These Were Hitler's Plans For The U.S. If He'd Won WWII

Adolf Hitler was front and center at WWI's Second Battle of the Marne, and according to Cambridge historian Brendan Simms (via ExBerliner), it was there that he had a run-in with two American soldiers, and they made a massive impression: They were tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. Sound familiar?

Hitler's attempts at building his master Aryan race are well documented, and Simms says there's another, oft-overlooked part of that. Hitler developed a theory that one of the richest places to find all that Aryan DNA he was so obsessed with was the U.S.A. — and conquering America meant all new seeds from which his Aryan race could grow.

The theory went like this: Over the course of hundreds of years, the U.S. population had been reinforced by immigrants from Europe. They weren't just any immigrants, either — they were the brightest, the strongest, the most adventurous, and the most resilient. They left behind a Europe that was overcrowded, disease-ridden, and famished, headed west, and settled in the U.S. There, they thrived with wide open spaces, and resources of the type only America could offer. And United States laws helped reinforce his ideas about just how pure their blood was: Legislation limited or outlawed immigration from certain areas of Europe — like the Slavic countries — along with interracial marriages. In other words? He saw the U.S. as an invaluable source of genetic material.