Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law

by James Q. Whitman

“There is currently one state,” wrote Adolf Hitler, “that has made at least the weak beginnings of a better order.” When one thinks of race law, said Nazi lawyer and later SS-Obersturmbannführer Fritz Grau, one thinks of “North America.” “It is attractive to seek foreign models,” declared Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner, and like others before them, it was American models that the lawyers of the ministry found. To be sure, America had failed to target the Jews “so far,” as Heinrich Krieger acknowledged, but apart from that “exception,” declared Roland Freisler, hanging judge of the National Socialist People’s Court, America had things to teach Germany: The United States had produced an admirably uninhibited racist jurisprudence, a jurisprudence that did not trouble itself about juristic niceties and that would therefore “suit us perfectly.” In the eyes of these Nazis, the United States was indeed the “classic example.” It was the country that produced the really “interesting” innovations, the natural first place to turn for anybody in the business of planning a “race state.” That is why the National Socialist Handbook of Law and Legislation could close its chapter on how to build a race state by describing America as the country that had achieved the “fundamental recognition” of the truths of racism, and taken the first necessary steps, now to be carried to fulfillment by Nazi Germany.