Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

by James Q. Whitman

Overview

How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler's American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies.

As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler's American Model upends understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691172422
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	02/21/2017
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	453,615
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. His books include Harsh Justice, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, and The Verdict of Battle. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

A Note on Translations ix

Introduction 1

1 Making Nazi Flags and Nazi Citizens 17

The First Nuremberg Law: Of New York Jews and Nazi Flags 19

The Second Nuremberg Law: Making Nazi Citizens 29

America: The Global Leader in Racist Immigration Law 34

American Second-Class Citizenship 37

The Nazis Pick Up the Thread 43

Toward the Citizenship Law: Nazi Politics in the Early 1930s 48

The Nazis Look to American Second-Class Citizenship 59

Conclusion 69

2 Protecting Nazi Blood and Nazi Honor 73

Toward the Blood Law: Battles in the Streets and the Ministries 81

Battles in the Streets: The Call for “Unambiguous Laws” 81

Battles in the Ministries: The Prussian Memorandum and the American Example 83

Conservative Juristic Resistance: Gürtner and Lösener 87

The Meeting of June 5, 1934 93

The Sources of Nazi Knowledge of American Law 113

Evaluating American Influence 124

Defining “Mongrels”: The One-Drop Rule and the Limits of American Influence 127

Conclusion 132

America through Nazi Eyes 132

America’s Place in the Global History of Racism 137

Nazism and American Legal Culture 146

Acknowledgments 163

Notes 165

Suggestions for Further Reading 197

Index 201

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Startling. . . . [Hitler’s American Model] contributes to a growing recognition of American influences on Nazi thought."—Jeff Guo, Washington Post

"The uncomfortable truth is that Nazi policy was itself influenced by American white supremacy, a heritage well documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book Hitler’s American Model."—Sasha Chapin, New York Times Magazine

"Every day brings fresh reminders that liberal and illiberal democracy can entwine uncomfortably, a timely context for James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model. . . . [H]is short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values."—Ira Katznelson, The Atlantic

"A crucial read right now."—Jelani Cobb

"Whitman reminds readers of the subtle ironies of modern history and of the need to be constantly vigilant against racism."—Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

Editorial Reviews

One of Foreign Affairs Best of Books 2017 – Economic, Social, and Environment / Finance

From the Publisher

"In Hitler's American Model, Yale Law School Professor James Q. Whitman makes a credible case for his assertion that, by the 1930s, ‘America was the obvious preeminent example of a ‘race state’."

The American Interest

2016-12-26
Mr. Hitler, meet Justice Holmes.Anyone pondering the results of the recent presidential election will detect the existence of at least two Americas. So did the Nazis. As Yale Law School professor Whitman (The Legacy of Roman Law in the German Romantic Era, 2016, etc.) observes, the Third Reich readily found plenty of precedents for their complex system of race-based law in American legal history, but they were also puzzled by "the strength of the liberal countercurrent in a country with so much openly and unapologetically sanctioned racism." By Whitman's account, the Nazis were sometimes even less heavy-handed on the legal front than the architects of Jim Crow—and, he writes, it must be remembered that racist laws spread far beyond the South. Nazi jurists even found some American laws too harsh, such as the "one-drop" rule of defining whether one were "Negro." As his argument builds, the author capably defends the assertion that the U.S. was not just a racist power throughout much of its history, but the pre-eminent racist power in the world, one that built elaborate classification schemes in the service of denying minorities and colonized persons full civil rights. Granted that the Germans were more thorough in their application: Whitman observes that whereas Germany sought to impose state machinery on race laws in order to avoid turning legal matters over to the mob, "the United States by contrast remained faithful to lynch justice." Whitman is careful to avoid the minefields of cause and effect: there has been only one real Hitler, after all, and only one Holocaust of the technocratic sort that he set in motion. Still, the author is clear that we should be alarmed and chastened by the fact that the Nazis found so much to emulate in American jurisprudence. "The image of America as seen through Nazi eyes in the early 1930s is not the image we cherish," he writes, "but it is hardly unrecognizable." A small book, but powerful all out of proportion to its size in exposing a shameful history.

Kirkus Reviews