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

by James Q. Whitman

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Race, American History, Law, The United States Of America

232 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2017

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.

Reviews

[lindsi · Rating 3 out of 5]

It wasn’t *bad,* but the author clearly has an uncritical fondness for America that renders him unable to accurately convey how brutal and systematic American racism really is. In particular, in the conclusion he argues that America has never been fascist, because American racism isn’t “organized” or “state-backed.” This is obviously ridiculously untrue, as the American state has thrown its full force behind genocide, mass incarceration, border camps, concentration camps, segregation, slave patrols, police, mass rape and mass death of all kinds against the indigenous, Black and brown people of this country.

I would love to see a treatment of this topic by a historical materialist rather than a milquetoast liberal. There’s clearly tons to unpack but this author was unwilling to do so, and what he did unpack was constantly tempered by assurances that of course America is (at least in spirit) dedicated to liberty and equality for all, and that America is in no way *causually* linked to the rise of Nazism, nor has it engaged in crimes of the same magnitude.

LOL k.

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

In which you find out that the Nazis thought American race laws were TOO severe.

[Mehrsa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yikes. If you're going to make a claim like this, you better provide ALL the receipts. The claim is that the Nazis borrowed heavily from American race law to craft their own. And the receipts are unfortunately all there. Turns out, the US legal system was the global innovators in racial exclusion, segregation, and anti-miscegenation laws. On that last point, our laws were too strict for the Germans. Now, obviously, they went well beyond where the US went with the holocaust, but as Whitman points out, the initial point was not extermination, but containment and removal of rights. And it turns out the US legal system taught them how to do that. Yikes.

One of the most fascinating tidbits (as a law professor) is how appealing our common law system was to them and how much more amendable it was than a civil law system to exploitation by the Nazi party. I had never considered that. The flexibility of our common law courts allow for cases like Brown v. Board of Ed, but they also suited the enforcement of the Nurenmberg laws. Yikes.

[Vincent Li · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is fascinating, disturbing, and nuanced. With the bold title, and swastika on the cover, the book certainly turns heads (I learned quickly that I probably should have taken the book cover off while reading it in public). However, at the end of the day the author is a law professor, and like most law professors writes in a hedged, and nuanced tone. The book suggests more than tells, but is a valuable read regardless. At some level, the book seems not to match the provocative title at all, but I argue that this makes it more worth reading than otherwise.

At the core of Whitman's thesis is that American legal traditions and laws in the late 1890s-1930s are more influential (influential to Whitman does not mean the Nazis always admired or approved but does mean beyond superficial intellectual engagement) in Nazi thinking than previously suggested in the historical literature. People looking for silver bullet answers that America is to blame for the Nazi regime will be sorely disappointed. Whitman does not argue that the Nazis lifted American laws or that the American legal tradition is responsible for the horrible crimes of the Nazis.

His argument is more subtle, he argues that America was a "model" for the Nazis (the Nazi attitude towards the United States at least before the war seemed ambiguous, they approved of certain American race laws but saw Germany as the logical culmination of such laws, and the US in constant threat of backsliding into its liberal open door traditions). Through varied and meticulously researched historical record piecing (this itself is worth the read without the analysis), Whitman shows that the Nazis were deeply interested and surprisingly well versed in American law in the areas of Jim Crow, immigration law and most damningly anti-miscegenation laws. Partially, this was not unique in that this was something that the Anglo-legal world had in common but since the United States was the leading power of the world it provided an interesting model for Nazi legal thought. Unflatteringly, Whitman argues that America was on the frontier of race law. Whitman shows that there was intense domestic Nazi interest and discussion of American law from within Mein Kampf to the internal discussions leading up to the Nuremberg laws. The Nazis were particularly interested in the laws that created de facto second class citizenship in the US for non-whites (ultimately, choosing to not wrestle with the American struggle between the 14th amendment equality guarantees and its de facto removal of citizenship rights through literacy tests and disenfranchisement but choosing to have an openly racist state). Interestingly, the Nazis found some American measures such as the one drop rule and racial social segregation as too extreme and harsh. Whitman admits that obviously, the Nazis had to adapt Jim Crow to their racist policies towards Jews, but that did not rule out the use of Jim Crow as a legal model for trained lawyers. The Nazis praised early American immigration laws creating quotas on nationalities (unique in the world at the time) as recognition of "healthy" race policy.

Most damningly, when the Nazis debated the Nuremberg laws over banning marriage between Germans and Jews, American anti-miscegenation laws played a large role. The more traditionally "moderate" Nazi legal scholars objected to the criminalization of interracial marriage, since in Germany only bigamy was criminalized and the scholars were concerned with the lack of a "scientific" definition for Jews. However, the "radical" faction brought up American anti-miscegenation laws as an example of a system that both criminalized interracial marriage (rare for the world at the time, and complete with maps of different state laws) and operated without a clear definition of race. In fact, according to Whitman, the Nazis had great admiration for the common law and its flexibility. Even more disturbingly, the Nazis had an admiration for the legal realism of the 1930s, with its desire to replace "formalism" with political and "flexible" lawmaking. Whitman argues that in Germany, legal scholars trained in the civil law tradition acted as brakes on the Nazi legal regime in the early days, and that there is a disturbing similarity between the legal realism and the lawlessness of the Nazi regime. Whitman argues near the end that the US differed vastly from the Nazis because it never made race policy the center of its state apparatus (being bound by the 14th amendment).

I can't decide if I'm annoyed with (what I assume is) the publisher's decision to feature such an inflammatory cover and title. On one hand it draws attention to a fascinating scholarly topic, but on the other hand it suggests a thesis different from the content of the book. On a minor note, this book seems to continue the annoying trend of publishing what should be a long law review article in a small hardcover book priced at an outrageous 25 dollars!, but I digress.

[Mike Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains important and fascinating research, but it was written in a very repetitive way.

[Ailith Twinning · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you're actually interested in the book, it's got little real content, so here's the TL;DR

"Nazis admired some stuff about America, especially its racism and Jim Crow as movements to a racial state and pro White Supremacy - and the lack of traditional legal classifications to allow for innocence until proven guilt or precedent for miscegenation laws was discussed in the context of those of the US. However, the US should never be compared to the Nazis, are not responsible for the Nazis, and are a force for good now, regardless our past, or indeed, our present."

----

Not only is this book painfully long for how little it has to say -- the above is the entire argument -- it's a cowardly defense of the US' behaviour before, during and after the War. This falls firmly in the camp of center-right apologetics. And yet the author seems to feel like he's being naughty.

Tell me mate, what is the difference between the Nazis and the Mao Mao 'revolt'? How about the US and Cambodia, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, Chile, or any other of our Cold War victims of our terrorism and wars of aggression? Hitler had two crimes, War of Aggression, and Genocide. Either of which America has him beat to shit on. For God's sake we killed half a million children in Iraq, in 1996. Even if you want to throw in "Overthrew a Democracy" for Hitler, then the US' running tally is over 50 at this point, we still win for evilest empire ever.

If you're going to compare the USA to Nazi Germany, do it. Otherwise, fuck off with your milquetoast rebellion.

[Fiona · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is written in what I think of as "academic recursive," a writing style most frequently exhibited by post-secondary professors. It stems, I believe, from the traditional essay structure employed by university students everywhere wherein the writer tells you what they are going to say, and then they say it, and then they remind you of what they just said. It annoys the crap out of me.

Allow me to save you the trouble of having to read this book: the Nazis thought American laws relating to marriage between people of different "races" were inspirational. Its tarted up like a bigger scandal than it is frankly, and the book focuses on what the Nazis said about the laws rather than discussing the restrictions themselves.

[Randall Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hitler in 1928 openly admired the United States, saying we had “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage.” Hitler saw how fellow Jew-hater Henry Ford was into building cars for the American masses and that led Hitler to the making of the Volkswagen - designed by none other than Porsche. Then following Hitler’s lead, the Nazis studied the archives of US racist eugenics theory and studied our own long genocidal quest for Lebensraum (esp. California) - Isn’t it great how the U.S. is such an inspiration to others! “In the early twentieth century, the United States was not just a country with racism. It was THE leading racist jurisdiction.” If only we were taught in school to picture the 1930’s as a time when not one but two “unapologetically racist regimes unmatched in their pitilessness” existed: we were all taught about the Nazis with the Jews in the 30’s, while conveniently told nothing about our similar treatment of blacks then in our own country (Jim Crow). And it should be noted, blacks were being lynched well after WWII was over. Thurgood Marshall said the American Constitution “was defective from the start” and “many of the Founders held beliefs we find reprehensible”. Nazis loved US race law with its separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, schools, bus seating etc. Never in my life have I seen photos of Jews with their signs and restrictions NEXT to photos of Blacks during Jim Crow with their equally evil 1930’s restrictions. Our culture cannot tolerate us making that connection. When as a teen-aged bully, the U.S., took its ‘guns-a-blazing’ show on the road in the Philippines, it found it could control foreign locals by legally defining them as “non-citizen nationals” – thus, on a people who merely wanted independence like us, was bestowed “a de jure form of second-class citizenship for the newly conquered populations.”

We were taught how Nazis made Jewish people second class citizens, but never taught that at the same time in the US, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, Chinese, Blacks and Native Americans were ALSO considered second-class citizens. I’ve never heard any American point out that example of hypocrisy, all I ever heard was how Germans took away freedom and fairness in the 30’s, while the U.S. was somehow a bastion of freedom and fairness. Let’s look at it: Americans alone came up with “lynch justice” and for a while “there a plan to create a Negro reservation in the Southern states, similar to the Indian reservations.” Did you know famed black boxer Jack Johnson wasn’t allowed to return to the U.S. for the shocking crime - of marrying a nice white woman who loved him. “The US was THE model for anti-miscegenation legislation.” “Nazi lawyers, even radical ones, found American law on mongrelization TOO harsh to be embraced by the Reich.” Southerners love their tradition and will enjoy that American anti-miscegenation law dates back to Virginia 1691 – Nazi’s saw how vagueness worked well in the US South – a sign that simply said, “colored” was all that was needed for the oppression to take hold. When the Nazis in 1934 got together to dress as transvestites and debate the best way to institutionalize hardcore racism, they first asked: how did the Americans do it? They admired how Thomas Jefferson said, “It is certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.” Then, they admired all those early white American Founders in wigs.

The Nazi’s released their Nuremburg Laws to try to minimize the nasty type of street lynchings they had noticed in the U.S. South – the U.S. responded to the German Nuremburg Laws the only way it knew how – lynchings in the US “noticeably” rose at that time. Lynch justice was not to be denied in the land that invented both institutionalized racism and the selling of lynching postcards. This book reveals Nazi efforts “to mine American race law for inspiration during the making of the Nuremburg Laws.” It was great, because it made me think of a lot more critical but uncomfortable things in American History that all citizens need to know to resist the myth of our exceptionalism and/or the branding of “the other.”

[Jonathan Blanks · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think the book is useful, but it makes far too many apologies for American law and culture. If anything, this repeated "its very uncomfortable and hard to believe but true" mantra that repeats throughout the book underscores how Americans have yet to really cope with the monstrosities that were Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation, and even our immigration laws were (and are, in the last case). I'm not saying the author shouldn't have mentioned it, but it's repeated throughout the book so often and instead, it could be laid out in the foreword and perhaps repeated in the first chapter, and then simply supported with the facts he marshals throughout the book before restating in conclusion.

The other flaw is in the last chapter, where he cites a mishmash of legal and historical trends and muddles them considerably. In particular, someone not familiar with American jurisprudence would think most US courts common law rather than statute-based given his description. He uses a lot of legal terms and jargon and he doesn't define or distinguish to the extent that he should have (particularly the differences in civil versus criminal law). Such sloppiness leaves the author open to criticism, though in toto these problems do not really harm the thesis.

All in all, it's a good summation of how US law influenced the Nazi regime. I was already familiar with the Nuremburg laws but the research and work done to draw the direct lines of influence are, I think, a valuable addition to the understanding of the era.

[Doug Gillan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hitler's American Model, greatly reduced in length, would have made a wonderful article in the New Yorker or the Atlantic. It contains some very interesting ideas and informations, perhaps four major points. But in book length, it becomes repetitive to the edge of belief. Several times, I thought that I must be rereading a section of the book because, I believed, that the exact same words were being repeated. Is there such a thing as self-plagiarism within a book? But the interesting ideas are very good -- including ***SPOILER ALERT****(1) that Nazi race laws were informed by, if not based on, race laws in the American South; (2) that the pragmatic American system of common law, in comparsion to the European system of civil law, was also attractive to the Nazis because they could bend it to their needs; (3) that Nazism was a populist movement, intended to make access to many of Germany's resources available to every member of the German Volk (so, only Nordic, non-Jewish people). ***END SPOILER SECTION****

[Ruya Hazeyen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It would’ve been more interesting if the author wasn’t saying some center-lib bs every few paragraphs. How do you write about the U.S. being so racist that the nazis found them to be too extreme while still spewing American exceptionalism???The mental gymnastics is almost impressive

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

DeSantis is definitely going to try to burn this one.

[Edward Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A painstakingly researched, deeply disturbing, and completely conivncing study of the profound influence America's eugenics movement and racist laws had upon Nazi codification of its own racist agenda.

[Dschreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a memorable scene from the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," the defence lawyer played by Maximilian Schell reads a legal opinion to the court: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange indeed, if it could not call upon those who already sapped the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offsprings for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent their propagation by medical means in the first place. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Snapping the book closed, Schell continues, “The opinion upholds the sterilization law in the State of Virginia, of the United States and was written and delivered by that great American jurist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes.” It is an unsettling moment in the film. Although the American precedent is not developed any further, it hints at a disturbing reality.

Could Oliver Wendell Holmes really have written such a thing? Could the words have been taken out of context? Could it be more than a rhetorical flourish? While racism was there for all to see in the American South with its segregationist Jim Crow laws, putting America side-by-side with Nazi Germany sounds almost obscene. And even if we must acknowledge that the Nazis regularly quoted U.S. eugenicists and U.S. race laws as precedents, we want to believe that such efforts were sheer propaganda, a shabby effort to put a veneer of respectability on their own odious regime.

Unfortunately, as J. Q. Whitman shows in Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the truth is much uglier than this. The truth is that the Nazis undertook a deep and sustained study of the laws of America as they were designing their infamous anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, because America was for them, as Hitler himself said in Mein Kampf, the one state that had made progress in developing a “healthy racial order.” To be sure, Britain was no slouch, along with its colonies and dominions, when it came to racist immigration preferences, treatment of non-whites, and so on. But America appealed to the Nazis more by being explicit in its laws—and harsher. Until at least 1936 Nazi Germany remained hopeful that it could “reach out the hand of friendship” to the U.S. on the basis of a shared commitment to white supremacy.

This may seem at first to be an extreme interpretation, but doubts quickly disappear as Whitman, Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, offers copious quotations from German texts of the 1930s. With chilling effectiveness, Hitler's American Model reveals how deeply a second current runs in the American system, counter to its high ideals of freedom, equality, and the rights of man, a current of white, even Aryan, racism.

While today Jim Crow laws probably come to mind most easily for us, they were not the focus of the Nazis who, after all, did not plan to create an apartheid regime. Their aim was—before the 1942 Wannsee Conference and its genocidal Final Solution—to drive non-Aryans out of the country and create a racially pure state. Their tools would be new laws on citizenship and sexual relations.

Citizenship law in America drew a clear race line as far back as 1790 when the Naturalization Act allowed citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” In the following century denying citizenship to Asians became the focus. Indigenous peoples were marginalized by being deemed “nationals” but not citizens. And when the Spanish-American War brought new non-white peoples into the American system, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the creation of second-class citizenship for Puerto Rican and Filipino subjects, a disempowered status of “non-citizen nationals,” “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.”

African-Americans presented a special difficulty as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which gave them citizenship rights; however, the Nazis were careful to note that, especially at the state level, “all means are used to render the Negro’s right to vote illusory” through petty measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. Most states, too, had laws to restrict African-Americans in their freedom of movement and career possibilities. The few Asians and Mexicans who had made it into the country had their voting rights blocked with similar legislation. Legal ingenuity such as this was appreciated by the Nazis, and in the case of the Czechs they did use a second-class status similar to the American example. But within Germany they were determined to be direct in their purposes by instituting straightforward racist laws.

According to Whitman, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s the United States came to be regarded not just by the Nazis but throughout Europe as “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” As the National Socialist Handbook put it, until the coming of Hitler, the United States had held “the leadership of the white peoples” in the “Aryan struggle for world domination”—although it had merely groped its way toward the historic mission to be undertaken by Germany.

The passing of the U.S. Immigration Act in 1924 delighted Hitler. He took as a given its Asian Exclusion Act (an extension of the 1922 Cable Act which revoked the citizenship of American women who married an Asian), but the National Origins Act struck him as especially revealing, for it favoured immigrants from the “Nordic” countries while limiting immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. For him it was a prime example of völkisch citizenship legislation—in fact, the only in modern times. Hitler spoke of it in combination with the earlier genocidal wars on indigenous peoples, believing that it showed clearly that the U.S. was “the model of a state organized on principles of Rasse and Raum,” that is, on the principles of race and the seizure of territory for a völk defined by race.

But immigration and citizenship laws are not enough to create a racially pure nation. There had to be metrics to determine the degree of acceptable racial purity and laws to prevent racially mixed births ("mongrelization," in Germany, "miscegenation" in America). Here again America provided the precedents for Germany, and in particular for the Nuremberg Blood Law where, according to Whitman, the American model is seen at its most influential. In many societies mixed marriages have been discouraged through social constraints and sometimes they have been annulled as a matter of civil law, but historically bigamy has been the only form of marriage subject to criminalization and prosecution. In their review of American legislation, the Nazi researchers found that thirty states had passed criminal laws against miscegenation, some of them with penalties as severe as ten years imprisonment. (Virginia continued to enforce its miscegenation statute until 1967, when the Supreme Court, in the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, struck it down. See the 2016 Hollywood film, “Loving.”) The Nazis passed their own criminal laws against race mixing, but the Americans, they thought, had been too harsh, especially with the “one-drop” rule that some states used to define Negroes. As a result, the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 was milder, defining a Jew as a person having three Jewish grandparents; and it allowed as a mitigating factor the degree of a person’s assimilation into non-Jewish society. The Jim Crow laws, too, were seen by the Nazis as going too far; German laws prohibited German women from consorting “indecently” with black men in public, but they did not place sanctions on private behaviour, as in the U.S.

Nazi Germany showed racism in its ugliest, most murderous form. However, a clear-eyed look at the historical record, such as we get in Hitler's American Model, is a healthy reminder that the nations that banded together to destroy Nazi Germany were also infected by the same disease, the difference being simply in the degree of toxicity.

[Camille]

Whitman ne se contente pas de comparer les lois raciales nazis (lois de Nuremberg) et les lois raciales aux USA (par exemple le principe du one-drop rule). Il montre la fascination et l'intérêt des juristes du NSDAP pour les lois raciales dans les pays de common law et pour celles des états du Sud aux USA en particulier. Si, pour Whitman, l'idée que les états du Sud étaient fascistes n'est pas opérante, il souligne avec force que les juristes se sont fortement inspirés (et même ont édulcoré le principe du one-drop rule) des lois raciales et de l'idée de sous citoyenneté (pas seulement limité aux Noirs américains mais qui s'appliquait aussi aux Philippins, aux habitants d'Hawaïi, aux Portoricains) pour développer les lois de Nuremberg.
La conclusion, qui revient sur l'actualité des lois criminelles aux USA, est convaincante : Whitman revient sur l'idée que les nazis auraient instauré un positivisme juridique, et démontre que c'est la common law qui a servi de sources d'inspirations aux juristes en charge du nouvel État.

[Michael Quinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wrote an extended review of Hitler's American Model for a law school course in legal history, so I have many thoughts. To put it briefly, I think the book has a fatal lack of historical context. Whitman’s marshaling of primary Nazi sources is impressive. He cites an incredible wealth of documents geared both to the mass membership of the Party and more technically-minded lawyers and officials, all of which make laudatory references to American law on racial matters. While praise for American law from such reprehensible sources helps to drive home the wretched legacy of American legalized racial discrimination, the most shocking of Whitman’s claims are untenable. He cites extensive Nazi references to American race-based immigration law as evidence of its influence on the Nuremberg Laws’ citizenship provision. But Nazi citizenship law was concerned with stripping political rights away from Jews who had been born Germans, and it is not a comparable area of law to that governing the admission of foreigners. While Whitman is stronger in his argument that Nazis may have looked to the Insular Cases and Indian law in America for examples on second-class citizenship, he devotes less space and has fewer sources on these issues. Whitman also makes rather extreme conclusions about the nature of American legal culture and the legal realist doctrine fashionable in the 1930s, based on Nazi perceptions of them, which unfairly maligns the impact of legal realism in reversing the American racial laws that the Nazis found so admirable.

Whitman’s greatest fault, however, is his failure to contextualize his key source in its place in Nazi history and hierarchy. His scant attention to the Nazi rejection of rule of law on ideological principle is a gross oversight, particularly for lay or legal readers who may be unfamiliar with Nazi history and thought. Fatal to his claim of an American model for the Nuremberg Laws is his failure to demonstrate substantive links between Nazi writing on American law or the June 1934 commission meeting (which he basis most of his argument on) to the laws that were promulgated in September 1935. The commission and its leaders were outside the core of Nazi power and at odds with its philosophy, making Whitman’s reliance on it as essential to Third Reich lawmaking very questionable. Furthermore, an examination of the actual drafting and enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws—which is totally unaddressed by Whitman—reveals no hint of the discussion of American law being of import.

Not to delve too far into detail, but Whitman bases most of his book on a transcript of a June 1934 criminal law reform commission meeting which included in-depth discussion of American race laws and comparing them to Nazi proposals for anti-Jewish laws. What he fails to mention is that the chair of the meeting, Justice Minister Gürtner, was a nationalist conservative holdover who had been in office since 1932, only joining the Nazi Party in 1937. Contrary to Nazi ideology, he firmly believed in the use of written law and procedures, and had established the commission to revise the Reich Criminal Code of 1871 in accordance with Nazi ideology. According to preeminent historian of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans, the commission was unable to keep up with the continuous creation of new criminal offenses by the regime, and its “legalistic pedantry” was rejected by Nazis who refused to put its drafts into effect. The commission was thus an unimportant feature of Third Reich policymaking, which perhaps explains why its June 1934 transcript garnered so little attention from scholars before Whitman, despite being first published in 1989.

Despite the failure of his most sensational claims of American law serving as a model for a genocidal regime, Whitman’s extensive collection of Nazi discussions of American race law is of some interest, providing a reflection of our law in a dark mirror. As Whitman correctly states in a moment of restraint, “Seeing America through Nazi eyes does tell us things we did not know, or had not fully reckoned with—things about the nature and dimensions of American racism, and things about the place of America in the larger world history of racism.” As a work of persuasive scholarship, however, Hitler's American Model is a failure.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Would've made for a decent 35 page essay, but the urge to turn it into a book ultimately transmogrified it into a repetitive mess. The story of influence it tells certainly feels compelling, but not that much effort seems to have been expended in telling a very academic story, with so many avenues left unexplored. A disappointment.

[Nick Girvin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The short version:
In terms of writing style, credibility, and engagement? Great! In terms of narrative? Eh…

The long version:
So, I guess to highlight what’s good about this, is that it accidentally works as a really great, easy to read, and well researched resource for how the Nazi race laws came to be, and how they took inspiration from very specific U.S. laws. For one, it makes itself clear that the author does NOT think Nazi race laws were simply packaged and sold from the United States, pinning Uncle Sam as responsible for Hitler’s atrocities. Rather, it aims to point out two big parallels and a few small side ones. The making of a Nazi “citizen” was the one that took heavy influence from early U.S. immigration laws, and the one that was almost a mere copy, the the blood laws of what constitutes someone as actually being a Jew; in fact, it’s pointed out that U.S. laws on what pass for “negro” “Indian” etc. were far more aggressive than what passed someone as a Jew in Nazi Germany. Moreover, it briefly touches on how Manifest Destiny would lead to inspire the conquest of Europe, flag making, and other small details. Hell, it even compared black deportation solutions in post-Civil War America to Zionism in Europe around the same time, which (intentionally or not) further reveals the truth about what’s going on in Palestine now. These are all important, but there’s a little more to this, so stick with me here.

It’s crucial to note that much of this was drafted prior to the extermination days of the SS, and that the big difference is that Germany was more explicit in its race laws, as opposed to the U.S. more or less trying to hide their race laws under (not so) sneaky Jim Crowe laws (which led to a large block of unnecessary text on realism at the end that really could have been cut). Naturally, as we know, Hitler then brought these extremes to a far higher level of state power and brutal extermination that the U.S. probably hadn’t seen since the trail of tears. So with all of this in mind, what is the problem with this narrative?

Well, it’s about what isn’t here, and the fact that there doesn’t seem to be one despite the title suggesting otherwise. It would be fine if it were a simple “history of the U.S. and Nazi race laws,” but it’s not. Again, this is all solid information to hold onto, however it never really comes to a conclusion that seems to matter outside of “we need to re-examine how we look at U.S. law.” Well, no shit, Sherlock. It gets awfully close to driving this point home in the literal last pages around how we still see remnants of this in many of our legal practices today, but it fails to draw that connection to anything further. What should this re-evaluation aim to change? What’s the bigger picture at work here? What should U.S. citizens do with this information? Why do we care about what laws written nearly 100 years ago did for the world’s most notable fascist regime? None of that is answered, and it just feels a little misleading.

A confession; I bought this nearly two years ago in the earlier days of latching onto certain political principles, and I may have obtained it with a “prove a point” mindset of one-upping someone to show that the U.S. isn’t ~actually~ this beacon of hope, peace, freedom, and prosperity. Not only is that a bad way of going about research, but I’ve also long since learned that very truth in far more pragmatic ways, and no longer need the easy strawman of “but hey! Hitler liked the U.S.!” to defend my stances, because as true as it is, it holds little in terms of moving my thoughts forward. And, I also care less and less about arguing politics the older I get anyway.

I guess if nothing else, Hitler’s American Model serves as a good starting point that re-affirms all of the things U.S. “patriots” like to conveniently overlook: slavery, genocide, racist law, etc. However, I find it far more effective to look to the likes of Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method, and get a real taste of covert treatment from the CIA, the Reagan administration, the United Fruit Company, Kissinger, etc. and events like the Vietnam War, Iraq invasion, Iran Contras, etc. meant to maintain the relentless grip of western capital and profit. Because at the end of the day, that has a far greater hand in how things are here and now, no matter how much people will try and pretend that race plays no role in day to day life for so many. You almost have to try to fall into the borderline Stockholm Syndrome that many unironically walk around with today when it comes to politics, but I guess you can’t blame someone who is a product of their environment. And if this book is someone’s first foray into an understanding of politics that isn’t regurgitated, packaged-and-sold garbage that you can’t avoid from your local Facebook news, then I say give it a whirl! It’s short and easy and took almost no time.

[greeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is a little misleading. This content was more of a comparison of racism in law between Nazi Germany and the United States after the Civil War. Still a valuable read. It gave me a lot to think about in terms of where we are today in the US and where current trends might lead. I would have benefitted from a fuller explanation of common law vs. code law, which was an important distinction that recurred throughout the book. Interestingly, the end touched on the harsh extremism and exceptionalism of today's American criminal justice system, noting that laws instituting severe punishments against habitual offenders (Three Strikes You're Out) echo similar Nazi laws.

5 stars for information
3 stars for clarity of delivery - a fair amount of unnecessary repetition
3 stars for not always knowing what was a quote and what was narration (audio version)
4 stars overall

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and disturbing. Builds its main (and most terrifying) argument around the single transcript of a meeting of Nazi lawyers prior to the adoption of the Nuremberg Laws. The deeper point that the author makes is about the ways of constructing and applying law, and how America’s common law tradition, in combination with its history of racism, enabled jurists to embed racist concepts into law.

[Luis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming to this book I was already startled by the idea that the United States had "influenced" or "inspired" Nazi German policies during the rise of Hitler's Third Reich. Too simplistic in light of the author's conclusion which discusses the USA's common-law tradition and how it was that which the German lawyers sought to emulate even more. This is particularly disturbing as that common law tradition, for all the good it has contributed to American society and culture, has also been weaponized to rationalize the irrational and legalize the unlawful. Germany's lawyers operating under the Nazi regime discovered in America's philosophy of law the means to foment their version of legal realism towards a racist state which they were convinced the United States was destined to become but was being held back by liberal as well as formalistic legal appreciations.

Despite America's appeal to its founding documents the Constitution in amendments like the 14th, the Nazi lawyers keenly observed contradictory existence of a legal philosophical "loophole" the allowed politics and ideology to influence the creation and execution of racist laws that would allow for the creation of a "legal" second class citizenry (e.g. blacks, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, etc.). Granted, as James Whitman emphasizes, this American legal tradition paved the way for social democracy to finally take root in American politics in the form of the New Deal and the civil rights movements but it was also used by racist political leaders to institutionalize racism. As Whitman warns in his conclusion, "...to have a common law system like that of America is to have a system in which the traditions of the law do indeed have little power to ride herd on the demands of the politicians, and when the politics is bad, the law can be very bad indeed."

Among a host of other things, Nazi Germany is a lesson of what happens when lawyers and judges become mere politicians in robes governed by a perverse irrational political theory that will stop at nothing to support heinous and cruel policies. Whitman correctly points to a current example in the USA: our criminal justice system. One of the most punitive in the democratic world that is negatively influenced by individuals --judges and prosecutors-- yielding primarily to ideological and political considerations that trump lawfulness while denying a reasonable path towards restorative justice. Even today, the American legal system remains vulnerable to the political headwinds that allow for racial injustice and the unequal treatment of "undesirables" to continue. This should put fear in the hearts of those concerned about the direction of American politics and how it will impact our courts, and our lives, for generations to come.

[Sasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite its bombastic, eye-catching title, the book is a sober historical and legal analysis of source material related to the crafting of Nazi Race Law and the inspirations (and limitations) of the United States example in that process. Through published materials, transcripts of contemporary discussions, and memoir accounts from the period, the author deftly explores the influence the example of the United States was to a foreign state as a model of a white supremecist legal system - one even many Nazis thought went too far in its callousness. In the conclusion, we do not just see an analysis of the influence of the American example in international racist lawmaking, but we also see a warning - a warning that the same legal philosophies and institutions that allowed for the propogation of racist laws and human misery still undergird the system today and allow for repetition if left unaltered.

[Ben Burtzos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Focuses primarily on the period from 1933-1935 and the debate leading up to the Nuremburg Laws of 1935. Research is substantial and persuasive; writing quality, less so. Whitman spends a great deal of time apologizing for making the comparison between American race law and Nazi law. In truth, I suspect few people would pick up this book unless they knew what they were getting into.

This is not a period of Nazi history likely to be overly familiar to casual readers. Whitman drops names like Schleicher and von Papen with little to no explanatory information.

Worth the read, but most beneficial to readers with fairly substantial knowledge of Nazi bureaucracy. I continue to think William Shirer's "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" should be the initial point of study for students of Nazi Germany.

[Ben Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“This too has to be part of our national narrative.”

Damn straight.

[Valerie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Major bummer.

[JC · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book’s title provides a very concise summary of what you’re in for; all that follows is an outline of specific examples in which Nazi jurors explicitly drew on American race law while trying to formulate racist legal frameworks for fascist Germany. It’s really remarkable how the United States can still perceive itself as some proud purveyor of freedom and human rights in the world when its racist laws became important points of reference for Nazi legislation, and it has yet to fully deal with the racism woven within the fabric of its legal system.

Whitman remains cautious throughout the entire text not to overstate his case. He qualifies that of course the U.S. cannot be held primarily responsible for the Holocaust or Nazi racism, and of course certain liberal traditions within American history were unsavoury to the ideological palette of Nazism, yet the admiration and interest Nazis had for American race law is very revealing about the place the United States had and still holds in the global history of racism. That is the main point for Whitman. And so 2020’s police violence and Trump himself is far more in line with American history than American liberals often let on.

Remembrance Day is right around the corner for Canadians. It’s called Armistice Day in the U.S.. Every year I’m always left wondering which war I’m paying tribute to, because I think almost all Western wars were unjustified. I think WW2 is the war most often explicitly memorialized on that day, and I think that is for good reason. It’s one of the few wars that in my view could be adequately justified on certain grounds (here I'm referring to the war itself, and not the specific actions taken in the war such as the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were completely unjustified). And sure the U.S. played a significant role in defeating the Nazis, yet it’s remarkable how significantly Cold War politics and narrative construction in North America wiped out the enormous contributions and sacrifices of the Soviet Union in WW2, which at the time was also an Allied Power. Yet I never learned this in school growing up in Canada. All I was told about focused on the role of the U.S., Canada, Britain, and France. To learn now that the U.S. racist legislation became an important template for Nazi Germany and offered the Nazis important precedents on which they could draw on makes the whole thing far more disturbing. This sort of thing reminds me of the sorts of things the staunch anti-communist Cold Warrior William Lyon Mackenzie King would say about Hitler:

"He (Hitler) smiled very pleasantly and indeed had a sort of appealing and affectionate look in his eyes. My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellow man. His face is much more prepossessing than his pictures would give the impression of. It is not that of a fiery overstrained nature but of a calm, passive man deeply and thoughtfully in earnest ... His eyes impressed me most of all. There was a liquid quality about them which indicates keen perception and profound sympathy. Calm, composed and one could see how particularly humble folk would have come to have profound love for the man. As I talked with him I could not but think of Joan of Arc..."

I understand Whitman’s book is on the U.S., but I want to emphasize here how in line Canada was with American race policy, because King passed the Chinese Immigration Act in 1923. This was around the time race laws like the Cable Act were passed, which Nazi jurists and lawyers were studying. Whitman writes about the Act in this way:

“the Cable Act included a race-based exception: until 1930, the act made a point of stripping American women of their citizenship if they were misguided enough to marry noncitizen Asian men. Saebisch, unaware that that provision of the Cable Act had been repealed, saluted it as a healthy example of legislation motivated by race consciousness: “If an American woman marries a Japanese man, then she does not retain her citizenship, as she would if she contracted other foreign marriages, but loses it upon marriage. This consequence is obviously meant as the well-deserved punishment for the female citizen who enters into a union with a person incapable of forming part of the Gemeinschaft.” This sort of race rule, expelling women who had polluted themselves through marriage to a “foreign body,” was of great interest to Nazi writers.”

So Canada was part of that milieu, and Whitman alludes to the racist social underpinnings of the Anglophone world more broadly and explicitly mentions Canada in this very important excerpt:

“It is important to note that the United States was not alone in introducing such measures. In particular, as the Nazis were very much aware, America was part of a broader historically British world. British imperialism deposited a network of “free white men’s democracies” around the globe, displaying a common commitment to maintaining what Columbia professor J. W. Burgess influentially praised in 1890 as “ethnically homogeneous” states. These included Canada and New Zealand; Australia, home of anti-Chinese agitation linked to similar agitation in California beginning in the late 1840s; and of course South Africa. A British demographer described this Anglophone world in 1936 this way: “[T]here are few gaps in the ring fence which has been erected in the last 50 years by the United States and the Dominions in order to exclude non-Europeans.” As we shall see, the Nazis knew this Anglophone pattern well, and looked for their models not only in the United States, but more broadly in the British Dominions.

Nevertheless by the latter part of the nineteenth century, it was the United States that occupied the place at the vanguard, in the eyes of Germans and others as well. From the late nineteenth century onward the United States came to be regarded as “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration,” and American immigration and naturalization practices were attracting plenty of notice in Europe well before the emergence of the Nazi movement.”

While I agree the US was in so many ways in the ‘vanguard’ of institutionalized racism globally, the point Whitman makes here regarding Anglophone countries is so important to contextualizing the rest of the book. It’s laughable to me to see white conservatives trying to defend statues of Winston Churchill during the most recent uprisings in the wake of George Floyd, and a handful of liberals trying to defend Churchill on the grounds that he helped defeat the Nazis. As Hobsbawm pointed out in his book Age of Extremes, Churchill entering WW2 had less to do with any anti-fascist impulse or sense of racial justice, and a lot more to do with his idea of what the British empire ‘stood for’ and that being under threat. More to my point on Churchill, I actually live close to a road named after this white supremacist who said stuff like “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph” and had no qualms about the racist underpinnings of British imperialism, unapologetically asserting:

"I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

And in light of saying stuff like that Churchill had no problem with British imperialism carrying out a sort of genocide in their colonies. This is something he wrote during his time in the North West Frontier of ‘British India’ committing acts of terrorism on behalf of British empire:

“We proceeded systematically, village by village, and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the great shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. So long as the villages were in the plain, this was quite easy. The tribesmen sat on the mountains and sullenly watched the destruction of their homes and means of livelihood. When, however, we had to attack the villages on the sides of the mountains they resisted fiercely, and we lost for every village two or three British officers and fifteen or twenty native soldiers. Whether it was worth it, I cannot tell. At any rate, at the end of a fortnight the valley was a desert, and honour was satisfied”

So Whitman I don't think even mentions Churchill, but I simply put examples from Canada and Britain to underscore that Anglophone countries outside the U.S. were and are not immune from this history of institutionalized racism, as is fairly obvious. Yes, I’m glad Churchill’s Britain, FDR’s U.S., and de Gaulle’s France did collaborate with Stalin’s Soviet Union to defeat Hitler and the Nazis, but it’s important to underscore how the racist impulses of Nazi fascism came from the same wellspring of American race law and the deeply embedded racism of American and Anglophone societies. And to turn WW2 commemoration into an exercise for patriotic values paying homage to Anglophone 'civilization' is in fact a disturbing exercise in high hypocrisy.

And to imagine there are still people out there that don’t believe institutionalized racism exists.

[Eve · Rating 1 out of 5]

read "the color of law" by richard rothstein along with this book because this book focuses too much on nazi germany & not enough on how USA racism is bad, especially considering the 2015-2018 part of the trump era this book came out in.

this author works for a ford foundation which sucks because ford sponsored nazis. this authors works at an ivy league college which are canvassing grounds for the cia, partly due to inhereted classism.

the book is divided into 3 chapters. this is bad because this means the audiobook had chapters of over 90 minutes & did a lot of comparisons, so it all blurred into each other, to the point that the bullet points i made were the main things i remembered after 5 hours of listening. i'm kind of offended about that sort of disorganization.

this gets really distressing because it'll make you aware of the sort of pipelines & talking-points nazis used to normalize genocide when campaigning in USA. like yeah, USA is fundamentally racist because it's a settler colonial state (which this book didn't name it as settler colonialization, more about "uniting" "europe" than the part about taking/colonizing land of other countries to then live in while genociding the local populace, including jews, gypsies, slavs, etc).

but this book took me into weird frames of mind of going down that pipeline as i was listening to it. like i was like hell no, hell no, but this book didn't do well at naming the resistances, it was a bit curl up & die. seriously, this book goes into how the aesthetics of "socialism" were perverted by nazis considering how brutal nazis treated german workers in favor of capitalists including ford.

basically in 2021 vox says that the electoral left with the milquetoast social democracy needs to embrace "white suburban" voters, considering how "white suburbia" is founded on white separatism to say the least, this is the exact template for nazis that is still being filled out under biden. https://web.archive.org/web/202106090... vox is considered left-wing in usa, and it's in the same conglomerate as MSNBC which is in touch with people who are democrats because they identify as democrats instead of left-wing policy agenda setters. to help emphasize how this goes down, in 2020 the biden campaign purged out of the democrat party anyone who didn't "believe in joementum" https://web.archive.org/web/202106090...

i don't necessarily hold that against the author, lol, but since history is somewhat done in order to forecast the future, and considering how that point was, like this book by not going thru the USA system enough ends up spreading lies about the left by not clarifying what the white nationalist welfare was in USA, while talking about it with nazi germany's. lying about the left is what nazis relied on. also since we would be reading this book in 2021 since we can't turn back time these failures that happened after the book's publishing are important to account for when sharing information in order to avoid screwing people over.

i don't remember if Whitman mentions ford & other USA capitalists sponsoring nazis, especially considering Hayek's "the road to serfdom" which is referenced a lot in order to contrast USA with Nazi Germany, was comissioned by USA bourgeoisie that paid into Nazi Germany when they figured out the Holocaust was going to get fully uncovered & wanted to save their own bourgeois asses. This book presents Hayek as a refugee/dissentant/resister against Nazi Germany when Hayek's work was literally paid to cover up USA Nazis. That was some wild shit. That fact came up in Kevin M Kruse's "One Nation Under God" which came out around 2015, I'm pretty sure that sort of fact should've been available to someone who studies Nazis.

does this book talk about redlining, such as how in USA the white separatist programs used especially during the 20th century were used to give welfare to "white" people (i put in quotations because there were a lot of demographics excluded such as families where the kids were born/conceived out of wedlock) & ghettoize black people? i don't know, the book wasn't that good at it. point being, "the color of law" by richard rothstein is going to be an important book to read either before or immediately after as if it's 1 book, when dealing with this book, because "hitler's american model" by james q whitman is more about legal theories. whitman's book is more for lawyers.

like it does help explain why biden would choose nazis over anti-capitalists, & why "leadership" instead of anti-liquidationism is a damn dogwhistle in USA, but similar to how as a Marxist I can be like dismissing way too much as "to be expected" of a bourgeois dictatorship, I can't give this book to white supremacists without worrying that I'll have led them down nazism. This book relies on already believing white supremacy is a bad thing. it is geared towards people who study nazi germany as if it were merely a historical country, due to how focused on legalities it is. Further, this book is rather important because of people who identify with the party of "democrat" & people who conflate leftists (revolutionary with reformist) along with "democrats" as "secularists", they need to read this book, but the conservatives who use "secularists" as I just laid it out are likely going to be too white supremacist to challenge it.

Let me be clear, I have met people who have defended life in fascist franco spain as having a good quality of life if you could shut the hell up long enough. like they lived in franco spain & then defended the franco regime. they did this in front of a relatively large group of people they had power over. this book was presented in anti-fascist & anti-racist circles as a way of showing how easily USA could fall into fascism. this book doesn't do enough to denounce USA neo-nazis. this book takes too much for granted.

oh, PS: I checked from the only other 1 star review this book has & apparently USA is called "a force for good", which is bullshit & is used to not critique hard enough against USA. to fact-check that other 1-star review yes USA has overthrown at least 50 govts, but nazis did overthrow a lot of countries in europe, not just germany (which to give an example, each of the native american tribes could probably be considered as a country/govt overthrown, as https://library.chatham.edu/whoseland can inform). to be clear, when bastards in the comments be like the nazis had "restricted" damage, it was only 15 years instead of centuries. like fuck off.

some take aways:
- researchers had often focused on the demographic of the discrimination targetting because of a false belief that racist systems are universal instead of localized. considering that the Nuremberg Laws took inspiration from both anti-black & anti-indigenous laws in USA (which were genocidal laws by the way), like yeah the author corrects this very basic error, yay, but whitman doesn't make a severe enough connection to settler colonialism considering how much he'll belabor other points such as we need to hold Nazi Germany accountable for Nazi Germany.
- "miscegenation" marriage laws were more of a concern for nazis, at least at the beginning
- the imprecise conflations that USA has regarding race based on perception, treatment, vs like heritage, is very intentional & meant to have enough loopholes
- USA tends to prefer decentralized networks or patchworks when it comes to enforcing white supremacy. the nazis took more the route of how political parties work in europe & had a centralized order. it was scary to them that party officials could interpret the law "in the spirit of the fuehrer" instead of "the fuehrer" verbatim, which resembles quite directly how cops in USA have free reign to murder civilians while judges & newsmedia aren't allowed to call it murder without a verdict, or even sentence the death penalty.
- if you want to follow up on how USA political parties are basically parodies of european political parties, then you should look up "the democrats: a critical history" by lance selfa, because a lot of USA's "conservative" arguments about nazi strictness are merely "arguments against" the party structures of european political parties in general.

[Yannick M · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book Dinesh D'Souza doesn't want you to know exists.

In the early 20th century, the US was widely perceived in Europe as the pioneer of modern, race-based legislation. This was not limited to the south. The US had explicitly race-based immigration laws until 1965. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in many states and they were not just aimed at black people. Don't forget, it was in the north were the second KKK controlled entire states.

So it is not surprising, when Nazi legal scholars wanted to 'safeguard the race' by legislation after they took power, America was the first place they looked to. They of course didn't copy American laws, but they sought to learn from them and mine them for ideas. Interestingly it was often the more radical lawyers that insisted most strongly on the need to learn from America.

This book focusses on the Nürnberg laws and their connection to American legislation. But it briefly touches on other ways in which the Nazis:
- Hitler sought to build a land empire for the nordic german race in the east and use slave labour to do it. This, he wrote long before he came to power, was what had happened in America. And the only way to compete with America in the 20th century was to do the same.
- The Eugenics movement was very much internationally connected and America played an important role.
- Many Nazis admired FDR, although they liked him for the kind of caricature that his critics thought he was.

If this was all, I would have given the book 4 stars, but it finishes with a very strong conclusion.

The Nazi regime is often viewed as the European civil law tradition brought to a totalitarian extreme. Instead, the author argues, the Nazi lawyers were very sympathetic to the Anglo-Saxon civil law tradition. They also viewed them selves as similar to the American legal-positivist movement. Like them they viewed themselves as fighting against jurisprudence divorced from normal life and politics. Many of the Nazis conservative (very racist, but non nazi) allies viewed themselves closer to the civil law tradition and often argued against some of the nazis excesses on just this ground.

The closer connection of American law with politics is still apparent in americas incredibly harsh criminal law for instance, in clear contrast to the European laws.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Americ...

I have a vague recollection of seeing "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" with my parents as a child. I remember a line by Spencer Tracy where he tells his daughter that her plans to marry Sidney Poitier would be "illegal in 20 states." That must have been 1967, the same year that the United States Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws.

I am pushing 60. 1967 was not so long ago. It's amazing how much things have changed in the space of a single lifetime.

"Hitler's American Model" by James Q. Whitman takes us back to a period when American led the world in race law.

Briefly, in 1934, Hitler's new regime wanted to bring its racial ideas into reality. The German legal profession tackled this issue as it handled most legal problems by performing a survey of race laws around the world in order to find precedents. This search brought it to America, where states had pioneered racial laws that prohibited miscegenation and made non-white racial minorities into second-class citizens. America also had progressive laws allowing for the sterilization of the disable for eugenics reasons.

Whitman examines the history and state of American racial law as of the 1930s. Whitman does not claim that Germans modeled their race law on the American version. The Germans recognized the differences between the situation of non-whites in America and Jews in Germany as preventing any such use. Moreover, the professional German lawyers were horrified at the legal treatment of minorities. The German legal class was committed to its commitment to a legal system that defined violations in such a way as to limit judicial discretion. On the other hand, the Nazi zealots found American common law an inspiration since it enabled judges to "work toward Hitler" by importing Nazi principles into the formation of laws on a case by case basis.

As Whitman points out, several times, it is a mistake to claim that the Nazis would not have enacted the Nuremberg laws without the American model or that the American model provided an inspiration for Nazis, but the Nazis did find a way to use American law, particularly in their internal debates between the zealots and the legalists.

The history here is fascinating as background for Nazi actions. For example, the Swastika was adopted as the official flag of the Nazi state as the first Nuremberg law because of a riot of New York Jews concerning the ship "Bremen" and a judicial opinion by Jewish magistrate Brodsky describing the Nazi flag as a "pirate flag." This gave the Nazis the excuse to make the Swastika the national flag. This is an obscure bit of history that exemplifies the contingent nature of history, and the willingness of the Nazis to use actions of foreign Jews to justify domestic actions.

Also interesting was the American part of the history. Whitman says that miscegenation laws were not known outside of the American context. This surprises me, but it may be correct. Catholic cultures were not as racist as Protestant countries.[See e.g., [[ASIN:B00LPMJ1CK Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law]] - certainly not as racist when it came to intermarriage. So, that basically leaves the Anglophone world as providing the Protestant variant, which basically leaves America as the country that might be the outlier from global policy.

On the other hand, although something like 30 states had anti-miscegenation laws at some point, that leaves 20 that never had anti-miscegenation laws at any time, and of the remaining 30, a good number, including California, had repealed those laws. Likewise, although the Immigration Act of 1924 was incredibly racist in prohibiting immigration or citizenship of non-whites, in 1964 this policy was totally repudiated. (The Supreme Court decision in US v. Thind (1923), involving the question of whether a high class Hindu qualified as "Caucasian" is an eye-opening bit of race science. Eventually, however, the court rejects science and goes with a common law approach to defining Caucasian. Thind is not taught in law school; as a bit of history it is illuminating.)

So, interestingly, despite the Nazis' fulsome praise for America as the pioneer of race law, there was a different thread of American law that was less supportive of their policies.

Another question I have is what role the German involvement in South-west Africa, particularly the Herero Genocide, played their legal deliberations. Did the Germans have any laws pertaining to interracial marriages? It seems like a good area for future inquiry.

Whitman points to other affinities between National Socialism and America, namely the commitment of both the Nazis and the New Deal for "legal realism," which basically means dispensing with formalities in favor of imposing social policy on pragmatic grounds. Whitman writes:

"There was more to “Realism” in New Deal America and Nazi Germany than I can explore here; the topic requires a book of its own. Here I would like to emphasize only the obvious point: The “realists” of both countries shared the same eagerness to smash the obstacles that “formalistic” legal science put in the way of “life” and politics—and “life” in both New Deal America and Nazi Germany did not include only economic programs designed to lift the two countries out of the Depression. “Life” also involved racism.
It is here that the affinities between the realisms of Nazi Germany and New Deal America should really begin to make us shift uneasily in our seats. American Legal Realism was not just the possession of liberals like Karl Llewellyn; there were also many prominent American racists of the 1930s who embraced it.73 The “realistic” attitude in American law did not just involve yielding to political decision makers when it came to economic legislation; it was also involved yielding to political decision makers when it came to racist legislation. And while some prominent realists spoke out against American racism, during the 1930s, most passed over the race question in silence.74 In that sense the American Legal Realism of the early 1930s was entirely at home in the early New Deal, founded as it was on the Mephistophelean bargain between economic reformers and southern racists. The same “realistic” legal philosophy that could be invoked to defend the “bold [economic] experiments” of FDR could also be invoked to defend the racism of the Southern Democratic Party."

It makes a person wonder about the "zeitgeist."

Whitman is handling a touchy subject that can provoke a negative reaction in so many different ways. He has done a good job of addressing the issues in a fair and scholarly way. I found the book interesting. I think it hit the right scholarly note.

[704graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

The amount of apologia for American racism is frankly disgusting and does a disservice to the decent research into German-American judicial exchange. There is an absurd amount of mental gymnastics at the beginning of each section, all to make America seem as though it has put its racist policies of post-Reconstruction in the past. It feels at times as though half the book is trying to soften the blow of the similarities of the post-Reconstruction USA and Nazi Germany. This incessant hand-wringing of differences overplays the USA’s incredibly minor role in defeating Nazi Germany in WWII as a moral opponent to Fascism. This constant prefacing of America’s supposed anti-fascism does much of the work of fascism itself; redirecting a critical eye on pre-war American corporate collusion with the Nazis, the size and influence of the “America First” movement, and general indifference of the US government towards the crimes against humanity that were being perpetrated by the Nazis. The Author’s refusal to examine American-German relations also conveniently absolves the more unsavory actions of the post-war US. Especially the American backing of regimes like the Nazi-led Bonn Republic (West Germany), the large number of Japanese and Nazi war criminals that were given refuge by the US (Operation Paperclip, MK Ultra, etc.), or the large amount of monetary and military support for ex-Nazi terrorism in the USSR (Gehlen Org, OUN/UPA, etc.).

Given that this book was written in 2018 I understand that the American judicial system was regarded in some circles as just and followed a magical “arc of progress”. This view, that the author seems to hold throughout the book, is a phenomenally naive and dangerously unserious approach to American law that has given way to the current far-right Roberts Court. It is reluctant to confront the reality of its own subject, a reluctance which strains under the weight of its own well-done and meticulous research.

The actual research that was conducted is very well done and comprehensive. The presentation of that research after pages and pages of qualifiers diminishes the impact that this scholarship can have.