War and Revolution by Domenico Losurdo

Author:Domenico Losurdo
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Random House Publisher Services

The Third Reich and the Natives

With the unleashing of the war in the East, Hitler set about constructing the ‘German Indies’, as they were sometimes called, or conquering a Lebensraum similar to the Far West. The First World War and the British naval blockade had demonstrated the geopolitical vulnerability of Germany’s previous colonial expansion. Assessing this negative experience, Mein Kampf stressed that ‘the New Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old’, in order to build a robust continental empire.104 This involved exploiting the disintegration of Czarist Russia, avoiding a ‘fratricidal’ conflict with the Anglo-Saxon powers, and preserving Germanic or Aryan solidarity intact. In this optic, the war with the ‘natives’ of Eastern Europe was equated with the ‘war against the Indians’, with ‘the struggle in North America against the Red Indians’. In both cases, ‘victory will go to the strong’,105 and be secured by the methods appropriate to colonial war: ‘in the history of the expansion of the power of great peoples, the most radical methods have always been applied with success’.106

It might be said that Hitler sought his Far West in the East and identified the Untermenschen of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as ‘Indians’ to be chased ever further beyond the Urals in the name of the march of civilization. This was not a fleeting suggestion, but a long-premeditated programme spelt out in detail. Furet aptly draws attention to the fact that Hitler compared the great spaces he readied himself to conquer to a ‘desert’.107 But he does not breathe a word about the history behind this metaphor, which pertained to the history of colonialism and, above all, the expansion of the continental empires. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mexico seemed like a set of ‘desert wastes … untrodden save by the savage and the beast’ to chauvinistic circles in the USA, who aspired to conquer it, at least in part.108 Going further back, here is how Tocqueville described the immense territories of North America on the eve of the Europeans’ arrival:

Although the vast country that I have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied it without possessing it. It is by agricultural labour that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps, their savage virtues consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these tribes began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing its completion.

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