In his new book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, legal scholar James Q. Whitman shows that America’s regime of legal discrimination drew the admiration of the most notorious “race realists” of the 20th century, the Nazi regime. The mutual regard of Nazi and US eugenicists is well known to historians of scientific racism. (Edwin Black’s 2003 War Against the Weak brings together many threads of this story.) We know, for instance, that Hitler wrote a fan letter to Grant, and that his writings and speeches exhibited an approving awareness of US compulsory sterilization laws, racial restrictions on immigration, and—especially—exterminatory policies toward Native Americans.
On the US side, the eugenicist Harry Laughlin published a translation of the 1933 German Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny in his Eugenical News. He noted proudly that the Nazi law, like several similar American state laws, was patterned on a model that he drafted. As late as 1940, the American writer Lothrop Stoddard published a book subtitled “A Sympathetic Report from Hitler’s Wartime Reich.” By then, admiration for Germany was unfashionable, but for most of his career Stoddard had been a respected expert on international relations whose work, alongside Grant’s, brought the idea of “race suicide” into the scientific mainstream.
Whitman brings legal theory into this story, showing that the jurists charged with working out the early phases of the Nazi legal regime showed intense interest in American racial jurisprudence. Nazi thinkers examined legal practices in other settler colonial states as well (and while Whitman only mentions it in passing, German scientists and administrators had already used German-controlled South West Africa—now Namibia—as a laboratory and testing ground for techniques of racial degradation and extermination). Nonetheless, the Nazi lawyers Whitman discusses saw the United States as “the leading racist jurisdiction”—the prototype of a legal regime addressing how a Nordic Volk could deal with foreign races living in their midst. As a result, they went on study trips to the US; published articles, books, and bureaucratic reports on American legal practices; and met with American legal experts.
Drawing on meeting transcripts, memos, and published work, Whitman argues that US models inspired the lawyers working to craft the Nuremburg laws that stripped Jews of citizenship, barred mixed marriages, and prohibited what the Americans called “miscegenation.” Dismayingly, the US example appealed primarily to the most extreme Nazi thinkers.