It is always beneficial, and in some ways inevitable, that there will be comparisons between the Holocaust and other genocides. That exercise, of genocide comparison, is sometimes familiar to Armenians in diaspora. The descendants of genocide survivors try to make sense of what happened, why it happened, and whether similar crimes occurred in other parts of the world.

That exercise is a pivot into a topic which I will take up here.

But first, let’s begin with the story of Uncle Kurt, better known as Kurt Heinrich Debus, (1908 – 1983). His trajectory illustrates better than I can an ideological affinity that has largely gone underreported – the ideological similarities between American settler colonialism, and Nazi German white supremacy.

No, similarities do not mean both experiences are completely identical. But the convergence between the doctrine of Manifest Destiny in the American colonial settler expansion in the West, and the German Lebensraum (living space) in the East, are not coincidental.

Uncle Kurt and NASA

Uncle Kurt, rocket scientist and NASA director, had the kind of storied career you would only find in epic historical sagas.

His expertise was impeccable; a pioneer of the German V2 rocket programme, he was responsible for the technology underpinning the Saturn rocket family of NASA missions, as well as supervising countless space missions involving military missiles. It is no exaggeration to say that without Debus, the NASA astronauts would never have made it to the Moon.

Debus was a member of the SA (Sturmabteilung), the Nazi paramilitary brown shirts, an organisation crucial in the rise of the Nazi party. He went on to become an officer in the Waffen SS. However, he was not just a brainless thug, but a scientist and rocket engineer.

He and his colleagues were responsible for the deadly V2 ballistic rocket. That weapon was responsible for, among other things, thousands of casualties among the British population, when the Nazi leadership launched these ‘vengeance’ weapons targeting civilian populations.

After the war was over, the knowledge of rocketry was in demand, particularly in the United States. The bombing of cities was a war crime. Never matter, said the Washington authorities.

The Waffen SS was condemned as a criminal organisation by the International Military Tribunals – aka the Nuremberg trials – in 1946. Individual membership of that group automatically attracted imprisonment. However, SS membership was not an impediment to emigration to the United States.

Debus was one of the hundreds of Nazi German scientists appropriated by Operation Paperclip, the covert American government programme to acquire German scientists and their knowledge capital. Provided refuge by the US authorities who were now waging a Cold War against the Soviet Union, technological advancements in that confrontation, particularly of a military nature, outweighed any concerns about using war criminals as allies.

Debus and his colleagues, including the more famous Wernher von Braun, went to successful careers as scientists and administrators for NASA. Cape Canaveral became their sanctuary.

Race, living space and Manifest Destiny

The white American colonists, from the Revolutionary Wars onwards, were determined to expand their agricultural settlements across the continent at the expense of the indigenous peoples. George Washington waged a simultaneous war; against the British authorities, and against the native nations in the form of the Iroquois confederation.

Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the new American republic, envisioned liberty, democracy and an agrarian-based nation devoid of the native population. The latter were destined to die out, he reasoned.

The so-called ‘red Indians’ as they were known, were to be eliminated and their lands seized. The Mississippi River, as the decades wore on, was considered the outermost boundary of the expanding settler nation. A new race of yeoman farmers, combining the qualities of sturdy self-reliance and dedication to the cultivation of the land, were to take over the new spaces emptied of their indigenous inhabitants.

In the 1840s, this expansionist imperative was summarised in the concise phrase Manifest Destiny. The white race, preordained by god, were on a mission to conquer the lands of continental North America. Biblically sanctioned violence became the cornerstone of the westward expansion of the American colonies.

An interesting side note here; no-one has ever invaded and colonised a country in the name of Satan….

The practices of mass killings, rape, starvation, disease, forced settlement into reservations, adopted against the indigenous peoples were remarkably effective, if I can use that term for a genocidal programme. Combining ideas of race and expanding living space for a new race of yeoman farmer colonists was a defining feature of continental imperialism.

What has all that got to do with Nazi Germany?

Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and the top Nazi leadership envisioned a continental empire in the European East. They drew direct inspiration from the American West. Himmler in particular developed a doctrine of ‘blood and soil’; a race of German colonist farmer-warriors settling the lands of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The Slavs, Jews and other so-called ‘inferior’ peoples were to be eliminated in a social Darwinist experiment in societal reengineering.

Indeed, Hitler himself declared that the Volga river was the German equivalent of the Mississippi. All the conquered territories were to be Germanised, and the native Eastern European peoples eliminated or turned over to pitiful reservations.

Taking the westward expansion of the United States’ colonists as a template, Nazi propaganda portrayed hardy German settlers on wagons, heading out on a colonising mission to the California of the East. Writing in Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed his admiration for how Aryan America had seized the continental West, clearing out the doomed ‘red Indians’, thus making way for white settlers.

It is this kind of modern history that is under attack from the cultural vandals and free-market fanatics of the MAGA cult embodied in the Trump-Musk-Silicon Valley nexus administration. Understanding more about ourselves equips us with the tools to confront the current creeping censorship of the underbelly of US continental imperialism.

The Nazi East and the American West are geographically separated by thousands of kilometres, but have more in common than we realise.