APPLIED DARWINISM:

As set forth in his groundbreaking and disquieting 2017 book Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton University Press), Professor Whitman found--contrary to many previous historians--that the Nazis had carefully studied American race law and social policies in developing the notoriously racist and antisemitic Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and other racist policies. He cautions, however, that whatever the influence of American law, the Nazis were ultimately the authors of their own monstrous schemes.

The history Professor Whitman reveals is profound and often heartbreaking. Hitler and his Nazi adherents admired many aspects of US law and history while ignoring our constitutional restraints and the ideal of egalitarianism. In Mein Kampf, penned almost a decade before he became German Chancellor in 1933, Hitler openly praised the United States as the world leader in racist policies and laws and in establishing a racist social order. Hitler admired restrictive US immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans and mostly excluded other nationalities, ethnicities and races. He admired American criminal laws forbidding miscegenation and particularly the mixed marriages or sexual relations between white and Black citizens. He admired Jim Crow segregation laws and other white supremacist provisions that effectively robbed African Americans of civil rights and made them second-class citizens. He admired American eugenics that prized white supremacy and led to laws that encouraged sterilization of the "feebleminded" and others found somehow defective. And, as a devoted reader of Karl May--the German pulp fiction writer who romanticized the conquest of the American West by bold white men--Hitler admired the mass extermination of Native Americans by "Nordic" settlers in the nineteenth century and the subsequent isolation of most Indigenous survivors on reservations.           

In his book, Professor Whitman carefully examines the evolution of American laws that discriminated against non-whites from the Naturalization Act of 1790 that specifically opened naturalization to "any alien, being a free white person" to the post-Civil War Jim Crow segregation laws, as well as miscegenation laws from as early as 1691, and extremely restrictive immigration laws such as the racist Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. He also notes the power of American eugenics and legalization of sterilization for the "unfit" in most states.

Professor Whitman also recounts the Nazi fascination with, and reference to, our law as they drafted racist laws that deprived Jews of rights of citizenship and, eventually, included other non-Aryans. He found ample evidence of serious discussion and frank modeling of legislation based on US law and policies that privileged white citizens at the expense of others. A notorious example, the Nazi Nuremberg laws of 1935, essentially robbed Jews of all rights of German citizenship and criminalized mixed marriages and sexual relationship between Jews and Aryans.

Ironically, Professor Whitman found that some Nazi race laws were less harsh than American legislation. For example, the Nazis found too extreme the American rule that "even one-drop" of African American blood made a person Black, as touted by fierce segregationists such as Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo. The Nazis went back two generations in tracing Jewish heritage rather than back countless generations as the American "one-drop" rule permitted.

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