Hitler's American Models: What the United States Taught the Nazis

As historians are beginning to show, Adolf Hitler and other Nazis often drew on American precedents for inspiration and ideas to guide their thinking and policy decisions. This lecture will focus on recent research that addresses a number of disturbing questions: (1) How were Hitler's ideological obsessions and genocidal fantasies influenced by American historical precedent? (2) How did the precedent of American race laws and racial practices influence Nazi racial laws? (3) How did the American eugenics movement shape Nazi race science and its programs of sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide? (4) How did American treatment of minorities inform discriminatory measures in Nazi Germany? (5) How did American westward expansion and its brutal treatment of American Indians guide Nazi empire-building in Eastern Europe? (6) What does seeing America through Nazi eyes tell us about our own history? This course seeks to provide an illuminating and unsettling window onto Nazi crimes, as well as the American past and present.

The required text is: Jane Caplan, Nazi Germany: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford Very Short Introduction Series: Oxford University Press, 2019). This short text is available from Amazon in Paperback ($11.95).