Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law Audiobook (Free)

Nazism triumphed in Germany through the high period of Jim Crow laws and regulations in america. Do the American program of racial oppression at all inspire the Nazis? The unsettling answer is certainly yes. In Hitler’s American Model, James Whitman presents a detailed investigation from the American impact on the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation from the Nazi routine. Contrary to those people who have insisted that there is no meaningful connection between American and German racial about Hitler’s American Model: AMERICA and the Making of Nazi Race Regulation repression, Whitman demonstrates how the Nazis took a real, sustained, significant, and revealing fascination with American race policies.

As Whitman shows, the Nuremberg Laws and regulations were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable focus on the precedents American race laws had to provide. German compliment for American methods, already found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, was continuous through the entire early 1930s, as well as the most radical Nazi attorneys were anxious advocates of the use of American models. But while Jim Crow segregation was one aspect of American legislation that appealed to Nazi radicals, it was not one of the most consequential one. Rather, both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two primary Nuremberg Laws-the Citizenship Law and the Bloodstream Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, unappealing irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not really because they found them as well enlightened, but too harsh.

Indelibly linking American race laws towards the shaping of Nazi policies in Germany, Hitler’s American Model upends understandings of America’s influence in racist practices in the larger world.