Hitler's division of "mankind into three groups" was even more basic than race, just as race was more basic than nationality. The tripartite division alone provided a coherent underpinning for Hitler's entire world picture. It is of course clear that the Aryans constituted the first and the Jews the third group. But who belonged in the second? While Jeffrey Herf noted that Hitler "assigned" the role of culture preservers to the Japanese, this assertion is somewhat misleading. While Japan was clearly a culture-preserving state in Hitler's scheme, not all culture preservers were Japanese. In fact, from a logical point of view, every branch of humanity that was neither Aryan nor Jewish had to fall into the culture preserver category.

Nevertheless, what Hitler said about the Japanese more or less applied to the whole category. Culture preservers like the people of Japan were continually assimilating the heritage of the Aryans, but that heritage soon "rigidified" unless reinvigorated by another dose of Aryan influence. While the Aryans -- and the Jews -- were essentially dynamic, the culture preservers were thus basically static. Even if they adopted the forms of the Aryan, they could not adapt the Aryan dynamism which generated the constant creation of new forms. Progress belonged to the culture creators alone. The Japanese, Hitler notes, had adapted "European technology and culture" although they could not adapt the European ability to create new culture constantly. It is also important to note that Hitler did not regard all culture preservers as equal. On the contrary, they represented a series of peoples whose abilities varied, ranging from highly developed societies like the Japanese to simple societies like the Bushmen, with the Slavs somewhere in the middle. Yet, this broad range of peoples of unequal "race value" all fit into the broad category of culture preservers.

The Jews, in contrast, represented a destructive force which was the "mightiest counterpart to the Aryan." In this sense, these destroyers were as above the preservers as were the creators. The Jews indeed offered the nations a counterfeit progress which mirrored the true progress of the Aryans. Hitler's tripartite model thus translated into geopolitics what was essentially the old Christian model in which God and the devil fought over the soul of man. The peoples of the world were to be given the choice of allying with either the godlike Aryan or the demonic Jew. Hitler clearly saw geopolitics as a titanic struggle between creators and destroyers over who would control the preservers. In effect, this was a contest between an Aryan humanity and a Jewish antihumanity for a variegated subhumanity. Unfortunately, Hitler believed, the Jews were winning that struggle.

In the Hitlerian worldview, the imminent victory of the Jews was heralded by the growing power of the United States and the Soviet Union. These two states were, for Hitler, two opposing but similar microcosms, each of which reproduced on a regional level the contradictions of the world as a whole. Both Russia and America, he believed, were made up of all three categories of humanity. Originally, Hitler claimed, each super-state was ruled by a Germanic minority, a creative Aryan aristocracy holding sway over a variegated collection of inferior culture-preserving races and culturedestroying Jews. He thus proclaimed that the creation of the Russian Empire "was not the result of the political abilities of the Slavs" at all but rather a result of creative powers of "the German element in an inferior race." Over the ages the Russian Empire had taken "nourishment from this Germanic nucleus." But in 1917, Hitler argued, the Bolshevik Revolution ousted the German and replaced it with a Jewish ruling class, thus making Russia a focal point of Jewish "infection." Meanwhile the hapless Slavs had merely exchanged a good for an evil master.

Hitler saw a similar development in the United States. Like Russia, America was inhabited by a heterogeneous collection of people sustained by a Germanic ruling class. But the ruling caste of the United States was much larger than its Russian counterpart and originally took much better care to preserve its racial identity. As Gerhard Weinberg noted, at first Hitler had many good things to say about America. He admired its subjugation of its black and red to its white citizens, approved of its antimiscegenation laws, endorsed its policy of limited immigration and copied its experiments in forced sterilization. But even in the twenties, Hitler believed that it was the "Jews who govern the stock exchange forces of the American Union." By the mid thirties, Hitler had come to see the Roosevelt "revolution" of 1933 as a kind of mirror image of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Like Lenin, the American president jettisoned a Germanic ruling class and replaced it with a Jewish one. Hitler thus saw a strange parallel between the two potential superpowers in which each exchanged its culture-creating for a culture-destroying government. In both countries, the culture preservers continued to exist as mongrelized subhumans who took on the coloration of their new masters just as they had their old.

Clearly, Hitler regarded the United States and the Soviet Union as equally cosmopolitan and transnational. Both represented an alliance between culture destroyers and preservers he felt compelled to oppose. Each represented one side of the two-front cultural war Hitler had already been fighting since the twenties. United States capitalism and Soviet communism were as soulless as the states they dominated. Moreover, both states were "Jewish" in the sense that they were basically international in orientation. From Hitler's perspective, the American stock-exchange and the Bolshevik international states were in effect states without any territorial limit.