In my previous article I had written how the U.S. stood by and idly watched as a “Jewish genocide” was transpiring. As history has it, the U.S. was one of the world’s most strongest states in this era, and if it wanted to, it could have stopped the Nazis. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, racial segregation laws had been enforced against Black Americans the the U.S. These “Jim Crow Laws” would only be abolished 20 years after the Nazis had been defeated.
The similarities between the U.S. back then and Hitler’s Germany are not limited to the racist practices of the Nazis against the Jews, and against the Black Americans in the U.S. The real shocker here is that the Nazis drew inspiration from the “American model.”
It needs to be pointed out that the Jim Crow laws, the name of which was taken from a Black character humiliated in a comedy, were stringently implemented by Democrats in southern United states. In the Nazis’ early years, almost half of the Democrats in the U.S. Congress were southerners; and in this era, southern Democrats were hardline racists.
Americans have never liked discussing the fact that the Nazis were actually inspired by the racial segregation law system in the U.S. They defend that the Nazi regime and the American regime were as different as chalk and cheese. In a book written by James Q. Whitman, a professor teaching comparative and foreign law at Yale University, one of America’s most prestigious colleges, he completely shatters this taboo. His book, “Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law,” was published by Princeton University in 2018. Whitman documents in this text that the racist "Nuremberg Laws" implemented by the "Third Reich" regime, which marked the Hitler era, were inspired by the Jim Crow laws in the U.S.
About one and a half years after Hitler came to power, a group of Nazi lawmakers traveled to the U.S. and analyzed the American racial laws. The practices, especially those in the south, seem to have spellbound the Nazis. Hitler himself lauded the American model in his book “Mein Kampf.” According to the Nazis, the U.S. owed the fact that it was becoming richer and stronger to these racial laws. The Nazis then developed their own idiosyncratic model so that German society could internalize the U.S. model. This Nazi propaganda seems to have hit the bull’s eye.
According to Professor Whitman, the Jim Crow laws were even harsher than the Nürnberg laws, especially when it came to punishing interracial marriages. On the other hand, the Nazis were particularly influenced by the fact that the Native American population in the U.S. had been decreased from millions to around two hundred thousand between the 1500s and 1900s. The law system that kept African Americans, who had previously been enslaved, ostracized from the American citizenship system, also captured the Nazis’ special attention. The Nazi sterilization law of 1934 also drew inspiration from a similar practice in the State of California.
The Immigration Act of 1924 was also of a racist nature. This law made it extremely difficult for Jews fleeing the Nazis to take refuge in the U.S. Adolf Hitler was particularly fond of this bill. According to a poll conducted in the U.S. in the 1930s, the Americans were not at all happy about Jewish immigration. White Americans, for their part, absolutely did not want Jews to join American society. Furthermore, White Supremacists did everything in their power to prevent the U.S. from going to war against Hitler’s Germany. Dr. Bradley W. Hart, a lecturer at Fresno California State University, sheds light on these activities in his book, “Hitler's American Friends:The Third Reich's Supporters in the United States,” published in 2018.
U.S. presidents, primarily Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, who strongly opposed Black Americans equally being a part of the same system as White Americans, were the Nazis’ heroes. Professor Whitman in his book reveals how the Nazis were inspired by American racism from the late 19th to the early 20th century. What’s more, it can also be ascertained that the American model that inspired the Nazis also inspired the transformation of Israel into a regime based on apartheid.
