Hitler's American Model by James Q.Whitman ( Princeton University Press)

NUREMBERG IN AMERICA


Nazi paramilitary officers stand outside a Berlin store in 1933 posting signs reading ‘Germans! Defend yourselves! Do not buy from Jews!’. (photo credit:GERMAN FEDERAL ARCHIVES)


Introduced by the Reichstag in September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws codified the racist policies of the Nazis. The laws declared that the swastika was the national symbol of Germany, consigned German Jews to second- class citizenship, and criminalized marriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans.

In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Whitman, a professor at Yale Law School, makes a stunning and unsettling claim about the Nuremberg Laws. The Nazis who promulgated these laws, he maintains, “found precedents and parallels and inspirations” in the immigration and miscegenation legislation of the United States.

Whitman acknowledges that the tale he tells “has to be told cautiously.” He supplies frequent reminders that Nazism was not a transplant of American racism into Central Europe and that the Nazis certainly would have committed heinous crimes even if they had not found “interesting” examples of American race law. That said, he makes a compelling case that “seeing America through Nazi eyes” in the 1930s reveals things about “the nature and dimensions” of racism in the legal culture of the United States and about America’s place “in the larger world history of racism.”

The Nazis, Whitman demonstrates, frequently cited American statutes “regulating” the citizenship and sexual relationships of blacks, Native Americans, Filipinos, Japanese and Chinese as models of race-based legislation that could be applied to Jews. The immigration quotas of 1921 and 1924, they reported, manifestly favored the Nordics of northern and western Europe over eastern and southern Europe’s “undesirable” races. In Mein Kampf, Whitman points out, Hitler singled out the United States for recognizing that the “melting pot fails as soon as fundamentally different types of humans are involved” and refusing to admit “physically unhealthy elements” and “certain races.”