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Shelley Baranowski, Edward B. Westermann. Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 197–198, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.197
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Extract
An accomplished and well-published scholar of German military history, Edward Westermann broadens his range in his new study, which compares the Nazi Lebensraum project and the Indian wars in the United States. The comparison arises from the recent scholarly recognition of Hitler’s ambition to outdo the American conquest of the West. In Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars, Westermann responds to current debates on the meaning of genocide and to Carroll Kakel’s theoretically informed synthesis (The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective, 2011), which, despite qualifications, suggests links between the two territorial expansions. Westermann mines extensive empirical evidence derived from original sources, beginning with an array of archives in Germany and the United States, to accentuate the differences between the expansions. His chapters offer side-by-side comparisons that discuss visions of conquest; national policies of race and space; military strategies and warfare; massacres and atrocities; and, finally, guerrilla and partisan conflicts. The result is a compelling analysis that recognizes both cases as ambitious and destructive colonial projects while highlighting the distinctiveness of each.
