Support NeoGAF

[phanphare]

so I saw this twitter thread today and found it very interesting. going to have to look into this book.

Jeff Guo reviewed a book called Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Whitman and then expanded on it today in a bunch of tweets. basically Hitler and the Nazis were really impressed with how America went about white supremacy and learned a lot about how the United States went about that with their laws and such.

some excerpts from the twitter thread. full thread can be read here and the book review can be read here

While drafting laws to exclude Jews from civic life, Nazi lawyers keenly studied how the U.S. suppressed immigrants and minorities.

The Nazis discussed how the U.S. model could be transposed to Germany, and even dismissed certain American race laws as too extreme

Racism was fashionable around the world in the 1930s, but only the United States had developed a robust set of laws to reinforce it.

For instance, Nazi lawmakers struggled to find any examples of laws forbidding interracial marriage.

Such policies were rare—except in America, where dozens of states not only banned black-white unions, but imposed lengthy jail sentences

The harsh criminalization of mixed-race marriages was an American tendency that the Nazis pointed to repeatedly in closed-door sessions

The Nazis would later implement their own harsh penalties for mixed marriages as part of the landmark Nuremberg Laws in 1935.

The Nazis also took special note of America’s restrictive immigration and citizenship laws, another area where the U.S. led the world.

Though many countries set limits on foreigners, Americans had developed an unusual race-conscious quota system — which favored people from Western Europe, discouraged immigrants from other parts of Europe and Africa, and banned Asians outright.

Hitler praised America’s quota system in Mein Kampf comparing it favorably to Germany’s more liberal citizenship policies at the time

“There is at present one State where at least feeble attempts of a better conception [of race] are perceptible," Hitler wrote.

“This is of course not our German model republic, but the American Union.” Hitler literally said that

There's no comparison between the United States and Nazi Germany, but the Nazis did help us better understand ourselves.

As much as Hitler resented the liberal ideals of the United States, he admired America’s yearnings toward racial oppression.

Hitler correctly identified one of America’s most enduring traditions: Our asterisked promise of liberty for all.

there's more in the links

 

[EdibleKnife]

Thanks for the book recommendation. I guess I never really sat to think about it but Nazi's most certainly must have curbed a lot from how the US treated minorities, black people. Legalized segregation, abuse and even torture in the name of "scientific and medical advancement" (read the Medical Apartheid people) are deeply embedded in America and openly expressed to the rest of the world particularly back when the country was proud of how it treated people with dark skin.

I'd hope such a book and observation would be popular enough to give the US a wake up call but that's forgetting that there are thousands of historical texts that interrogate the way America was and still is, yet they just get ignored. I'll do my part by making a purchase though.

 

[Slayven]

I am not shocked, craft a law with enough wiggle room in America, and 9/10 it will err toward being racial enacted. Laws can only do so much, you must have a population willing to go with them

 

[TestOfTide]

One of things I remember finding so fascinating about "The Second Sex" by Simone De Beauvoir was how in spite being written in 1948 and being focused on issues of gender and sex it was fairly blunt about American racial issues.

 

[phanphare]

Thanks for the book recommendation. I guess I never really sat to think about it but Nazi's most certainly must have curbed a lot from how the US treated minorities, black people. Segregation, abuse and even torture in the name of "scientific and medical advancement" (read the Medical Apartheid people) are deeply embedded in America and openly expressed to the rest of the world particularly back when the country was proud of how it treated people with dark skin.

I'd hope such a book and observation would be popular enough to give the US a wake up call but that's forgetting that there are thousands of historical texts that interrogate the way America was and still is, yet they just get ignored. I'll do my part by making a purchase though.

the sad thing is this bit at the end of the book review; the notion that America did take a long hard look at itself in the mirror after WWII and did change. obviously not enough as we can see today but the notion that had it not been for the atrocities that the Nazis committed that change could have been even slower.

The Nazi atrocities held a dark mirror to some of America's most shameful impulses. On some level, Americans understood this. After World War II, eugenics fell out of favor, and the United States gradually rolled back some of its racist laws. Jim Crow was dismantled, at least on paper, by the efforts of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. And the last anti-miscegenation laws were struck down in 1967. This was slow progress, but it probably would have been slower if the Nazi regime hadn't horrified the world with its racial intolerance.

so it took a literal attempted genocide and murder of about 12 million people for America to be like "man, maybe we're kind of fucked up" and even then the changes didn't go far enough.

 

[Crimsonclaw111]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

 

[ShadowSwordmaster]

the sad thing is this bit at the end of the book review; the notion that America did take a long hard look at itself in the mirror after WWII and did change. obviously not enough as we can see today but the notion that had it not been for the atrocities that the Nazis committed that change could have been even slower.



so it took a literal attempted genocide and murder of about 12 million people for America to be like "man, maybe we're kind of fucked up" and even then the changes didn't go far enough.

Or the changes didn't even matter to begin with.

 

[Dingens]

... and while germany (an other european states) made an effort to change after the 2nd WW, the US hardly did (sadly)

 

[Magwik]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

What the hell
This shit is mentioned nowhere in any public education history book

I never knew this kind of stuff happened. Fuck.

 

[Kinyou]

... and while germany (an other european states) made an effort to change after the 2nds WW, the US hardly did (sadly)

What's funny is that Germans and black GIs actually build up good relations during the post war time, with black soldiers being treated better than at home

https://books.google.de/books?id=FY...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

[ShadowSwordmaster]

What's funny is that Germans and black GIs actually build up good relations during the post war time, with black soldiers being treated better than at home

https://books.google.de/books?id=FY...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

That happened during world war 1 too, I think.

 

[Crimsonclaw111]

What the hell
This shit is mentioned nowhere in any public education history book

I never knew this kind of stuff happened. Fuck.

It's really disgusting. I brought it up in high school once and it was kind of hand waved away.

"Yeah it happened but the important bit is the nazis!"

 

[firehawk12]

I mean, America and Canada basically had their own version of concentration camps targeting one race, so yeah.

 

[TheLaughingStock]

What the hell
This shit is mentioned nowhere in any public education history book

I never knew this kind of stuff happened. Fuck.

Of course not. White men dominate the writing, editing, and publishing.

 

[Kyzer]

Learned about this from books when I was younger, Hitler learned from the USA on how to implement a system of racial segregation, kinda crazy to think about. I checked out books from the library on WWII when I was a kid

 

[Fuchsdh]

What the hell
This shit is mentioned nowhere in any public education history book

I never knew this kind of stuff happened. Fuck.

I'd have to examine the book's claims about Nazi laws being directly modeled on US ones with regards to racial politics; there's nothing really presented to refute or support the assertion.

But the Nazis *did* directly model some of their eugenics policies on US laws. California gets specific fame here as it had one of the most comprehensive. However it was on the wane by the 30s and its association with Nazism helped kill it, although in respect to some areas (such as treatment of those with mental illnesses and retardation) things weren't substantially redressed until decades after.

 

[Xando]

What's funny is that Germans and black GIs actually build up good relations during the post war time, with black soldiers being treated better than at home

https://books.google.de/books?id=FY...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

This is true.

My grandpa always told me how black GIs always gave them chocolate when they had no food after the war and played football(soccer) with them after school.

 

[Jag]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

I am starting to hear it more and more, but yeah we never learned about any of this. The US was always the model country that could do no wrong.

 

[phanphare]

Learned about this from books when I was younger, Hitler learned from the USA on how to implement a system of racial segregation, kinda crazy to think about. I checked out books from the library on WWII when I was a kid

I'm a Jew so we start learning about WWII at a fairly young age and obviously it gets more in depth as we get older and can handle the harsher aspects of the war but we never learned about this kind of stuff. public school was no better.

 

[Thelonelykoopa]

Not surprising, hell go the 1800s you will see in the south but also in the North alot of things that would remind you of Nazi ideology hell some government officials advocated not just annexing texas from mexico but taking over all of it and commenting genocide to purge Hispanics and Catholic influences from North America.

 

[Vigilant Walrus]

There is this fantastic Radiolab episode about the many many thousands of German Nazi prisoners in the US.

But the journalists were unable to confirm if American segregation laws where a direct influence in the populism of Nazi Ideology; "CORRECTION: A previous version of this podcast stated that the Nuremberg Laws and the Mississippi Black Code could be viewed side by side at a museum in Nuremberg. We were unable to confirm the existence of such an exhibit. We were also unable to confirm that the Nuremberg Laws were literally copied from the Mississippi Black Codes. The audio has been corrected to reflect this."




What makes this episode so insane is just how many Germans where in the US as prisoners, and what also surprises me is how well they were treated meanwhile the rest of the US rationed.
The episode goes into the anger of the American people once they find out the human rights abuse and war crimes of what the Germans did to their prisoners. I'm surprised why I've never heard about this aspect of WW2.

Nazi Summer Camp

 

[User Name Here]

That happened during world war 1 too, I think.

That is pretty nuts when you think about it.

 

[SolarPowered]

That happened during world war 1 too, I think.

Many black veterans were threatened just for wearing their uniforms when they came back from Europe after WWI. There was even a case where one black veteran was killed because he refused to comply.

 

[Noisy Ninj4]

It's really disgusting. I brought it up in high school once and it was kind of hand waved away.

"Yeah it happened but the important bit is the nazis!"

I hadn't heard of this until college. My US history professor was latino and was pretty focused on the less told parts of the story of the country. Pretty disturbing stuff.

I was proud to introduce him to Blazing Saddles when I used clips of it for a presentation.

 

[User Name Here]

Many black veterans were threatened just for wearing their uniforms when they came back from Europe after WWI. There was even a case where one black veteran was killed because he refused to comply.

America what the fuck?!

 

[VanillaCakeIsBurning]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

Edwin Black wrote that one of the methods that was suggested to get rid of "defective germ-plasm in the human population" was euthanasia.[7] A 1911 Carnegie Institute report explored eighteen methods for removing defective genetic attributes, and method number eight was euthanasia.[7] The most commonly suggested method of euthanasia was to set up local gas chambers.[7] However, many in the eugenics movement did not believe that Americans were ready to implement a large-scale euthanasia program, so many doctors had to find clever ways of subtly implementing eugenic euthanasia in various medical institutions.[7] For example, a mental institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk infected with tuberculosis (reasoning that genetically fit individuals would be resistant), resulting in 30-40% annual death rates.[7] Other doctors practiced euthanasia through various forms of lethal neglect.[7]

In the 1930s, there was a wave of portrayals of eugenic "mercy killings" in American film, newspapers, and magazines. In 1931, the Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began lobbying for the right to euthanize "imbeciles" and other defectives.[71] The Euthanasia Society of America was founded in 1938.[72]

Overall, however, euthanasia was marginalized in the U.S., motivating people to turn to forced segregation and sterilization programs as a means for keeping the "unfit" from reproducing.[7]

.

 

[SolarPowered]

America what the fuck?!

I was curious so I started looking it up just now and there were actually many more cases than I thought. Stake burnings, lynchings, murder by police, etc. You name it and it probably happened.

Edit: Oh god, someone was actually shot a thousand times. I thought I was at least a little woke. Turns out I've been in a goddamn coma.

 

[phanphare]

.

fuck..

 

[EdibleKnife]

America what the fuck?!

In the greater American consciousness, the job of a black serviceman was still as much expendable chattel as back when they were slaves. Nothing changed. In fact, black people were seen as more dangerous and worth putting down post-war than they were already considered before:

In Congress, the fear that returning soldiers posed a threat to racial hierarchy in the South was a matter of public record. On August 16, 1917, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, speaking on the Senate floor, warned that the reintroduction of black servicemen to the South would ”inevitably lead to disaster." For Senator Vardaman and others like him, black soldiers' patriotism was a threat, not a virtue. ”Impress the negro with the fact that he is defending the flag, inflate his untutored soul with military airs, teach him that it is his duty to keep the emblem of the Nation flying triumphantly in the air," and, the senator cautioned, ”it is but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected."65

White Americans also feared that meeting black veterans' demands for respect would lead to post-war economic demands for better working conditions and higher wages and would encourage other African Americans to resist Jim Crow segregation and racially oppressive social customs. Veterans' experience with firearms and combat exacerbated fears of outright rebellion. In addition, the prevalent stereotype of black men as chronic rapists of white women — frequently used to justify lynchings — was amplified by accounts of wartime liaisons between black troops and white French women. Such acceptance by French women, it was claimed, would give black veterans the idea that they had sexual access to white Southern women. So as black soldiers returned home to enjoy peace, many Southern whites literally ”prepared for war."66 Racial violence targeting African American veterans soon followed.

Equal Justice Initiative - Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

 

[milanbaros]

It is so difficult to try and remove oneself from the propaganda. The war ended so recently 1945 (1990?) that it's impossible to have a removed opinion.

In a thousand years, when history is written, I'd be fascinated about what they would say about the 20th century. Unfortunately that would also be governed by the political and social situation at the time...

 

[More_Badass]

.

Is this touched upon in the book as well?

 

[Linkup]

This is when the US began to hide it's clear cut laws of institutional racism against minorities groups. Also explains why it's not taught in school and also why so many deny institutional racism though they are aware of segregation etc.

 

[What did he mean by this?]

Sure Hitler had his nazi youth but have you ever seen an portrait for them equal to the postcards of lynchings with white kids smiling eating picnic sandwiches. America is sick mang

 

[water_wendi]

Oh im going to have to get this.

 

[Air]

I'm not surprised. No one really does racism like the US

 

[hipbabboom]

When you point at others, 4 fingers point back at you. Ironically, the Nazis figured out a way around this.

 

[Thelonelykoopa]

When you point at others, 4 fingers point back at you. Ironically, the Nazis figured out a way around this.

Wait do you have an additional finger I can only manage to get 3 to point back to me?

 

[nomis]

maybe i'm just feeling moody anyways but this thread makes me wanna cry

 

[EdibleKnife]

maybe i'm just feeling moody anyways but this thread makes me wanna cry

You're not moody. It's few times that I learn something new about and/or revisit historical examples of America's racism that I don't feel like screaming and crying at the same time.

 

[User Name Here]

In the greater American consciousness, the job of a black serviceman was still as much expendable chattel as back when they were slaves. Nothing changed. In fact, black people were seen as more dangerous and worth putting down post-war than they were already considered before:



Equal Justice Initiative - Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

I didn't get through the whole thing, and I might've​ missed something, but i'm wondering why the vets didn't teach people how to defend themselves to prevent some of the atrocities that took place.

 

[EdibleKnife]

I didn't get through the whole thing, and I might've​ missed something, but i'm wondering why the vets didn't teach people how to defend themselves to prevent some of the atrocities that took place.

Many did. And many others were already learning self-defense just by the nature of living in a hostile environment:

Krugler argues that black service members' experience in World War I was one of the catalysts. In many places, demobilized black veterans, having fought for their country, had a diminished tolerance for racial discrimination—and their families, having sacrificed on the homefront, felt the same way. Meanwhile, white civilians resented what they perceived as an excess of pride (what an Army captain, registering his concern with the Military Intelligence Division, called ”social aspirations") in those who had served. Servicemen were allowed to wear their uniforms for three months after being ”demobbed." Georgian Wilbur Little was lynched in April 1919, reportedly for the sin of wearing his after the cutoff date—a crime that suggests how much the vision of black men in uniform threatened the racial regime.

The black community's defensive actions in response to racial violence were also shaped by the war. Veterans took the initiative in armed self-defense, using their combat experience and knowledge of tactics and organization. But communities around them—many of whom had worked for the war effort in civilian capacities—were also energized by their wartime experiences and by the presence of the returned service members. (C.P. Davis and S.L. Jones were not veterans, but they were affected by the prevailing climate nonetheless. Davis' escape took advantage of the cover provided by his borrowed uniform and relied on solidarity from black soldiers who were willing to vouch for him.)

But the idea of self-defense in response to vicious attacks didn't really earn them sympathy from the white public or a legal system in a nation that was already all for attacking them and justifying racial violence in the first place.

 

[hipbabboom]

Wait do you have an additional finger I can only manage to get 3 to point back to me?

The last ones pointing at your toes bro!

 

[User Name Here]

Many did. And many others were already learning self-defense just by the nature of living in a hostile environment:



But the idea of self-defense in response to vicious attacks didn't really earn them sympathy in a system that was already all for attacking them and justifying racial violence in the first place.

I see. That is seriously tragic.

 

[emag]

"History" is a convenient way to distance ourselves from actions taken or condoned by ourselves, our parents, or at most our grandparents.

I didn't get through the whole thing, and I might've​ missed something, but i'm wondering why the vets didn't teach people how to defend themselves to prevent some of the atrocities that took place.

Minorities that defend themselves against atrocities are labeled terrorists.

 

[pa22word]

I didn't get through the whole thing, and I might've​ missed something, but i'm wondering why the vets didn't teach people how to defend themselves to prevent some of the atrocities that took place.

Because there are two classes of racists in that time period of america: the KKK style guys who would ride around and incite violence, and then the "moderates" who would rally to annihilate blacks when any reprisal from the black community was done to the KKK style guys for fear of a "race war" breaking out. One white boy killed no matter the circumstances, scores of blacks are killed in reprisal.

 

[Napalm_Frank]

The United states even had a eugenics movement around that time. We of course quietly swept it under the rug after Germany came to power.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States

You guys ain't alone. For example Sweden, everyone's favourite progressive, tolerant country did some fun stuff with sterilation all the way till the 70's.

 

[aspiegamer]

Plus or minus a genocide for said persons locked up-- But mostly which side won the war-- Yeah, the US wasn't far from the "are we the baddies?" syndrome back then. And of course textbooks in the states are going to gloss over extremely inconvenient topics, especially when they haven't entirely disappeared yet.

Every generation does stuff that looks appallingly stupid to the subsequent ones. It's pretty much a historical constant. When our children are fighting for Human-AI marriage they'll be baffled as to how we could have ever been so backwards as to try to deny LGBT persons that basic right. "Oh man, that was only 50 years ago!"

 

[FStubbs]

I thought it was well known that Hitler quoted and borrowed liberally from men like Jefferson Davis.

 

[Nabbis]

You guys ain't alone. For example Sweden, everyone's favourite progressive, tolerant country did some fun stuff with sterilation all the way till the 70's.

The whole world back then was far more racist than anything in US today. I think it's important to understand that by modern standards, there were no good guys.

 

[Spladam]

American exceptionalism.