Hitler's goal of a German Master Race controlling the world required space
and plenty of Aryan DNA. Little wonder that he set his sights
on the U.S. But how detailed were his plans, and were they already underway?
History is very clear about Hitler's relentless march across Europe and his desire to rebuild
under the flag of the Third Reich. But what about across the Atlantic? James P. Duffy,
historian and author of Target America: Hitler's Plan to Attack the United States,
says that's a little less clear, and historians have long debated how much Hitler wanted.
Duffy says that Hitler intended to rule the world. He cites a 1927 letter from Rudolf
Hess to the London-based Nazi Walter Hewel, in which Hess wrote of Hitler preaching:
"[World peace] will be realizable only when one power, the racially best power, has
attained complete and uncontested supremacy. That [power] can then provide a sort of world police."
This seems to confirm there were plans for even America
to fall under the jurisdiction of a global Nazi law enforcement agency.
Hitler definitely had his eye on the U.S. Although The National Interest calls the Nazi
attempt to build a bomber that could cross the Atlantic an idiotic waste of resources,
the idea behind building something literally called the Amerikabomber
means that the U.S. was on Hitler's list. And that, says Duffy, was just part of it. In 1941,
the Nazi regime started planning for a postwar world. First and foremost, that
meant a massive navy with hundreds of submarines, anchored by 25 battleships and 150 destroyers.
In the spring of 1941, LIFE magazine sent correspondent and former Belgian
ambassador John Cudahy to report on what was happening in Germany.
Cudahy got a sit-down with Adolf Hitler himself, who started by pointing out that
convoys — just like the ones that the U.S. was sending to Britain — signified war.
So Cudahy got right to the point and asked Hitler what his plans were regarding the
U.S. He explained that most Americans backed the idea of going to war against Nazi Germany
because they were afraid that once Europe fell, they'd be next. Speaking through a translator,
Hitler called the idea preposterous. Cudahy wrote:
"He laughed at that and refused to take me seriously. He said the idea
of a Western Hemisphere invasion was about as fantastic as an invasion of the moon."
According to Cudahy, Hitler went on to say that,
"He had too high an opinion of the intelligence and good sense of Americans."
The logistics didn't work. Millions of troops would need to be moved across
the Atlantic for the Nazis to gain a foothold in the U.S. That meant there
was absolutely nothing for America to worry about. At least, Hitler said so,
but rational thought and reasoning weren't his strongest qualities.
In order to talk about what Hitler might have had in store for the U.S.,
it's worth mentioning just why he might want to see that part of the world burn — at least,
eventually. According to University of North Carolina emeritus professor of history Gerhard
L. Weinberg, Hitler had been writing about taking out the U.S. as far back as the 1920s. While he
wanted global domination for Germany and all that, he also felt like it was sort of his
moral obligation to right a perceived wrong, and that skewed his view in favor of war with the U.S.
It all went back to the stab-in-the-back myth, which the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum describes
as the belief that German's loss in World War I came not on the battlefield, but because of
espionage, sabotage, and subterfuge on the home front. All that was, of course, supposedly led
by those who would become enemies of the Nazi state, including Jews, liberals, and communists.
At the same time, it meant that America didn't really have all that much to do
with Germany's loss. Therefore, America wasn't a military might that needed to be contended
with. But what historian and author James P. Duffy says was described as "Europe's
greatest future rival." That meant Hitler believed he could wrap up the war in Europe,
take his sweet time building up a navy, then deal with the U.S.
Adolf Hitler famously wrote Mein Kampf, but less famously, he wrote a second book,
the very directly-named Hitler's Zweites Buch, or Hitler's Second Book. According
to Target America: Hitler's Plan to Attack the United States, the book was written in
1928 but not published until 1961. It outlined a series of three conflicts,
and it wasn't until the third one that Hitler got around to the U.S.A.
First, Hitler saw his Germany taking on France to regain what they'd lost post-WWI. Then,
he was going to head east and seize all the land and agricultural resources he
needed from the Soviet Union. And then? On to America, which he wrote was a:
"Real threat to German domination of the world."
But here's the thing: Hitler wrote that analysis before the Great Depression got into full swing.
As he watched what was unfolding across the Atlantic, he eventually came to the conclusion
that America was so weakened by her own problems that it didn't really matter. The third war could
wait. According to Gerhard L. Weinberg, Hitler believed that wrapping up the war in Europe,
stabilizing his Third Reich, and building up an army of long-range forces was all
something he could take his time doing. America, he thought, was too weak to do anything but wait.
There's a lot that's been written about Adolf Hitler's obsession with taking on the Soviet
Union. But according to Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, he was just as obsessed with
the U.S. So much so, Simms told ExBerliner, that it shaped policies across the Third Reich. Simms
explains that the more research he did, the more he found about Hitler's focus on America.
"It became absolutely obvious that 'Anglo-America' — that's my phrase, Hitler tended to refer
to them as the 'Anglo-Saxons' — was the biggest kid on the block, his main focus,
his main enemy, the partner he would have liked. The biggest element of his reality."
That's a massive claim, and Simms says that there are a few layers to Hitler casting his greedy eye
toward the U.S. Part of it started with the U.S. having something that Germany didn't:
size. Let's put that in perspective. The U.S. is about 28 times the size of Germany,
but that only tells part of the story. Germany could fit inside California and take up about only
85% of the state. It's also about the same size as Montana and New Mexico, give or take a bit.
Even if Hitler had managed to take over all of Europe, building his master race
would require a ton of space and a ton of resources, which America has in abundance.
Adolf Hitler was front and center at WWI's Second Battle of the Marne, and according to
Cambridge historian Brendan Simms, it was there that he had a run-in with two American soldiers,
who made a massive impression: They were tall, blond, and blue-eyed. Sound familiar?
Hitler's attempts to build his master Aryan race are well documented. And Simms says
there's another, often overlooked part of that. Hitler developed a theory that one
of the richest places to find all that Aryan DNA he was so obsessed with was
the U.S.A. Conquering America meant all new seeds from which his Aryan race could grow.
The theory went like this: over the course of hundreds of years,
the U.S. population had been reinforced by immigrants from Europe.
"Remember the United States is a nation of immigrants. People
came here to avoid war in Europe." They weren't just any immigrants,
either. They were the brightest, the strongest, the most adventurous,
and the most resilient. They left behind a Europe that was overcrowded, disease-ridden,
and famished. They headed west, and settled in the U.S. There,
they thrived with wide open spaces, and resources of the type only America could offer.
And United States laws helped reinforce his ideas about just how pure their blood was. Legislation
limited or outlawed immigration from certain areas of Europe, like the Slavic countries, along with
interracial marriages. In other words? He saw the U.S. as an invaluable source of genetic material.
Henry Ford is often lauded as the father of the American automobile industry,
but here's the thing: While he was a genius when it came to industry and manufacturing,
he was a terrible person. Ford was a raging antisemite.
"Ford blamed the Jewish people for everything from world war,
to short skirts, cheap movies, and jazz music."
And PBS says that he was often quoted saying that all the world's ills could be traced back
to "Jews or to the Jewish capitalists." And if that's the sort of thing that seems like
it would have Hitler singing, "You've got a friend in me," it absolutely was. According
to Bradley W. Hart, author of Hitler's American Friends, it was even more than
that. Ford was spouting antisemitic rhetoric long before mainstream America knew about
things like the concentration camps, and his views didn't go unnoticed by Hitler.
According to research from The Nation, Ford profited heavily from manufacturing for the
Third Reich, even for months after the U.S. officially declared war. A contemporary report
from the U.S. Treasury Department shows they knew about it, summed up in this observation:
"There would seem to be at least a tacit acceptance by [Ford's son] Mr.
Edsel Ford of the reliance ... on the known neutrality of the
Ford family as a basis of receipt of favors from the German Reich."
"In July, 1938, Ford accepted Germany's Grand Cross,
the highest honor the Third Reich could bestow on a foreigner."
Hart goes on to say that Hitler saw Ford as a way into America. And he
uncovered records describing how Hitler had tapped Heinrich Ford to become what
Hitler described as "the leader of the growing Fascist movement in America."
World War II usually plays out as an Allies vs. Axis conflict,
but it wasn't that neat and tidy. According to The National World War II Museum,
the U.S. had a faction of Nazis that weren't just alive and well, they were holding rallies
at venues like Madison Square Garden. The German-American Bund dated back to 1936,
and the entire idea behind the organization was to promote all the ideals and racial hatred that
went along with being a Nazi. That Madison Square Garden event attracted about 22,000
loyal members in 1939, and it was done under the command of a German WWI veteran named Fritz Kuhn.
The Bund, of course, got the attention of The House Committee on Un-American Activities,
and while they were found not to be a threat to national security,
there is an interesting footnote. One of the claims used to discredit the Bund was
that Kuhn reported directly to Hitler and that Hitler was meddling in U.S. affairs.
It makes sense that Hitler would be thrilled to have a Nazi party ready
and waiting for him. But not only was that not true, but according to Traces, Hitler outright
denounced the party. Why? Because the Nazis thought the Bund was giving them a bad name.
Names like Dachau and Auschwitz are instantly recognizable,
but they made up only a sliver of a percentage of the facilities the Nazi regime built to contain,
enslave, and execute those they didn't like. Here's a terrifying statistic:
According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, there were more than 44,000 camps of varying
purposes — all detention and incarceration-based — that were active during the Third Reich.
Would those camps have been set up in North America? According to the CBC,
probably. In 2019, the Library and Archives Canada purchased a book that had been taken
from Hitler's personal library. It was called what translates to Statistics,
Press, and Organizations of Jewry in the United States and Canada. The 137-page
book is essentially a compilation of data on Jewish populations across North America.
"What this book shows us is that there was already
the beginnings of a plan had the war gone differently."
"That the Holocaust would have happened here."
And as the LAC curator Michael Kent explained,
"This information would have been the building
blocks to rolling out the Final Solution in Canada."
The book — written by Nazi linguist Heinz Kloss — details things from ethnicity and
languages of cities' populations to listing Jewish organizations. And Kent
further explained to The Guardian that the book is essentially proof that Hitler and
the Nazi party had plans to expand the Holocaust to North America. Kent said,
"The Holocaust wasn't a European event,
it was an event that didn't have the opportunity to spread out of Europe."