Hitler’s American Model

Jim Whitman’s book-length essay makes a bold argument in modest language. Repeatedly questioning the fairness of asking whether American legislative models influenced the Nuremberg Citizenship and Blood Laws of September 1935, Whitman methodically frames an inescapable truth: Nazi lawyers who drafted legislation to exclude Jews from German society consistently turned to American law for guidance. And the more radical the Nazi lawyers, the stronger the appeal of American models. In the end, Whitman argues, it is not only fair to examine the parallels between American and Nazi race law, but it is necessary for Americans to hold up the mirror of that epitome of lawless regimes, National Socialism, to view our own unresolved, unbewältigt, racial past and present—whatever the role that America played in defeating the Nazis and extirpating their lingering influence in the postwar Federal Republic, and despite the overturning of race legislation at home. While other scholars have concluded that Jim Crow public accommodation laws did not interest Nazi theorists (because the Nazi goal was not segregation but exclusion and expulsion), Whitman scrutinizes documents compiled by lawyers in the Prussian, and later Reich, Ministry of Justice to determine which models those officials did admire. He identifies their great fascination with three categories: race-based immigration law, especially the Immigration Act of 1924; race-based second-class-citizenship laws that deprived African-Americans, Native Americans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans of the vote and other civil rights; and race-based anti-miscegenation laws, rendering civilly invalid and criminal interracial marriages in thirty of the forty-eight states. These laws, far more than segregation, addressed the main Nazi concerns of limiting citizenship to “racial comrades” and criminalizing reproduction outside of the “racial community,” which ultimately resulted in the Citizenship and Blood Laws Hermann Goering proclaimed at the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1935

Citizenship · Dissenting opinion · Immigration · Immigration law · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European history and politics · Medical History and Research · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity · Law