Hitler’s American Model

By 1900 the fragile racial promise engendered by Union military victory over the pro-slavery Confederacy in the American Civil War had dissipated. The United States strode the world stage as a vigorous imperialist power committed to fashionable notions of Anglo-Saxon superiority. At home, the federal government was complicit in the wholesale subjugation of non-whites, not least the country’s Native Americans, who were corralled onto squalid reservations in the Far West, and African Americans, full-blown citizens according to the Fourteenth Amendment, who were disenfranchised, segregated and murdered with impunity. A pernicious combination of politics and federalism made it easy for individual states to pass a raft of racist legislation. Many of them criminalised racially mixed marriages and offered a bewildering array of definitions of racial difference. For white supremacists across the globe, ‘the land of the free’ was a polity worthy of emulation. Just how worthy of emulation is made clear in this revealing assessment of the impact of American race law on Nazi planners during the 1930s. Several scholars have noted unsettling similarities between the New Deal and the Third Reich. Others have recorded Nazi admiration of the Americans’ devastation of the Plains Indians and pioneering work in the field of eugenics. Few, however, have paid much attention to the role of American models in the formulation of anti-Jewish legislation in the years following Hitler’s accession to power. James Q. Whitman’s probing analysis here targets a watershed meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform which took place in June 1934. The meeting, attended by the Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner and a group of leading Nazi lawyers, including conservatives such as Bernhard Lösener and hardline radicals, notably ‘the terrifying Roland Freisler’, was convened to draft a response to the Prussian Memorandum of 1933 which conveyed the radicals’ demands for concrete legal action against the Jews (p. 1). The resulting discussions proved instrumental in the drafting of the so-called Nuremberg Laws. This infamous legislation defined persons who either ‘were’ or ‘counted as’ Jews. It also prohibited and punished marriage and sexual relations between Jews and ‘nationals of German blood’ (p. 31)

Genealogy · Nazism · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · European history and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law · Medical History and Research · Race, History, and American Society