In 1926, on the last page of Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler made his vision for Germany clear: “A state that in this age of racial poisoning dedicates itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day become lord of the earth.” In 1940, the Texas rancher, Marine, and country singer Texas Jim Robertson wrote his own “Last Page of Mein Kampf.” “There’ll be no raving about a Master Race,” he sang, declaring that Hitler’s book was full of “hooey” and promising to send Adolf to “Hades.” “Slavery and brutality might well be ended when we write the last page of Mein Kampf,” he concluded. The “we,” of course, was America, and the song — which focuses more on what we will do to Hitler when the war is over than on the genocide he was masterminding at the time — was written and sung two years after Kristallnacht’s anti-Jewish terror spree and five years before Allied troops would arrive at Auschwitz and not believe their eyes.

“The Last Page of Mein Kampf” appears on American War Songs 1933-1947: Hitler & Hell, a compilation of US popular songs recorded during WW2 and recently assembled by the German label Trikont. The songs can roughly be divided into two camps: those that promote the war effort by celebrating American victories and waving flags of racist Yankee Doodle patriotism (“We’ll soon have those Japs right down on their Japan-knees,” the Teddy Powell Orchestra sings on “Goodbye Mama, I’m off to Yokohama”), and those that spotlight Hitler as the enemy. But even in the latter case, the emphasis is on the glory of America’s being able to stop Hitler and not on the shame of America’s failure to stop the Nazi genocide.

The songs confirm what Peter Novick pointed out in his 1999 book The Holocaust in American Life. During the Holocaust, Novick wrote, there was no “Holocaust” — it’s “a retrospective construction, something that would not have been recognized to most people at the time.” Not until the ’60s and ’70s would Americans start to conflate Hitler more with death camps and yellow stars and melted gold and piles of bodies than with his political mania.

So we get “A Rodeo Down in Tokyo and a Round Up in Old Berlin,” in which Ozzie Waters sings about those “rats across the sea” and swears that “we’ll hog-tie old Hitler and all of his crew.” We get Johnny Bond’s 1942 version of Oliver Wallace’s “Der Führer’s Face” (still best known in its Spike Jones incarnation) in which we “stop” Hitler with aggressive mockery — blowing raspberries in the Führer’s face, mocking the idea of Aryan supermen, and saluting “Heel Hitler.”

Even by the time the war was over and Hitler was dead, Rosalie Allen’s plea on “Hitler Lives” that we must not forget meant something very different from the do-not-forget mantras of post-’60s Holocaust memory: “Hitler lives if we forget those who fought where heroes died that our flag might float on high.” As late as 1945, then, Hitler’s legacy of racial extermination was being thought of in terms of American casualties. Since then, a different logic has emerged: Hitler lives if we forget the millions he exterminated. Contemporary Holocaust consciousness asks us to identify with the victims; the music of American War Songs asks us to identify with the liberators.

The two notable exceptions turn up during the album’s only moments of intense moral outrage — both provided by African-American singers intimately familiar with their own struggle against master race violence. The year before he died, in 1942, Atlanta Baptist minister J.M. Gates recorded “Hitler and Hell,” a part-song/part-sermon that casts Hitler as a demon walking the earth who has taken the lives of innocent women and children. “Thinking about Hitler,” Gates preaches, “is thinking about Hell.”

Like Gates, the ex-con blues singer Leadbelly didn’t think about Hell and then walk away — he sang out in its face, confronting the Devil Robert Johnson–style, with a voice saturated by betrayal and horror, not the fulfillment of dreams. Recorded in 1944, his “Mr. Hitler” does not use Hitler to bolster American patriotism. In a brittle, crackling voice, Leadbelly supplies dates and names names: he blames Hitler for forcing Jews out of their homes in 1932, admonishes him (“You know you done wrong”), and then declares over and over, “We’re gonna tear Hitler down someday.” It’s the only moment on American War Songs where we get a real sense of what was at stake between 1933 and 1947. There is no gleeful triumph in Leadbelly’s voice, no boastful pride, no Stars and Stripes propaganda, only the painful knowledge that no matter what he sings the world will still never be the same again.