Was Hitler Inspired By Lincoln’s Army?

In my Fall 2010 Independent Review article entitled “The Culture of Violence in the American West: Myth versus Reality,” I noted the creepiness of the fact that General William Tecumseh Sherman referred to the U.S. Army’s twenty-five year campaign of genocide against the Plains

Indians, which he was in charge of for the duration, as “the final solution to the Indian problem” (Cited in Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 260). It is creepy because it reminds one of Adolf Hitler’s “final solution” rhetoric. I did not claim in my article that Hitler literally plagiarized General Sherman or was even familiar with Sherman’s “final solution” rhetoric, but scholarship that has been brought to my attention suggests that he may well have been.

The scholarship is cited in a June 18, 2013 article in the jewishjournal.com Web site by Lia Mandelbaum entitled “Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust.” Citing the books Adolf Hitler by John Toland and Hitler’s Rise to Power by David A. Meier, Mandelbaum writes that “it shook me to my core” when she “learned that the genocidal mentality and actions of the U.S. policymakers [from 1862 to 1890] would find similar expression years later when the Nazis, under Hitler, studied the plans of [“The Long Walk of the Navajo”] to design the concentration camps for Jews.”

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