This is a troubling book. Its main contention is twofold: (1) that atrocities against Native Americans committed by the U.S. government and/or white settlers during the nineteenth century cannot be equated with Nazi Germany’s attempt to gain an “Eastern Empire” during World War II and (2) that the violence in the American West cannot be viewed as a precursor to the Nazis’ brutal plans of expansion and extermination in Eastern Europe. These arguments are not new. Although some American scholars have argued, albeit not convincingly, that the United States provided the “model character” for Nazi Germany, especially with respect to its expansionist plans, this notion has never gained much traction, more often than not attracting explicit rejection.1
Yet in addition to criticizing the idea of connections between the American West and the German East—which, as Westermann concedes, “most scholars have refrained” from accepting (5)—the book also “focuses on the...