Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars

Comparing Genocide and Conquest

Bibliographic Data

ID3451815
AuthorsJens-Uwe Guettel (Pennsylvania State University), Jens‐uwe Guettel (Pennsylvania State University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume48
Issue3
Pages410-412
Publication date2017-11-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169
PublisherMIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1162/jinh_r_01176
OpenAlexW2770062176
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited4

This is a troubling book. Its main contention is twofold: (1) that atrocities against Native Americans committed by the U.S. government and/or white settlers during the nineteenth century cannot be equated with Nazi Germany’s attempt to gain an “Eastern Empire” during World War II and (2) that the violence in the American West cannot be viewed as a precursor to the Nazis’ brutal plans of expansion and extermination in Eastern Europe. These arguments are not new. Although some American scholars have argued, albeit not convincingly, that the United States provided the “model character” for Nazi Germany, especially with respect to its expansionist plans, this notion has never gained much traction, more often than not attracting explicit rejection.1Yet in addition to criticizing the idea of connections between the American West and the German East—which, as Westermann concedes, “most scholars have refrained” from accepting (5)—the book also “focuses on the aptness and appropriateness of the comparison of Nazi genocide in the European East with the actions of the U.S. government, the U.S. Army, [and] settlers” (6). Ultimately, Westermann argues that although it is “completely understandable” that “for the Native tribes and individual Indians, the loss of life and land would evoke comparisons to the Shoa, ... the injustice and atrocity symbolized by the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee did not create a historical trajectory to Babi Yar and the killing fields of Himmler’s SS and police empire in the East” (259). Instead, Westermann argues that “acculturation and assimilation... constituted the primary goal of U.S. governmental policy” (54, 97), that “mass murder and atrocity proved the exception rather than the rule” in the American West (185), and that despite “the rhetoric of extermination...an intentional policy for the physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics was missing” (11, 54). Hence, in Westermann’s view, Native Americans and scholars who contend that genocide occurred in the American West labor under a double misunderstanding—that the American West was connected in any way to the Nazi East and that the concept of genocide is applicable in any way to American Indians.If Westermann’s intention had been to show only that American violence in the West differed in scope, scale, and execution from Nazi violence in Eastern Europe, and that the American and the Nazi-German projects of spatial expansion were not causally linked, Hitler’s Ostkrieg would be an accurate, if unnecessary, contribution to existing scholarship. Yet Westermann’s intervention in the debate about potential American genocide(s) is misguided in its implied attempt to determine how Native Americans should remember their pasts (259). Moreover, it either ignores or does not engage with the works of some of the most well-known scholars of genocide, among them Madley and Kiernan. Madley demonstrated that “settlement policies and a war of genocide” reduced the Yuki tribe in California from as many as 20,000 in 1851 to a mere “85 male[s] and 215 female[s]” in 1864. Instead of incorporating or directly arguing against such findings, Westermann barely acknowledges them.2Even though Westermann’s observation that violence in the American West was more random and less programmed than that in Eastern Europe, and that individuals and groups were able to protest against it is true (199, 226), the reduction in the U.S. Indian population by likely more than half during the nineteenth century is difficult to dismiss. Scholars have thus identified various genocides and genocidal massacres in California, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, and other regions in the American West during this period. Establishing whether genocide may have been “central to the making of the contemporary United States” is therefore not an academic exercise but a question with real-life implications. As Madley asks, “Should tribes press for official apologies, reparations, and control of land where genocidal events took place? Should tribes marshal evidence of genocide in cases involving tribal sovereignty and federal recognition? How should Native American communities commemorate mass murder?”3These real-life implications do not disappear just because fewer American Indians were killed in the American West than were European Jews during the Shoa, or because the Nazi regime, SS troops, and German soldiers were more single-mindedly committed to extermination than were U.S. federal troops, state militias, and/or settlers. Ultimately, Westermann’s rationale for exculpating U.S. westward expansion from charges of genocide does not even come close to refuting the contrary evidence presented by Madley, Kiernan, Jacoby, and other scholars.4

Empire · Expansionism · Genocide · Injustice · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

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