(Just to clarify, I do not mean to insinuate that these were his only inspirations; they most certainly weren’t, as anybody who regularly reads this subcommunity can attest.)
Quoting Carroll P. Kakel’s The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’, pages 17–8:
During his youth, Hitler had been fascinated by the ‘American West’, its ‘frontier’, and its hardy pioneer settlers. His initial awareness of the ‘Wild West’ and the American assault on ‘native’ indigenous populations came from his lifelong reading (and rereading) of Karl May, the German cowboy Western novelist who wrote about the American frontier.
Like many young people of his generation, Hitler became enthralled by May’s popular tales of the American ‘Wild West’ and its ‘Indian wars’. At school, the young Adolf often led his classmates in war games and pranks.35
Hitler’s former teacher, Dr Eduard Huemer, attributed this aggressive youthful behaviour to an excessive addiction to Karl May’s Indian stories.36 As an adult, Hitler himself attributed a drop in his school marks to the time when, as an adolescent, he started to become absorbed with May’s novels.37 After attending a 1912 lecture in Vienna by the novelist, the young Hitler became caught up in the ‘May cult’ and grew to be one of Karl May’s greatest admirers.
Hitler’s fascination with May and his ‘Wild West’ novels never faded, becoming a lifelong addiction.38 During the election campaign of October 1932 (for the forthcoming 6 November national elections), Hitler admitted to still being thrilled by Karl May’s cowboy and Indian stories, with their tales of the ‘Wild West’ and its ‘Indian wars’.39 For inspiration, Hitler read all 70 volumes of May’s works shortly after becoming German chancellor in January 1933.40
German Chancellor Hitler kept vellumbound volumes of May’s works on a special shelf in his personal library. A visitor to the Obersalzberg, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, in 1933, noticed that the majority of books in the Führer’s modest first‐floor room were May’s adventure stories. When German officers, in the spring of 1940, objected to his military plans, Hitler overrode all their objections, observing that ‘They should have read more Karl May!’41
During one of his famous wartime monologues, he insisted that every German officer should carry one of May’s ‘Indian books’ (Indianerbücher). At the height of the fighting on the Eastern front, in fact, **the Führer ordered 300,000 copies of May’s books printed and given to German troops to help defeat the Russians (who, after all, fought like ‘Indians’).42
Thanks to the influence of Karl May, in Hitler’s spatial imaginary, the Nazi ‘Wild East’ had become the American ‘Wild West’, and the ‘Russian [insert slur here]’ had become the ‘savage’ American ‘Red Indians’.**
(Emphasis added. Plenty more U.S. sources of inspiration for the Third Reich can be learned in Mr. Kakel’s book.)
In addition to being prejudiced against Native Americans, May also despised Armenians.
Quoting Stefan Ihrig’s Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler, pages 76–7:
Anti‐Armenianism also found its way into fiction—and not just any fiction, but the work of one of the most successful German novelists of the time, Karl May, whose books were still widely read in the German‐speaking lands throughout the twentieth century.
Among May’s best‐known works were the novels of his “Oriental cycle,” viewed by the author himself as his most important work, and some of which were turned into movies as early as the 1920s.57
May’s usual protagonist was called Kara Ben Nemsi (“Karl, Son of the Germans,” in May’s invented language) when he traveled in Karl May’s Orient, or Old Shatterhand when he and his horse had crossed the ocean and were on adventures in the American Wild West.
In May’s In the Empire of the Silver Lion (1898), Kara Ben Nemsi also commented on the massacres of the Armenians in the mid‐1890s and in fact “plagiarized” Naumann’s infamous potter quote about the Armenians word for word.
(For context, Naumann was another popular author in the Twoth Reich, and the ‘potter quote’ refers to an anonymous potter whom Naumann quoted, who spewed a bunch of anti‐Armenian stereotypes.)
Kara Ben Nemsi/Old Shatterhand—this hero held so dearly still in post‐World War II Germany and portrayed by Lex Barker in the German 1960s movies—then justified killing the Armenians on racial grounds and continued to express all the anti‐Armenian stereotypes (see above).58 Karl May thus significantly contributed to the further dissemination of Naumann’s potter quote.
Another comment on the Armenians, taken from another of May’s texts, also illustrates how the Armenians, although Christians themselves, were excluded from Christianity in May’s world:
A Jew dupes ten Christians, a Yankee tricks 50 Jews, but an Armenian even dupes a hundred Yankees. […] Wherever some malice, some treason is planned, certainly the hawk’s nose of the Armenian is implicated. When even the unconscionable Greek refuses to commit some villainy, there will no doubt be an Armenian who wants to earn the wages of sin.59
(It is unclear if ‘Yankee’ here refers to a specific type of U.S. citizen, such as a Northerner, or a U.S. citizen in general.)
Anti‐Armenian clichés and stereo types permeated Karl May’s novels of the Oriental cycle, and time and again one meets May’s despicable Armenian with his crooked nose and the overall physical appearance of a vulture. And, moreover, in May’s books it was basically the Greeks’ and the Armenians’ fault that the Ottoman Empire was sick.60
Karl May was of course not alone in his peddling of anti‐Armenianism; a host of German nationalist and imperialist publications on the Ottoman Empire espoused similar views. But May was by far the most successful author of the lot and his books were the most widely read books of the late Kaiserreich.
Events that happened today (August 5):
1944: While Polish insurgents were liberating an Axis labor camp (Gęsiówka) in Warsaw, thereby freeing 348 Jewish prisoners, the Fascists in Wola meanwhile commenced the worst massacre in Poland’s history, taking 40,000–50,000 civilians and POWs over the course of a week. Coincidentally, at least 1,104 Japanese POWs in Australia attempted to escape from a camp at Cowra, New South Wales; 545 temporarily succeeded but later either suffered homicide, committed suicide, or were recaptured.
1998: Otto Kretschmer, Axis naval officer, expired.
2000: Tullio Crali, member of the Fascist ‘Futurist’ movement, expired.