Hitler’s America Problem: Germanic Envy of Greater America

What Made America Great?

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

Dear Reader,

“What makes America great, and how could Germany be greater?” was the geopolitical obsession of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

Manifest Destiny provided living space to the American Union, he reasoned; this meant Germany had to acquire its own. He was convinced that the strongest and best Europeans were adventurous, so they went to the New World and left the remainder of the Europeans behind. This and other views of the Nazi leader show his peculiar interest in the United States.

In his Zweites Buch, the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf, Hitler foresaw the final showdown for world supremacy as being against the Americans, not the Soviets. In fact, he attacked the Soviets because he believed they would be easy to defeat, and the resources of European Russia could be used against the Americans in a future war—a war of a union of German-dominated European states against the American Union.

In his declaration of war speech against America, Hitler used both class warfare and historical envy to justify his animosity toward President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

After attacking Thomas Woodrow Wilson for his intervention in the First World War, Hitler went on to criticize Franklin D. Roosevelt, saying:

But why is there now another President of the U.S.A. who regards it as his only task to intensify anti-German feeling to the pitch of war? National-Socialism came to power in Germany in the same year as Roosevelt was elected President. I understand only too well that a world-wide distance separates Roosevelt's ideas and my ideas. Roosevelt comes from a rich family and belongs to the class whose path is smoothed in the Democracies. I am only the child of a small, poor family and had to fight my way by work and industry. When the Great War came, Roosevelt occupied a position where he got to know only its pleasant consequences, enjoyed by those who do business while others bleed. I was only one of those who carry out orders, as an ordinary soldier, and naturally returned from the war just as poor as I was in Autumn 1914. I shared the fate of millions, and Franklin Roosevelt only the fate of the so-called Upper Ten Thousand…

He continued with:

And yet there is something in common between us. Roosevelt took over a State in a very poor economic condition, and I took over a Reich faced with complete ruin, also thanks to Democracy. In the U.S.A. there were 13,000,000 unemployed, and in Germany 7,000,000 part-time workers. The finances of both States were in a bad way, and ordinary economic life could scarcely be maintained. A development then started in the U.S.A. and in the German Reich which will make it easy for posterity to pass a verdict on the correctness of the theories.

While an unprecedented revival of economic life, culture and art took place in Germany under National Socialist leadership within the space of a few years, President Roosevelt did not succeed in bringing about even the slightest improvements in his own country. And yet this work must have been much easier in the U.S.A. where there live scarcely 15 persons on a square kilometer, as against 140 in Germany. If such a country does not succeed in assuring economic prosperity, this must be a result either of the bad faith of its leaders in power, or of a total inefficiency on the part of the leading men.

To Hitler, the economic problem of the Depression should have been solved because America had so much more land per person than Germany. He went on to blame Jewish Americans for inciting the war—a clear lie and gross distortion—but also accused Franklin D. Roosevelt of:

First he incites war then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war, not without calling God to witness the honesty of his attack-in the approved manner of an old Freemason.

He ended his speech by announcing that the Japanese war, which began on December 7th at Pearl Harbor, was now a German and Italian war at Japan’s side against the United States, and that Germany was a victim—as a “have-not” power being bullied by the ultimate “have” power in America. The idea of Germans as a “have-not” people, often directed against France and Britain as vast colonial powers, was a regular theme in Hitler’s writings and speeches.

The American President and his Plutocratic clique have mocked us as the Have-nots, that is true, but the Have-nots will see to it that they are not robbed of the little they have.

—————-Hitler’s Declaration of War against the United States of America December 11, 1941

Hitler’s resource-obsessed materialism and racial determinism were not only wrong they were a strategic liability. He was in the wrong century and on the wrong continent. He completely, and for Germany, disastrously failed to comprehend the institutional, cultural, and religious foundations that undergirded American ascendancy.

Adolf Hitler was driven by envy of America, so extreme that he often considered how he could emulate the United States when he achieved Lebensraum by conquering Eastern Europe. He considered what he called the “Red Indian” policy—population reduction and reservations. He also looked to exploit slave labor in order to maximize German resource extraction from the East. Like with the issue of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to lift the United States out of the Depression, Hitler saw the question as one almost exclusively of resources. In this, he misunderstood what made the USA great. He has not been alone, though he is the most extreme example. Marxists too have emphasized American racial crimes in order to draw a parallel between the Third Reich and American capitalism. Now, it is important to distinguish between critical analysis and bad-faith equivalency. However, they miss that what made America a great power were the things that made it unique. Let’s consider the factors that led to America becoming a world power in the late 19th century.

First, it is true that without the expansionary wars against the Native Americans, the post-colonial United States would not have developed quickly, because it would have lacked the land and resources to do so. Take away Ohio, Michigan, the Mississippi River, and confine the population to a narrow strip of populated land from Boston to Savannah, and you have very low GDP growth in the pre-industrial era. The conquest gave America coal, iron, wheat, and land for cattle and cotton, and eventually gold, silver, and oil.

Second, it is also accurate that slavery was critical to the cash-crop economy because the planters wanted to control their labor fully. The cash crops did help American economic development by generating trade surpluses through cotton exports, thereby fueling capital accumulation across both Southern plantations and Northern financial institutions. Enslaved people served as collateral in sophisticated credit systems. The plantation economy pioneered early forms of managerial capitalism. The trade in slave-produced crops like cotton energized interstate commerce between the North and South at a time when intrastate commerce was dominant. The economics of slavery also drove much of the push for westward expansion, though not all of it, as Yankees marched from sea to shining sea by force as well.

But the simplistic analysis and model-copying of Hitler and others jealous of the United States miss a few things about America. To describe America as “a nation that conquered and exploited the resources of a continent” could just as easily describe Russia—and do not forget about Russian serfdom. Likewise, if you said America was “an ex-European colony whose top commodities were reaped with exploited slave labor,” you could just as well be referring to Brazil, which imported perhaps ten times the number of slaves as British North America or the United States. The scope of the conquest of native peoples applies to the entirety of the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are right there with the United States in the 19th-century claiming of tribal lands and enforcement of racial hierarchy.

In many cases, America’s competitors had hierarchy without law, a Family Compact rather than a federation of families; resource wealth without restraint, and memory without purpose.

America committed historic crimes of exploitation, and it gained wealth from wars of conquest and slavery. There is no need to deny that. Rather, the question is: why did the United States, and not Brazil, Canada, Mexico, or Russia, end up on top in the 19th and 20th centuries? This is where Adolf Hitler, the Marxists, and other opponents of the United States truly misunderstand American greatness.

1. America was law-bounded. Law-boundedness refers to the degree to which political actors and institutions are constrained by law, especially formal constitutional and legal norms. It is a measure of how subject to legal rules the rulers themselves are. The Americans began this way because they were British/English, but they made innovations in the English system. This included the written, codified Constitution with its Bill of Rights. The reliability of this system built in a predictability that grounded American political relations, creating a low barrier to honesty in government. In a dictatorship like Germany, or petty-tyrant regimes as seen throughout Latin American history, fear and flattery disrupt government operations. The leader does not always hear the truth when reported to, and because the system is not law-bounded, the leader’s authority is never as secure as it should be. As a result, such leaders tend to retain control and not share it with their subordinates. You see this in the way Adolf Hitler retained too much control over operations in Normandy, preventing his commanders from using their independence to act and direct resources against the Allied landing. Franklin D. Roosevelt had no such problems

2. The Separation of Powers. In the British system, the Crown-in-Parliament is supreme. The Prime Minister is the executive who functions as the manager of Parliament—the legislature—on behalf of the Crown, the lawful chief executive. So the leader of the legislature is also the top officer of the monarch; therefore, the powers of the legislature and the executive are fused. Likewise, the courts, while having independence, are in fact the monarch’s courts. Judicial power in the United Kingdom is an exercise of the executive power, meaning the king. Additionally, traditionally, the highest courts answered directly to the king or were situated in the House of Peers (the Lords). In the United States of America, we formally separated these offices to allow for competition and specialization, but with superior power residing with Congress the body representing the People and the States of the Union: the branches are not co-equal and were never designed to be, despite the common misconception. However, this system gave the United States an advantage over the European regimes for a time.

3. Federalism. By which I mean a real federalism: where the states truly have powers that cannot be infringed by the central government, and the central government has jurisdictions that are exclusive to it. This furthered the specialization and focus of the governments—plural—of the United States of America. The Erie Canal was built not by the federal government but by the State of New York; this was true federalism in action. Championed by Governor DeWitt Clinton and completed in 1825, it revolutionized frontier commerce by linking the Hudson River to Lake Erie and opening the interior of the continent to Atlantic trade. New York identified a need, used its own resources, and executed—transforming the economy of young America. A mere state connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. That is an example of how federalism is not about “laboratories of democracy,” which presumes a scientific solution that will be applied to everyone, but is instead about what Alexander Hamilton meant when he talked about energy in government. Missouri should have the energy and agency to solve its own problems. Indiana should be able to reinvent itself. Virginia should create a plan to redevelop its education system with urgency to compete with the top talent in the world. Etc., etc. Adolf Hitler destroyed the old German states and replaced them with the Gau, a district led by little mini-führers called Gauleiter. After the war, the Federal Republic of Germany, sponsored by the United States of America, rebuilt a strong federalism that led to the German economic miracle of the 1960s.

4. Politics over Ideology. This is where America has had a commanding advantage over its competitors for nearly two centuries, and even still today to a lesser extent over countries like the People’s Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Unlike Europe, where ideology—monarchism vs. republicanism, socialism vs. traditionalism, nationalism vs. imperial cosmopolitanism—drove statecraft and war, America’s historical disputes were largely political, not ideological. Americans argued over who should wield power, to what practical ends it should be directed, and what the shifting priorities of the government were—not over abstract theories of man and society. The exception was the Civil War, and to a much lesser extent, the fight over ratification of the Constitution. The Nazis and Soviets let ideology dictate their actions far too often, and this ultimately made them beatable opponents.

5. Foundationally Energetically Democratically Protestant. Finally, America became great because it was Protestant in a civilizational sense. The Protestant spirit meant literacy through reading the Bible for oneself, which increasingly applied to women as well. It also meant lay participation in the leadership of the Church, which implied self-government apart from politics and the franchise. This was combined with suspicion of excessive hierarchy and a sense of personal calling. It is no coincidence that the Great Awakening predated the American Revolution, because by democratizing thought about faith and accountability to God, it reordered ideas about the accountability of the state to God and His children on earth. Like the ancient Israelites, Americans were expected to know the law and their rights. Democracy became a cultural habit before it was put into practice through universal suffrage at the ballot box. This habit was retained even when Americans became more secular or even non-believing, because it had become part of the national identity.

   The United States is perhaps the first foundationally Protestant state, by which I mean all the other governments of the West prior to the USA could trace themselves to a pre-Protestant past—meaning they underwent a Reformation that was often messy, violent, and left unhealed wounds in many countries for a century or more. The USA, however, was founded without that baggage for the government; rather, it presumed freedom of conscience through mandating the freedom of religion from government interference.

Yes, America committed historic wrongs, and yes, Jim Crow and other practices were borrowed by our Nazi enemies. But they missed the forest for the trees. America has never been just its sins, nor have our virtues been the only important thing about us. Rather, Americans became strong because of what they did to address their own weaknesses and failings. It is these efforts that established perhaps America’s greatest weapon: from 1776 to 1945, the United States of America was always better than the particular alternatives at the time.