Hitler's American Model

The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

By: James Q. Whitman

Narrated by: James Anderson Foster

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. Contrary to those who have insisted that there was no meaningful connection between American and German racial repression, Whitman demonstrates that the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing interest in American race policies. As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer. German praise for American practices, already found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and the most radical Nazi lawyers were eager advocates of the use of American models.

But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American law that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws - the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman 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 understandings of America's influence on racist practices in the wider world.

©2017 Princeton University Press (P)2018 Tantor

Critic reviews

"An important book every American should read." (Donté Stallworth)

Think we’re the good guys?

An awful story because what is says about the USA. The quick take away is that the Nazis were inspired by our race laws how the “pure Aryans” settled the West. Except that the Nazis thought our Jim Crowe laws were too severe. Imagine - Hitler and company thought that WE the “shining city on the hill” were too harsh and draconian when it came to how we treated people of color. Wow. This was of course was before WW2 and before the murderous “final solution” of genocide. This was when the Nazis just wanted the Jews to leave.

An eye-opener. Klan = Nazism

With all the stuff going on in this country this book points out the very procedures, or lack there of, enacted to be a totally authoritative government.

Germany didn't see it coming. And we're looking at it right before our eyes.

Well argued

Less of a history and more legal analysis than I originally assumed but it works

Interesting and disturbing

This is very insightful. Also depressing as it makes you realize what our real history is. Well written and easy to understand.

Great performance overall

Very well researched book. Only criticism is that the author misses a connection to progressivism here in the United States. Once Government is granted power to engineer a society,, it is open to such abuses and an erosion of legal protections.