Alex Ross published an April 2018 article in The New Yorker on the scholarly research into the international precursors of Nazism, titled “How American Racism Influenced Hitler”. I read the article at the same time that I was reading Robert Proctor’s book, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under The Nazis, and the tie-ins were stark. The article is deeply disturbing, and the comparisons to our current climate left me feeling distraught. It is my hope that projects like The Mischlinge Exposé can use personal stories to help make room for compassion.
“Americans have an especially insatiable appetite for Nazi-themed books, films, television shows, documentaries, video games, and comic books. Stories of the Second World War console us with memories of the days before Vietnam, Cambodia, and Iraq, when the United States was the world’s good-hearted superpower, riding to the rescue of a Europe paralyzed by totalitarianism and appeasement. Yet an eerie continuity became visible in the postwar years, as German scientists were imported to America and began working for their former enemies; the resulting technologies of mass destruction exceeded Hitler’s darkest imaginings. The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier. From boyhood on, Hitler devoured the Westerns of the popular German novelist Karl May. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly, that white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind.”