What Uncle Sam and Jim Crow taught Hitler: when Nazi lawyers went looking for racial legislation to emulate, they turned to the United States.

AuthorHarwood, Matthew
PositionBOOKS - James Q. Whitman's "Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law" - Book review

ON JUNE 5,1934, leading Nazi jurists gathered for a meeting on Germany's "Jewish problem." They had one goal: to draft "unambiguous" legislation banning mixed marriages and sexual relationships. But they were split into two factions: the radicals, who wanted to criminalize miscegenation, and more traditional German jurists, who weren't sure this was workable. During the debates that followed, the radicals in the room repeatedly pointed to an example overseas: the United States of America. Uncle Sam and Jim Crow, they knew, had much to teach them.

N JUNE 5,1934, leading Nazi jurists gathered for a meeting on Germany's "Jewish problem." They had one goal: to draft "unambiguous" legislation banning mixed marriages and sexual relationships. But they were split into two factions: the radicals, who wanted to criminalize miscegenation, and more traditional German jurists, who weren't sure this was workable. During the debates that followed, the radicals in the room repeatedly pointed to an example overseas: the United States of America. Uncle Sam and Jim Crow, they knew, had much to teach them.

The Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, one piece of that legislation, criminalized sexual relations and marriage between a German and a Jew, defined as anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents. Jews who broke this law were punished with imprisonment or hard labor, sometimes both. Under the Reich Citizenship Law, Jews lost the status of citizen. Soon they were stripped of their political rights, including suffrage, as well. This is where the goose step toward the ovens of Auschwitz began.

Whitman is well aware that his provocative thesis could be dismissed as just another academic blaming the world's evil on America. As he notes, other historians have denied that the United States taught Nazi Germany anything. To these scholars, any favorable mention of the U.S. by the Nazis was a deflection. The German lawyer Andreas Rethmeier even argued that the United States' racist laws and jurisprudence couldn't have been a model for Nazis since America considered Jews white.

Whitman easily refutes them.

In fact, Hitler often applauded the United States for its racist state violence and oppression. In a 1928 speech, he admired how Americans "gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage." In Mein Kampf, he wrote, "The racially pure and still unmixed German has risen...

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