To Heil With the Redskins

Adolf Hitler’s Thoughts about the Redskins

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Adolf Hitler adored the American story, especially of its dominance. He took a particular pride in the idea that European settlers (whom he characterized as “Nordics”) won “in the struggle in North America against the Red Indians.” In 1928, the fiery Nazi leader acknowledged his admiration for how white settlers “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” 

It is accurate that millions of Native Americans perished at the hands of white domination in the Western hemisphere — perhaps, even more died from exposure to European-borne diseases. To be sure, this episode in American history was genocide. 

In Hitler’s frame of thinking, the slaughter of “natives,” whom he called “redskins,” was key to America’s greatness. Lauding the history of American genocide, he actively took notes on how the United States developed its racist laws and policies. He himself had a similar vision for Germany, later becoming the architect of the Holocaust.  

“Nazism,” argues James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, “was a movement drawn in some ways on the American model—a prodigal son of the land of liberty and equality, without the remorse.” 

It is no doubt that the brutal and violent ordeal of Indigenous Americans is a shameful chapter in American history. However, the story of what Hitler called the “Red Indians” —the antagonizing foes of American progress—proved to be a pernicious and deadly caricaturization of Indigenous civilizations. It is an image that has had (and, to some degree, continues to have) far-reaching, hurtful and deadly consequences for millions. 

Hitler and Manifest Destiny

By the mid nineteenth century, the fabled myth of Manifest Destiny—the idea that God had bestowed upon the United States the right to expand its dominion from East to West, spreading democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent—was under way. This divine mission was completed by the early twentieth century. America—that “City Upon a Hill”—had arrived on the global stage as the most powerful industrialized nation. Thus, for Hitler, the brutal and violent story of the establishment of the American empire was instructive and nothing short of inspiring.

Following its defeat after World War I, Germany was searching for a way to regain its respect on the world stage. Hitler, who was appointed chancellor in 1933 and a year later would take over as Führer (the “supreme leader”), looked to the United States as a model. “The Nazis idolized many aspects of American society: the cult of sport, Hollywood production values, the mythology of the frontier,” writes Alex Ross in his 2018 article, “How American Racism Influenced Hitler,” featured in The New Yorker. 

The Nazis would valiantly attempt to mimic the American path to greatness, as Germany set its sights on expanding East. In the 1930s, Hitler would enforce his expansionist policy of Lebensraum (“living space”), Germany’s version of Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s Third Reich, an empire that was to endure “for a thousand years,” the “redskins” were non-Germans, anti-Nazis, particularly artists and intellectuals, as well as persons who were physically disabled, mentally ill, gays—and, of course, Jews. 

As early as 1919, Hitler, the Austrian-born future German demagogue, began to develop his ideological blueprint for carrying out a German version of Manifest Destiny. A former dispatch runner for the Bavarian Army during World War I, he advanced the idea that in order for Germany to regain its greatness (following the harsh provisions handed down after the Peace Conference at Versailles that June) the country’s “ultimate goal must definitely be the removal of the Jews altogether.” In 1925, he furthered this idea in his political manifesto Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”), written while he was serving time in prison for treason. Hitler writes: “Here he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew.” 

Hitler would successfully create a bogeyman—the German Jew—by producing antisemitic rhetoric that the Nazis would later employ. In this book, Jews are made out to be the “redskins” of Germany, vile and savage apostates to be feared. Thus, Mein Kampf, Hitler’s first and only major book, would prove important, as it catapulted Hitler’s profile as a right-wing, pro-German political agitator—and, more, it aided the Nazis in ginning up massive antisemitic support. 

Law Against Redskins 

By the time Hitler rose to power in Germany in the 1930s, it was clear that he had given much consideration to how the United States had effectively established itself as a white nation. “The United States also stood at the forefront in the creation of forms of de jure and de facto second-class citizenship for blacks, Filipinos, Chinese and others,” writes James Q. Whitman, in his 2018 book Hitler’s American Model. By the early twentieth century, there was a bevy of local, state and federal laws—what Whitman aptly calls “race law”— that severely limited the citizenship rights of nonwhites. These laws (and how they were created and maintained) would be of great interest and significance to the Nazis. For example, in 1857, the United States Supreme Court ruled in its Dred Scott vs. Sandford decision, that the Constitution was not meant to include citizenship for Black people. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited all immigration of Chinese laborers. In 1924, the Johnson-Reed Act banned immigration from Asia, and set harsh quotas on the number of immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere, namely Jews, Italians, Slavs and Greeks. (There are too many to record in this article.)

Hitler himself had designs on dominating Eastern Europe in the same way Andrew Jackson, in the early 1830s, wanted to push the United States farther west. (To be sure, Hitler, we would learn in the late 1930s, had his eyes on the whole of Europe, both East and West.) Jackson was the key enforcer of removing Native American tribes from their ancestral lands, namely through the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and the Trail of Tears in 1831. “That those tribes cannot exist surrounded by our settlements and in continual contact with our citizens is certain. [Native Americans] have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits, nor the desire of improvement which are essential to any favorable change in their condition,” Jackson said. Moreover, there was a Nativist movement under way. In this context “Native” did not mean Native Americans but rather those who descended from the inhabitants of the original Thirteen Colonies. Certain immigrants–Irish Roman Catholics, Chinese, Japanese—were not welcomed; neither were the Indigenous Americans. What the Nazis saw was an America set on defining what American meant: who counted as a legitimate citizen—nativist and racist sentiments, supported by law. 

Hitler–a German nationalist and a racist—also embraced nativism in Germany. He was obsessed with race, and incessantly spoke about racial “purity” and the superiority of the “Germanic race”—describing true Germans as an Aryan “master race.” The “Aryan” was the ideal; they were blond, blue-eyed, and tall. Hitler viewed the Jews as a physically distinguishable race, not a religious group. In this respect, he ultimately constructed a racial opposition to German-ness. 

Hitler saw an America that promulgated the ideals of freedom, equality and justice under the law as principles, but executed white supremacy as a practical matter of course. He would do the same. “Here in the [E]ast,” Hitler promised, “a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” What this statement reveals is that Hitler thought he could forge a brutal, violent and legal German conquest over the Jews and non-Germans, in the same manner as the Americans had over non-whites in the New World. Just weeks after Hitler was appointed German chancellor, the Nazis opened the first concentration camp, in March 1933, in the town of Dachau, located outside Munich. Dachau was eventually converted into an exclusive death camp where thousands of Jews were systematically executed. In 1935, the Nazis invoked its own version of the Dred Scott decision by introducing the Nuremberg Laws, which excluded German Jews from Reich citizenship; it also prohibited them from marrying or having sexual relations with persons of “German or related blood.” 

Redskins in Popular Culture and Sports

In America, in the first half of the twentieth century, overlapping with the entire span of the Nazi period, negative caricaturizations of “redskins,” “niggers” and “chinks” were commonplace throughout society, especially in education, popular media, arts and entertainment, and, certainly, sports. Peter Pan, one of the all-time children’s classics, has descriptions of “redskins” carrying on their oiled, naked bodies “tomahawks and knives.” The language and the characterization serve to reinforce the idea that the “savage Indian” is always a foe. In this context, the white man is the civilizing force, there to subdue and enlighten: God’s mission. 

There is only one duty: to Germanise this country [the East] by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins

Adolf Hitler, 1941

In the same time period, a host of professional sports teams began using Native American caricatures as mascots. In 1933, the Boston Braves became the Boston Redskins. Historical records indicate that former Redskins founder and owner George Preston Marshall, a known racist, who changed the team’s name to the Redskins, tried to avoid confusion with the baseball team named the Boston Braves, which formed in 1871 (ironically, the year of German unification). But he chose “Redskins” as a way to honor Native American culture. (This is disputable.) The Cleveland Indians, which formed in 1914, introduced the mascot Chief Wahoo in 1946. 

Of all the sports teams’ nicknames, the Washington Redskins stood out as one of the most offensive. It pejoratively refers to Native Americans’ skin color. To point out skin color was not a positive. It was to distinguish the “redskin” from the white man. The “redskin” was characterized  as a capricious brute who needed to be tamed. Thus, history shows us that the term “redskin” has always been an offensive term. A 2005 study by Ives Goddard, the Smithsonian Institution’s senior linguist emeritus, revealed the first free use of the word “redskin.” It occurred in 1769 when a British lieutenant colonel translated a letter from an Indian chief, promising safe passage if the officer visited his tribe in the Upper Mississippi Valley: “I shall be pleased to have you come to speak to me yourself if you pity our women and our children; and, if any redskins do you harm, I shall be able to look out for you even at the peril of my life,” Chief Mosquito said in his letter. In this example, as understood by the white settler, one can see that the idea of a “redskin” person was characterized as an existential threat to white people: a dishonorable, untrustworthy being. 

By 1941, Hitler continued to invoke the image of the “redskins” as obstacles to German greatness. “There is only one duty: to Germanise this country [the East] by the immigration of Germans, and to look upon the natives as Redskins,” he said. That same year, he had begun the Final Solution, the Nazi policy of annihilating all European Jews. Through reinforcing the idea that Jews were the “redskins” of Europe—obstacles to be removed by way of German Lebensraum–he carried out one of world history’s most damnable atrocities. Approximately six million Jews were murdered under his regime. 

In tracing the history of the Nazi regime, it is clear that Hitler studied the keys to America’s greatness. Part of that lesson was understanding how America created the “redskins.” Employing Manifest Destiny as the model, Hitler recast “redskins” as Jews and all non-Germans. To understand the construction of America, one must examine the creation of the “redskin,” which leads one down a harrowing study in brutality—ultimately, genocide. This is also the story of Nazi Germany. 

Washington Redskins—Football’s Last White Bastion

In 1962, the Washington Redskins hired their first Black players. This was big news back then, because it was the last team in the National Football League to integrate. The sad truth about the Washington football team is that it has its own roots in practicing overt racism. Getting the late owner George Preston Marshall to hire a Black player was a Herculean effort. As described in Thomas G. Smith’s 2012 book, Showdown: JFK and the Integration of the Washington Redskins, Stewart Udall, John F. Kennedy’s interior secretary, was determined to end, as Smith puts it, “pro football’s last color bar.” Secretary Udall once said he “considered it outrageous that the Redskins were the last team in the NFL to have a lily-white policy.” The team’s owner was being publicly shamed and was livid that the federal government was applying pressure on him to hire “negroes.” 

 “Why Negroes particularly?” Marshall inquired. “Why not make us hire a player from another race? In fact, why not a woman? Of course, we have had players who played like girls, but never an actual girl player.” The controversy attracted the attention of neo-Nazis, who came out to protest, in support of Marshall’s effort to “Keep [the] Redskins White.”

For decades, the term “redskins” was mired in controversy. Jack Kent Cooke, who became majority owner in 1974, held doggedly on to the idea that “redskins,” in his mind, were Redskins (with a capital “R”). Brave, not savages. “I like the name, and it’s not a derogatory name.” Cooke went on to say further that he just couldn’t believe that “anyone would object to our name.” Redskins mean “brave,” he insisted. He was steadfast in his campaign that the Redskins were a positive spin on a sad and violent history. “There is not a single, solitary jot, tittle, whit chance in the world” (that the Redskins change their nickname), he promised. 

Finally, in 2020, the Washington football team launched a “thorough review” of the Redskins’ name, and after new calls to change the nickname and mascot, owing to its offensive nature to Native Americans, Daniel Snyder, the team’s current owner, decided to retire “Redskins” — once and for all.

In history, “redskins” were never brave; never heroes or honorable people. In fact, “redskins” never existed. They were a racial category, a racialized construction in the mindset of white colonizers who saw Indigenous civilizations as oppositional to Western expansion—an emergent white supremacy. Whites wanted Native land, and the characterization of the Native peoples as the Other—as degenerates and inferior—offered justification for a campaign against them. The term “redskins” emerged in this context. 

We should be unsettled by the mere sight of the term “redskins.” Examining its history shores up millions of deaths for which the United States and Hitler are responsible—and there’s more, perhaps. It is long, long overdue that we cease using the term.  

The fact that Hitler used “redskins” in statements celebrating American genocide should oblige us to bury that word, that image—forever!