Hitler's antipathy to a Manhattan he never visited stemmed from his pre-war memories of polyglot multi ethnic Vienna

Hitler's hatred for a Manhattan that he had never even visited is quite remarkable.

Even in the failing days of his Reich, his regime wasted much scarce time and resources on trying to create ever more fantastic new weapon delivery systems to bomb and burn Manhattan to the ground from many thousands of miles away.

The best explanation for all this was that for Hitler, this hatred, as was so often with Hitler, was both deeply personal and deeply private.

It all actually stemmed from all those down on his luck years, roughing it on the street, in a city far far away from the Hudson River : pre-war Vienna.


Vienna was as big as Berlin and had been a big cheese for much much longer and why not, for it had ruled a vast and diverse empire for many centuries until the 1920s.

There this teenaged race-proud Aryan would have to see many talented and hard working members of the Astro-Hungarian empire's many smaller minorities making a good living, all the while wearing their strange garb, eating their weird food, cackling away in tongues he couldn't begin to understand.

Based on the experiences of his civil servant father, Hitler had grown up expecting a good job as a mere birthright of him growing up speaking German as his native tongue and had no skill at speaking other languages or in meeting strangers half way.

growing up in Linz is not good training for ruling a world empire

The comparatively small city where Hitler grew up, Linz, had only about four percent of the population of greater metro Vienna, though it was the third biggest city in Austria.

 Linz did have a few Jews but they looked and acted very much like their German-speaking neighbours, while Vienna had far more Jews than Linz had citizens of every sort and in addition, many of the capital's Jews lived distinctly Jewish lifestyles.

Hitler knew little of Manhattan but what little he knew was accurate enough --- it also was the polyglot centre of a vast - if informal - empire, filled with many ambitious and striving peoples from every corner of the world.

Hitler, so deluded in thinking himself far more talented than he really was, failed totally to see that this closely packed diversity is what gave these cities and their empires their real strength.

'the Jews of Manhattan control FDR and through him, the world'

He saw them only as conspiracies of secret cabals of sneaky Jews, controlling every organ of influence from behind the scenes and working always to see that no talented native born person ever got a chance above the ground level.

Metropoles dedicated to cutting down all the native born tall poppies.

Once in power, Hitler was unwilling to bomb and burn the real centre of his pent up hatred which was prewar and no long gone Vienna, so he forward projected that old hatred onto a new city that came closest to pre-war Vienna in its demographics and empire status.

That wasn't Paris, whose somewhat large Jewish population was submerged below Paris's larger reputation for being a magnet of all sorts of refugees from all sorts of milieu (in particular, the arts).

Hitler greatly admired cities dedicated to the fine arts and if that wasn't inter war Paris, what city ever was ?

But Manhattan and environs had only its millions of Jews and swarthy immigrants from Eastern and southern Europe, together with an ever growing population of southern American Blacks.

In addition, Manhattan was particularly noted, and not just by Hitler, as the soulless global capital of materialism with its Wall Street bankers and all its ever-higher ever newer gaudy skyscrapers.

Being the natural capital of international soulless materialism was just something that Vienna, Paris or even London could never really pull off.

(Though 1920s Berlin might have !)

"Skyscrapers, Jews, Negroes, what is there not to dislike --- - bomb them, burn them, to the ground - into the ground, totally exterminate them", one can easily imagine Hitler screaming at the end of another of his post supper rants.

pure Berlin's loss became impure Manhattan's gain ...

But Manhattan's well known atomic Project was filled with immigrants fleeing from Hitler's vision of racial pure empire centres, as was Manhattan's much lesser known penicillin project.

Leo Szilard and  Karl Meyer could have both stayed on to work their atomic and penicillin magic in 1930s Berlin, which since the late 1920s was already well on the road to becoming the leading global city, but Hitler pushed these talented Jews away and so 'pure' Berlin's loss became 'impure' Manhattan's gain....