in New York three years earlier. As for the meaning of the term he coined, Stoddard clarified that it indicated the mass of “savages and barbarians” who live inside or outside the capitalist metropolis, who are “essentially un-civilizable and incorrigibly hostile to civilization,” and who must necessarily be dealt with once and for all. In the United States, as in the rest of the world, it was necessary to defend “white supremacy” against “the rising tide of colour”: what incited the coloured people to revolt was Bolshevism, “the renegade, the traitor within the gates” which, with its insidious propaganda, reached not only the colonies, but even “the ‘black belts’ of our own United States.” The extraordinary success of these theories is quite understandable. Even before receiving Rosenberg’s enthusiastic comments, Stoddard had already been praised by two American presidents (Harding and Hoover), and he was later welcomed and honoured in Berlin, where he met not only the most renowned representatives of Nazi eugenics, but also the highest officials of the régime, including Adolf Hitler, who had already begun his campaign to decimate and subjugate the Untermenschen.
One more term should be examined. We have seen that Hitler looked at the white expansion into the Far West as a model. Immediately after invading Poland, Hitler proceeded to dismember it: one side was directly incorporated into the Great Reich (and the Poles were expelled from it); the rest constituted the “general Governatorate,” within which, as General Governor Hans Frank declared, the Poles would live as in “a sort of reservation” (they were ‘subject to German jurisdiction’ without being “German citizens”). The American model was copied here in an almost pedantic manner.
At least in the beginning, the Third Reich planned to also establish a Judenreservat, a “reservation for the Jews,” once again based upon the model of the reservations where Native-Americans were segregated. And, as far as the expression “Final Solution” is concerned, it was not in Germany, but in the United States that it first emerged, though it referred to the “Negro question” rather than the “Jewish question.” [...]
What is at the heart of Nazism is the idea of Herrenvolk, which is associated with the racial theory and practice carried out in the Southern United States and, more in general, with the Western colonial tradition. It is precisely this idea that the October Revolution attacked: not by chance, in fact, the revolution called upon the “slaves in the colonies” to break their fetters. The common theory of totalitarianism concentrates exclusively upon the similar methods attributed to the two antagonists and, besides, claims that they derive univocally from a supposed ideological affinity, without making any reference to the actual situation or to the geopolitical context.
Domenico Losurdo, Towards a Critique of the Category of Totalitarianism (2004).
