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During the film I learned about something that shook me to my core that I had not
heard before. I learned that the genocidal mentality and actions of the U.S. policy
makers would find similar expression years later when the Nazis, under Hitler, studied
the plans of Bosque Redondo to design the concentration camps for Jews.
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As John Toland notes in his book Adolf Hitler (pg. 202):
Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed
much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired
the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and
often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination—by starvation
and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.
He was very interested in the way the Indian population had rapidly declined due to
epidemics and starvation when the United States government forced them to live on the
reservations. He thought the American government's forced migrations of the Indians
over great distances to barren reservation land was a deliberate policy of extermination.
Just how much Hitler took from the American example of the destruction of the Indian
nations is hard to say; however, frightening parallels can be drawn. For some time
Hitler considered deporting the Jews to a large 'reservation' in the Lubin area where
their numbers would be reduced through starvation and disease.
David A. Meier notes in his book Hitler's Rise to Power:
His favorite game to play outside was cowboys and Indians. Tales of the American West
were very popular among boys in Austria and Germany. Books by James Fenimore
Cooper and especially German writer Karl May were eagerly read and re-enacted. May,
who had never been to America, invented a hero named Old Shatterhand, a white man
who always won his battles with Native Americans, defeating his enemies through sheer
will power and bravery. Young Hitler read and reread every one of May's books about
Old Shatterhand, totaling more than 70 novels. He continued to read them even asFührer. During the German attack on the Soviet Union he sometimes referred to the
Russians as Redskins and ordered his officers to carry May's books about fighting.
Parallels
Some of the parallels include the death marches when the Nazis forced hundreds of
thousands of prisoners from Nazi concentration camps and prisoner of war camps near
the eastern front to camps inside Germany away from front lines and allied forces. I
saw an image from May 11, 1945, where German civilians were walking past bodies of
30 Jewish women starved to death by German SS troops in a 300-mile march acrossCzechoslovakia. It made me think about how The Long Walk of the Navajo was also
300-miles, and many of the Native Americans died of starvation.
I thought about how the Nazis were burning Jewish books and burying bodies in mass
graves, and the parallels of how Indian cultures were also erased, libraries of oral
tradition functionally burned, and many were buried in mass graves under bibles.
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Map of the Long Walk:
We must listen…
We don’t talk about the correlation as much as we should between the Native American
Holocaust and the Jewish Holocaust. I often hear people dismiss the correlationbetween the suffering of our people and that of others. They felt that there is no
comparison between the magnitude of horror and death that happened during the
Jewish holocaust. I am by no means saying that the Jewish Holocaust was not one of
humanity's darkest hours, but I believe that we must put down our measuring stick of
who had it worse. I've witnessed this attitude within many different cultures. Although
not always, when I hear people say “ours was worse than theirs,” I see it as ultimately
a lack of empathy and an attitude of indifference towards a grouping of people who
have suffered from the same evilness that Hitler was fueled by. And like Elie Wiesel
said, “Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.” These conversations of “ours isworse than theirs” in regards to any grouping of people who have suffered from such
evilness, MUST stop.
Open discussions about the Native American Holocaust need to happen, so that we may
understand the very blueprint of Hitler’s reign. To truly achieve “Never Again” we must
hear the stories of others who have also endured humanity's darkest times, especially in
the land in which we reside.
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