Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration

Aeon Essays ^ | 2017 | James Q Whitman

[CondoleezzaProtege]

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws…

That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the laws of the United States of America.

At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation to the Third Reich. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a ‘Negro’ or a ‘Mongol’, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room.

This story might seem incredible. Why would the Nazis have felt the need to take lessons in racism from anybody? Why, most especially, would they have looked to the US? Whatever its failings, after all, the US is the home of a great liberal and democratic tradition. Moreover, the Jews of the US – however many obstacles they might have confronted in the early 20th century – never faced state-sponsored persecution. And, in the end, Americans made immense sacrifices in the struggle to defeat Hitler.

Nevertheless the evidence is there, and we cannot read it out of either German or American history.

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TOPICS: History
KEYWORDS: antisemitism; jews; jimcrow; nativeamericans; nazigermany; nazism; nuremberg; racism; segregation

[CondoleezzaProtege]

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

https://l1nq.com/UbMUs

[CondoleezzaProtege]

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.

[Zhang Fei]

[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).]

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So 14th century Germans decided to avenge the people who died in a Russian dynastic transition 600 years later? Or Hitler decided to avenge the Russians who died in that transition, whom he wanted to exterminate anyway, so he could repopulate Russia with Germans? The problem with Nazis who want to claim the mantle of Russia’s avenger is that they basically wanted the Russians dead.

Note that there’s a lot of exaggeration around deaths from Communism because the narrative generally avoids the issue of what previously happened around dynastic transitions. The switch from Rurikids to Romanovs killed 1/3 of the Russian population. This was a combo of several things - (1) deciding which faction would win (2) deciding which faction leader would rule, (3) getting rid of rival faction leaders, (4) getting rid of entire populations of potential rebels, all of which involved knock-down, drag-out conflict and large scale atrocity. Quite apart from the fighting and atrocities, this often also involved mass famine, as war disrupted normal economic activity, and supplies were seized from reluctant civilians to feed and clothe armies with no routine way of raising funds because they weren’t established governments.

Note also that an estimated 5% of Russia’s Jewish population died during the Bolshevik Civil War as a result of Russian pogroms. For many Jews, the choice was between joining the Reds or being killed by the Whites. So those who couldn’t flee Russia often joined the Reds. But the number of Russians who died during Russian Civil War and Great Terror combined was an unremarkable 6% of the Russian population (similar to the Jewish toll) compared to the 33% of the Rurikid to Romanov transition.

[Zhang Fei]

[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).]

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This is something Ukrainians and Balts might use to justify their collaboration with Germans in the butchery of Jews during the Holocaust. But what business was it of the Germans what Jews did as Reds during the Bolshevik Revolution to stay alive and prevent the resurgence of the Whites who killed them at every opportunity? And if every last Jew deserved to be killed, didn’t every last German?

[Morgana]

The Nazis were taking notes from the American Birth Control League which later changed it’s name to Planned Parenthood.

[GingisK]

It is historical fact that the Japanese modeled the Baton Death March after the Trail of Tears.

[Angelino97]

But what business was it of the Germans what Jews did as Reds during the Bolshevik Revolution to stay alive ...

"To stay alive"?

For Jews, there is never justification for any crime done against Jews. Yet apparently, many justifications for crimes Jews commit against gentiles.

... and prevent the resurgence of the Whites who killed them at every opportunity?

"At every opportunity"?

Exaggerate much?

The Tsar wasn't that bad. Nikolai Tolstoy (Leo's grandson), in Stalin's Secret War, wrote that the Romanovs had executed a few thousand people during their 300 year reign. The Bolsheviks executed hundreds of thousands in only the first six months.

In the Russian Civil War, the Whites were the good guys, the Reds the bad guys.

[odawg]

Dr. Thomas Sowell researched lynchings after the Civil War and said there were 500 lynchings between 1865 and 1950 in the South. That is a lot of people but maybe one day’s work in Nazi Germany.

[odawg]

“It involved citizens at every level in the entire country to accomplish, not just a few ‘demoniacs.’ People did what they did because they wanted to follow Hitler yes, but also obey the LAW.”

You are so full of crap and turning out to be extremely deceptive. It did not involve the citenzry, it was strictly government thugs and the military.

Also, after the war, about as many German civilians - men, women, and children — were killed for revenge as Jews were killed. Look that up.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

After the war was the Marshall Plan. And US poured money and food and aid into Germany. Candy, chocolates, and treats dropped by plane via the Berlin Airlift in fact. And to this day US still offsets Germany’s defense via NATO and has bases there.

No one wanted a First World War humiliation fest - as that was part of what rallied all of Germany to do Hitler’s bidding in the first place. He promised to recover their pride and rebuild their race.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Teachers ratted their Jewish or other suspect students. Students ratted out their friends. Bosses ratted out their staff. And vice versa. Neighbors reported suspicious activity…Doctors calmly took the vitals signs of newcomers to camp. Secretaries typed in data and checked off address books, passports, and files. Custodians prepared and maintained the gas chambers.

That’s what participation meant…

[Lurker]

Facts are not racist.

L

[Lurker]

Playing Hall Monitor isn’t your call.

See something that offends your delicate sensibilities? Ping the moderators. Whine to them.

If they don’t like it they’ll take action.

Until that happens you can stow the Race Card. Neither that nor American Express are taken here.

Now be a dear and go make some sandwiches for the grownups.

L

[Angelino97]

The person I responded to was comparing lynchings to pogroms, not lynchings to Nazi Germany.

Mass lynchings are indeed comparable to pogroms.