May 18th, 2024
Band of Brothers at the Eagle’s Nest and Hitler’s Opinion of the USA
When the Eagle’s Nest opened on May 16th, 2024, it brought to mind the arrival of the US 101st Airborne Division: Easy Company or the “Band of Brothers” back in May 1945. “Every man and his dog wanted to get to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest” I have often heard from the mouths of WWII veterans. We know how Hitler felt about the United States joining the war effort against Germany and the Axis Powers in December 1941: he went ahead and declared war on the USA. But it is interesting to discover the views Adolf Hitler had on the United States before he came to power.
“It is not by chance” Hitler wrote in his Second Book in 1928 “that the American Union is the state in which by far the greatest number of bold, sometimes unbelievably so, inventions are currently taking place. Compared to old Europe, which has lost an infinite amount of its best blood through war and emigration, the American nation appears as a young, racially select people.
It is amazing how few people today – even WWII history buffs – have read, let alone heard about, Hitler’s unpublished sequel to the infamous Mein Kampf. Historians and scientific researchers on Hitler’s sphere of influence and the National Socialist period widely fail to study, or refer to, an important source of relative information: Hitlers Zweites Buch (Hitler’s Second Book), at one time referred to as ‘Hitler’s Secret Book’.
A chapter of my new work → EXPOSING THE REICH explores this secret and unpublished manuscript that Hitler dictated in 1928 at Obersalzberg, the mountain on which he would eventually build his grand home, as well as the lofty Eagle’s Nest teahouse. The following are other excerpts from this chapter:
In his → “Second Book” Hitler deplores the fact that so many Germans were forced to emigrate due to lack of space. In particular he mentions those who lived in the United States (referred to as the American Union): “under no circumstances will they be able to participate any longer in the motherland’s struggle with destiny in any significant way, nor in the cultural development of their people. Whatever the Germans in North America achieve specifically, it will not be credited to the German people, but is forfeited to the body of culture of the American union. Here the Germans really are only the cultural fertilizer for other peoples everywhere. Yes, in reality the greatness of these peoples, to a high degree, is not infrequently [attributable] to achievements contributed by Germans.”
Though, Hitler expresses next to no hope for Germany’s success in international trade, he begrudgingly cites America’s successes: “…in addition to all the European states that are struggling for the world market as export nations, the American union is now also the stiffest competitor in many areas. The size and wealth of its internal market permits production levels and thus production facilities that decrease the cost of the product to such a degree that, despite the enormous wages, underselling [by Germany] no longer seems at all possible. The development of the automotive industry can serve as a cautionary example here. It is not only that we Germans, for example, despite our ludicrous wages, are not in a position to export successfully against the American competition even to a small degree; [at the same time?] we must watch how American vehicles are proliferating even in our own country. This is only possible because the size of the internal American market and its wealth of buying power and also, again, raw materials guarantee the American automobile industry internal sales figures that alone permit production methods that would simply be impossible in Europe due to the lack of internal sales opportunities. At issue is the general motorization of the world – a matter of immeasurable future significance. For the American union, in any case, today’s automobile industry leads all other industries.”
Other fascinating excerpts from Hitler’s out-of-print “Second Book” and innumerable insights into how Hitler managed to mesmerize the German Nation can be found in → EXPOSING THE REICH: How Hitler Captivated and Corrupted the German People.
David Harper