The irony that lies in this situation is the fact that Adolf Hitler studied many of the United States’ policies implemented against American Indian people, as models for how he would deal with Jewish people. He studied the plans of Bosque Redondo, the concentration camp where over 8,000 Navajo men, women and children were sent after the Long Walk in 1864. According to, John Toland, Pulitzer Prize winning author, in his book Adolf Hitler (pg. 202) wrote: “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”
Hitler studied how the Native population rapidly declined due to starvation and disease when placed on reservations. There are so many parallels one can draw from Nazi and American Indian history– including death marches of Jewish people to concentration camps and the Navajo Long Walk and the many Native American Trails of Tears. The parallel of Nazis destroying Jewish art, music and books and burying people in mass graves and the Wounded Knee Massacre where generations of people and their knowledge, were also buried in a mass grave. My aunt Ethleen Iron Cloud-Two Dogs once said, “We can never measure the loss of language, stories, and culture we experienced when our relatives were buried that day”