Hitler's obsession with USA

Hitler’s “Secret Book”(1928-33 journals), published in obscurity after WW II, is telling new things about the diabolical dictator. He was less obsessed about Jews than USA. In his early years, he couldn’t afford a placement in the Vienna School  of Fine Arts, while other richer Jewish kids bought a seat. Hence he became disgusted with Judaism and agnostic.  But in the Secret Book he talked about being in charge of POWs in WW I.  He came off convinced that Germans who had immigrated to America had depleted Germany and enriched USA.  He viewed everything through racial eugenics and Germans were supposedly the Master Race. Eugenics and social Darwinism had been all the rage since 1890 among intellectuals. British were also long-lost Saxons and together with USA, they threatened to dominate the world. 

Meanwhile Germany lagged economically.  USA’s  Great Depression looked like a decent economy to German farmers of the time. Hitler despised the capitalism of USA and UK, so he adopted Mussolini’s socialism. It seemed to him that a Jewish banking culture had ruined Germany when the finance world conspired to cut down the German empire after WW I.

What to do? First Jews and Slavs had infiltrated German stock and he wanted to banish or genocide them.  Historians have mostly focused on this.  But secondly, he wanted an intense effort to raising up a contaminated German people. Central to every aspect of his Third Reich were things like Pure Aryan Art, Hitler Youth, Strength Through Joy athletic events and demands that good Aryan mothers bear as many children as possible. Thirdly there was Lebensraum, “living space”.  The military was rebuilt with clear intent to take over Eastern Europe and Russia as a “frontier” much as USA had taken over native Americans. Hitler had a unique gift to turn rhetoric into hideous reality.  Others decried the Weimar Republic; Hitler destroyed it.  Others castigated Jews for being money obsessed; Hitler planned a Final Solution.  Other politicians wanted a strong Germany; Hitler took over Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland.

America it seemed to his racial Darwinistic worldview  was economically mighty but culturally degenerate. Jazz, republican democracy, and Wall Street were things he found disgusting.   His hope was to stave off confrontation with America/Britain until 1943, but a miscalculation in starting war in Poland, then Japan’s Hawaii attack in 1941 stopped this delaying plan. Confronted with America’s military, he had no answers.  He distrusted Japan as they did him. As FDR endorsed a “Europe First” strategy and US industry out-produced Germany 5 to 1, the Germanic Darwinian cause was lost.