Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration

Aeon Essays ^ | 2017 | James Q Whitman

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American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany* [PDF]

https://l1nq.com/UbMUs

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Indeed. No leaf left unturned. Narrative is everything!

[Angelino97]

This is old news.

The famous Hitler biographer, John Toland, reported that Hiter drew inspiration from both American Indian reservations and British concentration camps in the Boer War.

Hitler also favorably compared America's race laws and attitudes (such as the One Drop Rule) to Latin America, where the Spanish Empire encouraged intermarriage with the natives. Hitler attributed North America's dominance over South America to the One Drop Raw, which he nevertheless regarded as too extreme.

[Angelino97]

Wait a second. I thought they took cues from the way ‘native Americans’ were treated.

They did. Hitler biographer John Toland reports that Hitler drew inspiration from both Indian reservations and British concentration camps in the Boer War.

But there's no contradiction. The Nazis could easily draw inspiration from multiple sources.

But I'm sure you know that.

[Angelino97]

There were pogroms against Jews way back into the 19th century. There were no pogroms against blacks in the United States.

There were "mass lynchings" against blacks in the U.S. Those are pogroms by another name.

[Angelino97]

I understand the Germans got the idea for the concentration camps from what the British did in South Africa during The Boer War.

They did. And from American Indian reservations.

[Zhang Fei]

[There were “mass lynchings” against blacks in the U.S. Those are pogroms by another name.]

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The vast majority of lynchings were carried out against suspected criminals, including rapists, murderers and horse thieves. The black-run Tuskegee Institute has estimated about 4500 lynchings over 58 years, or about 80 per year, ~60 of them black.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States
[Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration (c. 1916–1970) out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism.[6] A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape, attempted rape, or other forms of sexual assault were the second most common accusation; these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites[citation needed]. One study found that there were “4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese.”[7]]

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With a handful of exceptions involving genuine inter-communal violence, not always initiated by whites, lynchings were more an artifact of frontier justice than anything remotely similar to Germany’s long history of murdering Jews for fun and profit.

Imagine Gazans consecrating 10/7, making the site of the massacre a place of pilgrimage. That’s exactly what Germans did for 6 centuries after butchering a bunch of Jews and stealing their property.

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https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2015-09-30/ty-article/.premium/1338-knights-kill-deggendorfs-jews/0000017f-e3fd-d7b2-a77f-e3ffa2760000
[Only six centuries after the massacre, in 1992, did the bishop of nearby Regensburg, Manfred Mueller, see fit to call for an end to the Deggendorfer Gnad (“grace”), as the pilgrimage came to be called.

Bishop Muller was prompted to act after being presented with the conclusions of a study undertaken by historian Manfred Eder. According to Eder, the 1338 slaughter had come at a time of economic recession, which was in part caused by an invasion of locusts, which destroyed the local crops. Unable to repay their debts to the town’s Jewish moneylenders, the burghers and gentry eliminated those debts by eliminating the Jews.

Exoneration for the murderers
The same year, Henry XIV, the duke of Bavaria, officially pardoned Deggendorf’s gentiles for the killings - and granted them permission to retain any possessions of the Jews they may have confiscated during the pogrom.

The church built on the site of the synagogue, which still stands today, is called the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre. Its construction was financed with the money taken from the Jews.

Inside is a dedication, in German rhyme, explaining the building’s origins, and moving up the cycle of events by a year, to 1337: “In the year of the Lord 1337, on the day after St. Michael’s Day, Michaelmas, the Jews were slain, and the city burned. God’s body [namely, the Host] was found there, as [pious] women and men saw, and [it was] there [they] undertook to build a House of God” (as translated by Mitchell B. Merback, in “Pilgrimage and Pogrom.”)

Other written sources flesh out the story of the “Host desecration” with extensive detail, and provide examples of the miracles that later took place at the site, thus providing a basis for the transformation of the church into a place of pilgrimage. By 1737, the 400th anniversary of the alleged blasphemy and slaughter, the number of pilgrims who flocked to the church is said to have exceeded 100,000.]

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Only a tiny fraction of the Germans involved in butchering 6m Jews was even charged, let alone got the death penalty. Of the few hundred sentenced to death, many escaped the gallows. Germany got rid of the death penalty in an era when the majority favored it for ordinary crimes, because the specter of Jew killers being hanged smelled too much of victor’s justice. Better a hundred ordinary murderers go free than a single murderer of Jews be hanged.

[Angelino97]

Only a tiny fraction of the Germans involved in butchering 6m Jews was even charged, let alone got the death penalty.

No one involved in the butchering of tens of millions of mostly gentiles in the Communist Holocaust were charged (a disproportionate number of whose butchers were Jews).

So it kind of evens out.

I doubt Israel vetted any of these Reds, to see if they had committed atrocities, before being admitted to Israel: The forgotten Jews of the Red Army.