How American Racism Influenced Hitler By Alex Ross Part-2

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier.

She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence.

In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical.

Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him.

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews.

Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans.

...in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death.

Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair.

He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations.

To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies.

Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications.

The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage.

The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell.

This was a major difference between American and German racism.

Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist.

He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations.

Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier.

With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence.

Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it.

Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.”

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a Russian forgery from around 1900, fuelled the Nazis’ paranoia.

Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type.

Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence.

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair.

They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt).

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans.

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted.

For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

(The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”)

In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below.

At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.”

Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors.

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly...

Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair.

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece.

Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt).

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror.

He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film.

(The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”)

Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited.

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell.

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents.

The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

Even those who found his words repulsive were mesmerized by him.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

“Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans.

...I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus...

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence.

His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career.

For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life.

He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures.

Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command.

With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death.

The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.”

Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union.

When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program.

They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state.

The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the...

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I...

Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of...

Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted.

.... . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth,...

They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state.

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

...of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should...

There are also sinister, if mostly coincidental, similarities between American and German technologies of death.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece.

With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film.

This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited.

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

Leading Nazi scientists had it better.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film.

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror.

The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death.

He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense.

Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.”

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence.

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted.

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose.

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles.

Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt).

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped.

Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type.

American eugenicists made no secret of their racist objectives, and their views were prevalent enough that F. Scott Fitzgerald featured them in “The Great Gatsby.”

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

Krieger concludes that the entire apparatus is hopelessly opaque, concealing racist aims behind contorted justifications.

At the same time, and with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticization of Native Americans.

Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist.

He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made.

Records were airbrushed; de-Nazification procedures were bypassed (they were considered “demoralizing”); immigration was expedited.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—

Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I...

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to “eliminate” or “extirpate” Native Americans.

In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.”

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

(The cloddish Tom Buchanan, having evidently read Lothrop Stoddard’s 1920 tract “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” says, “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged.”)

Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families.

To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace.

Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

Conservatives made the gargantuan mistake of seeing Hitler as a useful tool for rousing the populace.

Goebbels’s propaganda harped on this motif; his diaries imply that he believed it.

In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada.

For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.

This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature.

...1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into...

When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace.

In 1943, Goebbels triumphantly broadcast news of the Katyn Forest massacre, in the course of which the Soviet secret police killed more than twenty thousand Poles.

He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

A pro-Hitler remark was featured atop the comments, and soon, thanks to Autoplay, I was viewing contributions from such users as CelticAngloPress and SoldatdesReiches.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

For most people, such stories remain fantasy, a means of embellishing everyday life.

To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose.

At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny.

Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.”

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist.

J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds.

He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.

The Nazis were not wrong to cite American precedents.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche.

In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.”

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense.

Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program.

To be sure, others promoted more peaceful—albeit still repressive—policies.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny.

) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934.

Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type.

He might be out there now, cloaked by the blue light of a computer screen, ready, waiting.

The present occupants of those lands—tens of millions of them—would be starved to death.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure.

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?”

Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.”

For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.

This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature.

The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable.

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

What set Hitler apart from most authoritarian figures in history was his conception of himself as an artist-genius who used politics as his métier.

He then stood atop the corpses and played the Lithuanian anthem on an accordion.

Autobahns would cut through fields of grain.

For one thing, Hitler had more discipline.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

Meanwhile, squads of Brown Shirts brutalized and murdered opponents, heightening the very disorder that Hitler had proposed to cure.

In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada.

This was the achievement of Timothy Snyder’s profoundly disturbing 2010 book, “Bloodlands,” which seems to fix cameras in spots across Eastern Europe, recording wave upon wave of slaughter.

Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

...“prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe...

Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible.

The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America.

In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view.

This was a major difference between American and German racism.

In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

...Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of...

With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil.

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

Still, bigotry toward Jews persisted, even toward Holocaust survivors.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped.

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made.

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.

Hitler’s “scientific anti-Semitism,” as he called it, echoed the French racial theorist Arthur de Gobineau and anti-Semitic intellectuals who normalized venomous language during the Dreyfus Affair.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature.

The Nazis found collaborators in almost every country that they invaded.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

This is the focus of Wolfram Pyta’s “Hitler: Der Künstler als Politiker und Feldherr” (“The Artist as Politician and Commander”), one of the most striking recent additions to the literature.

This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece.

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

The musical structure was one of crescendo toward triumphant rage.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense.

“Europe—and not America—will be the land of unlimited possibilities.”

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror.

At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny.

Although some resemblances can be found—at times, Trump appears to be emulating Hitler’s strategy of cultivating rivalries among those under him, and his rallies are cathartic rituals of racism, xenophobia, and self-regard—the differences are obvious and stark.

“Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

Constitution.

The magnitude of the abomination almost forbids that it be mentioned in the same breath as any other horror.

The media got caught up in pop-culture distractions; traditional liberal newspapers were losing circulation.

The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose.

In 1938, President Roosevelt called for an international conference on the plight of European refugees; this was held in Évian-les-Bains, France, but no substantive change resulted.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny.

The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable.

“It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.”

Brian Crim’s “Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State” (Johns Hopkins) reviews the shady history of Wernher von Braun and his colleagues from the V-2 program.

Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief planners of the Holocaust, thought that, once the Soviet Union had been defeated, the Jews of Europe could be left to die in the Gulag.

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism.

“Concentration camps were not invented in Germany,” Hitler said in 1941.

The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

“Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans.

Like a colored dye coursing through the bloodstream, they expose vulnerabilities in the national consciousness.

One can, however, keep the entire monstrous landscape in view without minimizing the culpability of perpetrators on either side.

“Race Law in the United States,” a 1936 study by the German lawyer Heinrich Krieger, attempts to sort out inconsistencies in the legal status of nonwhite Americans.

Such is the tenor of Hitler’s infamous “prophecy” of the destruction of the European Jews, in 1939: “I have often been a prophet, and have generally been laughed at. . . . I believe that the formerly resounding laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be...

) California’s sterilization program directly inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews.

These chilling points of contact are little more than footnotes to the history of Nazism.

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

But Hitler’s embrace of belligerent nationalism and murderous anti-Semitism is not in itself historically significant; what mattered was his gift for injecting that rhetoric into mainstream discourse.

The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews.

The historian Edward B. Westermann, in “Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars” (Oklahoma), concludes that, because federal policy never officially mandated the “physical annihilation of the Native populations on racial grounds or characteristics,” this was not a genocide on the order of the Shoah.

Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union.

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether.

Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a “first-class cyanide fumigating job.”

He amused the crowd with sardonic asides and actorly impersonations.

Nazi sympathizers carry on this project today, alternately denying the Holocaust and explaining it away.

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type.

In prison, he wrote the first part of “Mein Kampf,” in which he completed the construction of his world view.

The British Empire was Hitler’s ideal image of a master race in dominant repose.

They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state.

General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”

One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

Hitler and Goebbels were the first relativizers of the Holocaust, the first purveyors of false equivalence.

The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized.

He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor.

The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews.

When Braun was captured, in 1945, he realized that the Soviets would become the next archenemy of the American military-industrial complex, and cannily promoted the idea of a high-tech weapons program to ward off the Bolshevik menace.

Yet no order was really necessary.

He fostered the production of catchy graphics, posters, and slogans; in time, he mastered radio and film.

Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made.

The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell.

The Armenian genocide of 1915-16 encouraged the belief that the world community would care little about the fate of the Jews.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor.

At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.”

Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine would be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families.

Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, “Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.”

In the summer of 1941, as hundreds of thousands of Jews and Slavs were being killed during the invasion of the Soviet Union, Goebbels recalled Hitler remarking that the prophecy was being fulfilled in an “almost uncanny” fashion.

Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

Peter Longerich’s “Hitler: Biographie,” a thirteen-hundred-page tome that appeared in Germany in 2015, gives a potent picture of Hitler’s skills as a speaker, organizer, and propagandist.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

In one Lithuanian town, a crowd cheered while a local man clubbed dozens of Jewish people to death.

In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.”

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

Party propagandists similarly highlighted the sufferings of Native Americans and Stalin’s slaughter in the Soviet Union.

The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized.

This was a major difference between American and German racism.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

With one stroke, the inconspicuous outsider assumes a position of supremacy, on a battlefield of pure good against pure evil.

When I did a search for “Hitler” on YouTube the other day, I was first shown a video labelled “Best Hitler Documentary in color!”—

He made frequent mention of the American West in the early months of the Soviet invasion.

The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

The spread of white-supremacist propaganda on the Internet is the latest chapter.

...international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”

The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable.

Defying skeptics and mockers, he imagines the impossible.

Hett refrains from poking the reader with too many obvious contemporary parallels, but he knew what he was doing when he left the word “German” out of his title.

The fact remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population of U.S. territories dropped from many millions to around two hundred thousand.

Since Trump entered politics, he has repeatedly been compared to Hitler, not least by neo-Nazis.

Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.

This is the language of a connoisseur admiring a masterpiece.

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

America’s knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death struck Hitler as an example to be emulated.

It is a mistake to call him a failed artist; for him, politics and war were a continuation of art by other means.

...Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish...

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

He would also have millions of citizens who acquiesce in inconceivably potent networks of corporate surveillance and control.

For Nazi observers, this was evidence that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

He is more likely to take inspiration from the newly minted myths of popular culture.

This literature is provocative in tone and, at times, tendentious, but it engages in a necessary act of self-examination, of a kind that modern Germany has exemplified.

They also undermined parliamentary democracy, flouted regional governments, and otherwise set the stage for the Nazi state.

The Weimar Republic stabilized somewhat in the middle of the decade, and the Nazi share of the vote languished in the low single-digit figures.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

He was able to reconstitute most of his operation Stateside, minus the slave labor.

The British had operated camps in South Africa, the Nazis pointed out.

The German Foreign Office, in a sardonic reply, found it “astounding” that other countries would decry Germany’s treatment of Jews and then decline to admit them.

As for Hitler and America, the issue goes beyond such obvious suspects as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

At Stalin’s urging, many Communists viewed the Social Democrats, not the Nazis, as the real enemy—the “social fascists.”

She writes, “Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.”

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

Although the aestheticizing of politics is hardly a new topic—Walter Benjamin discussed it in the nineteen-thirties, as did Mann—Pyta pursues the theme at magisterial length, showing how Hitler debased the Romantic cult of genius to incarnate himself as a transcendent leader hovering above the fray.

The artist-politician of the future will not bask in the antique aura of Wagner and Nietzsche.

The left, meanwhile, was divided against itself.

Benjamin Carter Hett deftly summarizes this dismal period in “The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic” (Henry Holt).

Scholars have long debated when the decision to carry out the Final Solution was made.

Yet the Holocaust has unavoidable international dimensions—lines of influence, circles of complicity, moments of congruence.

The most dangerous claim made by right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit was that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror, and was therefore to some degree excusable.

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

What is worth pondering is how a demagogue of Hitler’s malign skill might more effectively exploit flaws in American democracy.

He would certainly have at his disposal craven right-wing politicians who are worthy heirs to Hindenburg, Brüning, Papen, and Schleicher.

His most adroit feat came after the failed Beer Hall Putsch, in 1923, which should have ended his political career.

Above all, Hitler knew how to project himself through the mass media, honing his messages so that they would penetrate the white noise of politics.

One day, though, a ruthless dreamer, a loner who has a “vague notion of being reserved for something else,” may attempt to turn metaphor into reality.

J. Edgar Hoover became concerned that Jewish obstructionists in the State Department were asking too many questions about the scientists’ backgrounds.

At the trial that followed, Hitler polished his personal narrative, that of a simple soldier who had heard the call of destiny.

Whitman, however, points out that if these comparisons had been intended solely for a foreign audience they would not have been buried in hefty tomes in Fraktur type.

Such intellectual atrocities led Theodor W. Adorno to declare that, after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric.

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

...laughter of Jewry in Germany has now choked up in its throat. Today, I want to be a prophet again—if the international Jewish financiers inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the...

Longerich writes, “It was this eccentric style, almost pitiable, unhinged, obviously not well trained, at the same time ecstatically over-the-top, that evidently conveyed to his audience the idea of uniqueness and authenticity.”

Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

To many liberal-minded Germans of the twenties, Hitler was a scary but ludicrous figure who did not seem to represent a serious threat.

Whitman’s “Hitler’s American Model,” with its comparative analysis of American and Nazi race law, joins such previous studies as Carroll Kakel’s “The American West and the Nazi East,” a side-by-side discussion of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum; and Stefan Kühl’s “The Nazi Connection,” which describes the impact of the American eugenics movement on Nazi thinking.

The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, the one giving license to the other, in remorseless cycles of revenge.

The archetype of the ordinary kid who discovers that he has extraordinary powers is a familiar one from comic books and superhero movies, which play on the adolescent feeling that something is profoundly wrong with the world and that a magic weapon might banish the spell.

On the book’s final page, he lays his cards on the table: “Thinking about the end of Weimar democracy in this way—as the result of a large protest movement colliding with complex patterns of elite self-interest, in a culture increasingly prone to aggressive mythmaking and irrationality—strips away the exotic and foreign look of swastika banners and goose-stepping Stormtroopers. Suddenly, the whole thing looks close and familiar.”

Valiant journalists like Konrad Heiden tried to correct the barrage of Nazi propaganda but found the effort futile, because, as Heiden wrote, “the refutation would be heard, perhaps believed, and definitely forgotten again.”

The economic misery of the late twenties and early thirties provided another opportunity, which Hitler seized.

The Immigration Act, too, played a facilitating role in the Holocaust, because the quotas prevented thousands of Jews, including Anne Frank and her family, from reaching America.

If Hitler’s radicalization occurred as rapidly as this—and not all historians agree that it did—the progression bears an unsettling resemblance to stories that we now read routinely in the news, of harmless-seeming, cat-loving suburbanites who watch white-nationalist videos on YouTube and then join a neo-Nazi group on Facebook.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler spoke of the planned mass murder of Poles and asked, “Who, after all, is today speaking about the destruction of the Armenians?”

Hitler’s “prophecy” was itself an oblique command.

He would begin quietly, almost haltingly, testing out his audience and creating suspense.

As Zeynep Tufekci recently observed, in the Times, YouTube is a superb vehicle for the circulation of such content, its algorithms guiding users toward ever more inflammatory material.

Most now believe that the Holocaust was an escalating series of actions, driven by pressure both from above and from below.

Scholars have long been aware that Hitler’s regime expressed admiration for American race law, but they have tended to see this as a public-relations strategy—an “everybody does it” justification for Nazi policies.

General George Patton criticized do-gooders who “believe that the Displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.”

In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Donald Trump once kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed.

Jim Crow laws in the American South served as a precedent in a stricter legal sense.