{"id":50642,"date":"2016-12-14T21:38:11","date_gmt":"2016-12-14T21:38:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=50642"},"modified":"2017-03-01T21:20:23","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T21:20:23","slug":"why-the-nazis-studied-american-race-laws-for-inspiration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=50642","title":{"rendered":"Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration"},"content":{"rendered":"

Why the Nazis studied American race laws for inspiration<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Aeon<\/a>
\n2016-12-13<\/p>\n

James Q. Whitman<\/strong><\/a>, Ford Foundation Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law
\nYale Law School<\/em><\/p>\n

Edited by Marina Benjamin<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
\n\u2018At the bus station in Durham, North Carolina<\/a>.\u2019 May 1940. Photo by Jack Delano<\/a>\/FSA\/Library of Congress.<\/em><\/small><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

James Q Whitman<\/a> is the Ford Foundation professor of comparative and foreign law at Yale Law School. His subjects are comparative law, criminal law, and legal history. His latest book is <\/em>Hitler\u2019s American Model<\/a>\u00a0(2017).<\/em><\/p>\n

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler<\/a> became Chancellor of the Reich<\/a>, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany<\/a> gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws<\/a>, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi<\/a> race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.<\/p>\n

That transcript reveals a startling fact: the meeting involved lengthy discussions of the law of the United States of America<\/a>. At its very opening, the Minister of Justice presented a memorandum on US race law and, as the meeting progressed, the participants turned to the US example repeatedly. They debated whether they should bring Jim Crow segregation<\/a> to the Third Reich<\/a>. They engaged in detailed discussion of the statutes from the 30 US states that criminalised racially mixed marriages. They reviewed how the various US states determined who counted as a \u2018Negro\u2019 or a \u2018Mongol\u2019, and weighed whether they should adopt US techniques in their own approach to determining who counted as a Jew. Throughout the meeting the most ardent supporters of the US model were the most radical Nazis in the room…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 5 June 1934, about a year and half after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the leading lawyers of Nazi Germany gathered at a meeting to plan what would become the Nuremberg Laws, the centrepiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi race regime. The meeting was an important one, and a stenographer was present to take down a verbatim transcript, to be preserved by the ever-diligent Nazi bureaucracy as a record of a crucial moment in the creation of the new race regime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,28,459,1467,8,20],"tags":[8660,25740,25733,25735,25739,25734,25738],"class_list":["post-50642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-europe","category-history","category-law","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-adolf-hitler","tag-aeon","tag-james-q-whitman","tag-james-whitman","tag-marina-benjamin","tag-nazism","tag-nuremberg-laws"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=50642"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51970,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50642\/revisions\/51970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=50642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=50642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=50642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}