How America Shaped Hitler’s Racist Views

Many historians have gone to great lengths to deny that Nazi Germany copied American racist policies inflicted on Native Americans and Black people. In Mein Kampf, written almost a decade before he became German Chancellor in 1933, Hitler praised the United States as the world leader in racist policies and laws and in establishing a racist social order. Hitler admired restrictive US immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans and mostly excluded other nationalities, ethnicities, and races.

Hitler admired American criminal laws forbidding miscegenation, particularly the mixed marriages or sexual relations between white and Black citizens. He admired Jim Crow segregation laws and other white supremacist provisions that effectively robbed African Americans of civil rights and made them second-class citizens. He especially admired American eugenics that prized white supremacy, and led to laws that encouraged sterilization of the “feebleminded,” and others found somehow defective. Hitler admired the mass extermination of Native Americans by “Nordic” settlers in the nineteenth century and the subsequent isolation of most Indigenous survivors on reservations.

Hitler grew up idolizing America’s Wild West, mainly through the fiction novels of German novelist Karl May. May sold over 100 million copies of his books, mainly to Germans. May wasn’t nearly as successful in America, a land he’d never visited. May’s works were poorly researched but fascinating storytelling. It would be like learning history by reading comic books or watching serials at the theater. The Nazis admired America’s conquest of the West. In 1928, Hitler praised the Americans for having “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand” in the course of founding their continental empire.

It wasn’t only the Wild West that got Hitler’s attention; America’s immigration policies were well received. In Mein Kampf, Hitler called America the “one state,” making progress toward the creation of the kind of order he wanted for Germany. In 1935, the National Socialist Handbook on Law and Legislation, an essential guide for Nazis as they built their new society, would declare that the United States had achieved the “fundamental recognition” of the need for a race state.

After Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich and the Nazis took power in 1933, Nazi lawyers carefully studied the American example as they crafted the Nuremberg Laws, the most reviled race legislation of the twentieth century. Those laws followed the lead of the United States. They criminalized intermarriage; they relegated Jews to second-class citizenship. Their goal was to make Germany so frightening that the Jews would all flee.

In America, Congress passed immigration legislation designed to guarantee the predominance of immigrants from northern Europe, mainly shutting the door on Jews, Italians, Asians, and others. As Nazi commentators approvingly put it, this was a law intended to keep out “undesirables.” More recently, an American president asked why we are letting in people from “shithole countries” and why not have more from places like Denmark.

Nazi Germany was based on a cult of personality led by a man of questionable intellect and supreme ego. He had dedicated followers like Joseph Goebbels, who totally capitulated to the man and helped create the policies. I see a resemblance between Joesepf Goebbels and Stephen Miller.

“I love him … He has thought through everything,”-Joeseph Goebbels.

I’ll repeat something I wrote earlier. After Hitler took power in 1933, Nazi lawyers carefully studied the American example as they crafted the Nuremberg Laws, the most reviled race legislation of the twentieth century. Those laws included the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which forbade marriages and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans and the employment of German females under 45 in Jewish households, and the Reich Citizenship Law, which declared that only those of German or related blood were eligible to be Reich citizens. Those laws were later expanded to place gypsies and Black people into the same categories as Jews.

There are dozens of articles and books disclaiming that the Nazis copied the United States because they didn’t adopt the same exact policies. Even the Nazis felt the one-drop rule went too far and didn’t go along. Germany initially attempted to make things so hard on its Jewish population as to force them to flee. Mass executions came later, but Hitler had always loved how America “gunned down” millions of Native Americans. A segment of Americans is seeking to recycle some of these ideas. The size of this segment will be evident in the upcoming presidential election. We will see.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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