{"id":113408,"date":"2017-04-01T19:08:41","date_gmt":"2017-04-02T03:08:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113408"},"modified":"2017-04-01T19:08:41","modified_gmt":"2017-04-02T03:08:41","slug":"was-hitler-inspired-by-racist-american-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=113408","title":{"rendered":"Was Hitler Inspired by Racist American Laws?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Haaretz<\/a>: ‘Hitler\u2019s American Model,’ by James Q. Whitman, contends that America’s racist legislation served as a model for at least portions of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.<\/p>\n

\u201cHitler\u2019s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,\u201d by James Q. Whitman, Princeton University Press, 208 pp., $24.95
\nIt\u2019s not widely realized that Adolf Hitler wrote a sequel to \u201cMein Kampf.\u201d Published only in 1961, \u201cHitler\u2019s Second Book,\u201d as it was titled, rehashed many of the themes from his earlier work but also included some significant additional material, including some fascinating praise of America\u2019s immigration system in the 1920s.
\n\u201cThe American nation appears as a young, racially select people,\u201d Hitler wrote. \u201cBy making an immigrant\u2019s ability to set foot on American soil dependent on specific racial requirements on the one hand as well as a certain level of physical health of the individual himself, the bleeding of Europe of its best people has become regulated in a manner that is almost bound by law.\u201d
\nYale law professor James Q. Whitman, in his intriguing new book, \u201cHitler\u2019s American Model,\u201d contends that the Nazi leader\u2019s praise of America was not merely some propaganda rant but reflected the Nazis\u2019 genuine admiration for the laws governing race relations in America in those years.
\nMore than that: Whitman contends that Nazi legal theorists not only extolled America\u2019s racist legislation, but actually used it as a model for at least portions of the Nuremberg Laws. The centerpiece of Whitman\u2019s case is a June 1934 gathering of senior Nazi attorneys and Justice Ministry officials to draft sweeping new legislation that would define the status of German Jews and their relations to non-Jewish Germans.
\nIn preparation for the conference, the attendees examined legal systems around the world, in search of precedents for government-imposed legal restrictions based on race. They were not looking for ammunition to publicly justify the laws they were creating; in fact, there was no public aspect at that point, since the 1934 meeting was held entirely behind closed doors. Rather, Whitman shows, they were trying to determine how best to turn Nazi racial ideology into German federal law.
\n\u201cThis pivotal meeting on the road to the Nuremberg Laws involved repeated and detailed discussion of the American example,\u201d Whitman writes. The Germans were not interested so much in U.S. segregation laws; their goals were to disqualify Jews from citizenship and to criminalize marriage and sexual relations between Jews and non-Jews, in order to \u201cprotect German blood and honor.\u201d
\nFor this, they looked to a number of American legal innovations. One was the way in which the U.S. immigration quotas, adopted by Congress in 1921 and tightened in 1924, were structured to heavily favor what were considered \u201cracially desirable\u201d people in northern and western Europe, and severely reduce the number admitted from eastern and southern Europe (primarily Jews and Catholics) and from Asia. Although the U.S. was by no means the only country to decide immigration based on racist ideas, Whitman notes, it had become \u201cthe leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.\u201d
\nThe Nazi jurists were also keenly interested in America\u2019s development of a type of second-class citizenship for residents of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the territories that the U.S. captured and occupied in the Spanish-American War of 1898. The Supreme Court upheld the conquered peoples\u2019 status as \u201cnon-citizen nationals.\u201d German legal scholars created an extensive body of literature on the subject, which the Nazis utilized. \u201cAmerica, in the eyes of this German literature, was a laboratory for experimentation in diminished citizenship rights,\u201d Whitman notes.
\nFinally, the Nazis looked closely at the laws in 30 states prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks, the last of which (Virginia) was abolished only in 1967. In defining who could marry and who could not, these American precedents included helpful (to the Nazis) ways for deciding the status of persons of mixed-race. The issue of \u201cmongrelization,\u201d which entered the American legal system originally because of relations between white masters and black slaves, was important to the Nazis in addressing the question of Germans who were of partly Jewish descent.<\/p>\n

As an example of the prominence of sentiment in America against race-mixing, Whitman quotes U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo (Democrat of Mississippi) railing, in 1938, about how \u201cmongrelization\u201d could \u201cdestroy white civilization.\u201d Bilbo worried that \u201ceven one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and palsies his creative faculty.\u201d\u00a0
\nMany states\u2014primarily, but not exclusively, in the south\u2014defined a Negro as someone who had any Negro ancestors; hence the term \u201cone drop.\u201d Ironically, the Nazis considered the one-drop rule too harsh, and instead adopted the one-grandparent rule to define Jewishness.
\nWhitman should have mentioned that such views were held not only by crude southern demagogues, but by the president of the United States himself. In a document from 1939 (first published by this author more than 10 years ago), President Franklin D. Roosevelt was reliably quoted by a friendly senator as boasting, \u201cWe know that we do not have any Jewish blood in our veins.\u201d Prof. Greg Robinson\u2019s study of FDR\u2019s writings in the 1920s uncovered statements warning that \u201cthe mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future citizenship.\u201d And there can be no doubt (since it was a matter of public controversy) that the president approved his administration\u2019s policy of segregating Negro blood donations during World War II.
\nDid America\u2019s racist legislation directly influence any aspects of Nazi racial laws? Whitman concludes that although the Nazi statute criminalizing mixed marriage \u201cwas not directly copied\u201d from the U.S. legal code, the German jurists\u2019 thinking clearly was \u201cinfluenced\u201d by the American example, as demonstrated by their frequent reference to U.S. law during that crucial 1934 conference, and the inclusion of extensive American material in major Nazi law texts. While \u201cit is perfectly possible\u201d that the Nazis \u201cwould have succeeded in criminalizing mixed marriages even if they had not had an American example to cite,\u201d Whitman writes, there is \u201cno justification for ignoring the evidence of Nazi engagement with American models that litters the sources.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Haaretz: ‘Hitler\u2019s American Model,’ by James Q. Whitman, contends that America’s racist legislation served as a model for at least portions of Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. \u201cHitler\u2019s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,\u201d by … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29693,21791],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adolf-hitler","category-america"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t