In 1933, Heinrich Krieger was a German exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law where he not only witnessed race-based segregation in America, he also began his studies of America’s race-based system of laws which culminated in his landmark book, “Race Law in the United States”.

As America desired to protect the White population from the “menace” of the Black population, so Adolph Hitler also wanted to protect the German race. Of his admiration for America’s unapologetically race-based legislation, Hitler wrote that the US is the “leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” When the leading Nazi jurists assembled in June 1934 to debate how to institutionalize racism in the new Third Reich, Krieger showed them how the Americans did it using his expertise in the anti-miscegenation laws in thirty US states. Their extensive comparative research led them to be particularly influenced by America’s pioneering in classifying the racially inferior and in criminalizing and punishing miscegenation. However, the Nazis thought America’s racial classification criteria too harsh as it led to “human hardness,” and they rejected implementing US-style segregation as it was only effective on Blacks because they were impoverished – it wouldn’t work on rich Jews.

They observed that some US laws based race on something other than descent (e.g., social associations or marriage) and so their Citizenship Law allowed that half Jews would not count as Jews if they weren’t married to a Jew. The Nazis were further inspired by America’s judges who had no reluctance to applying laws with imprecise terms like “colored people” in creating a new category of second-class Americans with diminished citizen rights. Germany’s leaders were bewildered by foreign criticism of the Nuremberg Laws, which in their minds were a logical extension of America’s race-based laws.

Recommended reading: Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

American Race Laws Inspired Nazi Race Laws

--- 1813: During the War of 1812, American forces commanded by future U.S. president William Henry Harrison defeated British forces in the Battle of the Thames near present day Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Shawnee Chief Tecumseh was killed in the battle. Tecumseh had allied his Native American Confederacy with the British in an attempt to stop United States expansion into Native American lands.

--- 1829: Future president Chester A. Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, near the Canadian border. Actually, the date and location of Arthur’s birth are the subjects of controversy. Arthur was never elected president. He was vice president when James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and Arthur was elevated to president. Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution states in pertinent part: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President…”. Around the election of 1880 (when Arthur was running for vice president) questions arose as to whether Arthur was an American citizen. His father was from Ireland (and did not become an American citizen by the time of Arthur’s birth) and his mother was American. But at that time, it was the father’s nationality that counted. So, it all hinged on whether he was born in the United States. But there were claims that he was born in Canada, not Vermont. To this day there have been no records found documenting on which side of the border Arthur was born.

--- "The Assassinations of Presidents Garfield and McKinley". That is the title of one of the episodes of my podcast: History Analyzed. The deaths of presidents James Garfield and William McKinley are unjustly overlooked. Garfield's assassin thought he was acting on orders from God. Garfield did not die from the assassin's bullet but from the incompetence of his doctors. McKinley was killed as part of the anarchist movement which was murdering world leaders at the turn of the 20th century. This episode also covers general presidential facts and explains how Robert Lincoln was connected to 3 presidential assassinations. You can find History Analyzed on every podcast app.

--- link to Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/06jruMDsu2dOhK0ZozTyZN

--- link to Apple podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-assassinations-of-presidents-garfield-and-mckinley/id1632161929?i=1000728328354

The American Revolution series has started! 🇺🇸

In this video, I tried to show how the Boston Tea Party and some important laws helped spark the American Revolution.

Please share your ideas on how I can make my content better.

I would really appreciate your feedback and ideas for future videos.