Confederate "Heritage" Month 2023, April 30: One real "heritage" of the Lost Cause ideology
Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote about one of the most malignant actual heritages of American white racism: the 1935 Nuremburg Race Laws of Nazi Germany.1
Hitler became German Chancellor in 1933 and quickly began building a dictatorship. In 1935, the Nuremburg Race Laws codified Nazi anti-Semitism into law. In one of the grim ironies of the situation, a significant number of Jews who had left Germany actually returned, thinking and hoping that as bad of the Nuremburg laws were, at least the situation of Jews in Germany had been clearly defined and there was hope that they might stabilize.
According to the Nuremberg Laws, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew. A grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community. Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion (Judaism), and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews. [In other words, there was no way that could define Jews by physical characteristics in a way that met their purposes of persecuting all Jews.] …
While initially focused on Jews, the Nazi government clarified that the Nuremberg Laws also applied to Roma (also called Gypsies), Black people, and their descendants. They could not be full citizens of Germany. Nor could they marry or have sexual relations with “people of German or related blood.”2
Whatever stabilization those laws represented, by 1938 with the annexation of Austria, the Nazi policies against Jews radicalized considerably. The government-planned pogrom that is remembered as Kristallnacht took place on November 9-10, 1938.
In two days and nights, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or otherwise damaged. Rioters ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The attackers were often neighbours. Some 30,000 Jewish males aged 16 to 60 were arrested. To accommodate so many new prisoners, the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were expanded.3
As Richardson writes of the post-Civil War era:
With no penalty for their [Confederates’] attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.
In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. [my emphasis]
American anti-miscegenation laws, for instance, had a particular influence on the new Nazi laws. “It was standard legal doctrine in Germany [prior to 1935], as in all parts of the Western world outside the United States, that marriage was in any case ordinarily not a matter for criminal law.” (my emphasis)
Robert Miller emphasizes that the study of American policies on the displacement of Indians: “the American example influenced Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in their aspirations of a German empire in the East, and their approach to dealing with Jewish and Slavic racial groups.”4
Hitler himself was a fan of the pseudoscientific racial theories of Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History (1916).
This was not just a general influence. The drafters of the Nuremburg Laws relied heavily on the models of American segregation laws and the dramatically racist Immigration Act of 1924 approved in the US during the Presidential Administration of Republican Calvin Coolidge.
Miller writes, “No sensible person would conclude that it was American inspiration that led causally to the crimes of the Nazis. He takes this broad perspective on US influence on Nazi laws and practices:
We all know that there was racism in the United States, and that it ran deep. It is not news that America had ugly race law in the early twentieth century. We all already knew that there were parallels between Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany; after all, they are obviously there. We already knew about the Nazi interest in American eugenics. Historians have already documented Nazi admiration for American westward expansion. ... If we were not aware of the depth of Nazi interest in American race law during the making of the Nuremberg Laws, we should not be entirely astonished by it. The image of America as seen through Nazi eyes in the early 1930s is not the image we [Americans] cherish, but it is hardly unrecognizable.5 [my emphasis]
Richardson, Heather Cox (2023): April 9, 2023. Letters from an American 04/09/2023. <https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/april-9-2023> (Accessed: 2023-10-04).
The Nuremberg Race Laws. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum/Holocaust Encyclopedia n/d. <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws> (Accessed 2023-13-04).
Berenbaum, Michael (2002): Kristallnacht. Britannica Online. <https://www.britannica.com/event/Kristallnacht> (Accessed 2023-13-04).
Miller, Robert (2020): Nazi Germany's Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians. St. John's Law Review 94:3, 751-817. (Accessed: 2023-10-04).
Ibid., 136-137.