All this certainly does not mean that the Blood Law was mechanically copied from the law of some American state, but it can hardly be written off. What it suggests, clearly enough, is that for radical Nazi lawyers in the summer of 1934, as for Hitler in the 1920s, America was the obvious preeminent example of a “race state,” even if it was one whose lessons were not unproblematically applicable to Germany. The bottom line is this: when the leading Nazi jurists assembled in early June 1934 to debate how to institutionalize racism in the new Third Reich, they began by asking how the Americans
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