Question inspired by this Nazi propaganda poster aimed at the Americans, published by the Dutch branch of the SS. If you can’t see it, it’s a depiction of a destructive monster thing with the head being the Klan’s peaked hood with the words ‘Ku Klux Kl’ under it, along with a noose hanging from the arm.
Got me thinking…why would the Nazis be against the Klan? Wouldn’t they have been pretty good bedfellows, natural allies in promoting their racist agenda? The NSDAP was contemporaneous with the second KKK, did either organisation make any public proclamations about the other (other than that poster)?
Well, the Klan was explicitly anti-Catholic, while the Nazis were on good terms with the Roman Catholic Church, at least. (Precisely how good is a matter of perennial debate, but Germany and Austria both have very Catholic regions, so an anti-Catholic stance wouldn’t have flown among the Nazis’ supporters.)
Other than that, it’s propaganda. Nazi propaganda said that the USSR was Pure Jewish Bolshevist Evil even as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was being signed.
I always heard that poster was aimed at Italian civilians and if so makes complete sense. The KKK hated Italians for both being Catholic as well as being seen as non-white and Italians were frequent targets of the KKK in New Jersey. The implication being that the American forces would bring their KKK inspired anti-Italian-American views against native Italians.
I think that is bordering on the ahistorical, considering that the Nazi’s produced their own anti-Catholic propaganda and persecuted the Catholic church. Not to mention that this particular piece of propaganda is clearly aimed at the civilian population in the Netherlands, which was majority Protestant.
That first part is true, the RCC was persecuted more than Protestantism. But “majority” is stretching it. The closest number I can find is 44% Protestant/39% Catholic in 1947. The KKK was also very nativistic, whereas the Nazis stratified their races, and if Germans were at the top, other Germanic races were close.
America Firsters, dedicated to a pure American culture wouldn’t be acceptable to a culture that explicitly condemned American culture.
Plus — although the Klan didn’t ( as I was brought up to believe ) direct lynchings ( a folk art that was in any case in decline by the 1930s ) — even the Nazis didn’t care for dragging people through the streets and setting them on fire: they regarded it as crude and decadent. Plus the Nazis got on better with black people than the average American southerner at that time.
Klansmen should not be confused with Bundists despite coming from the same pool of right-wing repulsion. And the Bundists disappeared like Spring snow once actual war broke out between their country and their Heimatland. And despite both the Klan and the Nazis being defined by anti-marxism; Nazism was too much a creature of it’s time not to be a pale clone of Bolshevik practice — the revolutionary opposite formed by it’s revolutionary enemy — whilst the Klan had never been revolutionary nor Bolshevik.
Nor even effective.
Postwar, the Third Klan embraced to some extent neo-fascist ideology and alliances [ ‘Illinois Nazis’ ], but remains too committed to Americanism, eg: capitalism, libertarian social ideals, anti-blackness and the reimposition of the American Way, and an imagined American past that like any the regular parties wishes to make the world in America’s image, to be a natural fit with an internationalist authoritarian ideology.
Such as it is. People are getting more right-wing; but in a conservative, anti-union, capitalist way rather than in organised social movements dedicated to hitting people.
Considering the poster also has a Star of David loincloth, a banker with a big nose, a couple of unflattering caricatures of dancing Negroes, and various other symbols of decadent Americans, I’m a little wary of attaching any particular significance to any individual feature.
I would guess there may have been Allied bombings of some targets in the Netherlands (there are images of historic Dutch buildings at the bottom) and it’s a generalised message on the theme the Nazis pushed in the later stages of the war in the Western occupied nations, that they were leading the defence of “European culture” - just slinging in anything about perceptions of America that might arouse distaste among “respectable” Dutch people (not just Catholics).
Don’t forget, the public line on anti-Semitism was that Jews were being “resettled”, that shootings of resisters were legally processed punishments of terrorists and shootings of hostages were an unfortunate necessity imposed as a result of terrorism, and that “civilised” Europeans didn’t go in for lynchings and the like. However nonsensically implausible that might seem now, it provided a “deniability legend” that people could persuade themselves of in the absence (as for the most part there was) of any immediately visible evidence to the contrary.
One time in 1940, perhaps. But the various Klan groups and various American Nazi groups were never really on the same side. As it turns out, fascists and racists are incredibly intolerant of everybody. In Jersey, the Klan couldn’t appeal to Preserving the White Race and Southern Heritage, so it had to be a bit less choosy about who was sufficiently white and American.
Thanks for the replies fellas, just seemed very very odd for the Nazis to start throwing stones by saying the Americans are bad because they’re racist and kill people because of racism. I mean, people who live in glass houses Adolf.
Soviet leadership also milked Klan imagery for all it was worth, because as we all know there was never any racism/ethnic oppression in the Soviet Union, much less violence against targeted groups.
But they at least aspired to that. Whatever the reality may have been (especially if your ethnic group was considered untrustworthy by Stalin) Soviet Communism idealized the concept of a universal proletariat united against their capitalist oppressors, regardless of race, ethnicity, etc.
I think it’s precisely because of the Nazi’s racist policies that they pointed the finger of racism elsewhere. It’s the “look, he does it too” response to criticism.
Not really. It’s more of a cognitive dissonance thing, or a shotgun approach to propaganda if you will - namely, at the time the Klan’s existence was one of the bullet points used to poo-poo the US and portray it as backwards or inhumane (the Russians rung that bell a number of times, too) so into the poster it went. Along with that negro jazz, and Them Jews and so forth. It doesn’t matter that the whole is incoherent, as long as the viewer is reminded of one thing he doesn’t like and associates it with the US.
I guess you could argue that the Nazi objection to the KKK was in regards, not of its goals, but the vigilante anonymous aspect of it - but even that is probably reading too much into it. Nazi propaganda, or indeed most of the hamfisted propaganda of that era, wasn’t much coherent to begin with. It was not supposed to appeal to reason or spark debate or something, but to elicit emotional, instinctual responses.
*"In (The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression) editor Stéphane Courtois states that “Communist regimes… turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government.” According to Courtois, the death toll amounts to 94 million. The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Ethiopia
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Eastern Bloc
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power.”
Courtois writes that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims includes deaths through executions, man-made hunger, deportations, and forced labor."*
The world would have been far better spared such “aspirations”.
:eek:
