The United States — A Model for the #Nazis - Los Angeles Review of Books
▻https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-united-states-a-model-for-the-nazis
When #Hitler came to power, Nazi lawyers, judges, and officials followed the Führer’s lead and expanded their study of systematic American racial exclusion in preparation for writing the infamous #Nuremberg Laws.
James Q. Whitman, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School and author of several books on criminal justice, recounts this history in his disturbing and alarming new book based on detailed and scrupulous scholarship, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi #Race Law. “Awful it may be to contemplate,” Whitman concludes, “but the reality is that the Nazis took a sustained, significant, and sometimes even eager interest in the American example in race law.” Based on Nazi documents and a stenographic record of a pivotal meeting on June 5, 1934, Whitman writes that less than two years after Hitler became chancellor of the Third Reich, “it was the most radical Nazis who pushed most energetically for the exploitation of American models.” Nazi lawyers “regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist law.”
While Hitler’s admiration for the United States’s role in promoting the now-discredited theory eugenics has been well documented, Whitman breaks new ground by upsetting a preexisting consensus among historians who have downplayed America’s influence in the development of Nazi race law. Casting a searching and unapologetic eye on the documentary evidence, Whitman rejects the “reassuring consensus” that the United States’s legal system was insignificant in the Nazis’ quest for a legal solution to “the Jewish problem.”
At a troubling time when the United States is in the throes of a deeply divisive and ugly crisis over restrictions on immigration, exclusion of refugees, bans on travel from predominantly Muslim countries, and openly racist political rhetoric, Whitman’s chilling book forces us to examine some of the most grievous sins of America’s past through an unlikely lens.