March 9, 2017
Did American Racism Inspire the Nazis?
By Joshua MuravchikA new book claims as much—and in so doing falls into the intellectual trap known as reductio ad Hitlerum.
In 1935, two years after Hitler came to power, Nazi Germany promulgated the so-called Nuremberg Laws. One of the two laws stripped Jews of their citizenship, leaving them instead as mere subjects. The other prohibited marriage or extramarital sex between Jews and persons of “German or related blood.”
Some months earlier, the Reich Minister of Justice had convened a meeting of lawyers to begin drafting the two laws. The lawyers left behind a stenographic record that has now been mined by James Q. Whitman, the Ford Foundation professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale University, to “ask what it tells us about Nazi Germany, about the modern history of racism, and especially about America.”
About America? Why America, and why “especially”? Because, as the lawyers convened, they had before them, among things, memoranda detailing American regulations outlawing miscegenation and imposing various forms of racial discrimination. Coming upon this transcript, Whitman proceeded to study it and several other sources to see where they might lead. His conclusion: the American “model” served as an “influence” and an “inspiration” to the Nazis.