Whitman, James Q. Hitler’s American Model

Most Americans are familiar with the Nazi regime’s Nuremberg Laws, the legislation that discriminated against Jews by stripping them of their citizenship and forbidding them from marrying or having intimate relations with non-Jews. What they may not realize, though, is how U.S. laws influenced the Nazis as they consolidated power in Germany and worked to address what they called the “Jewish problem.” In fact, as James Whitman illustrates, the U.S. had a global reputation in the early twentieth century for its “race law” that favored whites over “coloreds,” so it makes sense that “when the leading Nazi jurists assembled in early June 1934 to debate how to institutionalize racism in the new Third Reich, they began by asking how the Americans did it” (113). By carefully utilizing primary sources, Whitman revises previous scholarship by proving that American race law did have a profound impact on the Third Reich’s discriminatory laws against the Jews

Citizenship · Judaism · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Race (biology) · Racism · Sociology · Theology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity · Religious studies