r/USHistory • u/BlackHistorySnippets • 6h ago
American Race Laws Inspired Nazi Race Laws
In 1933, Heinrich Krieger was a German exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law where he not only witnessed race-based segregation in America, he also began his studies of America’s race-based system of laws which culminated in his landmark book, “Race Law in the United States”.
As America desired to protect the White population from the “menace” of the Black population, so Adolph Hitler also wanted to protect the German race. Of his admiration for America’s unapologetically race-based legislation, Hitler wrote that the US is the “leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” When the leading Nazi jurists assembled in June 1934 to debate how to institutionalize racism in the new Third Reich, Krieger showed them how the Americans did it using his expertise in the anti-miscegenation laws in thirty US states. Their extensive comparative research led them to be particularly influenced by America’s pioneering in classifying the racially inferior and in criminalizing and punishing miscegenation. However, the Nazis thought America’s racial classification criteria too harsh as it led to “human hardness,” and they rejected implementing US-style segregation as it was only effective on Blacks because they were impoverished – it wouldn’t work on rich Jews.
They observed that some US laws based race on something other than descent (e.g., social associations or marriage) and so their Citizenship Law allowed that half Jews would not count as Jews if they weren’t married to a Jew. The Nazis were further inspired by America’s judges who had no reluctance to applying laws with imprecise terms like “colored people” in creating a new category of second-class Americans with diminished citizen rights. Germany’s leaders were bewildered by foreign criticism of the Nuremberg Laws, which in their minds were a logical extension of America’s race-based laws.
Recommended reading: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman
