Lebensraum - Hitler's observation about America

This nation's founding was largely based upon the wholesale extermination of an entire race of people and the repopulation of their land by "superior" Nordic people.
That's pretty much a sideshow.

In the USA you have a group of people with a relatively advanced social structure and technology given a vast, empty and previously untapped continent to exploit. That's a no-brainer recipe for economic success.
It is amazingly hard to effectively and deliberately commit genocide. The Nazis tried really hard to do so, and barely made a dent on the global population.
It's not as though they had all the Jews to hand, or were being left in peace to get on with it. Where they had time and control the extermination was horrifically effective, e.g. in Poland.
 
The Nazis tried really hard to do so, and barely made a dent on the global population. Even Jewish global numbers recovered very quickly. Unless I'm mistaken quite.

I'm pretty sure you're mistaken. It was about 2/3 of the Jews in Europe and 1/2 the Jews in the world and the Jewish population still hasn't reached its 1940 levels. If you look at Ashkenazi populations in particular, the recovery will be even slower.
 
Ah well. Maybe you're right.

From this it would appear that Jewish global population in 1900 was 11 million. And in 2020 13 million.

Which, in real terms, could be a significant downturn. That is, a reduction from 0.68% of the total human population to 0.19%.

The figures might give a very muddled picture, though. Depends what you mean by Jewish people. And how much "attrition" they've suffered from people just drifting away.
 
I asked about it because the OP claims that Hitler's summary on American history is accurate and used "nordic" to describe Americans which seems a bid odd, as if he believe's Hitler's notion of "nordic" is a real thing. Though it was probably just poorly worded.

He didn't really know what he was talking about as far as ethnicities are concerned. He thought that the Germans were Aryan for instance, right? Maybe in his mind Nordic and Aryan were related in some way, since it is clear that in his mind both terms refer to Germanic people in some way.
 
Has anybody read anything about why the disease thing didn't work both ways, why Western colonists weren't equally susceptible to Native American germs to which their systems weren't accustomed?

If it's just that the Native Americans just didn't have any, that's a way of saying they were the healthier race, actually (viewed objectively)(much good that did them!).
 
The reason they were the healthier race was due to the fact they were sheltered from things like Mongolians and the Black Plague.

In fact, due to the fact they weren't immune against a disease they've never seen, they are technically less healthy than the Europeans.
 
Healthier = not as full of disease. Healthier in that sense.

Yes, their not being as resistant to disease was the premise of my question.
 
The reason for it, I've heard, is that Europeans had a long history of living in close proximity to a wide range of domestic animals.

The range and numbers of domestic animals in the New World was very much smaller. The guinea pig and the lama, maybe?
 
And let's not forget that the discovery of the New World and it's subsequent colonization happened some 2 centuries after from Mongolia the Black Death spread into all of Europe and Asia, generally killing and ruining millions of lives.
 
That's pretty much a sideshow.

In the USA you have a group of people with a relatively advanced social structure and technology given a vast, empty and previously untapped continent to exploit. That's a no-brainer recipe for economic success.

America was far from empty or "untapped."
 
America was far from empty or "untapped."

This is definitely something a lot of folks are unaware of. America as an "empty" land partly owes to the fact that disease in any case did kill off a lot of native Americans - by the time the English and French started pushing into modern-day Canada and the USA, for instance, a lot of the existing population were already dwindling from disease. Kind of as if aliens came to earth in a post-apocalyptic situation and assumed humans were few in number.

Anyhow, with somewhr in the ballpark of 90-95% of the Native American population dying off, this definitely made the European conquest a lot easier than it could have been. Given that a lot of native Americans put up a decent fight, one can only imagine that things might've been different if their numbers hadn't dwindled so much due to disease.
 
Native American peoples had extremely low genetic diversity. There was a genetic bottleneck caused by their immigration over a narrow land bridge which was later submerged. Their Asian ancestors were already less genetically diverse than Europeans. (However, Asians back then were a bit more diverse, including groups more closely related to Caucasians than to the more familiar east Asians. Native Americans do carry genes from those lineages too.) European genetic diversity is far less than African genetic diversity, but it has still been estimated that any two native Americans from completely different tribes were more genetically similar than the average first cousins of European descent.

Native Americans were so in-bred that it is surprising they they did not suffer from a great many genetic disorders.

Genetic homogeneity means that there is unlikely to be much resistance to pandemics. If a diseases moves through the population and kills too quickly, then there may not be enough carriers left to spread it further.

In much of the New World human population density was relatively low. Diseases proliferate better with dense populations, where they can move from host to host quicker.

There were some densely populated cities in Central America, but they had remarkably advanced sanitation systems. The fall of Tenochtitlan did lead to a great many Spaniards dying of a deadly native disease. However, the natives died from it too. Having a quality sewer system prevented them from developing an immunity to it, and losing that sewer left them quite vulnerable.


In Europe, Asia, and Africa, it was quite common for humans to live in close quarters with their livestock. Most major human diseases started in other animals and spread from this contact. It was also common for Eurasians to milk their cattle, which requires close contact with the delicate mammary tissues through which pathogens can travel easily.

There were some domesticated animals in the new world, like turkeys, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Humans did not live in close contact with these animals though, or rely on their milk.


I've read that the natives' genomes were actually better suited for fighting off the native parasites, but such parasites did not cause easily communicable diseases.
 
Why did the native populations in Central America remain relatively unscathed compared with those of North America?
Actually, they got it much worse, if we are including the Yucatan.
The whole idea of "Central America" is silly to me. Where does it start? Mexico? Mid-Mexico? It's just the Euro/Anglo way of saying - Not us America, but not quite S. America per geography.

Anyhow, the Mayans, for example, had been on a downturn when the Spaniards arrived... having maxed out their lands and been in a descent for some time.
The Aztecs, almost totally wiped by Euro disease, etc...

The N American Indians, on the other hand, were much more sparsely populated.
 
There were some domesticated animals in the new world, like turkeys, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Humans did not live in close contact with these animals though, or rely on their milk.

Guns, Germs, and Steel?

There were also far less domesticated animals in the new world overall. Less species domesticated, etc.
 
Do you ever get that feeling of déjà-vu? I've just had it now. Again.
 
The fact that the primary axis of the Americas is north-south and of Eurasia is east-west also plays a role, as it is harder for an animal (or plant) domesticated in one place to thrive at a wildly different latitude than at a wildly different longitude. Horses could be domesticated once and spread throughout Eurasia, but llamas couldn't be taken far from the Andes. They might be able to do fine in North America, but only if taken there directly rather than passing though the jungles of Central America first.



I'm more of a Charles C. Mann "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" ( and "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created") fan than a Jarod diamond "Guns, Germs, and Steel" fan.

Mann covers Diamond's titular subjects less redundantly and more thoroughly, while also showing considerable respect for human agency rather than being such a determinist.



Incidentally, the African slaves were not particularly docile. They tended to be prisoners of war, often high ranking military personnel from advanced iron age civilizations. They were only easier to control in that they did not know the terrain or contacts that could hide them when they escaped. Plenty of slaves escaped anyway and formed their own societies in the new world. Sometimes they joined groups of natives and shared their technological knowledge, so that there were some native tribes using African-style iron weapons when they made first contact with Europeans. Africans have great genetic diversity and disease immunity, and so thrived in places where their masters perished from illness. There was at least one colony founded by Europeans where all the Europeans died out, but the African slaves an things more efficiently on their own and sent enough payments back that no one bothered to check and discover that they had been de facto freemen for decades.
 
Incidentally, the African slaves were not particularly docile. They tended to be prisoners of war, often high ranking military personnel from advanced iron age civilizations. They were only easier to control in that they did not know the terrain or contacts that could hide them when they escaped. Plenty of slaves escaped anyway and formed their own societies in the new world. Sometimes they joined groups of natives and shared their technological knowledge, so that there were some native tribes using African-style iron weapons when they made first contact with Europeans. Africans have great genetic diversity and disease immunity, and so thrived in places where their masters perished from illness. There was at least one colony founded by Europeans where all the Europeans died out, but the African slaves an things more efficiently on their own and sent enough payments back that no one bothered to check and discover that they had been de facto freemen for decades.
Well, they were more easily handled than the Indians, whether in reality or to perception, which is why the locals would be wiped out and African slaves brought in (in the places where that happened, some Indians were more easily enslaved).

Which colony was that? Where the blacks survived?

The story of Haiti is an interesting one. It did have rather organized and no longer docile africans, stirred by the US and French declarations of men being equal. Eventually Haiti became the only successful slave revolt (if by success we mean gaining total freedom).
 
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