Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

Author:James Q. Whitman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

EVALUATING AMERICAN INFLUENCE

Like American immigration and citizenship law, American miscegenation law was thus a regular point of reference during the years when the Nuremberg Laws emerged. The question remains whether we can say that the Nazis were in some meaningful way directly “influenced” by American miscegenation practice. The answer to that question is an (inevitably controversial) yes.

First of all it is essential to reject once and for all the proposition that American law could not have been of interest to the Nazis because it did not expressly target Jews. The absence of Jews from American prohibitions did not deter Nazi jurists from investigating American law in the least. Yes, it is true that American anti-miscegenation law primarily spoke of “Negroes” and “Mongols.” But that hardly meant that American law had nothing to offer. Helmut Nicolai, the Nazi race fanatic with whom this chapter began, declared, in a major 1933 speech, that “Negroes” and “Mongols” represented a threat to racial purity just as Jews did,152 and the Prussian Memorandum spoke, in the same vein, not just of Jews, but of “Jews, Negroes or other coloreds.”153 Radical Nazis throughout the early years of the 1930s were well aware that there was an American model to exploit, and they were quite willing to draw on American law in planning their “fundamental constitutional law of the national socialist state” on interbreeding and sex. It is simply nonsense to claim that Nazi lawyers could not have made use of American precedents because of the absence of formal measures against American Jews. These were able lawyers, who were quite capable of extracting legal techniques from statutes with goals somewhat different from their own.

Once we dispose of that dubious claim, we can indeed, and really must, speak frankly of something that can only reasonably be called “influence,” as objectionable as that term is sure to seem. First and foremost, we can detect something that it is entirely right to deem “influence” in the criminalization of racially mixed marriages. The Blood Law decreed both the civil invalidity and the criminality of mixed marriages:

Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

§ 1

(1) Marriages between Jews and nationals of German blood or racially related blood are forbidden. If such marriages are nevertheless entered into they are null and void, even if they are concluded abroad in order to evade this law.

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