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

by James Q. Whitman

The plain truth, he insisted, was that the German people were convinced that the Jews were an inferior race, and German law should say so openly. Here, Klee believed that America offered a valuable model. American race law, he argued, was unquestionably founded on a belief in racial inferiority: like the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, Klee had no doubt that Jim Crow was designed to dramatize the inferiority of the black population.102 Klee viewed segregation as a form of Nazi-style “race protection,” intended to alert the white population to the menace posed by blacks. Jim Crow, he argued, was the American equivalent of one of the principal “race protection” strategies Nazis were using on the German streets in 1933–34, the boycott.