Some American Policies Were Too Extreme For the Nazis
By Mitch Altman from San Francisco, USA — Gdańsk, Oct-2017, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67791022
Many historians have gone to great lengths to deny that Nazi Germany copied American racist policies inflicted on Native Americans and Black people. In Mein Kampf, written almost a decade before he became German Chancellor in 1933, Hitler praised the United States as the world leader in racist policies and laws and in establishing a racist social order. Hitler admired restrictive US immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans and mostly excluded other nationalities, ethnicities, and races.
Hitler admired American criminal laws forbidding miscegenation, particularly the mixed marriages or sexual relations between white and Black citizens. He admired Jim Crow segregation laws and other white supremacist provisions that effectively robbed African Americans of civil rights and made them second-class citizens. He especially admired American eugenics that prized white supremacy, and led to laws that encouraged sterilization of the “feebleminded,” and others found somehow defective. Hitler admired the mass extermination of Native Americans by “Nordic” settlers in the nineteenth century and the subsequent isolation of most Indigenous survivors on reservations.
Hitler grew up idolizing America’s Wild West, mainly through the fiction novels…