Intolerance: Race, America, Germany

Race, America, Germany

America's democracy, however flawed, won the battle of public perception against Hitler’s despotism driven propaganda. Between 1933–45, roughly half of the Democratic Party’s members in Congress represented Jim Crow states, none strived to end the racist laws. Nazis idolized American values of sport, Hollywood and the mythology of the frontier. The USA entered the 1930s as the globe’s most established racialized order, imitation of which led Germany and the world to genocides. Thomas Jefferson spoke of the need to ‘eliminate or extirpate’ Native Americans. In 1856, an Oregonian settler wrote, “Extermination, however unchristianlike it may appear, seems to be the only resort left for the protection of life and property.” General Philip Sheridan, the Union general in the American Civil War spoke of “annihilation, obliteration, and destruction” of natives.

Many adopted what is known as the Sonderweg thesis which held that the German inability to modernize politically prepared the ground for Nazism. Left-oriented German scholars like Hans Mommsen used this concept to call for a greater sense of collective responsibility. They argued that simply blaming Hitler was an evasion, that ‘Nazism was not something that he did to us’. The Sonderweg theory took on a punitive edge abroad, indicting all of German history and culture.

Many others adopted a different line from the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Dispute). German right-wing scholars in Germany proposed that the nation ends its ritual self-flagellation, they reframed Nazism as a reaction to Bolshevism and recast the Holocaust as one genocide among many. The mass killings by Stalin and Hitler existed in an almost symbiotic relationship, one validating the other. Large-scale deportations of Jews from the countries of the Third Reich followed upon Stalin’s deportation of the Volga Germans. Right-wing historians during the Historikerstreit held that Nazi terror was a response to Bolshevik terror and was therefore to some degree excusable.

They are both partially incorrect. Hitler was an eccentric and intermittent dictator. His frequent absences exacerbated the order his toady bureaucracy came up with. Nazi functionaries made calculated guessed at what he wanted, amplifying and radicalizing his policies further. Hitler remained in the Army after the WWI Armistice while disgruntled nationalist soldiers joined paramilitary groups because Hitler supported the leftist German government. He even served the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, where the Left was blamed for the chaos, street killings were routine and politicians were assassinated on weekly basis, anti-semitism flared because several prominent Leftist leaders were Jewish.

American eugenics was racist and eugenicist views were so popular they were employed in various cartoon characters. California’s sterilization program inspired the Nazi sterilization law of 1934. In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place in Nevada. The fumigating agent was provided by the Germans who copy-pasted the macabre method to cope up with the countless jailed at the Auschwitz camp. Ten lakh plus humans were dispatched mechanically at Auschwitz alone. When Hitler praised American restrictions on naturalization, he had in mind the American Immigration Act of 1924, which imposed national quotas and barred most Asian people altogether. The belief in racial superiority helped justify the harsh treatment meted out to those considered inferior. President Obama is as much white as black in terms of parental ancestry. He has three white grandparents and one black grandparent. Even though this person’s ancestry is thus 75% white and 25% black, she or he is likely to be considered black in the United States and may well adopt this racial identity. This practice reflects the traditional “one-drop rule” in the United States that defines someone as black if she or he has at least one drop of 'black blood'. This was used in Southern USA to keep the slave population as large as possible.

US laws went beyond segregation. They were dictatorial and outright criminal by current standard for people ranging from American Indians, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans to African Americans. They included citizenship laws, immigration regulations, and prohibitions against miscegenation. In 1928, Hitler remarked, approvingly how white settlers in America had “gunned down the millions of redskins to a few hundred thousand.” When he spoke of Lebensraum, the German drive for “living space” in Eastern Europe, he often had America in mind. The Holocaust was the result of such syllogisms: if Germany was to expand into the East, where millions of Jews lived, those Jews would have to vanish because Germans could not coexist with them.

Historians and sociologists make light of the debate by saying that since US federal policy never officially mandated the physical annihilation of the native populations, the Native-American genocide was not the same as the Shoah. The truth remains that between 1500 and 1900 the Native population within US territories dropped from many millions to around 2 lakhs. The Native American population was at an all-time high about 5,000 years ago, before reaching the lowest point about 500 years ago. Native Americans were culled first by novel European viruses and later, mechanically.

General George Patton ranted against conscientious do-gooders who “believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals”. FBI director Hoover became concerned about Jewish obstructionists in the State Department. Senator Styles Bridges proposed that the State Department needed a ‘first-class cyanide fumigating job’. The forty-five strong Nazi legal team was rewarded for codifying the Reich’s race-based legal philosophy with a trip to the USA. They studied American laws under the auspices of the Association of National Socialist German Jurists. Americans were as anti-semitic and racist as Germans but Germans alone were vilified because they put their hate to work industrially.

As race law’s global leader, America provided the most obvious point of reference for the Preußische Denkschrift (The Prussian Memorandum) written by the Nazi legal team which included Roland Freisler, the future cruel president of the Nazi People’s Court. American precedents also informed other crucial Nazi texts, including the National Socialist Handbook for Law and Legislation of 1934–35, edited by the future governor-general of Poland, Hans Frank, who was later hung at Nuremberg. German lawyer Heinrich Krieger was the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of American race law. He had spent the 1933–34 academic year as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law. Krieger used his legal knowledge in service of Aryan racial purity, discovering racial foundations in American laws through his 1936 book Das Rassenrecht in den Vereingten Staaten (Race Law in the United States). On June 5, 1934, a conference of leading German lawyers gathered to exchange ideas about how best to operationalize a racist regime. The main conceptual idea was Roland Freisler’s. Race, he argued, is a political construction.

American maintenance of innocence despite the genocide of Native Americans struck Hitler. It was the model he emulated. He was impressed by the American West driven by the German romanticization of Native Americans. The Volga would be ‘our Mississippi,’ Hitler said. Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine were to be populated by pioneer farmer-soldier families. The present occupiers of those lands, millions of them, had to be culled to clear space. One of Goebbels’s less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise against their oppressors. Nazis, in their ignorance filled air of supremacy, had thought they could goad nations into wars by according them make-believe superiority, that too through racial status.

1. How American Racism Influenced Hitler | The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler.