James Q. Whitman writes that, in the early 1930s, when Nazi lawyers were engaged in creating a race law that would function as a barrier to miscegenation and race-based immigration, “they went looking for foreign models and found them—in the United States of America.” For instance, they learned from the United States how to rank residents into superior and inferior classes. Until 1924, American Indians were considered “nationals” but not citizens; the Nazis adopted that same terminology. Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that “the volkish state divides its inhabitants into three classes:
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