--- title: Nazis: America Taught Them Racism in Laws description: In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party looked to America to learn how to turn racism into law — in ways echoed by the President today canonical: https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/ author: James Whitman article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2017-03-21T18:00:53.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:54:33.239Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why the Nazis Loved America og:description: The terrible history of racist laws og:url: https://time.com/4703586/nazis-america-race-law/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt72cbda27a22b61a1/6988bf438fd2eef86d35639b/american-nazi-parade.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2560 og:image:height: 1440 og:image:alt: american-nazi-parade og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why the Nazis Loved America twitter:description: The terrible history of racist laws twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt72cbda27a22b61a1/6988bf438fd2eef86d35639b/american-nazi-parade.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why the Nazis Loved America > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: The Last Nazi Trials [Watch (HLS stream): The Last Nazi Trials](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/iBig1Tcg.m3u8) (7:02)  _Published 2016-05-03. The trial of a former Nazi guard brings forth questions about justice and forgiveness for Holocaust survivors and German citizens._ by [James Whitman](https://time.com/author/james-whitman/) ## James Whitman Mar 21, 2017 6:00 PM UTC  American Nazis parade on East 86th St. in New York City around 1939. American Nazis parade on East 86th St. in New York City around 1939. Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty Images by [James Whitman](https://time.com/author/james-whitman/) ## James Whitman Mar 21, 2017 6:00 PM UTC To say America today is verging on [Nazism](http://time.com/4544562/donald-trump-supporters-lugenpresse/) feels like scaremongering. Yes, [white nationalism](http://time.com/4569895/donald-trump-stephen-bannon-alt-right/) lives in the White House. Yes, President [Donald Trump](http://time.com/4706573/donald-trump-poll-young-americans/) leans authoritarian. Yes, the [alt-right](http://time.com/4705134/amy-schumer-on-netflix-trolls/) says many ugly things. But for all the economic pains of many Americans, there is no Great Depression gnawing away at democracy’s foundations. No paramilitary force is killing people in the streets. Fascism and Nazism have not arrived in the United States. But there is a different and instructive story to be told about America and the Nazis that raises unsettling questions about what is going on today — and what Nazism means to the U.S. When we picture a modern American Nazi, we imagine a fanatic who has imported an alien belief system from a far-away place. We also, not wrongly, picture captives in concentration camps and American soldiers fighting the Good War. But the past is more tangled than that. Nazism was a movement drawn in some ways on the American model — a prodigal son of the land of liberty and equality, without the remorse. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, America led the world in race-based lawmaking, as a broad political consensus favored safeguarding the historically white character of the country. That is, it codified white nationalism. Congress passed immigration legislation designed to guarantee the predominance of immigrants from northern Europe, largely shutting the door on Jews, Italians, Asians and others. As Nazi commentators approvingly put it, this was law intended to keep out “undesirables.” (Attorney General [Jeff Sessions](http://time.com/4689345/jeff-sessions-russia-press-conference-transcript/) said in a 2015 interview with White House Chief Strategist [Steve Bannon](http://time.com/4657665/steve-bannon-donald-trump/) that that policy was “good for America.”) Jim Crow segregation blanketed the South. Thirty of the forty-eight states possessed anti-miscegenation legislation that prohibited interracial marriage — not only between whites and blacks, but also between whites and Asians — and sometimes threatened violators with harsh criminal punishment. In Maryland, they faced up to ten years in prison. Law made second-class citizens of blacks, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, Asians and Native Americans. Most especially, it deprived these non-white Americans of any meaningful right to vote. European racists took note. Among them was [Adolf Hitler](http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,760539,00.html). In _Mein Kampf_, Hitler called America the “one state” making progress toward the creation of the kind of order he wanted for Germany. In 1935, the _National Socialist Handbook on Law and Legislation_, a basic guide for Nazis as they built their new society, would declare that the United States had achieved the “fundamental recognition” of the need for a race state. Beyond its laws, the Nazis also admired America’s conquest of the West. In 1928, Hitler praised the Americans for having “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand” in the course of founding their continental empire. And they knew that the United States had emerged as the dominant great power in the world after World War I. To them, racism had made America great. Plenty of Americans seemed to agree. Of course, there was more to America than its racism. The Nazis despised the United States’ otherwise egalitarian and democratic traditions. Many of them believed that race-mixing would eventually doom America to decline. And they found it sad that American law had not yet targeted the race they regarded as the most dangerous of all: the Jews. Nevertheless, American race law offered _the_ model for anybody who sought to build a racist legal order. And after Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich and the Nazis took power in 1933, Nazi lawyers carefully studied the American example as they crafted the Nuremberg Laws, the most reviled race legislation of the twentieth century. Those laws followed the lead of the United States. They criminalized intermarriage; they relegated Jews to second-class citizenship. Their goal was to make Germany so frightening that the Jews would all flee. That was the form that Nazism took in the early 1930s: It was about excluding and expelling outsiders, so that the “Aryans” of Germany could reclaim their dominant place in their country. Hitler and his followers were not yet planning the Final Solution. They were planning something different — something much closer to what the Far Right in Europe and the alt-right in America hope for today: The Nazi Party stood for the proposition that the benefits of life in Germany should be reserved for Germans alone. Eighty years later there is once again an American political movement dedicated to the proposition that America should return to its white nationalist roots. We have witnessed a disquieting rash of anti-Semitic incidents and a Holocaust Remembrance statement issued by the White House that omits the Jews. There are new laws in many former Jim Crow states that limit access to the polls — laws that transparently target the black population, a disgraceful echo of a disgraceful American past. And bans have been put in place that once again seem to deem some would-be immigrants as “undesirables.” Thankfully, we are still a long way from the 1930s. And thankfully, the very worst never happened here: Despite all of its similarities to, even its instructiveness for, the Germany of the 1930s, the United States did not fall into authoritarianism and become the Germany of the 1940s. America corrected its course. And the institutions that helped it do so — its courts, its civil rights infrastructure, its active democracy — remain intact. Still, there are powerful figures in Washington who seem willing to return us to what _did_ happen here, which was quite disturbing enough. It is a moment to remember the past and to stay vigilant. We all know that in Europe in the 1930s a country went mad in the attempt to rid itself of a supposedly alien race. But we need not look across the Atlantic to see the dangers — or the solutions. ## Transcript [ MUSIC ] Our family had tried so hard to stay together. My sister Edith was about 12 years old was sent in the direction that my mother went. The SS guard he motioned me to in the direction other young adults went. I didn't move. I leaned over peering into the crowd and trying to see if Edith had caught up. I was horrified that she would not find our mother. She would be lost to our family, alone amongst strangers. The trauma of this separation Lingers with me to this day. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] [ CROSSTALK ] It's not a matter of Sending him to jail for the rest of his life. I don't feel that, that will help, but what's happening now will help. And today, I must do what I'm asked to do and not stop and cry because that is not what's required at the moment [ BLANK_AUDIO ] Okay look at me. [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ MUSIC ] [ BLANK_AUDIO ] [ LAUGH ] It's a teaching moment for the entire country of Europe to rethink and learn from it. [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ FOREIGN ] [ MUSIC ] The lawyers were searching for people Survivors. They asked, would I come, and do I know anything about this Nazi guard, and of course no. I was much too distracted to look into his face, but I was not required to have remembered the face, so I said yes. If I can help. I would come. So far over the last seven decades, prosecutors just focused on the murder of the people who arrived in Auschwitz on the lam and then were gassed right No prosecutor ever brought forward a charge, saying that a guard is also responsible for making it possible that the people who were prisoners in the camp were murdered systematically. And the indictment against Hanning is the first indictment that actually says Auschwitz was altogether A organized factory of mass murder. Not only the selection on the [ INAUDIBLE ] This is, I am here. Right here standing here. As I said in the testimony, I had just been separated from my younger sister, and as I was saying I didn't leave. I actually defied orders, I just stood there. How am I to leave her like this? People tell me, you know she died, you know everybody died, and it's been a long time. And it doesn't help. [ MUSIC ] This is Council Aide and Justice Says it's too little, and is a enormous failure, it's a system in the end does the right thing, it's better than not going. I think the main purpose of this trials is to give justice to our clients, it's for them. I just want him to Hear from me and others who testified, what the consequences were of what he did at a young age. But he keeps his eyes down, head down. I don't know whether he doesn't want to face the survivors. What his motivation is. I really don't know. [ FOREIGN ] And the further you go down in the chain of command, the more the question arises of how far legal responsibility goes. And if none of the witnesses know the defendant, this, in the view of the defense, is a testament to how unremarkable the defendant possibly was. [ MUSIC ] I'm not interested in the personality of the defendant. For me he's a broken, failed person. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. What is he supposed to do? He's defending himself? That's ridiculous. If he was a warden in Auschwitz, I already judge him. I can't judge that. Forgiveness? Maybe he just... How many people followed? How many people killed? Maybe they didn't have a choice but to act in that way? [ MUSIC ] There's a lot of talk of forgiveness, I'm very surprised about it. Everybody had to do their part or it wouldn't have worked efficiently. How does mass murder get forgiven? [ MUSIC ] The crime is so enormous, it's not a forgivable crime, it's a crime to be analyzed and learned from. 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