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Laurie Voss (@[email protected])
An interesting thing I learned from Eleanor Roosevelt's biography is that Hitler used the USA's treatment of black people as justification for his treatment of Jews, and this was widely regarded *in the USA* as a reasonable point and a reason to stay out of the war: "we would have to stop...
mstdn.party
How the Nazis Were Inspired by Jim Crow | HISTORY
To craft legal discrimination, the Third Reich studied the United States.
www.history.com
In 1935, Nazi Germany passed two radically discriminatory pieces of legislation: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. Together, these were known as the Nuremberg Laws, and they laid the legal groundwork for the persecution of Jewish people during the Holocaust and World War II.
When the Nazis set out to legally disenfranchise and discriminate against Jewish citizens, they weren’t just coming up with ideas out of thin air. They closely studied the laws of another country. According to James Q. Whitman, author of Hitler’s American Model, that country was the United States. “America in the early 20th century was the leading racist jurisdiction in the world,” says Whitman, who is a professor at Yale Law School. “Nazi lawyers, as a result, were interested in, looked very closely at, [and] were ultimately influenced by American race law.”
In particular, Nazis admired the Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against Black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.
Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn’t go far enough. “One of the most striking Nazi views was that Jim Crow was a suitable racist program in the United States because American Blacks were already oppressed and poor,” he says. “But then in Germany, by contrast, where the Jews (as the Nazis imagined it) were rich and powerful, it was necessary to take more severe measures.”