Book description
In February 1942, barely two months after he had declared war on the
United States, Adolf Hitler praised America's great industrial
achievements and admitted that Germany would need some time to catch
up. The Americans, he said, had shown the way in developing the most
efficient methods of production-especially in iron and coal, which
formed the basis of modern industrial civilization. He also touted
America's superiority in the field of transportation, particularly the
automobile. He loved automobiles and saw in Henry Ford a great hero of
the industrial age. Hitler's personal train was even code-named "Amerika."
In Hitler and America, historian Klaus P. Fischer seeks
to understand more deeply how Hitler viewed America, the nation that
was central to Germany's defeat. He reveals Hitler's split-minded
image of America: America and Amerika. Hitler would
loudly call the United States a feeble country while at the same time
referring to it as an industrial colossus worthy of imitation. Or he
would belittle America in the vilest terms while at the same time
looking at the latest photos from the United States, watching American
films, and amusing himself with Mickey Mouse cartoons. America was a
place that Hitler admired-for the can-do spirit of the American
people, which he attributed to their Nordic blood-and envied-for its
enormous territorial size, abundant resources, and political power.
Amerika, however, was to Hitler a mongrel nation, grown too
rich too soon and governed by a capitalist elite with strong ties to
the Jews.
Across the Atlantic, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his
own, far more realistically grounded views of Hitler. Fischer
contrasts these with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that
caused Hitler, in the end, to see only Amerika, not America, and led
to his defeat.
"Hitler and America is an extraordinary book,
chock-full of evidence and significant details about the complexity
(and in some ways, the duality) of Hitler's consideration of the
United States."-John Lukacs, author of The Hitler of History
Klaus P. Fischer is Professor of History and Philosophy at Allan
Hancock College and the author of Nazi Germany: A New History and
History of an Obsession: German Judeophobia and the Holocaust.
