The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective

The book's tripartite structure ("Continental Imperialism," "Settler Colonialism," "Frontier Genocide") organizes the comparison along a continuum that begins with the formation of expansionist ideology and ends with practices of eliminationist violence. Nazi leaders regarded the East as Lebensraum to be conquered, settled, and colonized. For example, Karl Haushofer, a geopolitical theorist, influenced Adolf Hitler's thinking in this regard, and Hitler's self-description of as a Raumpolitiker (rather than as a Grenzpolitiker) echoes imperial ideologies that [Carroll P. Kakel III] also sees at work in the more "aggressive" (30) Jacksonian version of America's westward expan- sion. In fact, Nazi planners of Lebensraum policies referred to the "Wild East" as the America of the "Germanic peoples" (45). Intriguingly, Kakel pulls together a number of quotes by Nazi leaders in which they directly refer to America's expansion to justify their own thirst for territory. But whether such occasional referencing constituted an "obsession for Hitler" (3), as Kakel claims, is not really backed up by empirical proof (e.g., a statistical analysis). Nazi ideology was certainly obsessed with the "Jewish question," but was it really obsessed with the American West? Though the book does not provide a satisfying answer, a comparative analysis does reveal that planners of colonial practices looked at and learned from historical antecedents-including the treatment of indigenous populations considered expendable. Notions of space and race thus "became interlocking imperatives" (45).