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.
विषयसूची
Introduction
Chapter 1. Hitler’s Split Image of America
Chapter 2. Hitler Takes Risks and America Legislates Itself into Neutrality: 1933-1937
Chapter 3. Hitler’s Year: 1938
Chapter 4. Hitler’s War against the West: 1939-1941
Chapter 5. The World Will Hold Its Breath: 1941
Chapter 6. The Tide of War Shifts in Favor of Hitler’s Opponents
Chapter 7. Prospects for a Separate Peace in 1943
Chapter 8. Hitler and the ‘Unnatural Alliance’: 1944-1945
Chapter 9. ‘This War against America Is a Tragedy’
Conclusion: Hitler and the End of a Greater Reich
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
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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.
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