The American Cowboy Novels That Inspired Hitler

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The adventure stories of Karl May set in the American Southwest have charmed millions of Germans, but especially Hitler, who patterned Nazi policies on their plots.

Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero/The Daily Beast

Times of Ahmad | News Watch | US Desk
Source/Credit: The Daily Beast
By Alan Gilbert | August 20, 16

[Excerpts]

The U.S. is not alone . . . in whitewashing its encounters with Native Americans. Most remarkably, perhaps, the ethnic cleansing of the “Wild West” has long been an exotic theme in Germany for more than a century thanks largely to the novels of a very strange man named Karl May—which were beloved by none other than Hitler.
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Equipped with a gorgeous imagination, May conjured fantasies of the Orient and with himself dressed up as the hero, Kara Ben Nemsi [Karl from Germany]. Between 1880 and 1888, he published an Orient cycle of six volumes. Prefiguring J.K. Rowling, he had made a list of plots to write, and at the age of 51 began to compose what could be called the Harry Potter books of Germany: the Winnetou novels, the first of which was published in 1893.

Set in an Aryanized American Southwest, these books center on the blood brotherhood of Old Shatterhand, a German surveyor, and Winnetou, a noble Mescalero Apache. Unsurprisingly, “Shatterhand’s” German name was Karl.
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A wide variety of Germans, including Karl Liebknecht, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and Hitler, loved the May novels. Even today, many young people, notably women, are drawn to Winnetou.
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In 1893, at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago, historian Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin famously lectured on settlers killing Indians across the United States as they extended an ever-westward American frontier and how that frontier was coming to an end. He was in touch with Friedrich Ratzel, the German historian who coined the terms Biogeographie (biological geography) and Lebensraum (a large, conquered space for an otherwise constricted German life). This was to be continental expansion and ethnic cleansing of “lesser” peoples.
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Karl Haushofer, Ratzel’s student, taught Rudolf Hess, who became Hitler’s secretary. When Hitler and Hess were jailed for the Munich putsch of 1923, Haushofer would give them five-hour tutorials on geopolitics each week. It was then that Hitler began to speak of Lebensraum, and Haushofer would subsequently propagate the idea of Lebensraum widely in the Third Reich.

The Karl May novels had long possessed Hitler’s imagination. As he recounts in Table Talk, I’ve just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were republished. I owe him my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying-glass…The first book of his I read was The Ride Through the Desert. I was carried away by it. And I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling-off in my school reports.

As Fuehrer, Hitler kept the whole collection of May’s works in his bedroom, and they inspired his ideas about the frontier. To Hitler, Lebensraum meant settlement and bread: “For a man of the soil, the finest country is the one that yields the finest crops. In twenty years’ time, European emigration will no longer be directed towards America, but eastwards.”

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