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James Q. Whitman is an American lawyer, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His critically acclaimed 2017 book is well researched. Its title is Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.¹²⁰

Whitman’s book provides an understanding of U.S. influences on the drafting of Nazi race laws. No, there were no U.S. laws in the 1930s establishing mass murder by poison gas in concentration camps. But neither were the Nazis looking for such laws. Nazis lawyers were looking for models of functioning laws on race, laws that effectively defined race in some way despite the obvious scientific difficulties, laws that restricted immigration, citizenship rights, and interracial marriage. In the early 20th century the recognized world leader in such things was the United States.

Whitman quotes from the transcripts of Nazi meetings, internal documents, and published articles and books. There is no doubt of the role that U.S. (state, not just federal) legal models played in the development of the Nuremberg Laws. The 1930s was a time, we should recall, when Jews in Germany and African Americans (primarily, but others too) in the United States were lynched. It was also a time when U.S. immigration laws used national origin as a means of discrimination that Hitler praised in Mein Kampf.

It was also a time of de facto second-class citizenship in the United States for blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and others. Thirty U.S. states had systems of laws banning interracial marriage of various sorts — something the Nazis could find nowhere else and studied in comprehensive detail, among other things for the examples of how the races were defined. The U.S. had also shown how to conquer territories of undesirables, such as in the Philippines or Puerto Rico, incorporate them into an empire that denied them first-class citizenship rights, but present itself to the world as a model of democracy. Up until 1930 a U.S. woman could lose her citizenship if she married a non-citizen Asian man.

The most radical of the Nazis, not the moderates, in their deliberations were the advocates for the U.S. models. But even they believed some of the U.S. systems simply went too far. The “one-drop” rule for defining a colored person was considered too harsh, for example, as opposed to defining a Jew as someone with three or more Jewish grandparents (how those grandparents were defined as Jewish is another matter; it was the willingness to ignore logic and science in all such laws that was most of the attraction). The Nazis also defined as Jewish someone with only two Jewish grandparents who met other criteria. In this broadening of the definition of a race to things like behavior and appearance, the U.S. laws were also a model.

One of many U.S. state laws that Nazis examined was this from Maryland:

“All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and a member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race . . . [skipping over many variations] . . . are forever prohibited . . . punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months nor more than ten years.”

The Nazis of course examined and admired the Jim Crow laws of segregation as well but determined that such a regime would only work against an impoverished oppressed group. German Jews, they reasoned, were too rich and powerful to be segregated. Some of the Nazi lawyers in the 1930s, before Nazi policy had become mass murder, also found the extent of the U.S. segregation laws too extreme. But Nazis admired racist statements from contemporary U.S. pundits and authorities back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Some argued that because segregation was de facto established in the U.S. South despite a Constitution mandating equality, this proved that segregation was a powerful, natural, and inevitable force. In other words, U.S. practice allowed Nazis to more easily think of their own desired practices in the early years of their madness as normal.

In 1935, a week after Hitler had proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, a group of Nazi lawyers sailed to New York to study U.S. law. There, they were protested by Jews but hosted by the New York City Bar Association.

U.S. laws on miscegenation lasted until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Vicious and bigoted U.S. policies on immigration and refugees are alive and well today. Whitman examines the U.S. legal tradition, noting much that is to admire in it, but pointing to its political or democratic nature as something that the Nazis found preferable to the inflexibility of an independent judiciary. To this day, the U.S. elects prosecutors, imposes Nazi-like habitual offender (or three-strikes-you’re-out) sentences, uses the death penalty, employs jailhouse snitches’ testimony in exchange for release, locks up more people than anywhere else on earth, and does so in an extremely racist manner. To this day, racism is alive in U.S. politics. What right-wing dictators admire in Donald Trump’s nation is not all new and not all different from what fascists admired 80 or 90 years ago.

It’s worth repeating the obvious: the United States was not and is not Nazi Germany. And that is a very good thing. But what if a Wall Street coup had succeeded? What if the United States had been bombed flat and faced defeat from abroad while demonizing a domestic scapegoat? Who can really say it couldn’t have or still couldn’t happen here?

Whitman suggests that Germans do not write about foreign influence on Nazism so as not to appear to be shifting blame. For similar reasons many Germans refuse to oppose the slaughter of and mistreatment of Palestinians. We can fault such positions as going overboard. But why is it that U.S. writers rarely write about U.S. influence on Nazism? Why, for that matter, do we not learn about U.S. crimes, like slavery or Native American genocide, in the way that Germans learn about German crimes?

Another book worth reading for a grasp of U.S. race relations at the time of World War II and in the years leading up to it is Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon documents how the institution of slavery in the U.S. South largely ended for as long as 20 years in some places upon completion of the U.S. Civil War. And then it was back again, in a slightly different form, reduced but still widespread, publicly known and accepted in certain places -- right up to World War II.¹²¹

During widely publicized trials of slave owners for the crime of slavery in 1903 -- trials that did virtually nothing to end the pervasive practice -- the Montgomery Advertiser editorialized: “Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies, many of whom were federal officials, against whose acts our people were practically powerless.” This was a publicly acceptable position in Alabama in 1903: slavery should be tolerated because of the evils committed by the North during the war and during the occupation that followed.

Across much of the Deep South, a system of petty, even meaningless, crimes, such as “vagrancy,” created the threat of arrest for any black person. Upon arrest, a black man would be presented with a debt to pay through years of hard labor. The way to protect oneself from being put into one of the hundreds of forced labor camps was to put oneself in debt to and under the protection of a white owner. The 13th Amendment sanctions slavery for convicts, and no statute prohibited slavery until the 1950s. All that was needed for the pretense of legality was the equivalent of today’s plea bargain.

Not only did slavery not fully end following the U.S. Civil War, but for many thousands it was worsened. The antebellum slave owner typically had a financial interest in keeping an enslaved person alive and healthy enough to work. A mine or mill that purchased the work of hundreds of convicts had no interest in their futures beyond the term of their sentences. In fact, local governments would replace a convict who died with another, so there was no economic reason not to work them to death. Mortality rates for leased-out convicts in Alabama were as high as 45 percent per year.

Enslaved Americans after the “ending of slavery” were bought and sold, chained by the ankles and necks at night, whipped to death, waterboarded, and murdered at the discretion of their owners, such as U.S. Steel Corporation which purchased mines near Birmingham where generations of “free” people were worked to death underground.

The threat of that fate hung over every black man not enduring it, as well as the threat of lynching that escalated in the early 20th century along with newly pseudo-scientific justifications for racism. “God ordained the southern white man to teach the lessons of Aryan supremacy,” declared Woodrow Wilson’s friend Thomas Dixon, author of the book and play The Clansman, which became the film Birth of a Nation.

Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government finally decided to take prosecuting slavery seriously, to counter possible criticism from Germany or Japan.

The vicious racism and antisemitism and homophobia and assorted other bigotries of the Nazis are fully the fault of the Nazis. But blame is unlimited. Giving it to someone does not take it away from anyone else. It’s hard to know how the laws stripping Jews of rights would have been developed in Germany without the American model. It’s easy to grasp that the United States did not need to create that model, that it could have done better and can do better in the future. As I write this, California is using prisoners to fight forest fires, paying them $1 an hour, and public scandals over police murders of black men are frequent occurrences.

As racist as the U.S. was prior to WWII, it was made more racist by WWII -- something that happens with each major war. In 2018, Frontline PBS and ProPublica reporter A. C. Thompson produced a film called “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” in which Thompson interviewed professor Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America.¹²²

KATHLEEN BELEW: One thing to understand is that throughout American history there’s always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements—those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.

A. C. THOMPSON: Postwar periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity?

KATHLEEN BELEW: Always. Yes.

A. C. THOMPSON: Wow.

A. C. THOMPSON: Belew outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement: George Lincoln Rockwell, World War II veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party; Richard Butler, World War II veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations; Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK; Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber.

KATHLEEN BELEW: It’s important to remember, too, that returning veterans that join this movement, and active-duty troops, we’re talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant, percentage of veterans. But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training.

It’s not hard to understand how wars feed off racism and feed back into it. William Halsey, who commanded the United States’ naval forces in the South Pacific during WWII, thought of his mission as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.¹²³ LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: “This is the only way.”¹²⁴ Dr. Seuss, whose The Butter Battle Book depicts war as idiocy, and who thought child refugees should be saved, churned out racist war propaganda, including a cartoon depicting Germans and Japanese as insects being sprayed with insecticide by Uncle Sam,¹²⁵ and another with the caption “Slap that Jap! Bugswatters cost money!”¹²⁶

A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth.¹²⁷ War correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, “What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.”¹²⁸

In 1942, with the assistance of the Census Bureau, the United States locked up 110,000 Japanese Americans and Japanese in various internment camps, primarily on the West Coast, where they were identified by numbers rather than names. This action, taken by President Roosevelt, was supported two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.¹²⁹

In 1943 off-duty white U.S. troops attacked Latinos and African Americans in Los Angeles’ “zoot suit riots,” stripping and beating them in the streets in a manner that would likely have made Hitler proud. The Los Angeles City Council, in a remarkable effort to blame the victims, responded by banning the style of clothing worn by Mexican immigrants called the zoot suit.¹³⁰

When U.S. troops were crammed onto the Queen Mary in 1945 headed for the European war, blacks were kept apart from whites and stowed in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from fresh air, in the same location in which blacks had been brought to America from Africa centuries before.¹³¹

African American soldiers who survived World War II could not legally return home to many parts of the United States if they had married white women overseas. Black soldiers who returned to the Southern United States sometimes found themselves required to sit in the back of streetcars so that Nazi prisoners of war could sit in the front.¹³² White soldiers who had married Asians were up against the same anti-miscegenation laws in 15 states.

Whatever the United States fought WWII for -- and we’ve seen that it wasn’t to save the Jews -- it surely wasn’t to oppose any sort of racist injustice. Nor was it to put an end to the imperial conquest of territory.

During World War II the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave. The island has been devastated. In 1942, the U.S. Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman made up his mind that the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll had no right to their island in 1946. He had them evicted and dumped as refugees on other islands without means of support. In the coming years, the United States would remove 147 people from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various depopulated and still-populated islands uninhabitable, leading to further displacements. Up through the 1960s, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of people from Kwajalein Atoll. A super-densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye.

Also during WWII, the United States evicted all native people, but not whites, from their homes in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, and put them into camps lacking food, water, or basic hygiene. Ten percent of them died.¹³³ In Hawaii, the U.S. government declined to remove the workforce desired by wealthy, white plantation owners, but did impose martial law and lock up 2,000 people of Japanese descent.¹³⁴

On Vieques, off Puerto Rico, the U.S. Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947, announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961, but was forced to back off and -- in 2003 -- to stop bombing the island. On nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s.¹³⁵

Beginning during World War II but continuing right through the 1950s, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans, or half the population, from their land, forcing people into refugee camps and shipping thousands of them off to Bolivia -- where land and money were promised but not delivered.¹³⁶

In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark to remove 150 Inughuit people from Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get out or face bulldozers. They are being denied the right to return.¹³⁷

Between 1968 and 1973, the United States and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants of Diego Garcia, rounding people up and forcing them onto boats while killing their dogs in a gas chamber and seizing possession of their entire homeland for the use of the U.S. military. They are being denied the right to return.¹³⁸

When I say that WWII was not fought to save the Jews or to oppose racism or imperialism, I mean both that the U.S. government was not so motivated and that the U.S. public and U.S. recruits were not so motivated. The public actually had very little say in the matter. President Franklin Roosevelt had blocked passage of the Ludlow Amendment that would have put the decision to go to war to a public vote. As a result, the public got no vote and did not even have to be persuaded of a justification. As Jacques R. Pauwels puts it in The Myth of the Good War,

“A Gallup poll of September 1942 revealed that 40 per cent of Americans had no idea at all why their country was involved in the war, and that less than one-quarter of Americans had ever heard of the Atlantic Charter. Only 7 per cent were able to name one of the ‘four freedoms.’ For the American people, the war was not a crusade for freedom and democracy but simply, as Fortune magazine wrote, ‘a painful necessity’ -- a deplorable but inescapable misfortune.”¹³⁹