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Comment by thriftwy | Hacker News Reader

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For examples of famous Hitler fans, one good example was Unity Mitford, one of the 6 Mitford sisters, daughters of an English baron.

Unity (and her sister Diana) were so close to Hitler that they were part of his inner circle of friends.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_Mitford

"Hitler's British Girl", a documentary about Unity Mitford is on YouTube.

> I suspect

You can just read. The most surprising thing about WWII, at least to many Nazis, is that the US and Britain didn't join the Axis. German theories about race were largely drawn from British and American sources. The US fought WWII with a racially segregated military.

White American culture is also kind of dominated by descendants of German immigrants. I recall seeing some historical racist media that was praising Anglo-German supremacy in contrast to Irish, southern and eastern Europeans etc. People forget this because the latter groups are all considered white now.

I personally think this puts some weight into the "race is a social construct" theory. That and the existence of mixed race people, and the stories of how they and their families have been arbitrarily treated based on varying perceptions. It's all pretty absurd.

stop, stop right there. There was no single "White American culture" .. that is a misrepresentation with a purpose!

The original collection of States were formed exactly to let groups divide. There were vastly different cultures, both culturally bonded, and also diverse, that were included from the earliest days.

source: anti-war, anti-slavery "whites" from that time

Ooooh time to drop my favorite WW2 quote

When Pearl Harbor happened, we [Roosevelt's advisors] were desperate. ... We were all in agony. The mood of the American people was obvious – they were determined that the Japanese had to be punished. We could have been forced to concentrate all our efforts on the Pacific, unable from then on to give more than purely peripheral help to Britain. It was truly astounding when Hitler declared war on us three days later. I cannot tell you our feelings of triumph. It was a totally irrational thing for him to do, and I think it saved Europe.

That was John Kenneth Galbraith, quoted here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

That is more an indication of how fundamentally naive many Nazis were. British rulers always aimed to break up any significantly large European power, it's been their obvious geopolitical imperative from before Elizabethan times. That necessity trumps any vague sympathy or political affinity du jour. They would never have allowed Hitler to take over the whole continent.

It's a bit more complicated than that, though. Because the alternative was to let the Soviets take over the whole continent. And in that 'framework' the UK aligning with the Nazis was actually more natural choice.

At the time the USSR wasn't thought capable to reach France. Maybe if Hitler had attacked Stalin first, the reasoning could have worked; but he went for the Molotov-Ribbentropp instead, which from outside made it look very much like he was on the same page as Joe.

Regardless, Britain would not have supported a cohesive Europe-wide power even to fight the USSR, as proven by the postwar bickering with DeGaulle.

A core part of Nazism was Germany's greatness, even beyond others of the same race. They "tolerated" the British "race". So I doubt the claim that German theories about race were drawn from British and American sources unless you're talking about pro-German idealogues.

The ideas of racial hygiene and eugenics certainly drew upon American science of the time, as well as German archaeology and anthropology. Their racial policies carried forward the ideas of American eugenics to its extreme but logical conclusion. To the extent that British were frowned upon, it was because of the presence of genetic contributions from the pre Yamnaya/Caucasian indigenous population. I remember there was a PBS American Experience: Eugenics episode that covered the Nazi party inspiration from American racial science.

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