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James Q. Whitman

Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law Paperback – September 4, 2018

by James Q. Whitman (Author)

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How American race law provided a blueprint for Nazi Germany

Nazism triumphed in Germany during the high era of Jim Crow laws in the United States. Did the American regime of racial oppression in any way inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is yes. In Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation of the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime. Both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws―the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Contrary to those who have insisted otherwise, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. He looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened but too harsh. Indelibly linking American race laws to the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends the understanding of America’s influence on racist practices in the wider world.

Print length

224 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Princeton University Press
Publication date

September 4, 2018
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.57 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

0691183066
ISBN-13

978-0691183060
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"One of Foreign Affairs Best of Books 2017 – Economic, Social, and Environment / Finance"

Review

"Startling. . . . [Hitler’s American Model] contributes to a growing recognition of American influences on Nazi thought."―Jeff Guo, Washington Post

"The uncomfortable truth is that Nazi policy was itself influenced by American white supremacy, a heritage well documented in James Q. Whitman’s recent book Hitler’s American Model."―Sasha Chapin, New York Times Magazine

"Every day brings fresh reminders that liberal and illiberal democracy can entwine uncomfortably, a timely context for James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model. . . . [H]is short book raises important questions about law, about political decisions that affect the scope of civic membership, and about the malleability of Enlightenment values."―Ira Katznelson, The Atlantic

"A crucial read right now."―Jelani Cobb

"Whitman reminds readers of the subtle ironies of modern history and of the need to be constantly vigilant against racism."―Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs

From the Back Cover

"Hitler's American Model is a breathtaking excavation of America's shameful contribution to Hitler's genocidal policies. This book is a profound testament to what the past can teach us about the present and is more timely than Whitman could possibly have imagined when he began this remarkable excursion into our nation's original sin and its surprising European legacy. A brilliant page-turner."--Laurence H. Tribe, Harvard Law School

"This is a brilliant, erudite, and disturbing book. By looking at the United States through the eyes of Nazi legal theorists in the 1930s, Whitman contributes to our understanding of this darkest chapter of German legal history. Moreover, he shines a light through this unlikely lens on the worst sins of our own country's past."--Lawrence M. Friedman, author of A History of American Law

"In Hitler's American Model, Whitman tells the deeply troubling story of how Nazi lawyers drew inspiration from the American legal system. He offers a detailed and careful reading of how U.S. immigration laws and antimiscegenation legislation gave the Nazi legal establishment the sense of remaining within the boundaries of respectable jurisprudence. Filled with novel insights, this is a particularly timely book given today's political climate."--Jan T. Gross, author of Neighbors

"This is a critical book for our difficult times. Whitman forces us to see America through Nazi eyes and to realize how profoundly white supremacy has shaped this country. Chilling in its details, the unsettling insights of Hitler's American Model jump from every page. A must-read!"--Eddie S. Glaude, author of Democracy in Black

"This is one of the most engrossing and disturbing pieces of legal history I've read in a long time. Whitman offers a sustained, systematic, and thoughtful look at how Nazi legal theorists and conservative German lawyers drew on American examples when crafting the Nuremberg laws--Germany's contribution to racial madness in the twentieth century. Whitman's book stands apart from, indeed above, everything I've read regarding America's influence on the making of the Nazi state."--Lawrence Powell, Tulane University

"This spellbinding and haunting book shatters claims that American laws related to race and segregation had little to no impact on the shaping of Nazi policies. Whitman's readings of the Nuremberg laws and Nazi legal scholarship are astonishing--nimble, sophisticated, and nuanced. Speaking volumes, this book will change the way we think about Jim Crow, Nazis, and America's role in the world."--Daniel J. Sharfstein, author of The Invisible Line: A Secret History of Race in America

About the Author

James Q. Whitman is the Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School. His books include Harsh Justice, The Origins of Reasonable Doubt, and The Verdict of Battle.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton University Press; Reprint edition (September 4, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0691183066
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691183060
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.57 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #67,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3 in Comparative Law (Books)
- #5 in European & European Descent Studies
- #7 in Foreign & International Law

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296 ratings

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Michael Quinn

A Fatal Lack of Historical Context

Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2019

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I wrote an extended review of Hitler's American Model for a law school course in legal history, so I have many thoughts. To put it briefly, I think the book has a fatal lack of historical context. Whitman’s marshaling of primary Nazi sources is impressive. He cites an incredible wealth of documents geared both to the mass membership of the Party and more technically-minded lawyers and officials, all of which make laudatory references to American law on racial matters. While praise for American law from such reprehensible sources helps to drive home the wretched legacy of American legalized racial discrimination, the most shocking of Whitman’s claims are untenable. He cites extensive Nazi references to American race-based immigration law as evidence of its influence on the Nuremberg Laws’ citizenship provision. But Nazi citizenship law was concerned with stripping political rights away from Jews who had been born Germans, and it is not a comparable area of law to that governing the admission of foreigners. While Whitman is stronger in his argument that Nazis may have looked to the Insular Cases and Indian law in America for examples on second-class citizenship, he devotes less space and has fewer sources on these issues. Whitman also makes rather extreme conclusions about the nature of American legal culture and the legal realist doctrine fashionable in the 1930s, based on Nazi perceptions of them, which unfairly maligns the impact of legal realism in reversing the American racial laws that the Nazis found so admirable.

Whitman’s greatest fault, however, is his failure to contextualize his key source in its place in Nazi history and hierarchy. His scant attention to the Nazi rejection of rule of law on ideological principle is a gross oversight, particularly for lay or legal readers who may be unfamiliar with Nazi history and thought. Fatal to his claim of an American model for the Nuremberg Laws is his failure to demonstrate substantive links between Nazi writing on American law or the June 1934 commission meeting (which he basis most of his argument on) to the laws that were promulgated in September 1935. The commission and its leaders were outside the core of Nazi power and at odds with its philosophy, making Whitman’s reliance on it as essential to Third Reich lawmaking very questionable. Furthermore, an examination of the actual drafting and enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws—which is totally unaddressed by Whitman—reveals no hint of the discussion of American law being of import.

Not to delve too far into detail, but Whitman bases most of his book on a transcript of a June 1934 criminal law reform commission meeting which included in-depth discussion of American race laws and comparing them to Nazi proposals for anti-Jewish laws. What he fails to mention is that the chair of the meeting, Justice Minister Gürtner, was a nationalist conservative holdover who had been in office since 1932, only joining the Nazi Party in 1937. Contrary to Nazi ideology, he firmly believed in the use of written law and procedures, and had established the commission to revise the Reich Criminal Code of 1871 in accordance with Nazi ideology. According to preeminent historian of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans, the commission was unable to keep up with the continuous creation of new criminal offenses by the regime, and its “legalistic pedantry” was rejected by Nazis who refused to put its drafts into effect. The commission was thus an unimportant feature of Third Reich policymaking, which perhaps explains why its June 1934 transcript garnered so little attention from scholars before Whitman, despite being first published in 1989.

Despite the failure of his most sensational claims of American law serving as a model for a genocidal regime, Whitman’s extensive collection of Nazi discussions of American race law is of some interest, providing a reflection of our law in a dark mirror. As Whitman correctly states in a moment of restraint, “Seeing America through Nazi eyes does tell us things we did not know, or had not fully reckoned with—things about the nature and dimensions of American racism, and things about the place of America in the larger world history of racism.” As a work of persuasive scholarship, however, Hitler's American Model is a failure.

65 people found this helpful

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David Swanson

How U.S. Race Laws Inspired Nazis

Reviewed in the United States on April 21, 2017

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James Q. Whitman's new book is called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. It is understated and overdocumented, difficult to argue with. No doubt some will try.

In cartoonish U.S. historical understanding, the United States is, was, and ever shall be a force for good, whereas Nazism arose in a distant, isolated land that lacked any connection to other societies. In a cartoonish reversal of that understanding that would make a good strawman for critics of this book, U.S. policies have been identical to Nazism which simply copied them. Obviously this is not the case.

In reality, as we have long known, the U.S. genocide of Native Americans was a source of inspiration in Nazi discussions of expanding to their east, even referring to Ukrainian Jews as "Indians." Camps for Native Americans helped inspire camps for Jews. Anti-Semites and eugenicists and racists in the U.S. helped inspire those in Germany, and vice versa. U.S. bankers invested in the Nazis. U.S. weapons dealers armed them. Nazis borrowed from U.S. propaganda techniques developed in World War I. Admirers in the U.S. of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy attempted at least one coup against President Franklin Roosevelt. The U.S. refused to admit significant numbers of Jewish refugees or to help evacuate them from Germany. The State Department turned down Anne Frank's visa. The coast guard chased a ship of Jews away, sending them back to their fate. Et cetera. We have known all of this.

We have known how the U.S. treated African Americans, Japanese Americans, and others at the time of World War II, how it experimented on Guatemalans even during the trials of Nazis for human experimentation, and continued to allow human experimentation in the U.S. for many years. And so forth. The good versus evil cartoon was never real.

What Whitman's book adds to the complex story is an understanding of U.S. influences on the drafting of Nazi race laws. No, there were no U.S. laws in the 1930s establishing mass murder by poison gas in concentration camps. But neither were the Nazis looking for such laws. Nazis lawyers were looking for models of functioning laws on race, laws that effectively defined race in some way despite the obvious scientific difficulties, laws that restricted immigration, citizenship rights, and inter-racial marriage. In the early 20th century the recognized world leader in such things was the United States.

Whitman quotes from the transcripts of Nazi meetings, internal documents, and published articles and books. There is no doubt of the role that U.S. (state, not just federal) legal models played in the development of the Nuremberg Laws. The 1930s was a time, we should recall, when Jews in Germany and primarily African Americans in the United States were lynched. It was also a time when U.S. immigration laws used national origin as a means of discrimination -- something Adolf Hitler praised in Mein Kampf. It was a time of de facto second-class citizenship in the United States for blacks, Chinese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and others. Thirty U.S. states had systems of laws banning interracial marriage of various sorts -- something the Nazis could find nowhere else and studied in comprehensive detail, among other things for the examples of how the races were defined. The U.S. had also shown how to conquer territories of undesirables, such as in the Philippines or Puerto Rico, and incorporate them into an empire but not give first-class citizenship rights to the residents. Up until 1930 a U.S. woman could lose her citizenship if she married a non-citizen Asian man.

The most radical of the Nazis, not the moderates, in their deliberations were the advocates for the U.S. models. But even they believed some of the U.S. systems simply went too far. The "one-drop" rule for defining a colored person was considered too harsh, for example, as opposed to defining a Jew as someone with three or more Jewish grandparents (how those grandparents were defined as Jewish is another matter; it was the willingness to ignore logic and science in all such laws that was most of the attraction). The Nazis also defined as Jewish someone with only two Jewish grandparents who met other criteria. In this broadening the definition of a race to things like behavior and appearance, the U.S. laws were also a model.

One of many U.S. state laws that Nazis examined was this from Maryland:

"All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent, to the third generation, inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and a member of the Malay race, or between a person of Negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race . . . [skipping over many variations] . . . are forever prohibited . . . punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months nor more than ten years."

The Nazis of course examined and admired the Jim Crow laws of segregation as well but determined that such a regime would only work against an impoverished oppressed group. German Jews, they reasoned, were too rich and powerful to be segregated. Some of the Nazi lawyers in the 1930s, before Nazi policy had become mass murder, also found the extent of the U.S. segregation laws too extreme. But Nazis admired racist statements from contemporary U.S. pundits and authorities back at least to Thomas Jefferson. Some argued that because segregation was de facto established in the U.S. South despite a Constitution mandating equality, this proved that segregation was a powerful, natural, and inevitable force. In other words, U.S. practice allowed Nazis to more easily think of their own desired practices in the early years of their madness as normal.

In 1935, a week after Hitler had proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws, a group of Nazi lawyers sailed to New York to study U.S. law. There, they were protested by Jews but hosted by the New York City Bar Association.

U.S. laws on miscegenation lasted, of course, until the 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling. Vicious and bigoted U.S. policies on immigration and refugees are alive and well today. Whitman examines the U.S. legal tradition, noting much that is to admire in it, but pointing to its political or democratic nature as something that the Nazis found preferable to the inflexibility of an independent judiciary. To this day, the U.S. elects prosecutors, imposes Nazi-like habitual offender (or three-strikes-you're-out) sentences, uses the death penalty, employs jailhouse snitches' testimony in exchange for release, locks up more people than anywhere else on earth, and does so in an extremely racist manner. To this day, racism is alive in U.S. politics. What right-wing dictators admire in Donald Trump's nation is not all new and not all different from what fascists admired 80 or 90 years ago.

It's worth repeating the obvious: the United States was not and is not Nazi Germany. And that is a very good thing. But what if a Wall Street coup had succeeded? What if the United States had been bombed flat and faced defeat from abroad while demonizing a domestic scapegoat? Who can really say it couldn't have or still couldn't happen here?

Whitman suggests that Germans do not write about foreign influence on Nazism so as not to appear to be shifting blame. For similar reasons many Germans refuse to oppose the slaughter of and mistreatment of Palestinians. We can fault such positions as going overboard. But why is it that U.S. writers rarely write about U.S. influence on Nazism? Why, for that matter, do we not learn about U.S. crimes in the way that Germans learn about German crimes? It seems to me that it is U.S. culture that has gone the furthest overboard into a sea of denial and self-idolatry.

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Al

enlightening if predictable

Reviewed in Canada on August 14, 2017

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Enlightening if predictable look at how Nazi lawyers were influenced by racist US laws and policies. Roland Freisler, the infamous judge who sentenced the July '44 plotters to death, was a great admirer of US laws. This book would be especially interesting to students of law and the history thereof.

2 people found this helpful

Mig

Strong theme, weak investigation. Flat.

Reviewed in Spain on January 17, 2018

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You better read Edwin Black works (which strangely the author ignores at all) on this matters . Decepting book. Nice physical edition, I have to praise that.

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Amazon Customer

Four Stars

Reviewed in Canada on April 18, 2017

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Thoughtful and well-written analysis of Nazi race policy

2 people found this helpful

Tireur

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on May 27, 2018