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Nazi Germany's Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians

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 Nazi Germany’s Race Laws, the United States, and American Indians
Robert J. Miller*

I. Introduction
II. Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, and American Indian Affairs
A. Germans’ knowledge of American Indians
B. American Manifest Destiny and German Lebensraum
1. Manifest Destiny
2. Lebensraum
C. The American “Frontier West” and the “German East”
1. Removal
2. Colonization
3. Concentration
4. Extermination
5. Frederick Jackson Turner and the American Frontier
III. Nazi Germany’s Reliance on American Law and Policies
A. Eugenics, Sterilization, Immigration, Naturalization, and Miscegenation
1. Eugenics Movement
2. Involuntary sterilizations
3. Immigration and Naturalization Laws
4. Anti-Miscegenation Laws
B. Heinrich Krieger
1. George Washington Law Review
2. Race Law in the United States (1934)
3. Race Law in the United States (1936)
C. Other German Scholars and American Race Law
D. Nuremberg Laws
E. American Indian Law and Policies and the Nazis
IV. Conclusion

I. Introduction

Most Americans would no doubt be shocked to learn that in the 1920s and 1930s Adolf
Hitler and Nazi scholars, lawyers, and officials were studying United States law while they were
developing Germany’s policies and laws concerning Jews and the conquest of Eastern Europe.

*
Professor, Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Arizona State University; Willard H. Pedrick
Distinguished Research Scholar; Faculty Director, Rosette LLP American Indian Economic
Development Program; Chief Justice, Pascua Yaqui Tribe Court of Appeals; Member, American
Philosophical Society; Citizen, Eastern Shawnee Tribe.
The author thanks Olivia Stitz, second-year law student at Sandra Day O’Connor College
of Law, for her very helpful research and translation assistance, and thanks ASU librarian Carrie
Henteleff for her very valuable services.
1
Most Americans would also be surprised that Nazis were carefully studying federal Indian law,
United States law, and the laws of the American states that discriminated against Indian nations
and American Indians when the Third Reich was turning its racist ideas into official policies and
laws.
In a 2017 book, a Yale law professor lays out a convincing argument that the Nazis carefully
studied American federal and state laws which discriminated against Black Americans, Chinese,
Japanese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and other racial groups.1 He only mentions American Indians,
however, on eleven pages of his book.2
In this Article, I analyze how, and how extensively, United States federal and state laws and
policies about Indians and Indian nations were examined by, and perhaps influenced, Hitler and
Nazi lawyers and officials in formulating and enacting Nazi race laws. Clearly, Adolf Hitler,
many Nazis, and even ordinary Germans had a significant level of knowledge about Indians,
American “Manifest Destiny,” the United States colonization of the American west, and federal
Indian law and policies. It is equally clear that they utilized, to greater or lesser extents, similar
ideas in developing Nazi race laws and policies and actions in the German “East.”
In addition, I analyze how both the United States and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis applied the
pseudo-science of eugenics to formulate national policies, programs, and laws. We will see that
the principles of eugenics led both countries to enact forced sterilization programs that in Nazi
Germany morphed into euthanasia and mass murder.3 In both countries, eugenics was also used
to draft immigration, naturalization, and anti-miscegenation laws. We will also note that Hitler
and the Nazis studied American laws in these areas and were no doubt influenced by American
precedents in drafting Nazi laws and policies. Surprisingly, we will note at least three instances
in which American law was too harsh even for Nazis to adopt. At the very least, we will see that
Hitler and the Nazis used the United States laws and policies on race and Indian law as
justifications for Germany to enact similar measures.4
Section II analyzes the extent of German and Nazi knowledge of the United States
interactions with the Indigenous peoples and nations of North America, and how that example
influenced Adolf Hitler and Nazis in their thinking about a German empire in the east, and how
to deal with Jewish and Slavic racial groups. Section III examines what Nazi scholars, jurists,
lawyers, and party officials learned about racial laws, and especially about Indian race law, from
the United States and the American states, and how such policies were applied by Nazis in the
1935 Nuremberg Laws. The Conclusion discusses the value of this historical and legal
investigation so that we all can better understand United States and German history and law, and
hopefully so that peoples and nations can see how these situations developed, and why they
might still exist today. Perhaps studying and learning from these historical and legal events, will

1
JAMES Q. WHITMAN, HITLER’S AMERICAN MODEL: THE UNITED STATES AND THE MAKING OF
NAZI RACE LAW (2017).
2
Id. at 205-06.
3
RICHARD WEIKART, FROM DARWIN TO HITLER: EVOLUTIONARY ETHICS, EUGENICS, AND
RACISM IN GERMANY 1-4 (2004).
4
See, e.g., STEFAN KUHL, THE NAZI CONNECTION: EUGENICS, AMERICAN RACISM, AND GERMAN
NATIONAL SOCIALISM 101 (1994) (Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg Doctors Trial in 1946
defended their euthanasia program by pointing to international approval of its scientific basis and
that killing the mentally handicapped was based on the laws and ideas of the United States).
2
help nations and peoples avoid similar mistakes and tragedies in the future.

II. Adolf Hitler, Nazi Germany, and American Indian Affairs

Adolf Hitler, and Germans in general, were very interested in American Indians and their
history, and in drawing analogies to German political, racial, and geographical conditions even
before the Third Reich came into existence.5 Thereafter, Hitler and many Nazis were influenced
in developing and applying their political and racial policies and lawmaking by an intimate
knowledge of the history and laws regarding the Indian nations within the context of the United
States and Indian affairs. In the following subsections, we will address Germans’ and Hitler’s
interest in, and knowledge of, Indians and the United States, and the similarities of the American
ideology of Manifest Destiny in the “Frontier West,” and Germany’s policy of Lebensraum in
Eastern Europe.

A. Germans’ knowledge of American Indians

The German people in general have long been interested in American Indians and the
United States relationship with Indian nations. One scholar alleges that as early as the end of the
1800s “thinking about American Indians had become integral to German cultures.”6 Some
scholars think this interest stemmed, and perhaps still does today, from some perceived
connection or romanticized similarity between American tribal peoples and the Germanic tribes
of ancient times.7 Thus, some Germans have seen themselves as Indians or at least as being
descended from tribal peoples.8
German interest in American Indians was probably first piqued in the 1830s due to the
writings of German noblemen who traveled in America.9 By the 1860s-1880s, and throughout
the Third Reich era, American Indians were popular subjects for books, artists, child-play, and
even toys in Germany.10 The American James Finemore Cooper’s book series from the 1820s
about Indians, which includes The Last of the Mohicans, was immensely popular in Germany

5
ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF (1927 ed.) (the United States was “the one state” progressing
towards a racist society); WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 2, 44-47 (Hitler discussed U.S. laws and
policies and noted the United States was a racial model for Europe).
6
H. GLENN PENNY, KINDRED BY CHOICE: GERMANS AND AMERICAN INDIANS SINCE 1800 3
(2013).
7
FRANK USBECK, FELLOW TRIBESMEN: THE IMAGE OF NATIVE AMERICANS, NATIONAL IDENTITY,
AND NAZI IDEOLOGY IN GERMANY 2, 10 (2015); PENNY, supra note 6, at 27, 152-53, 168); Native
Americans in German popular culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_German_popular_culture (visited Oct. 9,
2019).
8
EMPIRE, COLONY, GENOCIDE: CONQUEST, OCCUPATION, AND SUBALTERN RESISTANCE IN
WORLD HISTORY 32-33 (A. Dirk Moses ed., 2008).
9
USBECK, supra note 7, at 22; DAVID BLACKBOURN, THE CONQUEST OF NATURE: WATER,
LANDSCAPE, AND THE MAKING OF MODERN GERMANY 304 (2006).
10
PENNY, supra note 6, at 25-26, 151; USBECK, supra note 7, at 1 & 25.
3
and Adolf Hitler was also a fan.11 Then, in 1893, after the first extremely successful tour in
Germany of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, and subsequently other such shows, German
author Karl May began publishing his wildly popular series of fictional books featuring
Indians.12 Ultimately, May sold perhaps 100 million books making him “possibly the most-read
German author of all time,” and his books deeply influenced Adolf Hitler and many Germans.13
May was, and still is, so popular a museum devoted to him was opened in 1928 and is still
operating today.14 His success led other authors in Germany to write up to seventy-seven more
books on American Indians from 1927 to 1945.15
German publications from the 1830s through the Third Reich era also highlighted
historical American Indian leaders. Germans learned in particular about the Shawnee chief
Tecumseh who was famous for resisting United States expansion.16 One author called Tecumseh
the “Arminius of the Red Race” which was significant to Germans because Arminius is perhaps
the most famous of the Germanic tribal leaders due to his victory over the Roman Empire in 9
A.D.17 Some German authors even invoked Tecumseh to promote fascist principles.18 Tecumseh
and other chiefs such as Pontiac, King Philip, and Sitting Bull were featured in German
publications in the 1860s, 1935, 1938, 1940-41, and 1943, for example.19 German people were
exposed to reams of information and media about American Indians for more than a century
before the Third Reich came into existence, and newspapers also informed the public about
American race laws and Indian law, and the Nazis did the same for propaganda purposes.20
In addition, Hitler was as interested in Indians as the German public. He was significantly
influenced by the books of James Fenimore Cooper, and especially by the German author Karl
May. Hitler read and reread May’s books throughout his life, credited them with impacting his
thinking, recommended them to his generals, and distributed copies of May’s books to frontline
troops.21 No doubt because of Hitler’s and the German public’s interest, the Nazi party adopted
May for propaganda purposes, and encouraged German youth, and the Hitler Youth in particular,

11
PENNY, supra note 6, at 26 & 159.
12
USBECK supra note 7, at 24-25; PENNY, supra note 6, at 9, 27, 152.
13
Ich bin ein Cowboy: Modern Germany’s favourite author will come as a surprise, THE
ECONOMIST 8 (May 24, 2001); BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 304 (Hitler read and reread Karl
May throughout his life).
14
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_May_Museum (visited Oct. 9, 2019); https://www.karl-
may-museum.de/en/ (visited Oct. 9, 2019).
15
PENNY, supra note 6, at 167 (citing BARBARA HAIBLE, INDIANER IM DIENSTE DER NS-
IDEOLOGIE: UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZUR FUNKTION VON JUGENDBUCHERN UBER NORDAMERIKANISCHE
INDIANER IM NATIONALSOZIALISMUS (1998)).
16
PENNY, supra note 6, at 168; USBECK, supra note 7, at 99-100, 107, 169.
17
FRIEDRICH VON GAGERN, DAS GRENZERBUCH: VON PFADFINDERN, HAUPTLINGEN UND
LEDERSTRUMPFEN 171 (1944); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arminius (visited Oct. 9, 2019).
18
PENNY, supra note 6, at 168; VON GAGERN supra note 17, at 171.
19
PENNY, supra note 6, at 168-69; USBECK, supra note 7, at 3-4.
20
KUHL, supra note 4, at 98-99.
21
CARROLL P. KAKEL, III, THE AMERICAN WEST AND THE NAZI EAST: A COMPARATIVE AND
INTERPRETIVE PERSPECTIVE 35 (2011); PENNY, supra note 6, at 9, 150-52; Anthony Grafton,
Mein Buch, THE NEW REPUBLIC 32, 34 (Dec. 24, 2008).
4
to read his books and visit the May museum.22 In the late 1930s, Nazis even attempted to enlist
American Indian support for the Third Reich, particularly among Lakota peoples.23
As will be discussed further in subsections B and C below, Hitler was also familiar with
the United States’ subjugation of Indian nations and its creation of an empire in North America.
Since his youth, Hitler had been fascinated with the American frontier and Indians, and like
many Germans in the 1920s he was quite interested in the United States.24 Hitler was also well
aware of how the United States treated Indians, and he praised both the United States actions in
America, and England’s actions in India, as examples of the superiority of the White race.25 In
his unpublished book from 1928, Hitler demonstrated he held the United States in a favorable
light and paid tribute to it as a country that “felt itself to be a Nordic-German state and in no way
an international mishmash of peoples . . . .”26
Moreover, Hitler was apparently familiar with the official United States Indian policies
used to acquire much of its territorial empire, including the Removal, Reservation, and
Assimilation Eras of Indian polices.27 These policies were all designed to acquire Indian lands
for the United States, and to remove, concentrate, and no doubt exterminate Indians. Hitler
envisioned the “German East” of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia to be an analogy to the American
frontier of the “West”, and he expected to expand the German empire eastwards in the same
fashion as the United States. Interestingly, Hitler and other Nazi leaders often referred to Jews,
Poles, and Ukrainians as “Indians.”28
These brief highlights demonstrate that many Germans, and most importantly Adolf
Hitler himself, were avidly interested in and generally knowledgeable about America’s
interactions with, and conquests of, native nations and peoples.29 With this understanding, it is
not surprising Hitler and Nazi scholars and officials carefully studied principles of American

22
PENNY, supra note 6, at 164 & 166; USBECK, supra note 7, at 32, 34, 99-100, 104, 108 (Dr.
Josef Goebbels realized German enthusiasm for Indians could be used for propaganda);
https://www.karl-may-museum.de/en/ (visited Oct. 9, 2019).
23
PENNY, supra note 6, at 153; USBECK, supra note 7, at 4-5, 7, 11, 17; KUHL, supra note 4, at
98-99.
24
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 35-35; SHELLEY BARANOWSKI, NAZI EMPIRE: GERMAN COLONIALISM
AND IMPERIALISM FROM BISMARCK TO HITLER 141-42 (2011).
25
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 35-36.
26
Telford Taylor, Introduction, in HITLER’S SECOND BOOK xxiii-xxiv (1928 ed., Salvator
Attanasio ed. & trans., 1961).
27
See USBECK, supra note 7, at 4-5, 7, 11, 17-18 (during the Nazi era, many major German
newspapers, periodicals, and educational magazines published a multitude of articles about
Indians, America’s Indian policies and race relations); KUHL, supra note 4, at 98-99 (newspapers
made Germans knowledgeable about American race law, and Indian law). For descriptions of the
official eras of federal Indian policies, see Robert J. Miller, Tribal, Federal, and State Laws
Impacting the Eastern Shawnee Tribe, 1812 to 1945, in THE EASTERN SHAWNEE TRIBE OF
OKLAHOMA: RESILIENCE THROUGH ADVERSITY 155-58 (Stephen Warren ed., 2017).
28
See, e.g., BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 303-05 & nn.220 & 224 (Frederick the Great called
the Poles Iroquois Indians in the 1770s; Hans Frank called Jews “flat foot Indians”).
29
USBECK, supra note 7, at 1 & 170 (Adolf Hitler adopted the notion of German tribalism,
compared Germans to Indians, and constantly reminded Germans of their tribal ancestry).
5
Indian history, federal Indian laws and policies, and considered applying them to Jewish and
Slavic peoples.

B. American Manifest Destiny and German Lebensraum

In North America, the English colonists utilized political and military tactics we call
today settler colonialism. This type of conquest and colonialist strategy attempts to replace an
entire Indigenous population with new settlers.30 This strategy is based on domination from a
colonial government and its settlers by violent depopulation (ethnic cleansing and/or genocide),
or it can occur by more subtle methods such as assimilation and recognition of some Indigenous
rights and identities but only under the colonial framework.31 Not surprisingly, the objectives and
actions of settler colonialists can manifest themselves as genocide but some scholars maintain
that is not invariably the case.32
The English were experienced settler colonialists due to conquering Indigenous peoples
in Ireland and many other places around the world and partially displacing Indigenous peoples
after decades and decades of conflict and domination.33 In North America, the sponsors and
investors of the earliest English colonial efforts, and later the colonial, state, and United States
governments which replaced them, brought those same tactics, methods, and objectives to bear
on American Indian nations.34 The mantra of “free land” for the asking in the United States
encouraged mass immigration from Europe and westward migrations from the American states.35
Not surprisingly, conflicts between Indian nations and peoples and Euro-Americans ensued and
greed and violence prevailed.
We will not dwell on that sordid history here. Instead, we are examining the actual
meanings, objectives, and justifications put forward for American Manifest Destiny and empire,
and the almost total disregard of the human, cultural, property, and political rights of Indian
nations and peoples which followed. We will then compare Nazi objectives and justifications for
empire in the East as conducted under the rubric of Lebensraum (“living space”) to see if the
Nazis learned or borrowed anything from Manifest Destiny.

1. Manifest Destiny

30
Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, 8 J. GENOCIDE RESEARCH
387, 388 (2006). This same method of German colonization in the East was advocated at the turn
of the twentieth century by the German political geographer Friedrich Ratzel, who had a large
influence on Adolf Hitler.
31
Id. at 388-93.
32
Id. at 401-03.
33
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 83-85; ROBERT J. MILLER ET AL, DISCOVERING INDIGENOUS LANDS:
THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOVERY IN THE ENGLISH COLONIES 15-17 (2010).
34
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 83-84; ROBERT J. MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, DISCOVERED AND
CONQUERED: THOMAS JEFFERSON, LEWIS & CLARK, AND MANIFEST DESTINY 12-21, 25-48, 115-
59 (2006).
35
E.g., Oregon Land Donation Act, 9 Stat. 496 (1850). Congress enacted a variety of
Homesteading acts from 1860-1938, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Acts (visited Oct.
11, 2019).
6
 The United States adopted English settler colonial strategies when it gained independence
from England. For example, the “father” of the United States, George Washington, and
Benjamin Franklin (surely America’s “grandfather”), were fully committed to the United States
expanding its borders and taking lands and assets from the native nations.36
Franklin had been speaking about the United States being a “rising empire” since the
1740s and George Washington repeated the idea in 1783.37 The influential pamphleteer from the
Revolutionary War period, Thomas Paine, and other early Americans shared these same
expansive ideas.38 George Washington in particular argued for and foresaw that Indian nations
and peoples would vanish and their lands and assets were destined to fall to the United States. In
1767, he wrote that the international treaties European countries were signing with Indian
nations, guaranteeing tribes their lands, assets, and rights, were just “a temporary expedient to
quiet the minds of the Indians.”39
In 1783, Washington made his Manifest Destiny ideas crystal clear when a congressional
committee solicited his advice on how to conduct Indian affairs. On September 7, 1783, he
provided Congress with very influential suggestions on how to deal with Indians and Indian
nations. In his letter, Washington argued Indian relations were crucial to the United States
because “the Settlemt. of the Western Country and making a Peace with the Indians are so
analogous that there can be no definition of the one without involving considerations of the
other.”40 He was obviously discussing American westward expansion. Washington then
explained to Congress that keeping the peace with tribes and purchasing Indian lands instead of
engaging in warfare was by far the best approach:

“policy and oeconomy [sic] point very strongly to the expediency of being upon good
terms with the Indians, and the propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to
attempting to drive them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already
experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return as soon as the
pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left there; when the gradual

36
E.g., DAVID S. HEIDLER & JEANNE T. HEIDLER, MANIFEST DESTINY xv (2003).
37
R.W. VAN ALSTYNE, THE RISING AMERICAN EMPIRE 1 (1960); REGINALD HORSMAN, RACE
AND MANIFEST DESTINY: THE ORIGINS OF AMERICAN RACIAL ANGLO-SAXONISM 85 (1981)
(Franklin envisioned American pioneers expanding across the Mississippi River).
38
HORSMAN, supra note 37, at 85 (Paine wrote in Common Sense the American Revolution was
about “a continent”); MANIFEST DESTINY AND THE IMPERIALISM QUESTION 8 (Charles L.
Sanford, ed., 1974) (John Adams predicted in 1787 that the American states “were destined to
spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe”); IV THE PAPERS OF ANDREW
JACKSON 78-79 (David D. Moser ed., 1994) (a congressman wrote in 1814: “This Nation are
destined to civilize and Govern this Continent.”).
39
Letter from George Washington to William Crawford (Sept. 17, 1767), in 8 THE PAPERS OF
GEORGE WASHINGTON: COLONIAL SERIES 26, 28 (W.W. Abbot & Dorothy Twohig eds., 1993).
40
Letter from George Washington to James Duane (Sept. 7, 1783), in DOCUMENTS OF UNITED
STATES INDIAN POLICY 1-2 (Francis Paul Prucha ed., 3d ed. 2000) (Prucha argues Washington’s
1783 recommendations “were to form the basis for the Indian policy of the Continental
Congress.”).
7
 extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both
being beasts of prey tho’ they differ in shape. In a word there is nothing to be obtained by
an Indian War but the Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expence
[sic] . . . .”41

Washington clearly envisioned a future in which inevitably the United States would spread
across the continent and Indian nations and peoples would retreat and disappear, and that their
lands and assets would naturally fall to the United States. His “Savage as the Wolf” theory grew
out of the same kind of thinking as the international law principle called the Doctrine of
Discovery which Euro-Americans used in North America and around the globe and which easily
morphed into Manifest Destiny.42
Thereafter, the United States adopted Washington’s advice and pursued his policy until at
least the early 1960s. For example, Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Quincy
Adams, Andrew Jackson, and many other presidents, politicians, and American citizens
expressly foresaw extermination as the destiny of Indian nations, peoples, and cultures. Federal
Indian laws, policies, and treaty-making with Indian nations were expressly designed to
accomplish these goals.43
President Thomas Jefferson also compared Indians to the “beasts of the forests” and was
an eager advocate for the expansion of the United States.44 He has been called “perhaps the
greatest expansionist” of the Founding Fathers and “a fervent advocate of American
expansion.”45 He plainly worked to create a continent-wide American empire, an “empire of
liberty” as he called it.46 In fact, Jefferson foresaw an “expanding continental empire . . . There
were, in fact, almost no limits to his dreams of expansion.”47 Jefferson wrote in 1786, and to
James Madison in 1801, that the American “confederacy must be viewed as the nest, from which
all America, North and South, is to be peopled” and “our rapid multiplication will expand it
beyond those limits, & cover the whole northern if not the southern continent . . . .”48 Many

41
Id. (emphasis added).
42
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 39-40, 118, 168. The Supreme Court stated in
Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat) 543, 572-73 (1823):
“On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to
appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent
offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion
of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the
superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendency.”
43
See, e.g., MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 78, 92-94, 115-61, 200 n.98 (citing
authorities).
44
ROBERT V. REMINI, ANDREW JACKSON AND THE COURSE OF AMERICAN EMPIRE, 1767-1821
332 (1977).
45
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 79 (citing authorities).
46
Id. at 77-80, 83-84 & n.1 (citing authorities).
47
MERRILL D. PETERSON, THOMAS JEFFERSON AND THE NEW NATION: A BIOGRAPHY 284, 745-
46 (1970).
48
VAN ALSTYNE, supra note 37, at 81 & 87 (quoting Jefferson letters to Archibald Stewart in
1786 and to James Madison in 1801).
8
historians agree Jefferson’s conduct foreshadowed Manifest Destiny even though that term was
not used regarding American expansion until 1845.49
Although General Washington predicted the ultimate retreat of American Indians in
1783, Jefferson was the first president to make ethnic cleansing an official policy when he began
working to remove all Indian nations west of the Mississippi River.50 By 1803, Jefferson was
expressly advocating for the removal of Indian peoples to get out of the way of American
expansion.51 Thereafter, every U.S. President from James Madison to Andrew Jackson officially
supported a policy of removing Indians to the west as the final solution to the “Indian
problem.”52 Congress then enacted the Indian Removal Act in 1830 and made removal the
official policy of the United States.53
As already mentioned, the phrase “Manifest Destiny” was first used in regards American
expansion in 1845. But there is no question the legal and political theories that had been
espoused by Europeans for centuries and by America’s Founding Fathers and early politicians
and citizens was that Indian nations and Indian peoples had to disappear so Euro-Americans
could possess the continent.54 Once the term Manifest Destiny was used by a New York
newspaper editor in 1845, in regards the United States acquisition of Texas and the Oregon
Country, the words because an American mantra.55 The phrase had one objective: remove all
Indians and native nations so as to acquire the lands and assets for Americans.

49
JAMES P. RONDA, FINDING THE WEST: EXPLORATIONS WITH LEWIS AND CLARK 62 (2001);
REGINALD HORSMAN, EXPANSION AND AMERICAN INDIAN POLICY, 1783-1812 108, 376 (1967)
(“The sense of ‘Manifest Destiny,’ of moralistic expansion, is plainly evident in Jefferson’s
Indian policy.”).
50
Miller, Tribal, Federal, and State Laws, supra note 27, at 155-58 (President Thomas Jefferson
wrote in 1803 the tribes would have to move west of the Mississippi); Letter from Thomas
Jefferson to Governor William Henry Harrison (Feb. 27, 1803), in 10 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS
JEFFERSON 368-73, 371 (Andrew A. Lipscomb & Albert Ellery Bergh eds., 1903); id. at 390-96,
393-94 (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Governor W. C.C. Claiborne (May 24, 1803)); id. at
402 (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to General Horatio Gates (July 11, 1803)).
51
Thomas Jefferson, Second Annual Message (Dec. 15, 1802), in 1 A COMPILATION OF
MESSAGES AND PAPERS OF THE PRESIDENTS 367-68 (James D. Richardson ed., 1910); G.
EDWARD WHITE, THE MARSHALL COURT & CULTURAL CHANGE 1815-1835 703-04 (1991).
52
WHITE, supra note 51, at 704; see also FRANCIS PAUL PRUCHA, AMERICAN INDIAN POLICY IN
THE FORMATIVE YEARS: INDIAN TRADE & INTERCOURSE ACTS 1790-1834, 224-48 (1962).
53
Removal Act, ch. 148, 4 Stat. 411-12 (1830), in 3 THE AMERICAN INDIAN AND THE UNITED
STATES: A DOCUMENTARY HISTORY 2169-71 (Wilcomb E. Washburn ed., 1973).
54
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 119-21; Robert W. Johannen, The Meaning of
Manifest Destiny, in MANIFEST DESTINY AND EMPIRE AMERICAN ANTEBELLUM EXPANSIONISM 9
(Sam W. Haynes & Christopher Morris eds, 1997) (Manifest Destiny “provided a catchphrase
for a concept that was as old as the nation itself”); HEIDLER, supra note 36, at xv (“The events of
the 1840s, then, were more a continuation of a trend that stemmed from the earliest days of
American settlement and existed as a constant force over the entire span of the Early Republic.”).
55
E.g., SAM W. HAYNES, JAMES K POLK AND THE EXPANSIONIST IMPULSE 98 (1997); RAY ALLEN
BILLINGTON, THE FAR WESTERN FRONTIER, 1830-1860 145, 148-49 (1956); Johannen, supra note
54, at 7-8.
9
 The United States justified its Manifest Destiny policy and actions on the presumed
inferiority of Indian peoples and governments.56 American politicians and citizens also claimed
God intended Christians to possess and benefit from the lands and assets in America, because
they claimed Indian peoples were “uncivilized,” and falsely claimed Indians did not farm and
thus did not put land to its best and highest use.57 The real justifications were, of course,
territorial expansion and greed.
American historians state that all the discussions about Manifest Destiny and its
objectives and justifications come down to basically three points: Americans and their
institutions have special virtues; the United States has a mission to redeem and remake the world
in its image; and, America has a divine destiny under God’s direction to accomplish this task.58
Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler used very similar rhetoric and arguments in regards Lebensraum.

2. Lebensraum

Lebensraum translates as “living space” or “living room.” As used by Adolf Hitler and
many others, Lebensraum was a demand for the new territory Germany allegedly needed to
accommodate its expanding population, enlarge its borders, and establish colonies in Eastern
Europe.59 Hitler rejected the idea Germany could make itself a world power by possessing
foreign colonies or via trade in the world economy, and instead he looked eastward for more land
for Germany’s people and to cultivate the foods it needed.60 Hitler claimed the East was

56
E.g., HORSMAN, supra note 37, at 1, 89-92 (1981) (by 1850 American expansion was
considered a victory for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian race); JOSEPH STORY, A
FAMILIAR EXPOSITION OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES 13-14 (1859) (Story, a U.S.
Supreme Court Justice from 1812-45, stated: “the European nations paid not the slightest regard
to the rights of the native tribes. They treated them as mere barbarians and heathens, whom, if
they were not at liberty to extirpate [exterminate], they were entitled to deem mere temporary
occupants of the soil . . . .”).
57
E.g., HORSMAN, supra note 37, at 3, 82-83, 85-86, 88-89, 93 (in 1820, Secretary of State
Henry Clay said Providence had decreed all of the continent should be peopled by Americans).
See ROBERT J. MILLER, RESERVATION “CAPITALISM:” ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN INDIAN
COUNTRY 9-13 (2012) (Indians primarily supported themselves for centuries by farming);
Thomas R. Wessel, Agriculture, Indians and American History, 50 AGRICULTURAL HIST. 9-10,
14 (1976) (same).
58
E.g., WILLIAM EARL WEEKS, BUILDING THE CONTINENTAL EMPIRE: AMERICAN EXPANSION
FROM THE REVOLUTION TO THE CIVIL WAR 60-61, 110 (1996). See also MILLER, NATIVE
AMERICA, supra note 34, at 195 n.8 (citing authorities).
59
E.g., JOACHIM C. FEST, HITLER 214 (Richard & Clara Winston trans., 1974).
60
E.g., VOLKER ULLRICH, HITLER: ASCENT 1889-1939 178-79 & n.101 (Jefferson Chase trans.,
2016); FEST, supra note 59, at 214; PENNY, supra note 6, at 154; HITLER'S SECOND BOOK: THE
UNPUBLISHED SEQUEL TO MEIN KAMPF, BY ADOLF HITLER 79-80 (Gerhard L. Weinberg ed.,
Krista Smith trans., 2003) (Hitler wrote “[t]he point of a healthy territorial policy lies in the
expansion of a people’s Lebensraum”); IAN KERSHAW, HITLER: A BIOGRAPHY 387-88 (2008) (in
a 1937 speech to his General Staff Hitler said Germany needed “living space”).
10
Germany’s “destiny.”61 The word Lebensraum and the idea became a Nazi rallying cry. The
policy clearly evoked American Manifest Destiny which led in North America to military
actions, massacres, attempted extermination, and official federal policies and laws to remove
Indian nations and peoples from the path of American expansion.62
Historians appear to agree Hitler’s policy of Lebensraum originated with Professor
Friedrich Ratzel.63 In fact, Ratzel originated the term and popularized the concept around the turn
of the twentieth century, and it came to be widely used in German imperialist literature after
World War I.64 He was well-known in Germany for several reasons. First, one of his textbooks
went through at least seven editions and was widely used in German schools.65 Then, his 1901
book, entitled Lebensraum, helped foster the ideas of Social Darwinist racism in German
academic circles.66 One author claims while Ratzel was subtle in his treatment of the issue of
racial wars, his theories served imperialists and their justifications for conquests.67 This same
author alleges the concept of racial wars resonates within Ratzel’s conception of Lebensraum
and became a powerful argument for the extermination of “primitive” peoples.68 Moreover,
Ratzel even offered a concrete example of what he meant by struggles between humans over
land when he cited the extermination of the American Indians by Europeans.69
Ratzel wrote another very influential book in 1897 entitled Politische Geographie
(Political Geography), which was re-released in 1901 and 1923, on the subject of countries
expanding their territories.70 In this analysis, Ratzel again applied the Darwinian struggle for
existence among animals to human beings and nations.71 And he again specifically noted the
extermination of American Indians and other “less civilized” people by Euro-American
conquerors as examples of this struggle.72 Significantly, Hitler carefully studied Ratzel’s

61
HITLER’S SECOND BOOK, supra note 60, at 18-19 (quoting Hitler living space in the East was
“destiny’s grant to people who possess the courage in their hearts to conquer it”); PENNY, supra
note 6, at 154.
62
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 115-61; TIMOTHY SNYDER, BLACK EARTH: THE
HOLOCAUST AS HISTORY AND WARNING 12 (2015) (for “generations of German imperialists, and
for Hitler himself, the exemplary land empire was the United States of America.”).
63
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 20-21, 24; WENDY LOWER, NAZI EMPIRE-BUILDING AND THE
HOLOCAUST IN UKRAINE 20 (2005).
64
WOODRUFF D. SMITH, THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF NAZI IMPERIALISM 83 & 146 (1986).
65
Id. at 204.
66
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 20; WEIKART, supra note 3, at 192.
67
Id.
68
Id. at 192-93.
69
Id. at 194 (quoting FRIEDRICH RATZEL, LEBENSRAUM 1, 51-60 (1901)).
70
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 20-21; Alan E. Steinweis, Eastern Europe and the Notion of the
“Frontier” in Germany to 1945, 13 YEARBOOK OF EUROPEAN STUDIES, 56, 60 (1999) (because
of Friedrich Ratzel, Lebensraum became the central assumption of German geopolitical thinking
in the 1920s and 30s).
71
LOWER, supra note 63, at 20; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 20-21.
72
WEIKART, supra note 3, at 194 (Ratzel stated these wars would “quickly and completely
displace the inhabitants, for which North America, southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand
provide the best examples.” (quoting FRIEDRICH RATZEL, POLITISCHE GEOGRAPHIE, 44, 129-53,
11
Political Geography while he was incarcerated in Landsberg prison in 1924, and he also read the
theories of other academics on Lebensraum, scientific racism, and eugenics, for example.73
During Hitler’s time, Ratzel became even more well-known through the efforts of
another German professor, Karl Haushofer.74 Ratzel and Haushofer were both highly influential
geopolitical theorists and were the foremost advocates of Lebensraum.75 Furthermore, they
worked fairly closely together because Haushofer’s father was also a professor who had worked
with Ratzel. The three of them often took long walks together when Ratzel was working out his
Lebensraum theories.76 Ratzel is credited with being the person who shaped the subject of
political geography “into a philosophy of imperialistic expansion.”77 Hitler read Ratzel’s and
Haushofer’s books perhaps before 1924 but he surely read them during his time in Landsberg
prison.78 In addition, Hitler’s private secretary, fellow inmate, and later Deputy-Fuhrer Rudolf
Hess, certainly would have discussed these ideas with Hitler before, during, and after their time
in Landsberg.79 One historian claims Hess introduced Hitler to Professor Haushofer by 1919 or
1922 at the latest.80 That would not be surprising because Hess was an ex-student, ex-assistant,
and very close friend of Haushofer.81 In fact, both Haushofer and Hitler served as best men at

371-74 (2d ed. 1903)). See also Jens-Uwe Guettel, The US frontier as rationale for the Nazi
east? Settler colonialism and genocide in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the American West,
15 J. GENOCIDE RESEARCH 401, 415 (2013) (Ratzel admired America’s conquest of the West).
73
Holger H. Herwig, Geopolitik: Haushofer, Hitler and Lebensraum, 22 J. OF STRATEGIC
STUDIES, 218, 226 & n.33 (1999); ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 179 & n.99; FEST, supra note 59,
at 200-01; see also WEIKART, supra note 3, at 225 (“We know that Hitler began using Ratzel’s
concept of Lebensraum in the early 1920s to justify expansionism and racial struggle”).
74
Steinweis, supra note 70, at 61 (Karl Haushofer was the leading proponent of Ratzel and his
Lebensraum ideas); WEIKART, supra note 3, at 225 (in 1940, the famous Munich geography
professor, Karl Haushofer, claimed Hitler had thoroughly studied Ratzel’s Political Geography
while in Landsberg prison and while drafting MEIN KAMPF; citing Karl Haushofer, Einleitung, in
FRIEDRICH RATZEL, ERDENMACHT UND VOLKERSCHICKSAL xxvi (1940)).
75
EDWARD B. WESTERMANN, HITLER’S OSTKRIEG AND THE INDIAN WARS: COMPARING
GENOCIDE AND CONQUEST 36 (2016) (Hitler borrowed his Lebensraum ideas from the theories of
geopolitics and especially from Karl Haushofer); Herwig, supra note 73, at 221, 230-32
(Haushofer’s ideas were in wide circulation in the 1920s and influenced many Germans
including Hitler); KAKEL, supra note 21, at 31 (Friedrich Ratzel influenced Karl Haushofer, a
geography professor at Munich Polytechnic University; Haushofer built on Ratzel’s work);
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 154.
76
Herwig, supra note 73, at 220.
77
FEST, supra note 59, at 217; SMITH, supra note 64, at 219.
78
Herwig, supra note 73, at 226.
79
Id. at 224, 231 (via Rudolph Hess, Haushofer fed Hitler his views on space, race, and just
wars); KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 154 & 173; WERNER MASER, HITLER’S MEIN KAMPF: AN
ANALYSIS 19 & 59 (R.H. Barry trans., 2d ed., 1970).
80
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 154. See also FEST, supra note 59, at 217.
81
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 98, 617; MASER, supra note 79, at 19, 59; Herwig, supra note 73,
at 224 & 231.
12
Hess’ wedding.82 In addition, Haushofer visited Hitler and Hess in Landsberg prison on sixteen
separate occasions for a total of twenty-two hours of mentoring while Hitler was drafting and
perhaps even dictating parts of Mein Kampf to Hess, all while Hitler was developing his own
thoughts on Lebensraum.83 Hitler’s argument “that Germany needed ‘living space’ can be traced
back to the geopolitical ideas of Professor Karl Haushofer . . . [who] had considerable influence
on the foreign policy of Hitler . . . .”84
Adolf Hitler also developed his own ideas on what Lebensraum would mean for the Third
Reich.85 As already mentioned, Hitler demanded room for Germany to grow, and to expand its
agricultural capabilities to feed its increasing population.86 He knew that Germany would have to
look eastwards. By late 1922, and certainly by 1924, as set out in his book Mein Kampf, Hitler
had adopted the idea that Germany must go to war for living space and that it would come at the
expense of Russia.87 He expressed other objectives for Lebensraum in the East because it would
also create a convenient location to deport German Jews, help destroy “Jewish Bolshevism,” and
create colonies for German colonists.88
Hitler and the Nazi party long promoted the innate superiority of German and Aryan
peoples over the other races of the world. This alone justified Lebensraum.89 In addition, they put
forward other reasons Germany deserved to expand eastwards. In the second volume of Mein
Kampf, for example, Hitler declared it was Germany’s destiny to expand and acquire an empire
in Eastern Europe. In regards the coming war in the east Hitler stated: “We have been chosen by
destiny . . . .”90 Many of the Lebensraum justifications that Hitler and Nazis used directly echoed
the justifications given for American Manifest Destiny. Nazis claimed they had to “settle the
empty spaces of the East” and that the Indigenous inhabitants were just nomads.91 They also
projected onto Indigenous Slavs in Poland and Russia the qualities of “wild people,” who lived
in the “wilderness,” and who were savages, nomads, passive, and child-like with an undying
hatred for the superior German race.92 The German conquerors claimed their mission in the East
was to “civilize” the land and they attributed “hatred” and “primitive cruelty” to their victims.
National Socialists took on the mantle of noble colonizers who were fighting against ignoble

82
Id. at 231.
83
Id. at 225, 229, 233 (some of Haushofer’s and Ratzel’s ideas made it into MEIN KAMPF
through Hitler and his secretary Rudolf Hess); MASER, supra note 79, at 12, 19, 59, 122.
84
ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 179; accord KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 154-55; LOWER, supra
note 63, at 20; SMITH, supra note 64, at 218-23 (Haushofer had considerable influence on Hitler
and a strong influence on Rudolf Hess, the Deputy-Fuhrer).
85
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 37; SMITH, supra note 64, at 242-45.
86
ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 178-79.
87
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 146, 152, 154; FEST, supra note 59, at 214 & 216; ULLRICH, supra
note 60, at 178-79.
88
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 80; ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 178-79.
89
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 36 & n.85 (Hitler wrote, just as England in India and the United
States in North America, German expansion was a matter of the superiority of the White race).
90
ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 179 (quoting Hitler).
91
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 159, 161 (quoting Josef Gobbles from August 1940)
92
Id. at 74 & n.103, 159; PENNY, supra note 6, at 238; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 253 &
303.
13
savages.93 Not surprisingly, scholars recognize that these Nazi ideas on Lebensraum were largely
modeled on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century understandings of American expansion.94
Consequently, one scholar stated that Nazis cast the Slavs, “in short as Indians.”95
In point of fact, though, Hitler did not need any justifications for his Lebensraum policy
because, in his unpublished second book, he said all nations have the right to just take the lands
of other countries.96 He claimed the earth had not been given to anyone, but was awarded “by
Providence to those with the courage to take possession of it and conquer it.”97
It appears without question that the United States dogmas of Manifest Destiny and Nazi
Lebensraum were intimately related. The Nazi justifications and objectives for empire in the East
under Lebensraum were very similar to Manifest Destiny and were analogized to and maybe
even borrowed from this American principle. As will be discussed further in section C, Hitler
and the Nazis were knowledgeable of the history of the American Frontier West, American
claims to exceptionalism, and the objectives and justifications given for American expansion.
Consequently, it does not appear at all radical to claim that Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum
are two sides of the same coin.

C. The American “Frontier West” and the “German East”

America “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now
keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage . . . .” Adolf Hitler.98

Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party analogized the German East to the American West.99
Even if the Nazis did not directly adopt specific strategies and ideas from the American West,
they at least used the United States example to justify and excuse Nazi expansion eastwards.100
As Hitler prepared for war in the East, he drew parallels between the Nazi quest for Lebensraum
and Manifest Destiny and the treatment of American Indians.101 In October 1941, when Hitler
explained his vision of the German East, to be populated by ex-soldiers who would settle on
millions of acres of homesteads, he remarked “our Mississippi must be the Volga [a river in
central Russia] . . . .”102 Many historians have noted the American West was an obvious analog

93
Id. at 285-87, 306; PENNY, supra note 6, at 238-41.
94
E.g., id. at 239.
95
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 306; see also PENNY, supra note 6, at 237-41 (for citations to
multiple references by various Nazis to Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians, as Indians).
96
HITLER’S SECOND BOOK, supra note 60, at 13-15.
97
Id. at 15.
98
Speech by Adolf Hitler, Oct. 18, 1928, Oldenberg, Germany, in III ADOLF HITLER, REDEN,
SCHRIFTEN, ANORDNUNGEN 153 & 161 (1994 ed.); see also IAN KERSHAW, FATEFUL CHOICES:
TEN DECISIONS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD, 1940-1941 387 (2007).
99
See, e.g., WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 3 & 14 (in Hitler’s imagination the conquest of the
American West was a precedent for Nazi activities in the East); SNYDER, supra note 62, at 12.
100
E.g., KAKEL, supra note 21, at 34.
101
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 3, 12-13, 17-18 (finding several similarities and stating
Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum both encompassed the concepts of conquest and expansion).
102
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 431; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 293 & n.173.
14
to the German East and have carefully analyzed how much the Frontier West was a model for the
Nazis.103 Interestingly, the American frontier experience had powerful impacts on German
thinking well before Hitler’s time. In 1893, the very same year that American Professor
Frederick Jackson Turner was presenting his ideas on the impact of the frontier on the United
States, a German economist published his book on German colonization of the East and used
American settlers as models for Germany in its eastern frontier.104 Other German authors in the
1890s also explicitly compared Germany’s East with the American West.105
German and Prussian expansionists had long used analogies to American Indians and the
Frontier West in regards Poland and the East.106 In the 1770s, Frederick the Great compared
Poles to the Iroquois Indians from North America.107 In 1913, in Reichstag debates about
German colonies in Africa, politicians examined United States policies on how to control
Indigenous populations.108 Some of these German politicians even argued in favor of creating
American style Indian reservations to deal with colonized peoples and to assimilate them.109 In
1919, German colonial newspapers drew parallels between genocidal actions in German
Southwest Africa with measures the United States had undertaken against Indians on its
frontier.110
Moreover, Hitler had been fascinated with the American frontier since his youth, and it
became one of his obsessions and a topic he regularly discussed.111 In his writings, speeches, and
private conversations he saw America’s westward expansion and United States Indian policies as
prototypes for ideas about Lebensraum and policies in the East.112 Hitler and other Nazis also
perceived the American settlers to be examples for German settlement in the East.113 And in fact,
Hitler presumed that Germany’s conquest in the East would proceed “as in the conquest of
America.”114 During the German invasion of Russia in 1940-41, Hitler equated that war with
“the Indian wars in North America” and called it “a real Indian War.”115

103
Id. at 294-95, 303-05 (Nazis used Indians as propaganda versus the U.S.); PENNY, supra note
6, at 238; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 60-61. But see WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 5, 12-13,
51-54 (although noting a number of important similarities between Lebensraum and Manifest
Destiny, he nevertheless states most scholars refrain from making direct comparisons); Guettel,
supra note 73, at 403-06.
104
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 293-95 & n.182; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 60-61.
105
Id.; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 294-95 & n.182.
106
Id. at 303 (stating one expansionist said Poles were like the “American Redskins” and were
doomed to ruin and extinction just like the New World Indians were pushed back into the
“Everlasting Wilderness”).
107
Id. at 303-04 & nn.220 & 224.
108
PENNY, supra note 6, at 236.
109
Id.
110
Id.
111
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 293 & n.173; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 35.
112
Id. at 215-16.
113
Id. at 111; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 296, 303-05.
114
Id. at 296 & n.192 (quoting Hitler, Monologe 68 (Sept. 25, 1941)); accord KAKEL, supra note
21, at 111.
115
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 111 & n.114.
15
 Borrowing further from the American West, Nazis used the same racial and “civilization”
justifications to claim the East as Americans had used for the West. As already mentioned, Hitler
and many Nazis explicitly called Slavs, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians “Indians” and claimed
they were nomads, savages, and childlike.116 For example, in October 1941, Hitler stated that the
invasion of Russia would create gardens and orchards in the “desolate East” and he considered
“the indigenous inhabitants as Indians.”117 Hitler also declared that “’the East’s Slavic’
inhabitants were to be regarded and treated as ‘American Redskins.’”118 Moreover, Hans Frank,
the Nazi General-Governor of Poland, called the Jews in Poland “flat-footed Indians.”119 When
Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS, and Alfred Rosenberg, the head of the Reich Ministry
for the Occupation of the Eastern Territories, discussed how Germany would create a paradise in
the East, they referenced the American West, the British in India, and the European exploitation
of Africa.120 Himmler even believed Eastern Europe “could be a paradise, a California of
Europe.”121 There is little doubt some Germans, and Hitler himself, had a basic understanding of
the conquest of the American West and the Indian nations, and analogized the Nazi invasion of
the East to the American West.122
We now highlight specific United States frontier tactics, and examine whether they were
known, and even perhaps applied, by Hitler and the Nazis in the East.

1. Removal

The United States policy to colonize North America was to claim as much land as
possible and to remove Indian peoples and nations as rapidly as possible.123 The American
Founding Fathers and most early politicians and settlers were eager to get Indian nations and
peoples out of the way so Americans could settle these areas.124 In 1830, Congress enacted the
Removal Act which established as official U.S. policy the removal of all Indian nations west of
the Mississippi River.125 Indian nations quickly learned no matter how far west they moved, and
no matter how solemn the U.S. treaty promises that the tribes would own their new lands forever,
American settlers, economic interests, and the United States were soon clamoring for them to
move again. Conflicts, violence, warfare, and ethnic cleansing ruled the day.126 The prevailing

116
Id. at 74 & n.103; PENNY, supra note 6, at 238; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 303-06.
117
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 303-04 & n.219.
118
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 73 (citing BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 303 & 305).
119
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 73 (Hans Frank, the Nazi Governor-General of eastern Poland
called the Jews “Indians”); BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 305.
120
LOWER, supra note 63, at 33.
121
Id. at 33 & n.5.
122
PENNY, supra note 6, at 153-54, 239 (arguing many of Hitler’s plans in Eastern Europe
stemmed from his studies of the United States and on German nationalists’ understanding of
American expansion); KAKEL, supra note 21, at 1, 3, 27, 35; LOWER, supra note 63, at 20 &
n.10; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 61-63.
123
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 44-48, 68-91, 121-27, 130-44, 146-49, 153-59.
124
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 82.
125
Removal Act, ch. 148, 4 Stat. 411-12 (1830).
126
E.g., KAKEL, supra note 21, at 106 (the United States legitimized and encouraged attacks
16
attitude of American settlers towards Indians was well exemplified by an editorial in an 1870
Wyoming Territory newspaper that Wyoming was “destined for the occupancy and sustenance of
the Anglo-Saxon race . . . . The Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed . . . . The destiny of
the aborigines is written . . . the doom of extinction is upon the red men of America.”127
Hitler and the Nazis utilized identical tactics to remove undesired peoples in the East and
to acquire new areas for Lebensraum.128 He and other Nazis planned early on to remove tens of
millions of German Jews and Poles to the East and to place them on “reservations.”129 Hans
Frank, the German Governor-General of Poland, said the area would “be a reservation for the
Poles.”130 Violence, warfare, and ethnic cleansing would obviously ensue. Also similar to
American actions in the West, the Nazis denied Jews and Slavs the most basic forms of
subsistence because the goal was to make life so untenable they would voluntarily remove.131
Long before the decision was apparently finalized at the 1941 Wannsee conference to attempt to
exterminate all European Jewish peoples, German Jews were to be removed to the East and, in
fact, there had been numerous proposals over decades to remove all European Jews to
Madagascar.132 The Nazis also intended to remove Ukrainians, Poles, Slavs, and Russians further
east to make room for German settlers to occupy and utilize newly conquered lands.133
Ultimately, Nazis used “the bloody conquest of the American West [as] the historical warrant it
needed to justify the clearance of the Slav population.”134
Just as the Americans, the Nazis considered themselves to be messengers of civilization
and superior to the “racially inferior” Indigenous peoples who needed to be removed.135 It
appears that German settlement of the East was used as a rationale to displace and remove
Indigenous peoples just as it had been in the American West.

2. Colonization

From the moment European colonists landed in North America, they sought to acquire

upon non-combatants, the destruction of villages and crops, and shockingly violent campaigns).
127
DEE BROWN, BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE: AN INDIAN HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN
WEST 189 (1970) (quoting CHEYENNE DAILY LEADER, Mar. 3, 1870).
128
PENNY, supra note 6, at 238; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 303-05; KAKEL, supra note 21, at
157.
129
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 82, 84, 89; KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 80; ULLRICH, supra
note 60, at 178.
130
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 84.
131
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 154-55; LOWER, supra note 63, at 27.
132
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 80; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 163.
133
LOWER, supra note 63, at 18-23, 26-28.
134
ADAM TOOZE, THE WAGES OF DESTRUCTION: THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF THE NAZI
ECONOMY 470 (2007).
135
Jurgen Zimmerer, The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial
perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination, 39 PATTERNS OF PREJUDICE, 197,
217-18 (2005); LOWER, supra note 63, at 20 & nn.8 & 9, 27 (stating Germany ruled out a
civilizing mission and instead would remove the “racially inferior” Ukrainians).
17
the lands and assets of Indigenous peoples.136 The United States pursued those same goals. As
already mentioned, Thomas Jefferson envisioned America as an extensive “Empire of Liberty”
that would be filled by his beloved White yeoman farmers, “the chosen people of God,” who
were to “nest all of North and South America.”137 Thereafter, the United States acquired lands
and assets from Indian nations via wars and treaties and encouraged massive immigration and
gave away free land to American settlers. Consequently, Americans did colonize North America
and did replace Indigenous peoples.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazis understood American Manifest Destiny and colonization, and
a frontier culture, and looked to the United States as a model, and similarly applied colonizing
tactics in the German East.138 They expressly planned on settling German colonies and colonists
there.139 In 1941, for example, Hitler stated in regards the East: “there is only one task: to set
about the Germanization of the land by bringing in Germans and to regard the indigenous
inhabitants as Indians.”140 Like the United States, Nazi Germany practiced aggressive policies of
conquest, expansion, and racial ideologies designed to take the lands of Indigenous peoples to
create living space for its own settler-colonists.141 In fact, German theorists were advocating
settler colonialism in the East from the outset of developing their ideas on Lebensraum. In his
1901 book on this subject, Professor Ratzel favored wars of conquest and colonialism as the
most effective way to find living space for Germany, and he specifically referenced North
America, Southern Brazil, Tasmania, and New Zealand as examples of European conquerors
taking the lands of Indigenous peoples.142 Ratzel, in fact, stated conquests were unimportant
unless they included colonization.143
Other authors looked as far back as Frederick the Great’s efforts to encourage German
colonization in the East and its legacy for the Third Reich’s attempts to create in the 1930s the
ideal of the hardy German settler as a staple of the Nazi party.144 Akin to American political
leaders and citizens, Nazi leaders were equally motivated to acquire new lands for their allegedly
“superior” Aryan people, to develop agricultural settlements, and to cleanse the areas of Jews,

136
See Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat) 543, 572-73 (1823).
137
Letter to Archibald Stewart, Jan. 25, 1786, in IX PAPERS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 218 (1904);
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 79, 121 & n.2 (citing authorities); HORSMAN, supra
note 37, at 1, 3, 5, 82-85; WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 12.
138
PENNY, supra note 6, at 238; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 7, 43, 112, 173 (on October 17, 1941,
Hitler remarked the Indigenous peoples of the Soviet Union should be treated like the “Red
Indians” in the “American West.”); LOWER, supra note 63, at 19; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 59
& 64 (1999) (German colonization of the East was essentially similar to the colonization of
North America).
139
KERSHAW, supra note 60, at 80; ULLRICH, supra note 60, at 178-79.
140
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 306 (also quoting Hitler as saying if they resisted, the Nazis
would have to engage in a “real Indian war” in the East).
141
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 42, 44, 81, 112.
142
WEIKART, supra note 3, at 193-94 (Ratzel advocated for German colonialism; citing
FRIEDRICH RATZEL, LEBENSRAUM 1, 51-60 (1901) and FRIEDRICH RATZEL, POLITISCHE
GEOGRAPHIE, 44, 129-53, 371-74 (2d ed., 1903)); SMITH, supra note 64, at 148-49.
143
Id. at 148-49.
144
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 296.
18
Russians, and Slavs.145
The Third Reich undertook several affirmative steps to import German settlers and create
colonial settlements once it began acquiring territory in the East. The official government plan
for Poland and the East, completed in the summer of 1941, planned to transfer millions of
German agrarian settlers into the conquered areas and to eliminate tens of millions of Indigenous
inhabitants.146 In addition to using advertising and offering tourist trips to encourage emigration,
in 1934-40, the Third Reich exported ethnic Germans, Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians to
the East, and encouraged Germans to emigrate by offering tax breaks in the 1940s.147 The total of
German settlers relocated to Poland were 290,000 in the first two years of the German
occupation and eventually reached 536,000.148 In October 1941, Hitler stated in several
conversations that he wanted to settle the East with five, and later he said ten, million Germans
and to remove vast numbers of Indigenous peoples.149 Some 3,000 German war veterans
received land grants in the western part of Poland, and as late as 1944 Hitler was still giving land
in the East to soldiers and veterans.150 The Nazis also wanted to “Germanize” the East and
drafted various plans to build colonial settlements and massive infrastructure projects for
Germans.151 There is no question the Nazis created a colonialization program for the East, and
Hitler and various Nazis modeled their planning, at least somewhat, on the experiences of the
United States.152

3. Concentration

In this section, “concentration” does not refer to “concentration camps,” but to purposeful
efforts to so limit the living space of a specific people or group that it encourages their voluntary
emigration and actually works towards their extermination. Early American and Nazi politicians
and policymakers enforced policies of concentration against Indians and Jewish and Slavic
peoples through reservations and ghettoes.153

145
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 15-16, 24-25; LOWER, supra note 63, at 20 & nn.8 & 9 (Nazi
colonialism was about race and the “superior” German pioneers).
146
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 89; David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature and the
Mystique of the Eastern Frontier in Nazi Germany, in GERMANS, POLAND AND COLONIAL
EXPANSION TO THE EAST, 1850 TO THE PRESENT 141, 152 (Robert. L. Nelson ed., 2009); Herwig,
supra note 73, at 234 (German organizations and bureaucracies developed concrete plans to
settle the East).
147
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 265; LOWER, supra note 63, at 19; KAKEL, supra note 21, at
39-40, 124.
148
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 89.
149
Id. at 90
150
Id.
151
Steinweis, supra note 70, at 56 & 59; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 132, 146-47.
152
Id. at 142; BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 262, 305.
153
Zimmerer, supra note 135, at 218; KAKEL, supra note 21 at 157 & 164. One historian states
there is a striking similarity between the concentration of American Indians on reservations and
Jews in ghettos. WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 13, 81-82, 98 (Heinrich Himmler advocated for
concentrating Jews in ghettos).
19
 The United States abandoned its official Removal policy of 1830-50, once the U.S. had
pretty much achieved its goal of removing most Indian nations west of the Mississippi, and
established its control and jurisdiction across most of what is now the United States. The U.S.
realized it was now impractical to continue to attempt to remove all Indian nations to remote
locations further and further west or to centralize all the tribes in the Indian Territory which is
now part of the state of Oklahoma. Thus, in 1849-50, the United States enacted a new official
Indian policy called the Reservation Era. This policy was designed to force Indian nations and
peoples onto smaller and smaller areas of land. Indian peoples were now so concentrated, and
often located on such poor areas of land, they could no longer support their families through
farming, hunting, or fishing. It was the specific and purposeful, but unexpressed, policy of the
United States to starve Indian peoples into submission. The quote by Adolf Hitler set out above
that the United States “gunned” down American Indians demonstrates the effect of the policies
of the United States, and that Hitler was familiar with this treatment of Indians.
Nazi Germany pursued an analogous policy towards Jewish and Slavic peoples. Similar
to American Indian reservations, and as contemplated by Germany in German Southwest Africa,
the Nazis systematically planned to resettle millions of people to Eastern Europe and to place
Jews on reserves.154 In 1939, Germans discussed creating a Jewish reservation as a territorial
solution to the Jewish question and to “cause a considerable decimation of the Jews.”155 Hitler
also stated in October 1940 that “the General Government [the eastern part of Poland] is a Polish
Reservation, a great Polish labour camp.”156 The specific goal was to concentrate peoples onto
smaller and smaller areas of poor land, or in city ghettos, and ultimately to force them ever
further eastwards.157 It appears, once again, Nazi Germany was well aware of American policies
of the concentration of Indigenous peoples and applied similar tactics in the East.

4. Extermination

Stating that Nazi Germany pursued policies of extermination against Jewish and Slavic
peoples requires no citation and no evidence.158 It is interesting to note, however, the Nazis did
regularly cite to examples of the United States’ extermination and genocide of American
Indians.159 In fact, one commentator states that when the Nazis discussed American Indians, as
they regularly did, they were really talking about extermination.160
But it is controversial to assert Euro-Americans and the United States itself engaged in
extermination tactics against American Indians. It does not appear, however, anyone can deny
ethnic cleansing on a grand scale occurred in North America and Indigenous peoples suffered
grievously from the results. But some historians, and no doubt many people, deny the United

154
Zimmerer, supra note 135, at 207; WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 13, 82, 98.
155
Id. at 83-84; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 162.
156
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 85 (quoting Adolf Hitler).
157
Id. at 13, 82, 84-85, 98; Zimmerer, supra note 135, at 207.
158
See, e.g., id. at 198 (after four years of German occupation of Belorussia, a quarter of the
population was dead and 30% lost their homes); WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 82 (mass
murders took place in western Poland of the mentally ill, Jews, and 30,000 Roma (Gypsies)).
159
PENNY, supra note 6, at 241.
160
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 305.
20
States ever had the express objective of exterminating American Indians.161 Of course, other
historians and commentators do assert the United States purposefully pursued extermination
policies against Indians.162
We need not resolve this question here. It is sufficient to show United States officials,
western politicians, and westerners eagerly desired that Indian nations get out of the way of
American expansion, and yes, even become extinct.163
We have already set out George Washington’s “Savage as the Wolf” policy to get Indian
nations out of the United States way, and that the federal government pursued the policy through
various tactics for about one hundred and seventy years.164 By 1821, ex-president Thomas
Jefferson was calling for the extermination of any Indians who stood in the way of American
expansion.165 In 1825, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Clay stated it was “impossible to civilize
Indians . . . they were destined to extinction . . . .”166 Generals Phil Sheridan and William
Tecumseh Sherman, both famous due to their service in the Civil War and the Indian wars, made
comments in the 1860s advocating for Indian extermination. Sheridan made the well-known
statement the “only good Indians I ever saw were dead,” and Sherman stated in 1868: “We must
act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women, and
children.”167 Furthermore, in 1844, when U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton, well-known for his
advocacy of the Oregon Trail and the United States acquiring the Pacific Northwest, told the
Senate when he was asked whether expansion would cause the extinction of Indians: “I cannot
murmur at what seems to be the effect of divine law . . . . The moral and intellectual superiority
of the White race will do the rest . . . . ”168 In addition, many average Americans had similar
thoughts, and many frontiersmen and westerners expressly wanted Indians exterminated.169 One
example will suffice, which we have already quoted: an 1870 newspaper editorial stated
Wyoming was “destined for the occupancy and sustenance of the Anglo-Saxon race . . . . The
Indians must stand aside or be overwhelmed . . . . the doom of extinction is upon the red men of
America.”170
In sum, while it might be controversial to allege the United States actively attempted to
exterminate the Indigenous peoples of North America, the purposeful or incidental results of
America’s “Savage as the Wolf” policies and military and removal campaigns, and forcing
Indian peoples onto small and often worthless reservations could meet the definition of genocide

161
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 16, 96-97, 155-58, 185-86, 197-99, 251-59.
162
KAKEL supra note 21, at 164 & 172; see generally WARD CHURCHILL, A LITTLE MATTER OF
GENOCIDE: HOLOCAUST AND DENIAL IN THE AMERICAS 1492 TO THE PRESENT (1998).
163
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 16.
164
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 92-94.
165
Vol. 6 THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 273 (H.A. Washington ed., 1861); see also
MILLER, NATIVE AMERICA, supra note 34, at 78 & 92-94.
166
HARRY L. WATSON, LIBERTY AND POWER: THE POLITICS OF JACKSONIAN AMERICA 53, 105
(1990).
167
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 67 & 120 (citing authorities). General Ulysses S. Grant and
other generals also used the word “extermination” in regards Indians. Id. at 119-21.
168
Cong. Globe, 29th Cong., 1st Sess. 918 (1846).
169
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 47 & 60.
170
BROWN, supra note 127, at 189 (quoting CHEYENNE DAILY LEADER, Mar. 3, 1870).
21
and active attempts to exterminate Indian peoples.171 Certainly, numerous historians and
commentators note that continental imperialism and settler colonialism manifested itself as
genocide in the American West and in the Nazi East, and the Nazi East had its colonial and
settler roots in the North American precedent.172 In fact, one historian has stated that when Nazis
and Adolf Hitler discussed Indians and American Indians they were really talking about
extermination.173 It is evident there were parallels between the treatment of American Indians
and the German East, and that the conquerors of both visited ethnic cleansing and genocide on
their victims.174

5. Frederick Jackson Turner and the American Frontier

Professor Frederick Jackson Turner was a very influential American historian in the late
1800s and early 1900s and he still provokes discussion today.175 He is primarily famous for his
theories on the American frontier. In a nutshell, beginning in 1893, Turner claimed the frontier
had played an important role in shaping American democracy, the character of Americans, and
the trajectory of the United States.176 He won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1933 for his book
on sectionalism, an examination of the regional development of the United States.177 An
anonymous author on Wikipedia states “Turner’s model of sectionalism reminds one of [Karl
Haushofer’s] work during the same period.”178 The topic of Turner’s book also reminds one of
Friedrich Ratzel’s work on geographical politics discussed above.
Turner is worth noting here because of his views on the American Frontier but he is
especially intriguing because of his connections to Professor Friedrich Ratzel and his theories on
Lebensraum. Both men influenced each other’s thinking on the American Frontier West and the
German East.179

171
See, e.g., Lenore A. Stiffarm & Phil Lane, Jr., The Demography of Native North America: A
Question of American Indian Survival, in THE STATE OF NATIVE AMERICA: GENOCIDE,
COLONIZATION, AND RESISTANCE 23-53 (M. Annette Jaimes, ed., 1992).
172
E.g., KAKEL, supra note 21, at 177 & 218; LOWER, supra note 63, at 27.
173
BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 305.
174
Id.; LOWER, supra note 63, at 27 (stating Germany worked to exterminate the “racially
inferior” Ukrainians).
175
E.g., Allan G. Bogue, Frederick Jackson Turner Reconsidered, THE HISTORY TEACHER 195
(1994); HEIDLER, supra note 36, at 23 (Turner said Manifest Destiny was a natural offshoot of
America taming the wilderness and populating the frontiers).
176
Id.; WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 12-13. See FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, THE FRONTIER
IN AMERICAN HISTORY (1921), at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22994/22994-h/22994-h.htm
(visited December 30, 2019).
177
FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER, THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SECTIONS IN AMERICAN HISTORY (1932);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Jackson_Turner (visited December 30, 2019).
178
Id.
179
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 21 (Turner was indebted to the writings of the Leipzig geographer
Friedrich Ratzel on the influence of geography on history); PENNY, supra note 6, at 237;
Steinweis, supra note 70, at 60-61.
22
 In the 1890s, Turner and Ratzel were part of an international conversation about politics
and geography.180 Turner’s obsession was finding links between geography and national
character, and he echoed what various Germans, including Ratzel, were writing.181 Historians
state that the men communicated with each other through their writings, influenced each other’s
development of their theories, and openly admired each other’s work.182 Also interesting, is that
Turner collaborated closely with an ex-student and colleague of Ratzel, the American Ellen
Churchill Semple.183 Professor Semple “work[ed] with Ratzel and produced several academic
papers in American and European journals” and through “a series of books and papers she
communicated certain aspects of the work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel to the
Anglophone community.”184
Ratzel made complimentary comments about Turner’s frontier thesis of American history
and how Turner contrasted the effects of America’s westward expansion with the static European
borders.185 Turner’s thesis resonated with Ratzel and other German intellectuals who explicitly
and implicitly compared the German East to the American West.186 Ratzel was apparently
influenced by Turner and, in turn, Ratzel’s work “was a major influence on” Turner.187
Consequently, it is clear Ratzel was influenced in his thinking about Lebensraum and the
German East by Turner’s ideas on the American Frontier. Then, through Ratzel, Professor Karl
Haushofer, Rudolph Hess, and Adolf Hitler were also influenced by Turner.188 “Without doubt,
Hitler, if not Nazi bureaucrats, believed the U.S. conquest of Western North America and the
displacement and killing of the indigenous population provided a historical precedent for his own
plans in Eastern Europe.”189
In conclusion, the information set forth above demonstrates that Germans in general, and
Adolf Hitler and many Nazi officials in particular, were knowledgeable about American Indians,
United States Indian Affairs, Manifest Destiny, and the U.S. conquest of the Frontier West.
Many historians and commentators argue this knowledge was expressly used by the Nazis in
developing their thinking and actions in the German East. Others disagree to greater or lesser

180
PENNY, supra note 6, at 237; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 21.
181
Id. at 151.
182
Id. at 151 & 153.
183
Id. at 20 & 153 (Ratzel’s ideas came in part from late nineteenth century interactions that
included Turner and his frontier thesis and later spawned Karl Haushofer); BLACKBOURN, supra
note 9, at 303-05; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 56-69; PENNY, supra note 6, at 237.
184
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Churchill_Semple (visited Jan. 6, 2020); see also Everett
Eugene Edwards, Ellen Churchill Semple, 7 AGRICULTURAL HIST. 150 (July 1933) (at
JSTOR3739708).
185
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 21 & n.19; Steinweis, supra note 70, at 61; PENNY, supra note 6, at
237.
186
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 20 & n.20, 153; Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, supra note
147, at 151-53, 167.
187
Steinweis, supra note 70, at 60-61; accord BLACKBOURN, supra note 9, at 294-95;
Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature, supra note 147, at 153 & 167 (Ratzel said he also learned
from Turner).
188
See Steinweis, supra note 70, at 61.
189
WESTERMANN, supra note 75, at 14.
23
extents. We do not have to settle that argument. This discussion and the information presented
suffices to demonstrate the Third Reich understood some, or a lot, of the historical facts and
official American policies about the Indigenous peoples of America, Manifest Destiny, and
Indian affairs, and perhaps learned from the United States and its treatment of the Indian nations.
Notwithstanding how much the Nazis learned exactly, or whether they expressly used the same
tactics, they were clearly influenced by their knowledge and this history and often cited the
United States actions against Indians and in the Frontier West as an excuse and justification for
Nazi actions in the East.

III. Nazi Germany’s Reliance on American Law and Policies

In addition to the general knowledge and interest of the German public, Hitler, and Nazis in
American law, policies, and history about American Indians, the Third Reich also gave special
attention to other areas of United States jurisprudence and policies on race and racial
discrimination. Nazi scholars, lawyers, jurists, and party officials intensely studied these matters
and wrote numerous scholarly books and articles on these topics. It is impossible to deny they
were closely studying the United States to find models for Germany to consider and to find
justifications for the Nazi development of its racial laws and programs.

A. Eugenics, Sterilization, Immigration, Naturalization, and Miscegenation

Eugenics was a “scientific” movement primarily popular in the 1890s through the 1930s and
grew out of Charles Darwin’s theories on evolution and the survival of the fittest.190 “Social
Darwinists” applied his theories to human biology and heredity.191 In essence it was a nurture
versus nature debate on how best to improve the biological health of the human race.192
Academics, scholars, and activists in the United States and Germany were prominent leaders
in this international movement.193 Both countries ultimately enacted laws and policies on
involuntary sterilizations, naturalization, and miscegenation issues that were based on

190
E.g., THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF THE HISTORY OF EUGENICS 158 (Alison Bashford &
Philippa Levine eds, 2010); https://knowgenetics.org/history-of-eugenics/ (visited December 30,
2019); ALEXANDRA MINNA STERN, EUGENIC NATION: FAULTS AND FRONTIERS OF BETTER
BREEDING IN MODERN AMERICA 10-11 (2005) (the Englishman Sir Francis Galton coined the
word “eugenics” in 1883); Jeremy Noakes, Nazism and Eugenics: The Background to the Nazi
Sterilization Law of 14 July 1933, in IDEAS INTO POLITICS: ASPECTS OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
1880-1950 75, 76 (R.J. Bullen et al eds, 1984).
191
Noakes, supra note 190, at 76-77; STERN, supra note 190, at 85; WEIKART, supra note 3, at
99.
192
See PHILIP R. REILLY, THE SURGICAL SOLUTION: A HISTORY OF INVOLUNTARY STERILIZATION
IN THE UNITED STATES x & 111 (1991) (“The central doctrine of the eugenics movement was that
virtually all human defects could be ultimately explained by the presence of one or more
genetically determined characteristics.”); Noakes, supra note 190, at 75; STEPHEN TROMBLEY,
THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE: A HISTORY OF COERCIVE STERILIZATION 30, 115 (1988).
193
E.g., KUHL, supra note 4, at 13-26, 53-64, 77-96; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 49-69, 110-
21, 214-34.
24
eugenics.194 And both countries were well aware of the laws and political situations in other
countries involving eugenics, sterilizations, citizenship, and miscegenation. In Germany, under
the Third Reich, eugenics and forced sterilizations quickly led to euthanasia measures and, some
contend, to mass murder.195 Adolf Hitler was quite interested in eugenics and German politicians
and academics carefully studied American laws and readily acknowledged America’s influence
and leadership in the eugenics movement.196
In the United States, and elsewhere, eugenics also heavily influenced immigration and
naturalization (citizenship) policies and laws. For example, the United States enacted laws from
1875 onwards that singled out Chinese immigrants in the immigration and naturalization arena,
and then expanded racial exclusions to other countries and peoples. (American Indians were also
discriminated against in regards naturalization by the United States until 1924.) Adolf Hitler and
other Germans were aware of and expressly stated that they were influenced by American
policies and laws on these topics.
“Scientific” eugenics was also used to justify “old-fashioned” racism and discrimination
in the United States regarding immigration, citizenship, and especially inter-racial marriage, or
miscegenation. Forty-one states in the United States enacted anti-miscegenation laws.197 And,
again, Nazi attorneys, academics, and politicians studied and cited these laws and were directly
influenced by these American policies and laws.
A detailed analysis of eugenics, involuntary sterilizations, immigration and citizenship,
and anti-miscegenation policies are beyond the scope of this Article. But we briefly raise these
issues to investigate five more areas of American law and policies, which also contained Indian
law elements, that impressed and apparently influenced Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime and
provided them with concrete tactics to study, and with excuses and justifications in the national
and international arenas for the policies Nazi Germany enacted.

1. Eugenics Movement

“Now that we know the laws of heredity, it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy
and severely handicapped beings from coming into this world. I have studied with great
interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people

194
E.g., STERN, supra note 190, at 2-3 (thirty-three US states).
195
STERN, supra note 190, at 2-3 (stating it is “difficult to extract eugenics from the shadow of
Nazism.”); KUHL, supra note 4, at 105; KAKEL, supra note 21, at 62 (Third Reich professionals
constructed a hierarchy of racial types to bolster Nazi ideology and provided a theoretical
foundation for euthanasia, racial hygiene, and the annihilation of Jews).
196
See, e.g., REILLY, supra note 192, at 106 (in 1924 Hitler wrote in MEIN KAMPF: “To prevent
defective persons from reproducing equally defective offspring, is an act dictated by the clearest
light of reason. Its carrying out is the most humane act of mankind. It would . . . result in a
steady increase in human welfare.”).
197
Harvey M. Applebaum, Miscegenation Statutes: A Constitutional and Social Problem, 53
GEO. L.J. 50, 50 n.9 (1964).
25
 whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Adolf Hitler.198

Germany and the United States were major participants in the international eugenics
movement.199 By the 1930s, the U.S. and Germany had surpassed Great Britain as the leaders in
the field.200 In addition, American individuals and institutions were researching and funding
eugenics research. The Rockefeller Foundation even funded German eugenics research
institutions in Munich and Berlin.201 It is thus no surprise that German scholars and officials
studied and even emulated American methods.202 As Adolf Hitler stated in the quote that opened
this subsection, the Nazis actually did study American laws and actually were influenced by
American scholarship, advocacy, federal immigration and naturalization laws, and state laws
related to eugenics and its corollary of involuntary sterilizations. There is thus no question that
German and Nazi scholars and academics carefully studied and cited the United States when they
were developing racial policies and legal regimes about sterilizing undesirable peoples.
Significant eugenics organizations began forming in the U.S. in 1906 with the Race
Betterment Foundation, the Eugenics Research Office, and the Human Betterment Foundation.203
In Germany, the physician Alfred Ploetz was one of the earliest proponents of eugenics. In 1904-
05, he founded the first journal in Germany devoted to the study of race hygiene and he also
organized the German Eugenics Society.204 The influential organization, German Law for Racial
Hygiene, was created in 1922, and in the early 1930s under the Weimar Republic there was a
marked increase in the influence of eugenics in a large measure due to the work of this
organization.205
Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of cross pollination between German and
American eugenicists at international conferences, through scholarship and letters, and in visits
between the countries.206 For example, an influential 1913 book in German informed German

198
OTTO WAGENER, HITLER AUS NACHSTER NAHE: AUFZEICHNUNGEN EINES VERTRAUTEN 1929-
1932 264 (Henry A. Turner ed., 1978) (quoting Hitler); accord KUHL, supra note 4, at 37;
TROMBLEY, supra note 193, at 115-16.
199
KUHL, supra note 4, at 27.
200
Id. at 7 & 21 (1994); Noakes, supra note 190, at 75-76; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 24.
201
Id. at 116; KUHL, supra note 4, at 20.
202
Id. at 17 (a 1913 German book described America’s adoption and use of eugenics ideas which
was praised by German and English eugenicists).
203
STERN, supra note 190, at 5; REILLY, supra note 192, at 76-77; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at
59; DAVID SCOTT FITZGERALD & DAVID COOK-MARTIN, CULLING THE MASSES: THE
DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS OF RACIST IMMIGRATION POLICY IN THE AMERICAS 58 (2014).
204
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 105; USBECK, supra note 7, at 79.
205
Noakes, supra note 190, at 82-84 (in the late 1920s, the Prussian Ministry of Welfare
organized eugenics courses; the Reichstag considered bills in 1925 and 1927 on eugenics and by
the early 1930s appointed a committee on population questions and eugenics).
206
KUHL, supra note 4, at 42-43 (American eugenicists regularly informed German racial
hygienists about eugenics developments); STERN, supra note 190, at 3; TROMBLEY, supra note
192, at 116 (a German eugenicist took an exhibition of the Reich’s eugenics program to a
conference in Pasadena in 1934; held talks with American eugenicists in New York, Chicago,
26
academics and the public about American developments in eugenics and provoked the Reich
Health Office in 1923 to begin an inquiry into eugenics in the United States.207 In 1929, a very
important American eugenicist, Harry Laughlin, published an article about eugenics legislative
developments in the U.S. in a German magazine based on a talk he had delivered in Munich.208
In the article, he provided detailed information about the sterilization laws in twenty-three states
of the United States and he claimed that eugenic sterilization was no longer considered a radical
method in the United States.209 On another occasion Laughlin opined that the honorary degree
bestowed upon him by Heidelberg University was “evidence of a common understanding of
German and American scientists in the nature of eugenics.”210
These interactions clearly influenced German and Nazi scholars and they undertook
detailed analyses of the sterilization measures adopted in the United States and especially in
California.211 Numerous Nazis stated “they owed a great debt to the work” of several California
eugenicists in particular.212 And Americans also recognized the influence the California
sterilization experiments had on German law. For example, in 1935, an American woman
representing a maternal health organization visited Germany and spent several months studying
the operation of the German hereditary health courts and sterilization efforts and she learned that
a book by two prominent California eugenicists had been extremely influential on the drafting of
the 1933 Nazi sterilization law.213 She wrote: “The leaders in the German sterilization movement
state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California
experiment . . . .”214 Further, after enacting the 1933 sterilization law, the Third Reich’s legal
journal included flattering references to the California Human Betterment Foundation and its
assertion that sterilization “is a practical and essential step to prevent racial degeneration.”215
In turn, the United States was also influenced by German eugenicists and eugenics
programs. In 1934, a leading member of the eugenics movement in Virginia said his state needed
to extend its sterilization law to more closely resemble the German law.216 Other American
eugenicists hailed the German program and characterized it as a sensible plan that was working

and Baltimore); ANTHONY M. PLATT & CECILIA E. O’LEARY, BLOODLINES: RECOVERING

HITLER’S NUREMBERG LAWS, FROM PATTON’S TROPHY TO PUBLIC MEMORIAL 61-62 (2006)
(members of the California foundation were in regular contact with the advocates of racial
science in Germany).
207
Noakes, supra note 190, at 80-81; KUHL, supra note 4, at 23.
208
Id. at 24.
209
Id.
210
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 116.
211
REILLY, supra note 192, at 106; id. at 107 (German eugenicists were impressed with the
American Laughlin’s work on sterilizations); KUHL, supra note 4, at 38 & 42.
212
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 116.
213
KUHL, supra note 4, at 42-43; REILLY, supra note 192, at 106; see also KUHL, supra note 4, at
45 (a California eugenicist viewed the 1933 German sterilization law as the fulfillment of the
eugenics principles developed by the California movement).
214
Id. at 42-43.
215
PLATT, supra note 206, at 59-60.
216
KUHL, supra note 4, at 45.
27
well.217 In addition, American “eugenic and lay periodicals applauded the passage in the 1930s
of Nazi marriage and sterilization laws . . . .”218 In 1935, a Los Angeles Times writer, who wrote
a regular column on eugenics for the paper in 1935-41, applauded “the movement in Germany
and other Nordic countries of Europe for the elimination of the reproduction of the unfit.”219
Also, in a 1935 book, an American eugenicist wrote in support of Hitler’s actions and claimed
many farsighted people in England and America had been working towards something like what
Hitler now made compulsory.220 Furthermore, in a 1937 book, an American author defended
Hitler’s views and Nazi practices on sterilization by explaining that the programs had developed
naturally from standard works of genuine scientific character.221 Incredibly, some American
eugenicists even showed in the United States Nazi propaganda films which were intended to
sway the German public to the idea of euthanasia.222
It is possible some of the Nazi interactions with Americans and United States eugenics
laws might have been covert propaganda efforts. Hitler and the Third Reich certainly wanted to
justify their actions in this field to Germans, and to the world, and what a coup it was to have the
active support of the United States.223 Consequently, Nazi Germany went out of its way to flatter
and cater to American academics. The Nazi government instructed German universities and
eugenicists to treat Americans very well and thus German universities invited American
eugenicists to conferences and even awarded some of them honorary degrees all of which helped
give attention and credibility to Nazi policies.224 In 1934, Hitler himself might have been
participating in this effort to secure American support when he wrote some American eugenicists
and praised them and requested copies of their books.225 “Hitler's personal correspondence with
American eugenicists revealed both the influence that American eugenicists had on the highest
figures of the Nazi regime and the crucial importance that National Socialists placed on
garnering support for their policies among foreign scientists.”226 There is also a strong
probability “eugenics, offered the Nazis ample opportunity to compare their racial policies to
those of the United States.”227
It is clear Nazi Germany carefully studied and relied to some extent on American
eugenics scholarship and policies in developing Nazi eugenics laws and programs.

2. Involuntary sterilizations

In the United States, the eugenics agenda turned almost immediately to involuntary
sterilizations. It seems self-evident that the practical application of the theories of eugenics, and

217
REILLY, supra note 192, at 108.
218
STERN, supra note 190, at 3.
219
Id. at 82.
220
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 116.
221
Id. at 47.
222
WEIKART, supra note 3, at 226.
223
KUHL, supra note 4, at 88.
224
Id. at 86; STERN, supra note 190, at 3.
225
KUHL, supra note 4, at 86.
226
Id.
227
USBECK, supra note 7, at 79.
28
improving the human race through heredity and biology, would naturally lead to the practice of
population control via sterilization. In fact, thirty-two American states enacted involuntary
sterilization laws starting with Indiana in 1907, and Washington, Connecticut, and California in
1909.228 California and Virginia ultimately became the national leaders in performing
involuntary sterilizations.229 The Virginia law was challenged on constitutional grounds but was
upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes used some
unfortunate language.230
As in the United States, Nazi Germany also turned to involuntary sterilizations in its
attempts to improve racial purity and the Aryan stock. As mentioned above, various eugenics
measures and even sterilization laws had been considered by the Weimar Republic government,
but once Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, eugenics programs
were instituted and emphasized.231 In fact, the second major law enacted under the Third Reich
was the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring on July 14, 1933.232 This was
the first in a series of laws that put into practice eugenics and Nazi theories of applied biology
that progressed from sterilizations to euthanasia of handicapped children and adults, and then to
mass murder.233 In barely more than three years, by the middle of 1937, 200,000 people had been
sterilized in Germany compared to a conservative estimate for the United States of 12,145 people
from 1907-1932.234 The Nazis had the logic of eugenics on their side and since many people and
experts had been discussing the subject for decades, numerous people found it easy to accept the
new law.235
The Nazi sterilization law of 1933 legalized wholesale compulsory sterilizations of a
wide range of the “unfit” on social as well as medical grounds.236 “Nazi ideology combined both
the racist and the eugenic components of the German social Darwinist tradition and, although the

228
KUHL, supra note 4, at 17 (other states followed in 1911-13, Nevada, Iowa, New Jersey, New
York, Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota, and Oregon); REILLY, supra note 192, at 85-88;
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 51 & 63-68.
229
STERN, supra note 190, at 84-85 (California performed 20,000 sterilizations from 1909 to the
1960s, perhaps one third of the U.S. total); TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 53 (by 1944 California
had sterilized 17,012 people and Virginia 4675 out of a national total of 42,616).
230
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927) (the
Court allowed the sterilization of a “feeble-minded” woman because the state statute did not
violate the Fourteenth Amendment). German eugenicists noted this case, and a Nazi doctor on
trial in 1946 cited it in his defense. KUHL, supra note 4, at 25 & 101.
231
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 110; Noakes, supra note 190, at 85-86.
232
Id. at 85; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 110.
233
Id.; PLATT, supra note 206, at 71 (in 1939 Hitler authorized nurses and doctors in pediatric
wards to murder 5000 children with physical deformities; in 1940-41, gas chambers were first
used to kill 70,000 mentally and physically disabled adults; an estimated 200,000 adults were
killed in the Nazi euthanasia program).
234
Noakes, supra note 190, at 87; see also PLATT supra note 206, at 60.
235
Noakes, supra note 190, at 87.
236
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 47.
29
main emphasis was on the former with anti-Semitism the dominant theme, eugenics ideas formed
an integral part of the Nazi Weltanschauung [view of life].”237
The Nazis based their 1933 law on the model sterilization bill drafted in 1922 by the
American eugenicist Harry Laughlin.238 Laughlin was an internationally influential eugenicist
and an advisor to a House of Representatives committee on immigration issues.239 The Nazis
were also influenced by the California sterilization law and movement, which they considered to
be a model for German policies and laws.240 Germans, and later the Nazis, had long studied and
relied on American precedents.241
It is worth noting that as early as the end of the 1870s, and again before World War I, that
quite a few social Darwinists were discussing racial extermination in their writings and two
leading German experts expressly recognized the Darwinian influence on euthanasia
discussions.242 But once the Nazis came to power, their zeal to rid Germany of “inferior people”
led some eugenicists to propose helping natural selection along by killing those deemed inferior,
unfit, or worthless.243 Therefore, the 1933 Nazi sterilization law is alleged to have marked the
beginning of the “final solution” policy.244
The Nazis ultimately enacted a euthanasia program against the handicapped beginning in
1939.245 Germany killed perhaps 200,000 mentally and physically handicapped adults and
thousands of children with physically deformities.246 Incredibly, in 1935, even after the Nazi
party moved to euthanasia, a California eugenicist visited Germany to report on the program. His
report demonstrated the links between American and German eugenicists and the scientific
respectability of the movements.247
It is impossible to state unequivocally that Germany, Hitler, and the Nazis were
influenced by the eugenics and sterilization laws of the United States, or whether they just used
the U.S. as a justification for actions they planned all along. The ideology of race improvement
was by no means limited to just German advocates. But it is certain Germans coordinated with
and were influenced by American organizations and academics in their eugenics studies, that
they carefully analyzed and cited the thirty-two American state sterilization statutes, and noted
that sterilizations were widely used in the United States, as the Hitler quote above clearly
demonstrates. In sum, “Adolf Hitler's racial image of the world was not simply the product of his

237
Noakes, supra note 190, at 85 (citing ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF 232 & 365 n. (1969)).
238
KUHL, supra note 4, at 39 (the magazine Eugenic News reported the German 1933 sterilization
law was very similar to the 1922 model law drafted by Laughlin); TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at
47, 55, 110, 116.
239
REILLY, supra note 192, at 63-65; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 55.
240
STERN, supra note 190, at 3; TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 47, 55, 110, 116; KUHL, supra
note 4, at 23, 25, 39.
241
KUHL, supra note 4, at 23, 25, 39.
242
WEIKART, supra note 3, at 146, 192, 195-96.
243
Id. at 45.
244
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 47.
245
Noakes, supra note 190, at 75.
246
REILLY, supra note 192, at 110; PLATT, supra note 206, at 71.
247
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 117.
30
own delusion but the result of the findings of ‘respectable’ science in Germany and in other parts
of the world, including the United States.”248

3. Immigration and Naturalization Laws

“There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of
citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the
American Union . . . .” Adolf Hitler.249

As Adolf Hitler correctly understood, the United States had long used race and eugenics
principles to control immigration and naturalization (citizenship). In its very first naturalization
law in 1790 the United States limited the grant of citizenship to “free white persons.”250 In its
very first immigration law in 1803, Congress legislated that no Black persons could be imported
into the United States.251
The United States continued to use race in its immigration and naturalization laws for nearly
one hundred and fifty years. In 1870, for example, after the Civil War Amendment, Congress
amended the 1790 statute to continue to allow “free white persons” and persons of African
descent to become citizens.252 In 1875, Congress explicitly banned the subjects of “China, Japan,
or any other oriental country” from coming to the U.S. for “lewd or immoral purposes,” although
some commentators avow the stated purpose was a subterfuge and it was really intended to
prevent the immigration of Asian females to prevent Asian births on American soil and thus
automatic citizenship under the Constitution.253
In 1882, Congress imposed other immigration restrictions on Chinese people.254 Congress
followed that restrictive act by enacting what are called the Chinese Exclusion Acts in 1888 to
1904.255 These laws came about due to lobbying primarily by west coast states, citizens, labor

248
KLAUS P. FISCHER, THE HISTORY OF AN OBSESSION 118 (1998); WEIKART, supra note 3, at
232.
249
ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF 439-40 (Ralph Manheim trans., 1971).
250
Uniform Rule of Naturalization, 1 Stat. 103, § 1, Act of March 26th, 1790. See generally IAN
HANEY-LÓPEZ, WHITE BY LAW: THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF RACE (1996).
251
Act of Feb. 28, 1803, ch. 10, 2 Stat. 205.
252
Naturalization Act of 1870, 16 Stat. 254, § 7.
253
1875 Page Law, 18 Stat. 477; BETH LEW WILLIAMS, THE CHINESE MUST GO: VIOLENCE,
EXCLUSION, AND THE MAKING OF THE ALIEN IN AMERICA 8, 45, 264 n.18 (2018). See also United
States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 693 (1898) (under the Fourteenth Amendment, the
children of aliens born in the United States are birthright U.S. citizens regardless of their race).
254
Act of May 6, 1882, 22 Stat. 58. See also Act of February 19, 1862, 12 Stat. 340.
255
Chinese Exclusion Act of October 1, 1888, 25 Stat. 504. The Supreme Court held the 1888
was within Congress’ constitutional power. Chae Chan Ping v. United States, 130 U.S. 581, 609
(1889); WILLIAMS, supra note 253, at 8, 212, 264.
31
groups, and politicians who were upset by competition from Chinese, and no doubt included
significant elements of racism.256
In 1907–08, Congress and Japan quietly agreed to what is called the “Gentlemen’s
Agreement” to restrict Japanese immigration to the United States.257 In 1917, Congress created
the “Asiatic Barred Zone” and openly banned immigration from Japan, and also imposed literacy
tests on potential immigrants.258
In the golden age of eugenics, Congress also moved to ban immigration by peoples that were
considered to be from “unfit” countries and races, and even to deport the “Scum from the
Melting-Pot.”259 After working to ban Chinese and Asian immigrants for decades, in 1921
Congress imposed a national quota system on all immigrants that was clearly and blatantly
designed to favor northwestern Europeans.260 Three years later, Congress imposed a stricter
national quota system that even more drastically favored immigration from northwestern
European countries.261
American Indians were also treated differently in regards naturalization. It is actually not
surprising that this subject might have confused Congress for nearly a century because Indians
were citizens of their own nations which signed treaties and engaged in diplomatic, political
relations with the English, French, Spanish, and then the United States. It is perhaps
understandable why the United States and the states would not have considered American
Indians to be their citizens. As a matter of fact, the U.S. Constitution and the Fourteenth
Amendment state that Indians were only to be counted in the decadal census if they paid taxes.262
Slowly however, as tribal nations came more under the power of the United States and more
subsumed within the states, questions about Indian citizenship arose.
The language of the Fourteenth Amendment would seem to have made citizens of all
Indians that were born within the United States.263 But Congress debated this question in 1866
whether the proposed Fourteenth Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1866 would make
Indians U.S. citizens. Congress decided no because Indians did not recognize the United States
as their government, were subject to very few federal laws, the U.S. made treaties with Indian

256
REILLY, supra note 192, at 11 & 23; KUNAL M. PARKER, MAKING FOREIGNERS, IMMIGRATION
AND CITIZENSHIP LAW IN AMERICA 1600-2000 122 & 155 (2015); FITZGERALD & COOK-
MARTIN, supra note 203, at 91.
257
WILLIAMS, supra note 253, at 231; PARKER, supra note 256, at 154.
258
39 Stat. 874; FITZGERALD & COOK-MARTIN, supra note 203, at 137 (scientific racism played a
dominant role in forming the literacy tests and national immigration quotas).
259
TROMBLEY, supra note 192, at 57 (a Harvard professor wrote in 1916 in the Eugenics Review
that a policy of eugenics for the United States “means the prevention of the immigration of the
unfit alien.”); E.E. Grant, Scum from the melting-pot, 30 AMERICAN J. SOCIOLOGY 641 (1925)
(the author called for “deportation” that “eugenically cleanses America.”).
260
Act of May 19, 1921, 42 Stat. 5; FITZGERALD & COOK-MARTIN, supra note 203, at 101;
PARKER, supra note 256, at 156.
261
1924 Immigration Act, 43 Stat. 153; PARKER, supra note 256, at 156; FITZGERALD & COOK-
MARTIN, supra note 203, at 101; REILLY, supra note 192, at 39 (the 1924 law cut back U.S.
immigration from Italy, Poland, and Greece, for example, by 80%).
262
U.S. CONST. art. I, § 2 & Amend XIV, § 2.
263
Id. at § 1.
32
nations, the tribes had their own laws, and thus individual Indians were not considered to be
“subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States as the Amendment requires for citizenship.264 In
1884, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Congress because Indians were not “subject to the
jurisdiction” of the United States.265
The United States began granting citizenship to some Indians through statutes in 1887.266
In 1888, Congress granted citizenship to Indian women who married White Americans.267 In
1901, all Indians in the Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma, were made citizens,
and the Indian veterans of World War I were also awarded citizenship in 1919.268 Finally, in
1924, Congress made all Indians United States citizens.269 It seems certain that questions of race
and racial discrimination affected American Indian naturalization issues for over a century.
Moreover, it is not a surprise that issues of race and eugenics, and the desire to maintain a
“racially healthy population,” also affected U.S. immigration and naturalization laws.270 In fact,
the influence of eugenics was most heavily felt in the domain of immigration, and eugenics
scholars argue that immigration policies were the “single most internationally significant and
consistent policy and legal application of eugenic ideas.”271 Even in 1790, when eugenics was
unknown, the United States favored “white” naturalization and immigrants from northern
Europe. In the early 20th century, however, the eugenics debate took on a scientific cast and
began applying race and national origin issues and prejudices in immigration.272 One of
America’s internationally recognized eugenics expert, Harry Laughlin, was appointed by the
House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization as the committee’s “Expert Eugenical
Agent,” and he testified as an expert and wrote influential reports on the threats posed by
immigration to the committee that worked on the 1924 immigration act.273 Consequently, the

264
Id. See also CONG. GLOBE, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 527 (1866); PARKER, supra note 256, at 131.
265
Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U.S. 94 (1884).
266
24 Stat. 388 (1887).
267
Act of August 9, 1888, 25 Stat. 392, codified at 25 U.S.C.A. § 182 (2019). Cf. Mackenzie v.
Hare, 239 U.S. 299, 311 (1915) (upholding a 1907 federal law that denaturalized American
citizens who married foreigners). Thousands of American women lost their citizenship under this
Act. PARKER, supra note 256, at 177.
268
31 Stat. 1447 (1901); Act of November 6, 1919, 41 Stat. 350, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 3
(2018).
269
43 Stat. 253 (1924), codified at 8 U.S.C. § 3 (2018).
Under the rule of Plessy v. Ferguson, however, once Indians became U.S. citizens they
could still be segregated and treated differently from other citizens. See Piper v. Big Pine School
District of Inyo County, 226 P. 926, 929 (Cal. 1924) (California Supreme Court held it was not a
federal or state law violation to require Indian children, or others in whom racial differences
existed, to attend separate schools provided they were equal).
270
KUHL supra note 4, at 21-22, 38-39; accord WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 8-9 (Britain,
Australia, Canada and New Zealand all also began to screen immigrants for hereditary fitness).
271
Bashford, supra note 190, at 158. Accord FITZGERALD & COOK-MARTIN, supra note 203, at
58.
272
Id. at 99 (scientific racism gave a new justification for the old argument certain races should
be barred).
273
Id. at 100; REILLY, supra note 192, at 63-65.
33
federal government wove the new “science” of race and eugenics into its immigration and
naturalization laws.274
In turn, Nazi Germany used eugenics and racial hatred in drafting its naturalization laws
and policies. We address this subject briefly in subsection D on the Nuremberg Laws. But here,
it is worthwhile to point out the American influence on immigration and naturalization in
Germany. It is clear Nazi scholars and Hitler himself studied and applauded American laws and
policies in this field.275 One of the preeminent Nazi lawyers published a book in 1933 and
included a long discussion on American immigration and naturalization laws. He congratulated
the United States for applying “the eugenic point of view against inferior elements trying to
immigrate.”276 And he expressly analyzed the American ban on Chinese immigration and the
1921 U.S. immigration law which applied national quotas to immigration. He applauded
America for taking “an entirely new path” after World War I to protect the United States.277
Other German scholars also lauded American immigration restrictions, and the act of 1924 was
especially appreciated by German racial hygienists.278
In conclusion, there seems to be no question the United States used ideas of race in its
immigration and naturalization laws. Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime were well acquainted with
these American laws and policies. In discussing the laws and their intent, and especially the 1924
act which drastically favored northern European immigration, Hitler stated: “That the American
union itself feels itself to be a Nordic-German state and in no way an international mishmash of
peoples further emerges from the manner in which it allots immigration quotas to European
nations.”279 Furthermore, Hitler felt the United States was the most inventive nation in the world
at imposing immigration quotas “dependent on definite racial prerequisites.”280 He also praised
the United States for only allowing immigration of the fittest people, which naturally Hitler said
were Nordic.281 Clearly, Hitler and other Germans were knowledgeable about American
immigration and naturalization laws, paid homage to the United States for its use of racial and
eugenics policies, and were influenced thereby in the drafting of Nazi laws and policies.282

4. Anti-Miscegenation Laws
Nazi scholars and officials very carefully studied and then relied heavily on American
anti-miscegenation statutes to justify racial prejudice and the enactment of laws and policies
against Jewish peoples. In subsection D below, we look at how America’s anti-miscegenation
statutes and policies were reflected in the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. In this section, we primarily

274
PARKER, supra note 256, at 148-49.
275
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 51-52.
276
OTTO KOELLREUTTER, GRUNDRIFS DER ALLGEMEINEN STAATLEHRE 51-52 (1933).
277
Id.
278
KUHL, supra note 4, at 25-26, 38.
279
HITLER’S SECOND BOOK, supra note 26, at 108 (1928). Accord id. Telford Taylor,
Introduction, at xxiii-iv (Hitler praised the American immigration act of 1924).
280
Id. at 100-01.
281
Id. at 107-08 (Hitler also noted the United States had been unable to assimilate Chinese and
Japanese immigrants).
282
Id. Taylor, Introduction, at xxiv.
34
focus on how eugenics was used to justify anti-miscegenation policies and statutes.
Anti-miscegenation laws ban the marriage of people of different races.283 “The idea of a
prohibition of interracial marriage originated in [the United States] . . . .”284 Such laws existed in
the United States since at least 1661 when Maryland apparently enacted the first.285 Ultimately,
up to forty-one of the fifty American states enacted miscegenation laws, and made such
marriages civilly invalid and/or criminally punishable.286 As late as 1951, twenty-nine states, and
as late as 1964, nineteen states, still had such laws in effect.287
One commentator states these miscegenation statutes and policies “were emboldened by
the eugenics racism of the 1920s.”288 Not surprisingly, racism was linked to eugenics, and the
anti-miscegenation laws in particular were measures attempting to maintain what was thought to
be a “racially healthy population.”289 Some commentators point out that interest in “eugenics”
and miscegenation increased in the northern states after Black migration to the north
increased.290 There seems to be no question racial prejudice was behind such policies and laws.
The first American anti-miscegenation statute that appears to have been based on
eugenics principles was enacted in 1895 by Connecticut when the state prohibited the marriage
of “defective” peoples.291 By 1913, similar statutes had also enacted by twenty-four other states,
the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico.292
As we will examine in sections B-D below, the Nazi regime wholeheartedly adopted the
anti-miscegenation ideas from the United States. Hitler and the Nazis saw miscegenation as a
major threat to racial integrity.293
In conclusion, this discussion manifestly demonstrates that the United States, Adolf Hitler,
and Nazi Germany embraced the principles of eugenics and applied them to involuntary
sterilizations, immigration and naturalization, and miscegenation. The Nazi regime had much to
study and emulate in American laws and policies on these issues. German and Nazi scholars and
politicians avidly studied American ideas and federal and state laws, interacted with American
academics, and copied some aspects of the American strategies.

B. Heinrich Krieger

283
Applebaum, supra note 197, at 49.
284
Id. at 49-50.
285
Id. at 50. See also STERN, supra note 190, at 21.
286
Applebaum, supra note 197, at 50 n.9.
287
Id. at 50 & n.11, 51 & n.14. The United States Supreme Court only struck down state
prohibitions on inter-racial marriages in 1967. Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967).
288
STERN, supra note 191, at 21.
289
KUHL, supra note 4, at 21-22, 38-39.
290
Black migration to the north concerned Whites and apparently caused an increase in anti-
miscegenation laws in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. REILLY, supra note 192, at 24-
25; see id. at 72 (the second International Congress of Eugenics met in New York City in 1921
and papers were delivered on the “Negro problem” and interracial marriages).
291
Id. at 26.
292
Id.
293
USBECK, supra note 7, at 142.
35
 “Heinrich Krieger . . . was the single most important figure in the Nazi assimilation of
American race law . . . .”294

The German attorney and scholar Heinrich Krieger was a crucial actor in the process of
Nazis studying and adopting American racial laws and practices and, in particular, American
Indian law and policies. “Krieger himself defended the importance of studying the race laws in
the United States” because it “was the only country besides the German Reich and South Africa
that had ‘real race legislation.’”295 Consequently, Krieger researched and published important
materials that Nazi officials, jurists, attorneys, and scholars used to debate and formalize
legislative proposals in the run-up to the enactment of the infamous Nuremberg Laws in 1935.296
For example, Krieger’s materials were probably distributed, or at the least were well-known, to
the attendees at the crucial June 5, 1934 meeting in the process of developing the Nuremberg
Laws.297 At this meeting, seventeen German jurists, lawyers, scholars, and party officials debated
at great length how Nazi Germany could legally discriminate against Jews and they discussed in
depth American federal and state laws as viable working models.298 A brief review of Krieger’s
work adds significant strength to the thesis that Nazi scholars and officials were heavily
influenced by United States race law and by federal Indian law.
In 1933-34, Krieger was an exchange student studying American “legal and sociological”
issues at the University of Arkansas Law School while he also held a fellowship from the
prestigious Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German
Science).299 He was simultaneously “conducting research in the Library of Congress to write his
dissertation on “American Racial Law.”300 His dissertation was published in 1936 and became
well-known to Nazi scholars and even somewhat to the German public. But significantly, he also
published his research and findings on American race laws in an article contemporaneously with
the June 5, 1934 Nuremberg Laws meeting discussed infra.301 In the 1934 article, Race Law in
the United States, and in the 1936 publication of his dissertation under the same title, Krieger
presented his findings on American racial laws and, for example, cited the statutes of thirty U.S.
states that criminalized and/or civilly nullified inter-racial marriages, or miscegenation.
Most importantly for this Article, Krieger became intimately familiar with American
Indian Law. He published a twenty-nine page law review article on Indian law in March 1935,

294
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 57.
295
KUHL, supra note 4, at 99 & n.9 (quoting Krieger’s 1936 book).
296
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 113, 117-20.
297
Id.
298
Id. at 117-20.
299
Heinrich Krieger, Principles of the Indian Law and the Act of June 18, 1934, 3 GEO.WASH. L.
REV. 279, 279 n.* (1935) (hereinafter, Krieger, Geo.Wash.);
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notgemeinschaft_der_Deutschen_Wissenschaft (visited January
10, 2020). A very important Nazi professor of administrative law, Otto Koellreutter, was
Krieger’s mentor, and after publishing his book, Krieger became a fellow at an academic
institute under the control of the Reich Ministry of the Interior. WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 114.
Krieger thanked Koellreutter in the foreword of his 1936 book. KRIEGER, (1936), infra note 321.
300
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 279 n*.
301
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 117-18.
36
Principles of the Indian Law and the Act of June 18, 1934.302 His findings and the information he
provided on federal Indian law were important to Nazi officials in their study of American race
law in general. One author, citing Krieger and other Nazi scholars, notes that Indian law was
discussed by many Nazis “within the context of more general descriptions of American racial
legislation. . . . [and they] deliberately compared American legislation to the so-called
Nuremberg Race Laws . . . [and it is] obvious that the discussion of Indians as segregated racial
entities on reservations . . . suited the Nazi ideology of racial purity and cultural
determinations.”303 This author concludes that “prohibiting mixed marriages [as American anti-
miscegenation statutes and the Nuremberg Laws did] and the Indian New Deal [the specific
Indian law that Krieger analyzed] served as a model and justification for Nazi racial legislation,
and eventually for racial discrimination.”304

1. George Washington Law Review

In his law review article, Krieger discussed a wide array of issues regarding American
Indians, their U.S. citizenship, their rights, the discriminatory treatment of Indians and Indian
nations by the United States, and myriad other federal Indian laws, cases, and policies. We
cannot detail all of his discussion here. His article will be addressed again in section E below.
But it is worth noting here that after all his research and analysis, Krieger concluded that United
States Indian law was race law, and that the United States discriminated against and treated
Indians and Indian nations differently from other American citizens based on alleged racial
differences. In fact, as he pointed out, until statutory provisions which started in 1887 and finally
encompassed all Indians in 1924, American Indians were not U.S. citizens but were only U.S.
“nationals.”305 Significantly, this is the identical new status applied by Nazi Germany to Jews in
the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.
Krieger’s conclusions were crucial for justifying Nazi plans to legally discriminate
against Jews based on race and alleged racial differences. His conclusions about Indian law are
well worth quoting: “the Indian law is exactly what its name indicates: a racial law; and there is
no way out of the extra-constitutional situation . . . .”306 He also stated: “The proper nature of the
tribal Indians’ status is that of a racial group placed under a special police power of the United
States.”307 (We must note, however, that he was incorrect in these conclusions that Indian law is
racially based, as the U.S. Supreme Court clearly pointed out in the 1970s.308) Krieger’s
conclusions were essential for Nazi race laws and regulations designed explicitly to enforce
racial discrimination against Jews in Germany. This “extra-constitutional . . . police power” of
the United States to discriminate racially against Indian non-citizens, was exactly what the
Nuremberg Laws created in 1935 for Jews.

302
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299.
303
USBECK, supra note 7, at 146 & n.89.
304
Id. at 146.
305
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 282.
306
Id. at 304 (emphasis in original).
307
Id. at 307.
308
United States v. Antelope, 430 U.S. 641 (1977); Morton v. Mancari, 417 U.S. 535, 552-53 &
n.24 (1974).
37
 Consequently, what Krieger learned from his intensive study of United States Indian law,
and what he emphasized to Nazi officials and lawyers, was that the United States discriminated
against Indian peoples because of their race and had always done so. Krieger found American
Indian Law to be “a species of race law, founded in the unacknowledged conviction that Indians
were racially different and therefore necessarily subject to a distinct legal regime.”309 Thus, Nazi
Germany would be well justified, and even excused in the eyes of the world, or at least by the
United States, for doing the same to German Jews.

2. Race Law in the United States (1934)

Krieger published his 1934 article, Race Law in the United States, in a German
administrative law journal.310 He opened his article with a disturbing quotation by Thomas
Jefferson from 1821: “It is certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same
government.”311 In sixteen pages, Krieger provided an enlightening and yet troubling summary
of American race laws as of 1934. What prompted his study and investigation of American law
and his scholarship? Surely it was because the American legal regime was of great interest to
Hitler and the Nazi party and the policies they wanted to enact.
As would be expected by the title, the article covered the state of race law in the United
States. Krieger addressed legal limits various states placed on the rights of Black Americans,
primarily. For example, he noted the limits Delaware placed on Black voting rights in 1852, and
other states that did the same, including restricting the vote for Chinese people.312 He cited
restrictions Missouri placed on Black church services in 1847 which required the presence of a
White person before they could be held.313 He also noted the work regulations South Carolina
imposed in 1865 on Blacks and other racially discriminatory laws it applied in school settings.314
Krieger also discussed the Jim Crow laws and the “Black Laws” (he used those English words),
which are also known as the American “Black Code.”315
He cited thirteen state and U.S. Supreme Court cases that challenged racial laws as
unconstitutional discrimination against Blacks. The cases Krieger discussed include, of course,
Plessy v. Ferguson.316 Krieger also highlighted two Alabama cases: an 1877 case that upheld the

309
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 115.
310
Heinrich Krieger, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten (Race Law in the United
States), 39 VERWALTUNGSARCHIV 316-31 (1934) (hereinafter Krieger, (1934));
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verwaltungsarchiv_(Zeitschrift) (visited January 20, 2020)
(Krieger occasionally used English when discussing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
Amendments and when citing American state laws and court cases).
311
Id. at 316 (quoting Thomas Jefferson).
312
Id. at 317 & n.5, 326-28 & n.41.
313
Id.
314
Id. at 317 & 324-26 & nn.32-33 (citing the Oklahoma Constitution of 1907, a Wyoming
statute of 1887, and Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and South Carolina).
315
Id. at 318-19, 321-23. For a definition of the Black Laws and Black Codes, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Codes_(United_States)#cite_note-1 (visited January 20,
2020).
316
163 U.S. 537, 551-52 (1896); Krieger, (1934), supra note 310, at 330 n.46.
38
criminalization of inter-racial marriage and the imposition of two-year prison sentences on a
White woman and Black man, while another case from 1883 upheld a criminal statute that
provided longer prison sentences for a Black and a White who lived in a state of adultery than
was authorized by yet another statute for people of the same races who lived in a state of
adultery.317 It is especially important to note Krieger’s attention to these two cases because they
were examples of American states criminalizing inter-racial marriages just like the Nuremberg
Laws would do in 1935. But we will see this measure was controversial and Nazi moderates
fought against imposing criminal punishments on inter-racial marriages at the June 1934 meeting
discussed in section D below.
Krieger also found of interest a case which affirmed a state’s right to keep Black citizens
from practicing law in Maryland, the U.S. Supreme Court’s affirmance of a 1904 Kentucky
statute under which a corporation was convicted of teaching White and Black students in the
same institution, and a Kansas court’s approval of an 1879 law allowing separate schools for
“white and colored” children.318 Krieger also noted, in contrast, several cases in which minority
rights triumphed over state limitations.319
Krieger was well aware of lynching in the United States. In fact, the Nazis were quite
interested in lynching and often used this issue to highlight the hypocrisy of the United States
when it criticized Germany’s treatment of Jews.320 Krieger used the German word Lynchjufitz or
“lynch justice” (also “mob law” or “vigilante justice”) to describe the issue.321 He also cited the
“Dyer bill”, an anti-lynching bill introduced by Missouri Congressman Leonidas Dyer in the
U.S. House of Representatives in 1918. 322 According to Krieger, the bill passed in the House but
failed in the Senate.323

317
Id. at 321 n.1 (citing Green v. State, 58 Ala. 190 (Ala. 1877) and Pace v. State of Alabama,
106 U.S. 583, 585 (1883)).
318
In re Taylor, 48 Md. 28, 33-34 (Md. Ct. App. 1877); Berea College v. Commonwealth of
Kentucky, 211 U.S. 45 (1908); Reynolds v. Board of Education of City of Topeka, 92 P. 274,
281 (Kan. 1903). Krieger quoted, in English, from the last case: “for the accommodation of a
numerous white population a much larger and more imposing school building is provided than
that set apart for the few colored children . . . is but an incidental matter . . . . Schoolhouses
cannot be identical in every respect . . . .” Krieger, (1934), supra note 311, at 325 n.35.
319
See, e.g., Monroe v. Collins, 17 Ohio St. 665, 691-92 (Ohio 1867) (protecting a minority
person’s voting right); Guinn v. United States, 238 U.S. 347, 354-55, 364-68 (1915) (an
Oklahoma literacy test for some voters violated the Fifteenth Amendment).
320
KUHL, supra note 4, at 98-99 (when Americans criticized German treatment of Jews, Nazis
said America treated ethnic minorities the same; newspapers reported thirty U.S. states banned
marriages between Blacks and Whites, there was strict segregation, and lynchings, issues that did
not occur in Germany).
321
Krieger, (1934), supra note 310, at 331. He also discussed lynching and lynch-justice in his
1936 book. HEINRICH KRIEGER, DAS RASSENRECHT IN DEN VEREINIGTEN STAATEN (RACE LAW IN
THE UNITED STATES) 323 & 345 (1936) (at https://www.thefacultylounge.org/2017/05/heinrich-
krieger-on-the-race-laws-of-the-united-states.html).
322
Krieger, (1934), supra note 310, at 331 & n.50 https://www.naacp.org/naacp-history-dyer-
anti-lynching-bill/ (visited January 20, 2020).
323
Krieger, (1934), supra note 310, at 331 & n.51
39
 Section III of Krieger’s article discussed how American states determined and defined
race; specific state marriage laws and regulations; and how these laws appeared to only
recognize two races: White or “colored.”324 He also noted states that contained a significant
number of a specific minority group would often develop restrictive marriage laws addressing
that specific minority group.325 And he again highlighted state criminal penalties on inter-racial
marriages.326 In other sections, Krieger analyzed the Jim Crow laws, state racial laws pertaining
to schools, state voting laws discriminating against minorities, and the federal immigration laws
discriminating against Chinese.327
In his summary, Krieger concluded that race laws in the United States were a
compromise, built around the two pillars of ideology and racial awareness.328 He also concluded
American race laws had two goals: separation of the races, and to reduce minority influence.329
All of his conclusions would have been welcomed by the Nazi party.
From the foregoing discussion, it is obvious Krieger had an ample supply of American
race laws to analyze. We can see plainly the relevance of his article and research to Nazi scholars
and party officials. Professor Whitman claims “it is clear” Krieger’s research was relied on by
Nazi scholars at the crucial June 1934 meeting which was part of the drafting process for the
Nuremberg Laws.330 Whitman also alleges, and citations by other authors and periodicals prove,
Krieger’s 1934 article was widely used by the Nazis in debating and drafting racial policies and
restrictions on Jews and others.331 Krieger and his research was invaluable to Nazi officials and
lawyers.

3. Race Law in the United States (1936)

In 1936, Krieger published his dissertation.332 For some reason, he used the identical title
as his 1934 article: Race Law in the United States. The book is exactly what it said it was: three
hundred and fifty pages on federal and state race laws and policies in the United States. We need
not discuss and cite page after page of his analysis, but will instead just highlight some of the
aspects of American race law he addressed. We will also address the majority of his extensive
discussion on Indian law in subsection E below.
Krieger highlighted four major aspects of American race law and legalized racial
discrimination. He presented detailed information about federal immigration and racial issues;

324
Id. at 319-20 & nn.9-11 & 14-16, 326 n.36 (quoting the Constitution of Alabama; citing
Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North
Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, New York, and Tennessee).
325
Id. at 320. He supported his point by citing Arizona’s law that included a ban on Whites
marrying Indians. Id. at n.14.
326
Id. at 319, 320 n.15, 322 n.23
327
Id. at 321-30, 327 & n.42.
328
Id. at 327 n.41 & 329.
329
Id.
330
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 113, 117-20.
331
See, e.g., id. at 65 (a leading Nazi party publication on legal affairs, Deutsche Justice,
summarized Krieger’s 1934 article for a wider German audience).
332
KRIEGER, (1936), supra note 321, at 74-109.
40
addressed citizenship rights and naturalization under federal law and the state Jim Crow laws;
analyzed the state anti-miscegenation statutes; and showed how these governments infringed on
citizen voting rights.333 He also compiled his information into several interesting charts and
graphs.334
First, Krieger addressed many of the immigration laws already mentioned above. He
cited and discussed, for example, federal laws from 1917, 1921, and 1924 which imposed limits
on the immigration of nationalities such as Chinese, Japanese, other Asians, Eastern and
Southern Europeans, and people from Persia and Turkey, and even Hindus.335 He also noted the
federal laws accomplished their concealed objectives because the 1924 act successfully limited
immigration from the “new” disfavored countries and increased it from the “old” favored
immigrant countries such as England, Ireland, Germany, France, and Scandinavia.336 Krieger
also laid out for his readers some of the Supreme Court cases in this field.337
Second, Krieger demonstrated that the United States strictly controlled naturalization,
i.e., who could become citizens. He also addressed the Jim Crow laws and how state laws made
many minorities second-class citizens.338
Third, he surveyed the numerous state anti-miscegenation statutes, racially based laws
banning certain marriages.339 Krieger quoted from many of these statutes banning marriages of
Whites with American Indians sometimes, with Blacks or people with “blackblood,” Japanese,
Chinese, and other minorities.340 Krieger exposed the harshness of the anti-miscegenation laws
which exposed mixed marriages to criminal punishments in several states, and he specifically
discussed Nevada, Tennessee, and Maryland laws.341
Finally, Krieger highlighted and analyzed many state laws limiting voting rights based on
race.342 He noted, ironically, that although the U.S. Constitution claims to grant equal voting
rights, the states had learned how to get around that promise, and he provided numerous
examples of how they did so.343 He pointed specifically to southern states which imposed voting

333
He included chapters on how American laws determined race; on race and inheritance; and on
racially based education laws. KRIEGER, (1936), supra note 321, at 145-67, 185-25, 226-42.
334
Id. at 72, 91 (detailed immigration laws), 97-99 (calculated the actual number of immigrants
in the U.S. and their countries of origin for 1925-29), 174-75 (calculated the percentage of
various races in the total population and detailed state racial marriage laws and the amounts of
“blood” needed to be covered by the bans, which included Mexicans, people from India,
Mongolians, and Asians), 206, 297 (the racial voting laws by regions of the United States), 323
(summarized and compared all the U.S. immigration laws he reviewed).
335
Id. at 81, 84, 86-90.
336
Id. at 93.
337
Id. at 100.
338
Id. at 198, 205, 207, 213, 224, 232, 240, 326-28.
339
Id. at 168-84.
340
Id. at 151-53 & nn.12-14 (citing Oregon, North Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Arkansas,
Montana, Georgia, and Virginia).
341
Id. at 320.
342
Id. at 259-307.
343
Id. at 277.
41
requirements on racial minorities, and by getting creative, used residency tests, tax tests, property
ownership tests, education or literacy tests, and something Krieger called the integrity test.344
Whitman also describes Krieger’s 1936 book in some depth and notes it devoted thirty-
five “well-informed and thoughtful pages” to American immigration and naturalization laws.345
He praises Krieger’s book as a detailed study of American statutory and decisional law, and rich
in intelligent observations.346 It also might shock some to learn Krieger’s American heroes were
Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln - due to their opposition to race mixing.347
Whitman also discusses Krieger’s 1934 article, and his 1935 American law review article
on federal Indian law.348 According to him, Krieger correctly perceived the ruling race in
America had worked hard to prevent Black influence, to make most minority groups second-
class citizens, and had accurately described the racist side of American law.349
Heinrich Krieger’s three important works demonstrate that he engaged in a sustained,
serious, and comprehensive analysis of American race law and federal Indian law. His
scholarship was well known to Nazis scholars and officials. His work was even made known to
the public by book reviews and articles in German newspapers and Nazi propaganda.350
Krieger’s work was no doubt used to draft and justify Hitler’s and the Nazi party’s racial ideas,
and the policies and laws that followed which so drastically impacted Jews and other minorities.

C. Other German Scholars and American Race Law

Other German and Nazi academics, scholars, and lawyers also researched the racial laws
and policies of the United States and American states. In addition to Krieger, two very influential
scholars were Herbert Kier and Johann von Leers. These authors undertook careful studies of
American laws and highlighted for Nazi officials how the United States had legally
discriminated against minorities and American Indians for centuries. They both discussed thirty
U.S. state anti-miscegenation laws, various state segregation policies, and federal racially
discriminatory immigration statutes.

344
Id. at 278-80 & n.27 (discussing the Mississippi 1890 constitution, and the Alabama 1901
Constitution).
345
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 57, 74-109.
346
Id. at 117.
347
Id. at 116.
348
Id. at 67.
349
Id. at 65, 67, 157.
350
KUHL, supra note 4, at 99 & n.8 (June 28, 1936 German newspaper Grossdeutscher
Pressedienst praised Krieger’s book because for “Germans it is especially important to know . . .
how one of the biggest states in the world with Nordic stock already has race legislation which is
quite comparable to that of the German Reich.”); Richard Klinger, Rassenrecht in USA (Race
Law in USA), GERMANIA, Aug. 10, 1938 (stating that Krieger’s book demonstrated the principle
of equality in the U.S. was only theoretical; analyzed anti-miscegenation laws and criminal
punishments imposed in many states; the United States treated Indians as wards and
notwithstanding legal promises of equality to Indians, in reality, that was not the case);
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 179 n.168 (citing a Sept. 21, 1934 article in Deutsche Justiz that
summarized Krieger’s 1934 article for the public).
42
 In 1934, Herbert Kier published a chapter entitled People, Race and State in the Nazi
Handbook on Law and Legislation.351 At the time, he was a junior academic at the University of
Berlin, but later he became an associate of Heinrich Himmler.352 In his chapter, Kier presented
research on American racial laws on immigration, miscegenation, voting rights, second-class
citizenship issues, and segregated public facilities, for example.353 He also created a two page
list, which became quite important, of the thirty U.S. states with anti-miscegenation statutes as of
1934, and he recorded the quantum of minority blood some of these statutes required before the
marriage bans applied to a particular couple.354 In light of the facts and law he uncovered, Kier
was incredulous of American criticisms of Nazi race policies, since he thought the United States
was the world’s leader in enacting race based laws.355
Kier’s work was very important to the Nazi analysis of American race laws. In fact,
Whitman says it “seems likely” the list of thirty American state anti-miscegenation laws Kier
produced was the very list presented by the Reich Justice Minister and discussed at length at the
June 5, 1934 meeting discussed in subsection D below.356 That 1934 meeting, and thus Kier’s
research, heavily influenced the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws.357
Johann von Leers was another very important Nazi scholar on the issue of American race
laws. He was considered a leading expert on Jews and was involved from the earliest days in the
process of drafting the Nuremberg Laws.358 In 1936, he published a book length pamphlet
entitled Blood and Race in the Law in which he spent twenty-three pages discussing American
race based laws.359
Leers considered American racial discrimination in light of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments.360 He pointed out the legal limits imposed on Blacks’ rights, for
example, of possessing weapons and renting and owning property.361 He discussed the Jim Crow
laws and segregation, and how some southern states maintained separate “yet equal” schools,

351
Herbert Kier, Volk, Rasse und Staat (People, Race and State), in NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHES
HANDBUCH FUR RECHT UND GESETZGEBUNG 33 (1934).
352
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 54.
353
Kier, supra note 351, at 44.
354
Id. at 42-43; see also WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 113, 121, 129 (the author asserts that Kier’s
list of the state laws was used at the Nuremberg meeting discussed in section D below).
355
Kier, supra note 351, at 41-43; WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 122 (Kier was astonished at the
lengths America had gone to).
356
Id. at 113 (Kier published his list a few months later in his article in the National Socialist
Handbook).
357
Id. at 122 (Kier’s table circulated for years and appeared in a standard commentary on Blood
Law in 1937).
358
Id. at 57 & n.151.
359
Johann von Leers, Blut und Rasse in der Gesetzgebung. Ein Gang durch die Volkergeschichte
(Blood and Race: A Tour through the History of Peoples) 80-103 (1936). He also noted state
laws that discriminated against Native Americans, which we address in subsection E infra.
360
Id. at 82.
361
Id.
43
trains, and buses.362 He stated these laws were a way to circumvent the right of legal equality.363
Leers also analyzed the same anti-miscegenation laws of thirty American states Kier had
catalogued, and Leer specifically addressed Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, both Carolinas, and
Tennessee, and he also examined the United States racially discriminatory immigration laws.364
He also commented that while Jews in America were considered legally “white,” the U.S.
population itself was “further advanced” and some hotels, hostels, and other facilities would not
serve Jews.365 He specifically stated, however, this American form of subtle discrimination
against Jews would not be “successful” and was misguided because mere social rejection of Jews
had not stopped them from becoming influential.366
Moreover, there were other important German and Nazi scholars in the early 1930s and
even earlier who published works prominently highlighting American race laws for German and
Nazi attention. Perhaps the most infamous author was Roland Freisler, who was the Judge-
President of the Nazi “People’s Court” from 1942-45.367 In a short chapter written in 1936, Dr.
Freisler also cited and discussed the identical thirty American state anti-miscegenation laws Kier
first researched and reported in 1934, discussed American Jim Crow laws, and cited Heinrich
Krieger’s work.368
Professor Otto Koellreutter has already been mentioned because he was Heinrich
Krieger’s mentor. He was an important professor of administrative law and was one of only two
university professors who supported the Nazi party as early as 1930.369 In 1933, he published a
book entitled Foundations of General State Theories.370 Koellreutter stated one of his primary
purposes for writing the book was to “serve all those that are part of the process that is creating
this new [Nazi] political system.”371 He then explained even though the United States was a
democracy, Black Americans did not benefit from the promise of equality.372 He also discussed
the development of federal immigration laws, and their racially discriminatory intent and
impact.373 He noted the U.S. 1921 immigration national quota law had had a salutary effect on
the immigration of undesirables.374 Koellreutter concluded that there were “interesting results”

362
Id. at 82 & 85.
363
Id. at 84.
364
Id. at 86, 89-100.
365
Id. at 87.
366
Id. at 88.
367
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Court_(Germany) (visited January 29, 2020).
368
Dr. jur. Roland Freisler, Schutz von Rasse und Erbgut im werdenden deutschen Strafrecht
(Protecting race and inheritance/genetic material in the emerging German criminal law), in
ZEITSCHRIFT DER AKADEMIE FUR DEUTSCHES RECHT 142, 146 (Hans Frank ed., 1936).
369
MICHAEL STOLLEIS, THE LAW UNDER THE SWASTIKA 78, 97, 112 (Thomas Dunlap trans.,
1998).
370
OTTO KOELLREUTTER, GRUNDRISS DER ALLGEMEINEN STAATSLEHRE (FOUNDATIONS OF
GENERAL STATE THEORIES) (1933).
371
Id. at 4.
372
Id. at 37-38.
373
Id. at 51-52.
374
Id.
44
for Nazis to study in “the United States and the British dominions.”375 Obviously, this leading
Nazi intellectual found much of interest to study in American race law and advised other German
scholars to focus on it.
According to Whitman, another scholar worth noting, Detlef Sahm, published a book in
1936 entitled The United States of America and the Problem of National Unity.376 This author
also examined American race laws and interestingly pointed out their resemblance to the new
laws of the Third Reich.377 Sahm emphasized that while American law guaranteed certain groups
political rights on paper, several racial groups were excluded from voting including Blacks and
Indians.378
In conclusion, this section demonstrates briefly that many German and Nazi scholars and
academics had closely studied United States race laws by the mid-1930s. “Nazi lawyers put real
effort into studying the law of the American states, in the search for what wisdom they had to
provide.”379

D. Nuremberg Laws

The infamous Nuremberg Laws were enacted in Nuremberg Germany by the Reichstag
and announced by Adolf Hitler on September 15, 1935.380 The Nazis took several years to plan
and draft these laws.381 The Laws were actually three separate laws: the Reich Citizenship Law,
the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, and the Flag Law (which made
the Swastika the official flag).382 The Citizenship and Blood laws were the primary laws Nazi
Germany used to discriminate against and ultimately to attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
It appears early on, however, that Nazi policy was just to make conditions so unbearable for Jews
in Germany they would voluntarily emigrate.383 The Nuremberg Laws were a major step in that
direction. In fact, one commentator opined “the Nuremberg laws did as much damage to Jewish
life as the Nazi violence.”384
The Citizenship Law created a division between Reich citizens and German nationals.

375
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 145.
376
DETLEF SAHM, DIE VEREINIGTEN STAATEN VON AMERIKA UND DAS PROBLEM DER
NATIONALEN EINHEIT (THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE PROBLEM OF NATIONAL UNITY
(1936).
377
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 67 (citing SAHM, supra note 376, at 98-100).
378
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 68 (citing SAHM, supra note 376, at 99-98).
379
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 80.
380
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST: SELECTED SOURCES ON THE DESTRUCTION OF THE JEWS OF
GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, POLAND, AND THE SOVIET UNION 77-79 (Yitzhak Arad et al eds, 1981)
381
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 24.
382
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, supra note 380, at 77-79.
383
See KAKEL, supra note 21, at 154-55; see also Nathan Stoltzfus, Societal influences on the
promulgation and enforcement of the Nuremberg Laws, 94 SOUNDINGS 375, 381 (2011) (the
move towards genocide was accomplished in stages); PARKER, supra note 256, at 176 (the
involuntary expatriation of Jews became the next step).
384
Richard D. Heideman, Legalizing Hate: The Significance of the Nuremberg Laws and The
Post-War Nuremberg Trials, 39 LOY. L.A. INT’L & COMP. L. REV. 5, 15 (2017).
45
Under this law, Jewish Germans lost their citizenship and became mere nationals with restricted
political rights.385 On November 14, 1935, the first regulation to enforce the Citizenship Law
was issued and for the first time German law defined “Jewish” status. A Jew was any “person
descended from at least three grandparents who are full Jews by race.”386 Even before this legal
definition was enacted, but certainly thereafter, all sorts of restrictions were placed on Jews. By
1935, Jews were barred from public office, the civil service, journalism, the stock exchange, and
other professions.387 By 1939, there were more than 400 decrees, regulations, and amendments
consigning Jews and other non-Aryans to the outer fringes of society.388 By comparison,
American states enacted, and the United States Supreme Court often approved, similar laws
barring aliens from certain jobs, owning agricultural land, and from possessing other rights.389
The Nuremberg Blood Law took the surprising legal step of criminalizing marriages and
sexual relations between Jews and Germans.390 Except for the United States, and South Africa in
regards pre-marital sex, no country in the world imposed criminal sanctions on miscegenation
(marriages between people of different races).391 This American development was too harsh for
the Nazis at first, but they debated the idea for a long time and finally adopted the American

385
KAKEL, supra note 21, at 154 (the Nuremberg Laws segregated the Jews according to a racial
criteria and placed them under an alien status); DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, supra note 380,
at 80, § 4 (“A Jew cannot be a Reich citizen.”). The United States did something similar in 1907
when it enacted a law punishing native-born citizens who married aliens by stripping them of
citizenship. PARKER, supra note 257, at 151. Cf. Fong Yue Ping v. United States, 149 U.S. 698,
707 (1893) (the Court upheld the federal government’s absolute and unqualified power to deport
foreigners who had not been naturalized; by analogy, once Jews were no longer Germans
citizens they could be subject to deportations at the Third Reich’s whim).
386
DOCUMENTS ON THE HOLOCAUST, supra note 380, at 80, § 5; RAPHAEL GROSS, CARL SCHMITT
AND THE JEWS: THE “JEWISH QUESTION,” THE HOLOCAUST, AND GERMAN LEGAL THEORY 64-65
& nn.185-86 (Joel Golb trans., 2007).
The United States long used, and still uses, Indian blood quantum to determine certain
rights and the application of certain laws. See generally Paul Spruhan, A Legal History of Blood
Quantum in Federal Indian Law to 1935, 51 S.D. L. REV. 1 (2006).
387
STOLLEIS, supra note 369, at ix & 17; PLATT, supra note 206, at 76; Stoltzfus, supra note 383,
at 383; Greg Bradsher, The Nuremberg Laws, 42 PROLOGUE 1, 2 (2010); DOCUMENTS ON THE
HOLOCAUST, supra note 380, at 98 & 115 (Regulation for the Elimination of the Jews from the
Economic Life of Germany, November 12, 1938, forbade Jews from operating retail stores, mail-
order houses, or sales agencies or to carry on a trade); Moshe Zimmermann, Foreword, in
STOLLEIS, supra note 369, at ix (the first Nazi anti-Jewish law was April 7, 1933, The Law to
Restore the Professional Civil Service; it introduced Jewish discrimination into the legal system).
388
PLATT, supra note 206, at 80.
389
See, e.g., Clarke v. Deckebach, 274 U.S. 392, 396-97 (1927) (upholding a Cincinnati Ohio
ordinance that prohibited aliens from operating pool rooms); Terrace v. Thompson, 263 U.S.
197, 217, 220 (1923) (upholding a Washington 1921 Alien Land Act prohibiting aliens from
owning or leasing agricultural land); Crane v. New York, 239 U.S. 195, 198 (1915) (upholding a
New York law that barred aliens from being employed on public works projects).
390
Bradsher, supra note 387, at 4.
391
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 78-79.
46
position to criminalize miscegenation.
In drafting the Nuremberg Laws, there is no question American federal and state racial laws
and policies were major topics of study and discussion by Nazi lawyers, scholars, and officials as
they considered legislating against the Jews.392 Perhaps that statement will stun many Americans.
But the evidence is clear and irrefutable. Following Adolf Hitler’s lead and his interest in
American law, Nazi lawyers, party officials, and scholars engaged in serious and prolonged
studies and debates on United States law and American state laws in the run-up to enacting the
Nuremberg Laws and thereafter.393 Whitman convincingly establishes this position. In his
opinion, the Nazi Blood Law was definitely influenced by American law and was perhaps even
directly borrowed therefrom,394 but the Nazis probably did not borrow U.S. immigration and
naturalization laws in enacting the Nuremberg Citizenship Law.395 There is no reason to repeat
Whitman’s evidence and arguments verbatim. We will, however, briefly highlight a few
examples to support his conclusion that the Nazis were very interested in America’s use of race
and racial discrimination in immigration and naturalization laws, citizenship laws, and anti-
miscegenation laws.
Whitman highlights the important meeting of seventeen Nazi scholars, Justice Ministry
officials and employees, and Nazi party officials on June 5, 1934.396 This meeting literally
opened with the attendees reviewing and discussing extensive research materials on American
race laws which had been prepared by the Justice Ministry specifically for the meeting. Then the
attendees debated the research memoranda and whether American laws were relevant to Nazi
policy goals, and whether Germany could emulate them.397 There is a verbatim stenographic
transcript of this meeting and there is no question American laws were a major topic and were
discussed repeatedly by nearly all of the attendees.398 American law was pivotal and it had been
brought to the attention of the Justice Ministry and Nazis by the research of Krieger and Kier.399
Three major themes of American federal and state laws were presented in the scholarly materials
prepared for the meeting, and were analyzed and discussed at great length: the anti-

392
Id. at 5 & 29 (“It is even possible, indeed likely, that the Nuremberg Laws themselves reflect
direct American influence.”).
393
See, e.g., id. at 44-45 (citing and quoting MEIN KAMPF demonstrating when Hitler turned to
citizenship issues he relied on the U.S. immigration laws of 1921 and 1924 and praised the
United States as “the obvious ‘leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and
emigration.’”).
394
Id. at 72, 76-77, 139-40.
395
Id. at 71.
396
Id. at 1-2, 93-94.
397
Id. at 1-2, 96.
398
Id. at 4, 76, 94.
399
Id. at 96 & 113. The Reich Minister of Justice, Franz Gurtner, presented the research
materials his staff had prepared: “I possess here a thoroughly comprehensive synoptic
presentation of North American race legislation.” Id. at 100. Whitman believes the transcript
shows Krieger’s influence because the “material” Gurtner quoted most likely came from
Krieger’s 1934 article. Id. at 113, 117-18, 157 (a citation to Krieger’s work was added to the
redacted version of the meeting’s transcript. Id.). Whitman also alleges Krieger was “the German
lawyer whose research did the most to shape Nazi understandings of America.” Id. at 113.
47
miscegenation laws of thirty American states; the federal and state laws creating second-class
citizens in the United States; and American immigration and naturalization laws.400
The Nazis were especially intrigued by the anti-miscegenation laws (bans on inter-racial
marriage). Such bans existed in America as early as 1661 and throughout the 1930s when the
Nazis were studying them. In fact, four American states had enacted such statutes as late as the
early twentieth century, as the Nazis expressly noted.401 At the June 1934 meeting, Nazi scholars
and officials debated and read from the statutes of some of the thirty American states which
banned inter-racial marriages as of the mid-1930s and often imposed criminal sanctions on
violations.402 This information was presented via an annotated list that no doubt was the two-
page list created by Herbert Kier and published in the Nazi Handbook on Law and Legislation.403
The hardline Nazis at the meeting wanted to adopt these policies but the moderates pushed back
because it was too drastic of a legal change for them and perhaps too harsh for Germans in
general to accept.404 The primary reason some Nazis hesitated to enact miscegenation statutes,
and criminalize inter-racial marriage, was that throughout the world no country except for the
United States imposed criminal sanctions on marriages beyond the usual punishments for bigamy
and marriage by malicious deception.405 Ultimately, in 1935, the Nuremberg Blood Law did
enact an anti-miscegenation measure and criminalized marriage and extramarital intercourse
between Jews and Germans. Whitman cites this debate and the Blood Law as the clearest
example of direct Nazi engagement with American laws and even the adoption of American law
into Nazi race laws.406
The attendees of the June 1934 meeting also discussed in depth the issue of second-class
citizenship in the United States and the Jim Crow laws.407 An earlier document from April 1933
called the Prussian Memorandum had already addressed what the Jim Crow laws could teach
Nazi Germany, and that Memorandum and those American laws were analyzed in the research
materials prepared for and discussed at the June 1934 meeting.408 It is extremely interesting to
note, once again, the Jim Crow laws and segregation between races was considered too harsh for
the Nazis and too difficult to achieve in Germany.409 But several Nazi scholars continued to
advocate for second class citizenship laws for Jews and the Jim Crow laws long after the 1934

400
Id. at 1-2, 12, 93-113, 138.
401
Id. at 93-94 (there is no doubt the drafters of the Nuremberg laws studied American anti-
miscegenation laws, the United States was the model).
402
Id. at 12 & 102 (the thirty state regimes were carefully studied, catalogued, and debated by
Nazi lawyers; they could find no other anti-miscegenation laws in the world); 105-06, 112
(Roland Freisler came to the meeting prepared to debate American law and had detailed
knowledge of these laws and said the point was “race protection.”).
403
Id. at 121 & 129.
404
Id. at 4, 72, 77, 102, 112 (Reich Minister Gurtner opposed criminalization).
405
Id. at 12, 78, 125 (Reich Minister Gurtner stated at the June 1934 meeting the United States
was the only model they had found).
406
Id. at 72, 76-77, 124-25, 139-40 (“It was the American criminalization of racially mixed
marriage that was the forerunner of the Blood Law.”).
407
Id. at 3 & 98.
408
Id. at 103 & 139.
409
Id. at 87 & 99.
48
meeting.410 Several Nazi scholars, already discussed above, wrote about these laws and noted the
“devious pathways” America had used to produce second-class citizenship for Blacks, Puerto
Ricans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Indians.411 Other scholars also noted American restrictions on
voting rights for citizens such as Blacks and Indians, and the topic of second-class citizenship
was of great interest to Nazi lawyers.412 The Nazi party and several scholars were interested in
creating a race-based form of second-class citizenship for Jews and they found a model in the
United States.413
In regards the United States immigration and naturalization laws, Adolf Hitler himself
“was full of praise . . . [that the laws] excluded ‘undesirables’ on the basis of hereditary illness
and race.”414 Thus it is no surprise Nazi lawyers, jurists, scholars, and officials were very
interested in studying and writing research materials, articles, and books on United States
immigration and naturalization laws. For example, perhaps the preeminent Nazi public lawyer of
the early 1930s, Otto Koellreutter, devoted a long discussion to the American laws on
immigration and naturalization in his 1933 book.415 He noted many laws of the United States and
the British dominions had banned the Chinese and used eugenics ideals to ban “inferior
elements” from immigrating.416 He pointed out the United States use of national quotas in its
1921 and 1924 laws had greatly reduced undesirable immigration and increased immigration
from northwestern European countries.417 Other Nazi radicals also seized on the American
examples on immigration and citizenship.418 And two immigration scholars in 2010 agree this
was not a surprise because the United States was “the leader in developing explicitly racist
policies of nationality and immigration.”419 In fact, Whitman notes the “National Socialist
Handbook did indeed describe America as the country that had achieved the “fundamental
recognition” of the historic racist mission that Nazi Germany was now called to fulfill.”420 But he

410
Id. at 11.
411
Id. at 38-43, 57, 59-69, 158 (citing Krieger’s 1934 article and 1936 book for this point). In
1904, American Indian and Puerto Rican second class citizenship had already been discussed in
the German legal literature. DR. BURT ESTES HOWARD, DAS AMERIKANISCHE BURGERRECHT
(AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS) 35-38 (1904), at
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=hvd.hx2nnz&view=1up&seq=6.
412
MARK MAZOWER, HITLER’S EMPIRE: HOW THE NAZIS RULED EUROPE 584 (2008); WHITMAN,
supra note 1, at 65, 67-68 (citing SAHM, supra note 376, at 98-100 (1936)).
413
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 16, 19, 69 (warning it is a mistake to draw broad conclusions
about the direct influence of the American model on the Nuremberg Citizenship Law).
414
KUHL, supra note 4, at 26 & n.61 (citing ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF 400 (1924, D.C. Watt
trans., 1974); WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 46-47 (in his second unpublished book, Hitler again
depicted America as the racial model for Europe in regards the Chinese and Japanese).
415
Id. at 51; STOLLEIS, supra note 369, at 78, 97, 112.
416
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 51-52.
417
Id.
418
Id. at 71-72.
419
FITZGERALD & COOK-MARTIN, supra note 203, at 7.
420
WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 71.
49
concludes that while the Nazis were influenced by American law in this field, there was no direct
borrowing of U.S. immigration and naturalization laws in the Nuremberg Citizenship Law.421
Of course the June 1934 meeting was not the only interaction Nazi scholars and party
officials had with American laws. The 1934 meeting and the reports on American law drafted for
the meeting, and the authors discussed above in sections B and C, demonstrate Germans devoted
extensive time and efforts to studying and writing about the race laws of the United States. From
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1924 onwards, Nazi scholars and policymakers took a great
interest in American race law and engaged in detailed studies of America’s immigration and
naturalization laws, second-class citizenship laws, anti-miscegenation statutes, and United States
Indian law. Moreover, a Nazi lawyer who attended the 1934 meeting and prepared one of the
reports for the Justice Ministry stated that when one thinks of race law one thinks of “North
America.”422 And a German dissertation on the Nuremberg Laws, published in 1995, asserts
America provided the Nazis with the “’classic example’ of a country with racist legislation.”423
Whitman states that in the end we will never know exactly how much influence the American
models had on Nazis’ thinking and the concrete policies and laws they enacted. He claims,
however, “what ultimately matters is that they knew that there was an American example, and
indeed the example that they turned to first, and over and over again.”424 Clearly, “Nazi lawyers
regarded America, not without reason, as the innovative world leader in the creation of racist
law[.]”425

E. American Indian Law and Policies and the Nazis

The Nazi scholars who most directly influenced the drafting of the Nuremberg Laws and
other Nazi race policies were very familiar with American Indian law and federal policies
regarding Indian nations. It is important to be aware of and to analyze these facts.
The most important Nazi scholar in regards the Nuremberg Laws, Heinrich Krieger, was
very knowledgeable about federal Indian law. He became intimately familiar with the ins and
outs of the topic during his year of study at the Arkansas law school and his research at the
Library of Congress as evidenced by the erudite article on Indian law he published in 1935 in the
George Washington law review and by his 1936 book. We cannot begin to repeat all of the
insights and knowledge he demonstrated in these excellent examples of scholarship. But we will
focus on a few of his major themes and conclusions to emphasize the lessons he learned from
federal Indian law and which he and others no doubt applied to Nazi policies affecting Jews and
other minorities.
Krieger devoted the entire twenty-nine pages of his 1935 law review article to
U.S./Indian history and federal laws, and Supreme Court cases and state laws about Indians. For
example, Krieger discussed the place of Indian nations in the United States Constitution which
grants Congress power over commerce “with the Indian Tribes.”426 He especially highlighted the

421
Id.
422
Id. at 96-97, 160 (quoting Fritz Grau).
423
Id. at 4.
424
Id. at 131 (emphasis in original).
425
Id. at 5.
426
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 280.
50
non-citizenship status of Indian peoples under the Fourteenth Amendment, and state laws, and
that they were instead citizens of their own sovereign nations.427 Thus, American Indians had an
analogous political status to that of Jews after the Nuremberg Laws were enacted. He clearly
recognized individual Indians were neither federal nor state citizens and that they were only U.S.
“nationals” who he thought did not enjoy the privileges of due process of law or possess any
relevant natural rights.428 This point provided a key lesson for Nazis and was applied to Jews in
the Nuremberg Laws when they lost German citizenship and were turned into mere nationals
without much, if any, protection at law.429 Krieger also noted the tribal nations’ subservient
position vis-a-vis the United States and their dependence on the will of the federal
government.430
Significantly, Krieger focused on the fact that federal Indian law was a system unique
from the general law.431 He asked rhetorically where the authorization for Congress to make this
special body of law came from: what was the legal character of the power so it could regulate
some of the people in the United States in an extra-constitutional way?432 He answered that
American Indians had been placed under special federal authority, protection, and dependency
“because he is a person who, for racial reasons, especially in consequence of the development of
Indian law, is in need of the benefits of such special power.”433 Consequently, the United States
treated Indians as lesser persons than the average U.S. citizen because of their race and their
blood, not because they lived in “Indian territory” or some specific part of the United States.434
He concluded that some type of race law was necessary to subject Indians to a distinct legal
regime. Krieger’s research and opinions on Indian law had direct relevance to how the Nazis
wanted to apply law to Jews, and is exactly what they did in the Nuremberg Laws. All of his
conclusions regarding U.S. Indian law would have been of immense interest and welcomed in
the drafting of Nazi laws and policies because they provided further justifications for treating
Jewish people, and the Jewish race, differently from other Germans.
To conclude our consideration of his law review article, it is worthwhile to specifically
note Krieger’s conclusions. First, he claimed U.S. Indian law was racially based and grew out of
the United States plenary power over Indians and from some power resembling a police power of
the Congress to treat Indians separately as far as was necessary for their welfare and
protection.435 Second, he asked whether Congress had the power to abolish the Indians’ rights of
free movement and to impose heavy penalties on them.436 This question seems very relevant to

427
Id. at 283 (citing Elk v. Wilkins, 112 U. S. 94, 101-02 (1884), which held Indians were not
made U.S. citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment).
428
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 303.
429
Compare id. at 282.
430
Id. at 281-82, 290 (discussing United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886); Johnson v.
M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat) 543 (1823); Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831);
Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832)).
431
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 279.
432
Id. at 300 & 307.
433
Id. at 304.
434
Id. at 303.
435
Id. at 306.
436
Id. at 305.
51
the actions Nazis were contemplating taking in the mid-1930s towards Jews. Third, he rejected
the possibility that federal power over Indians and Indian nations arose from their political status
as governments recognized in the Constitution (contrary to what the United States Supreme
Court held multiple times in the 1970s).437 In contrast, Krieger said “the Indian law is exactly
what its name indicates: a racial law; and there is no way out of the extra-constitutional
situation” and furthermore “[t]he proper nature of the tribal Indians’ status is that of a racial
group placed under a special police power of the United States.”438 Obviously, Krieger’s
research, discussions, and legal conclusions were highly relevant to Nazi policy makers and
scholars, and to what the Nazis actually ended up doing to Jews and other minorities.
Similarly, in his 1936 book, Krieger spent three hundred and fifty pages on American
race laws and devoted a large portion of it to American Indian law.439 He repeated much of the
evidence and opinions from his 1935 law review article,440 but he also made other important new
findings which were similarly relevant to Nazi plans for Jewish people.
First, he addressed how the U.S. determined who was an Indian and how Indian status
fell within a racial categorization.441 He repeatedly mentioned issues of Indian and Black blood
quantum and stated “whites” or “Caucasians” only included persons with zero traces of Indian
blood.442 He was surely thinking of the American “one drop” rule for determining racial status
for Blacks and Indians. It is interesting to note, however, the American “one-drop” rule was too
harsh for the Nazis to adopt in the Nuremberg Laws.443
Second, he noted certain federal laws applied only to Indians and even, for example,
restricted their rights to contract with whomever they wished.444 He also detected that it was
solely up to Congress to decide when to end its guardianship relationship over Indians.445
Third, he set out how the United States had slowly begun to make some Indians U.S.
citizens in 1887, Indian women who married White men in 1888, Indians in the Indian Territory
in 1901, Indian World War I veterans in 1919, and finally all Indians were made U.S. citizens in
1924.446 He noted “full-blood” Indians were the last to receive relief from the federal
guardianship powers.447 It was noteworthy to Krieger that Indians received citizenship only
hesitantly, sixty years after Blacks, but even then Indians still did not receive full civil rights, and
really they had just fallen further under the power of the United States.448

437
See supra note 308.
438
Krieger, Geo.Wash., supra note 299, at 304 (emphasis in original), 307.
439
See, e.g., KRIEGER, (1936), supra note 321, at 110-45 (Chapter four is entitled “Indian Laws”
and covers a wide range of federal law regarding Indians, Indian property rights, and federal
powers over Indians). See also id. at 350-55 (the book’s Bibliography has 140 entries, twelve of
which, or 7%, are articles and books on Indian issues).
440
See, e.g., id. at 29, 62, 110-14, 121-22, 131-32, 321-22.
441
Id. at 116-17, 148-50.
442
Id. at 153.
443
See WHITMAN, supra note 1, at 127-28.
444
KRIEGER, (1936), supra note 321, at 125-26, 128.
445
Id. at 134.
446
Id. at 119-20. See supra notes 266-69.
447
Id. at 119.
448
Id. at 321-22.
52
 Fourth, Krieger also discussed the American state laws regarding Indians and
miscegenation. He described state statutes regarding Indians, primarily the laws from
Mississippi, Arizona, New Mexico, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Georgia.449 He
analyzed a Virginia law which defined a person as an Indian based on their amount of Indian
blood, and if they lived on a reservation, and if they had less than one-sixteenth Black blood.450
He remarked that three states even prohibited Indians from marrying Black Americans.451 He
then, perhaps copying Herbert Kier, printed a table of the thirty American state laws prohibiting
inter-racial marriages, including with Indians.452
Certainly, Krieger spent a lot of time and effort researching and analyzing United States
Indian law. He plainly and correctly found racism at work there. Moreover, he learned a lot from
his research and scholarship which applied to Nazi objectives and policies against Jews, and he
communicated this information to Nazi party officials and scholars. As Whitman says, he was
the most influential German scholar in the process of enacting the Nuremberg Laws and, thus,
surely he also influenced Nazis to concentrate on American Indian legal principles and to even
learn and maybe borrow ideas to use against Jews and minorities.
In addition, other important Nazi scholars researched and commented on aspects of
Indian law and history the Nazis would have learned from. The influential list Herbert Kier
compiled of thirty American state anti-miscegenation statutes, included six states that explicitly
banned Whites from marrying Indians and one which implicitly impacted Indian marriages:
Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oregon, South Carolina, and Virginia.453
Similarly, in his book length pamphlet, Johann von Leers also addressed several
American Indian law issues. Leers analyzed the thirty American state anti-miscegenation statutes
banning Whites from marrying Blacks and a few banning Whites from marrying Indians.454
Leers specifically analyzed four states’ laws which banned White/Indian marriages: Arizona,
Nevada, North Carolina and South Carolina.455

449
Id. at 121, 151, 153.
450
Id. at 153. Krieger delved deeply into state and federal legal regimes that considered minority
blood quantum and noted states looked to descent and fractions of blood to define minorities.
451
Id. at 172-73.
452
Id. at 173-79 & nn.5-14 (analyzing state statutes, constitutions, and cases). See also id. at 154-
56, 163-64 & n.26 (analyzing Supreme Court cases about Indians and civil rights in general).
453
Ariz.Rev.Code § 2166 (1928) (“All marriages of white persons with Negroes, Mulattoes,
Indians or Mongolians, are declared illegal and void.”); Ga.Code § 2941 (1926), Supp. 1930, §
2177(1)-(20) (“Marriage between a White person and a Native American descendant is null and
void.”); La.C.C., §§ 94-95, 1926 Supp. to Marr. Ann. Rev.C., 396, 1102 (“Marriage between a
Native American and an African American is prohibited and null and void.”); N.C. CONST. art.
XIV, § 8; Consol, St. (1919), §§ 2495, 4340 (“Marriage between a White person and a Native
American or his descendants up to the third generation is prohibited and void.”); Or.Code
(1930); S.C. CONST., art. III, § 33; C. (1922), Cr.L. § 378; C.C. § 5536 (“Marriage between a
White person and a Native American or half-blood is fully null and void.”); Va.Code (1930) §§
4540, 4546, 5087, 5099 (“Marriage between a colored person, a person that has more than 1/16
of non-caucasian blood, and a White person is null.”).
454
Leers, supra note 359, at 87-90.
455
Id. at 85 (citing Compiled Laws of Nevada in Force from 1861 to 1900 (Inclusive) (1900), §
53
 In 1942, Leers published an article in a weekly journal which would have reached a
broader German audience.456 He explained the historical background of how Euro-Americans
treated Native Americans from the beginning of colonization, and he set out the miniscule
percentage of Indians still remaining in each U.S. state. He then analyzed a Virginia statute, a
state which he said had no Indians left, banning marriage between a White person and a one-
sixteenth Indian by blood, a North Carolina law and its one-eighth Indian blood requirement
before the marriage prohibition kicked in, and that South Carolina prohibited such marriages
completely. He also discussed how Louisiana and New Mexico followed South Carolina’s lead.
Georgia, which he also claimed had no Indians, prohibited marriages between Whites and
anyone with even an inkling of Indian blood, while Oregon, in contrast, only prohibited
marriages between Whites and Indians with one-half Indian blood.
Leers also noted that Oklahoma, Louisiana, and North Carolina prohibited marriages
between Indians and Blacks, and Oklahoma claimed it did so to treat Indians like Whites and to
protect Indians from mixing with Blacks. Interestingly, Leers also analyzed some racial features
of American Indians. He described various characteristics he assigned to Indians and then he
devalued those traits in comparison with Whites.
It should be noted Krieger, Kier, and Leers overlooked or chose not to mention other U.S.
states who had also enacted anti-miscegenation laws that included bans on marrying Indians.457
Krieger, Kier, and Leers also did not find, or chose not to discuss, state cases applying the anti-
miscegenation laws to Indians. For example, in three state and U.S. territorial cases, the children
of mixed marriages between Whites and Indians were deemed illegitimate and thus could not
inherit the property of their White parents.458 In another case, the testimony of a defendant’s
“wife” was admissible in his murder trial because their marriage was void under Arizona’s anti-
miscegenation statute since he was of half Indian blood and she was of Spanish and French
descent.459 In another Arizona case, a White man and Indian woman did not need a divorce

4851 (p 944) An Act to prohibit marriages and cohabitation of Whites with Indians, Chinese,
Mulattoes, and Negroes, at
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=sstatutes&handle=hein.sstatutes/clnevfo0001&id=1
&men_tab=srchresults.
456
Johann von Leers, Rassenrecht in U.S.A. (Racial Laws in U.S.A.), DEUTSCHE MEDIZINISCHE
WOCHENSCHRIFT (GERMAN MEDICAL WEEKLY JOURNAL), Sept. 25, 1942.
457
Rev.Stat.Me (1871), Ch. 49, § 2 (“No white person shall intermarry with a Negro, Indian, or
Certain Mulatto; and no insane person or idiot shall be capable of contracting marriage.”) at
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.sstatutes/rtemij0001&id=1&size=2&collection=ss
tatutes&index=sstatutes/state114230; Rev.Stat.Mass. (1836), Ch. 75, § 5 (almost identical), at
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=sstatutes&handle=hein.sstatutes/rsocomas0001&id
=2&men_tab=srchresults); Gen.Stat.R.I. (1872), Title XX, Ch. 149, § 6, at
https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.sstatutes/gsrhpla0001&id=1&size=2&collection=
sstatutes&index=sstatutes/state114156); Stat.Terr.Wash., An Act to Regulate Marriages (1866),
§ 3, at http://leg.wa.gov/CodeReviser/documents/sessionlaw/1865pam1.pdf); Terr.Idaho (1863),
at https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063816907&view=1up&seq=612.
458
See, e.g., Follansbee v. Wilbur, 44 P. 262, 263 (Wash. 1896); Bailey v. Fiske, 34 Me. 77, 78,
1852 WL 1454 at *1–2 (Me. 1852).
459
State v. Pass, 191 P.2d 882, 59 Ariz. 16 (1942).
54
decree to terminate their marriage since they had violated the anti-miscegenation statute and their
“marriage” was already null and void.460
One final German scholar is also noteworthy. In his German language book in 1904,
American Civil Rights, Burt Howard informed his readers of the existence of Native American
nations who were allegedly independent political actors under the U.S. Constitution.461 He
claimed these nations could self-regulate to some extent, and had entered numerous treaties with
the United States, but that they still received the protection of the United States as wards, and
could only use their lands with the approval of the United States.462 He elaborated further on the
limited property rights of American Indians, and significantly, noted Indians could not be
naturalized as U.S. citizens.463 As of 1887, he correctly perceived some Indians were being
granted U.S citizenship if they met certain requirements.464 Howard concluded the U.S. President
could make Indians citizens even against their will.465 He also addressed Indian rights in his
chapter entitled “Civil Rights of Indians,” and correctly surmised that individual Indians were
under the civil and criminal jurisdiction of the United States.466
Turning briefly to topics addressed above, we see even more evidence of the potential
influence federal Indian law and policies had on the Third Reich. In section III.A, we addressed
eugenics, sterilizations, immigration, naturalization, and miscegenation. The research of scholars
like Krieger, Kier, and Leers demonstrated how the United States used those subjects against
Indians, and this knowledge would have informed Nazis about possible strategies for Jews.
Clearly, Hitler and many Nazis analogized Jews, Russians, and Slavs to Indians as all being
inferior peoples, unworthy of equal rights, and destined to extermination.
Moreover, Hitler and many Nazis were aware of U.S. naturalization laws and that Indians
had been permanent nationals and not citizens until 1924. The Nazis applied this same principle
to German Jews in 1935. And, it is absolutely certain Nazi scholars and officials were very well
acquainted with American anti-miscegenation laws and their application to Indians and other
minorities. Thereafter, Nazi Germany applied anti-miscegenation laws to Jews in the Nuremberg
Laws.
It is also clear Hitler, Nazis, and most average Germans were somewhat knowledgeable
about U.S. Indian policies and laws and aware of the history of the American Frontier West. It
seems obvious that these aspects were natural analogies and even teaching tools for Nazi race
laws and tactics in the German East.
In sum, Adolf Hitler and many Nazi party officials, jurists, lawyers, and scholars were
very interested in how the United States had discriminated against Indians and Indian nations for
one hundred and fifty years based on race and blood. Over several decades, German and Nazi
scholars and officials seriously studied and analyzed American Indian history, federal Indian

460
In re Walker's Estate, 46 P. 67, 68-69, 5 Ariz. 70, 75 (Ariz.Terr. 1896).
461
HOWARD, supra note 411, at 31, 35 & nn.2-3, 36 & n.1 (analyzing several U.S. Supreme
Court cases).
462
Id. at 31, 35 & nn.2-3, 36 & n.1.
463
Id. at 36-37 & nn.1-2, 38 & n.2 (discussing federal statutes and law review articles pertaining
to the government’s ability to make American Indians U.S. citizens).
464
Id. at 38 & n.1.
465
Id. at n.2 (comparing U.S. law review articles, statutes, and cases).
466
Id. at 37 & nn.1-2.
55
laws and policies, and state miscegenation statutes. Did the Nazis learn from, rely on, or were
they influenced by, federal Indian laws and affairs in the actual drafting of Nazi legislation and
policies? It seems eminently reasonable to say yes; but in the end this question cannot be
answered with any certainty.

IV. Conclusion

Following the interests of Adolf Hitler, “der Fuhrer” (the leader), Nazi scholars, jurists,
lawyers, and party officials were practically compelled to carefully study, compare, and maybe
even to borrow from American race laws and United States Indian law. The mere fact that Hitler
was a great fan of Karl May, was quite interested in American Indians and Indian laws, and was
quite familiar with the United States history of racially charged treatment of Indians would have
naturally led Nazis to seriously consider these issues. And that is exactly what they did, as
detailed above.
Moreover, as practitioners in a comparative law legal tradition, German lawyers were
accustomed to analyzing foreign law with an eye to finding and studying new ideas and making
comparisons.467 The Nazis were probably never going to just copy American race laws but they
were intensely interested in studying and learning from it for some reason: pure comparative law
analysis; legal, scientific, historical, and/or practical principles to emulate; or simply to find
justifications in American law for enacting race laws and policies. The fact the United States was
a democratic, first-world, “civilized” nation, and had engaged in colonialism, enacted race laws,
and practiced ethnic cleansing and even genocide on Indian nations and peoples and other racial
groups was of great interest to Hitler and the Nazis.
The Nazis also studied and compared U.S. Indian laws and policies for the exact same
reasons. The principles of federal Indian law and state laws affecting Indians were instructive
and useful to the Nazis in developing the Nuremberg Laws, for example, and in drafting other
laws and policies. Certainly, leading Nazi scholars understood and discussed Indian laws and
policies and provided this information to important Nazi decision makers. Once again, it is clear
that since Adolf Hitler was somewhat familiar with and interested in American Indian law and
history, the Nazi party would also be greatly interested in these topics. How much real influence
federal Indian law had on actual Nazi laws and policies is impossible to determine, but there is
no question Nazi scholars and officials gave serious attention and careful consideration to the
field when they were drafting the Third Reich’s Jewish laws and policies. All this German
“research unmistakably reveals [ ] that the Nazis did find precedents and parallels and
inspirations in the United States.”468
The Nazi scholars and attendees at the crucial June 1934 meeting on the road to the
Nuremberg Laws did not spend their valuable time researching, analyzing, writing, and
discussing American Indian law and history for no good reason. Again, we cannot quantify how
much, if any, the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi policies were influenced or instructed by federal
Indian law. But there is no doubt Nazi lawyers and scholars studied these subjects intensely.

467
WHITMAN, supra notes 1, at 126 (since the second half of the nineteenth century, German
governments have not enacted legislation unless it was preceded “by extensive comparative legal
research.”).
468
Id. at 10.
56
Thus, it seems fair to surmise there was some influence on Nazi policies and laws, and the
actions they undertook against Jews, other minorities, and in the German “East.”
Beyond the legal and historical issues analyzed here, and any possible conclusions about
the impact of United States race laws and federal Indian law on Nazi Germany, what is the
message of this Article? What can we learn today from this historical and legal analysis?
Is the message only that we should study the past so hopefully we are not “condemned to
repeat it?”469 Or is the message more ominous and that we surely will repeat it because as the
Bible says, “Man has dominated man to his injury.”470 There are, in fact, worrisome signs around
the world today that human society has not learned important lessons from the history of Nazi
and United States race laws. The chants of “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us” from
the Neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 11, 2017 should send chills through
everyone.471 The apparent return of religious and national discriminatory factors in current U.S.
immigration policies should also give us pause.472 And the July 2019 statement by Wyoming’s
Congresswoman, about a court decision in favor of grizzly bear recovery, that the “[American
Indian plaintiffs are] radical environmentalists intent on destroying our Western way of life” was
not a very encouraging sign either.473
What is the message then? Clearly, Euro-Americans and the United States pursued ethnic
cleansing and even genocidal actions against the Indigenous peoples and nations in North
America. The Nazis did the same and far worse against Jews and other peoples. Will humans and
our human governments learn from this history? One certainly hopes so, but who knows.474 Even
though we might not be able to answer this question, everyone is surely better off by studying
and being aware of these past tragedies, so that at least we have a chance to avoid repeating

469
George Santayana, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santayana (visited Oct. 2, 2019).
470
Eccl. 8:9 (New World Translation 1961).
471
Yair Rosenberg, ‘Jews will not replace us’: Why white supremacists go after Jews, WASH.
POST, Aug. 16, 2017, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-
faith/wp/2017/08/14/jews-will-not-replace-us-why-white-supremacists-go-after-jews/ (visited
January 25, 2020); Meg Warner, ‘Blood and soil’: Protesters chant Nazi slogan in
Charlottesville, CNN, Aug. 12, 2017, at https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/us/charlottesville-
unite-the-right-rally/index.html (visited February 4, 2020).
472
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Trump Administration Adds Six More Countries to Travel Ban, N.Y.
TIMES, Jan. 31, 2020); Adam Liptak and Michael D. Shear, Trump’s Travel Ban is Upheld by
Supreme Court, N.Y. TIMES, June 28, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/26/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-travel-ban.html (visited
January 28, 2020).
473
Compare Press Release, Cong. Liz Cheney, July 30, 2019, at
https://cheney.house.gov/2019/07/30/cheney-statement-on-relisting-of-the-yellowstone-grizzly-
bear/ (visited February 5, 2020), with Alex Kasprak, Did U.S. Rep. Cheney Accuse Native Tribes
of “Destroying Our Western Way of Life”?, SNOPES.COM, Aug. 2, 2019, at
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/our-western-way-of-life/ (visited February 5, 2020) (finding
the allegation “Mostly True” because all the plaintiffs were Indian nations, Indian individuals,
and Indian organizations).
474
Marc Santora, 75 Years After Auschwitz Liberation, Worry That ‘Never Again’ Is Not
Assured, N.Y. TIMES, January 26, 2020.
57
 them.
In closing: how intriguing, yet at the same time how profoundly disturbing and
unsettling, that American race laws and policies, and United States Indian laws and policies,
played a major role, some role, or any role at all, in the Nazi formulation of its racist policies,
laws, and genocide.

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