In 1935, Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation inspired by American laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Together, these were known as the , and they for the persecution of Jewish people during the and .
When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren鈥檛 just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to , author of Hitler鈥檚 American Model, that country was the United States.
鈥淎merica in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,鈥 says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. 鈥淣azi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.鈥
In particular, Nazis admired the -era laws that discriminated against Black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.
Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn鈥檛 go far enough.
鈥淥ne of the most striking Nazi views was that Jim Crow was a suitable racist program in the United States because American Blacks were already oppressed and poor,鈥 he says. 鈥淏ut then in Germany, by contrast, where the Jews (as the Nazis imagined it) were rich and powerful, it was necessary to take more severe measures.鈥
Because of this, Nazis were more interested in how the U.S. had designated , Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the portion of the , which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as 鈥渘ationals.鈥
But a component of the Jim Crow era that Nazis did think they could translate into Germany were anti-miscegenation laws, which prohibited interracial marriages in 30 of 48 states.
鈥淎merica had, by a wide margin, the harshest law of this kind,鈥 Whitman says. 鈥淚n particular, some of the state laws threatened severe criminal punishment for interracial marriage. That was something radical Nazis were very eager to do in Germany as well.鈥
The idea of banning Jewish and Aryan marriages presented the Nazis with a dilemma: How would they tell who was Jewish and who was not? After all, race and ethnic categories are socially constructed, and interracial relationships produce offspring who don鈥檛 fall neatly into one box.
Again, the Nazis looked to America.
鈥淐onnected with these anti-miscegenation laws was a great deal of American jurisprudence on how to classify who belonged to which race,鈥 he says.
Controversial 鈥渙ne-drop鈥 rules stipulated that anyone with any Black ancestry was legally Black and could not marry a white person. Laws also defined what made a person Asian or Native American, in order to prevent these groups from marrying whites (notably, Virginia had a for prominent white families who claimed to be descended from ).
The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a 鈥渙ne-drop rule,鈥 the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had .
Which means, as Whitman notes, 鈥渢hat American racial classification law was much harsher than anything the Nazis themselves were willing to introduce in Germany.鈥
It should come as no surprise then, that the Nazis weren鈥檛 uniformly condemned in the U.S. before the country entered the war. In the early 1930s, American eugenicists about racial purity and republished their propaganda. American aviator accepted from the Nazi Party in 1938.
Once the United States entered the war, it took a decidedly anti-Nazi stance. But Black American troops noticed the similarities between the two countries, and confronted them head-on with a Its goal? Victory abroad against the Axis powers鈥攁nd victory at home against Jim Crow.
