In 1936, Germany and America were gazing at each other across an ocean, and each offered a reflection of race hatred to the other. The Nuremberg Race Laws had been announced by the National Socialists at their annual party rally the previous year. A codified entrenchment of the Third Reich’s white supremacist ideology, the laws had been compiled after a careful study of race-based legal systems around the world.
Particularly inspiring to the National Socialists was the American system of immigration quotas, which was designed to accept more “racially desirable” people from northern Europe (whites from Britain and Scandinavia) and fewer undesirable emigrants from eastern and southern Europe (mostly Jews and Catholics) and from Asia.
As the National Socialists created their own system of legal inferiority for non-Gentiles, they also admired America’s classification of residents of the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the Philippines as “non-citizen nationals.” And to fortify their criminalization of mixed marriages, the National Socialists looked to America’s Jim Crow laws—in particular those laws in 30 U.S. states which decreed marriage between whites and Negroes illegal.
Many of those American states defined a “Negro” as anyone with a black ancestor—with, as they called it, “one drop” of Negro blood. Interestingly, the National Socialists considered the “one-drop” definition too severe. Instead they decreed that a Jew was any person with three or four Jewish grandparents, regardless of whether those forebears had converted to Christianity.
With the Nuremberg Laws in place, the National Socialists now had a legal framework with which to pursue the persecution of Jews in Germany. Jews were no longer citizens and they no longer had most of their former political rights. When the Olympic Games opened in Berlin in the summer of 1936, the Reich momentarily hid these strictures from view, showing off a false spirit of international amity. Once the games were over, for Germany’s Jews the situation quickly and systematically grew much worse.
Just as the tightening noose around the rights of Jews in Germany had been partially inspired by the National Socialists’ study of American racial legislation, so in turn was the robust climate of anti-Semitism in America directly fueled and abetted by the Third Reich.