Manifest Destiny in the 19th century United States and Lebensraum in 20th century Germany share commonalities and stark differences. Both policies deserve impartial observation. As more than one philosopher has stated, “those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it”.
In the 1800s, the people of the newly independent United States believed they had been “divinely chosen” to create a great nation by expanding “from sea to shining sea”. The term used was Manifest Destiny. Some of the vast new land would be acquired through purchase, some through conquest. The biggest purchase would be from France in 1803. The Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the new nation. At the end of the Mexican War in 1848, the victorious Americans coerced Mexico into selling a large part of the Southwest to the U.S. That purchase added all or parts of eight states; California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, and Wyoming. Texas was not part of the bargain, as it had broken away from Mexico and became a republic in 1836. It would be annexed to the U.S. in 1845. In 1854, the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico brought us the remaining parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Arizona would become the last of the “lower 48″ states in 1912.
Adolph Hitler admired the American accomplishments in building a great, powerful nation through the American belief in Manifest Destiny. He called Germany’s Manifest Destiny, Lebensraum, which translates to “living space”. It would be a conquest to the East. No purchases would be made. The land would simply be seized by force and the inhabitants exterminated. He considered the races to the East, mostly Slavs, to be racially inferior, and for the large Jewish population living there, he had no consideration at all. They would be eliminated to make room for German settlers who would move into the region to begin building a Greater Germany to culminate in a “Thousand Year Reich”.
The American westward movement had its atrocities. Native Americans were mistreated, sometimes massacred, by White settlers. Many of them were moved to “reservations” where they could be controlled and would pose little threat to the newly arrived farmers and ranchers. Unlike the Lebensraum of Germany, there was no government policy of extermination.
In Lebensraum, there was indeed an official German government policy of extermination. Those few skilled laborers, local government officials, and police who could be of benefit to Germany were allowed to live. As the German Army moved rapidly East through Poland and its neighbors, it was closely followed by the “Einsatgruppen” composed of SS killers, paramilitary militia, and locals who had traditionally hated their Jewish neighbors. Under the direction of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, they murdered on almost an industrial scale. Thousands of victims at a time. At BabiYar, just outside current day Kyiv, Ukraine, in a two day period in September 1941, they slaughtered 34,000 people, mostly Jews. Mass killings were commonplace. In Latvia, 25,000 were killed, and in Lithuania, 70,000. In Russia, entire villages disappeared. By the time the war ended, the victims numbered in the millions.
All the killings were part of Hitler’s “Final Solution” – He was just making “Living Space”.
Author: Staff
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