In particular, Nazis admired the
Jim Crow-era laws that discriminated against Black Americans and segregated them from white Americans, and they debated whether to introduce similar segregation in Germany.
Yet they ultimately decided that it wouldn’t go far enough.
“One of the most striking Nazi views was that Jim Crow was a suitable racist program in the United States because American Blacks were already oppressed and poor,” he says. “But then in Germany, by contrast, where the Jews (as the Nazis imagined it) were rich and powerful, it was necessary to take more severe measures.”
Because of this, Nazis were more interested in how the U.S. had designated
Native Americans, Filipinos and other groups as non-citizens even though they lived in the U.S. or its territories. These models influenced the
citizenship portion of the
Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish Germans of their citizenship and classified them as “nationals.”