How did Hitler view the American people?

by Pulsse

So WW2 history interests me, but I’m not an expert so bear with me

Hitler viewed the people of the word in almost like a ranking list of different groups of people, for example, he viewed Eastern Europeans with some respect and saw them as a reasonable people, but saw Italians as quite far below himself and the aryan Germans

My question is, how did hitler view the Americans? Did he see them as a respectable group of people? Or did he see them like he saw Italians? Did he see them as weak and feeble compared to his own people?

Thanks in advance everyone

jschooltiger

Hi there,

On /r/AskHistorians we often get questions along the lines of 'what did Hitler think about X' - I mean, as an April Fools joke one year, we changed the sub to /r/AskAboutHitler. However, for better or worse, many of these questions about what Hitler thought are, in the literal sense, unanswerable. We don't know what Hitler thought about many things, and especially about things which were inconsequential for him. Hitler did not keep a diary, and the collections of his private conversations is disjointed and nowhere near complete, being almost completely dependent on the post-war recollection of his intimates (who may also be unreliable in their recollections, especially given those circumstances).

Of course, you may still get an answer to this particular question! However, broadly speaking, proving the negative is very hard (there could be an 1965 article on the topic in Swahili), and if you've asked a question which is almost certainly "We don't know, and he probably didn't care anyways", few historians familiar with the topic matter actually are going to want to put in the necessary gruntwork, doubly so about a man who on a personal level was decidedly uninteresting.

For more information that will be helpful in understanding the context around your question, please read /u/commiespaceinvader's wonderful post on why Hitler's opinions actually aren't that interesting, and please see here for an example of a historian attempting to find evidence about Hitler's thoughts on a topic, but finding that it is likely unanswerable.