James Whitman detailed how American laws and legal precedent set the groundwork for Nazi raced based laws that targeted Jews and other groups in the 1930's in his book Hitler's American Model. It didn't start out with the Holocaust, it was limitations to freedoms and determining who was German and who wasn't.

We talk about the examples Whitman lays out, as well as how those same laws and ideas are still being used in similar ways to "other" groups of people to determine who should be allowed in this country or not.

Place in the historiography

• The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism by Stefan Kuhl, 1994
• Manifest Destiny history of the U.S. because of the Nazi focus on Lebensraum (living space) - the entire concept for the invasion of Poland in 1938 and other countries thereafter.
• Historians that did not believe the connection was evident between American laws and the laws created in Nazi Germany: Richard Bernstein and Jens-Uwe Guettel
• Miscegenation Laws- What Comes Naturally by Peggy Pascoe

Other sources

• Nuremberg Laws text
• Nazi discrimination laws lesson plan I helped develop and teach
• Rachel Maddow’s podcast Ultra season one on Spotify or Apple

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