and well today. Whitman examines the U.S. legal tradition, noting much that is to admire in it, but pointing to its political or democratic nature as something that the Nazis found preferable to the inflexibility of an independent judiciary. To this day, the U.S. elects prosecutors, imposes Nazi-like habitual offender (or three-strikes-you’re-out) sentences, uses the death penalty, employs jailhouse snitches’ testimony in exchange for release, locks up more people than anywhere else on earth, and does so in an extremely racist manner. To this day, racism is alive in U.S. politics. What right-wing dictators admire in Donald Trump’s nation is not all new and not all different from what fascists admired 80 or 90 years ago.
It’s worth repeating the obvious: the United States was not and is not Nazi Germany. And that is a very good thing. But what if a Wall Street coup had succeeded? What if the United States had been bombed flat and faced defeat from abroad while demonizing a domestic scapegoat? Who can really say it couldn’t have or still couldn’t happen here?
Whitman suggests that Germans do not write about foreign influence on Nazism so as not to appear to be shifting blame. For similar reasons many Germans refuse to oppose the slaughter of and mistreatment of Palestinians. We can fault such positions as going overboard. But why is it that U.S. writers rarely write about U.S. influence on Nazism? Why, for that matter, do we not learn about U.S. crimes, like slavery or Native American genocide, in the way that Germans learn about German crimes?
Another book worth reading for a grasp of U.S. race relations at the time of World War II and in the years leading up to it is Douglas Blackmon’s Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. Blackmon documents how the institution of slavery in the U.S. South largely ended for as long as 20 years in some places upon completion of the U.S. Civil War. And then it was back again, in a slightly different form, reduced but still widespread, publicly known and accepted in certain places -- right up to World War II.121
During widely publicized trials of slave owners for the crime of slavery in 1903 -- trials that did virtually nothing to end the pervasive practice -- the Montgomery Advertiser editorialized: “Forgiveness is a Christian virtue and forgetfulness is often a relief, but some of us will never forgive nor forget the damnable and brutal excesses that were committed all over the South by negroes and their white allies, many of whom were federal officials, against whose acts our people were practically powerless.” This was a publicly acceptable position in Alabama in 1903: slavery should be tolerated because of the evils committed by the North during the war and during the occupation that followed.
Across much of the Deep South, a system of petty, even meaningless, crimes, such as “vagrancy,” created the threat of arrest for any black person. Upon arrest, a black man would be presented with a debt to pay through years of hard labor. The way to protect oneself from being put into one of the hundreds of forced labor camps was to put oneself in debt to and under the protection of a white owner. The 13th Amendment sanctions slavery for convicts, and no statute prohibited slavery until the 1950s. All that was needed for the pretense of legality was the equivalent of today’s plea bargain.
Not only did slavery not fully end following the U.S. Civil War, but for many thousands it was worsened. The antebellum slave owner typically had a financial interest in keeping an enslaved person alive and healthy enough to work. A mine or mill that purchased the work of hundreds of convicts had no interest in their futures beyond the term of their sentences. In fact, local governments would replace a convict who died with another, so there was no economic reason not to work them to death. Mortality rates for leased-out convicts in Alabama were as high as 45 percent per year.
Enslaved Americans after the “ending of slavery” were bought and sold, chained by the ankles and necks at night, whipped to death, waterboarded, and murdered at the discretion of their owners, such as U.S. Steel Corporation which purchased mines near Birmingham where generations of “free” people were worked to death underground.
The threat of that fate hung over every black man not enduring it, as well as the threat of lynching that escalated in the early 20th century along with newly pseudo-scientific justifications for racism. “God ordained the southern white man to teach the lessons of Aryan supremacy,” declared Woodrow Wilson’s friend Thomas Dixon, author of the book and play The Clansman, which became the film Birth of a Nation.
Five days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government finally decided to take prosecuting slavery seriously, to counter possible criticism from Germany or Japan.
The vicious racism and antisemitism and homophobia and assorted other bigotries of the Nazis are fully the fault of the Nazis. But blame is unlimited. Giving it to someone does not take it away from anyone else. It’s hard to know how the laws stripping Jews of rights would have been developed in Germany without the American model. It’s easy to grasp that the United States did not need to create that model, that it could have done better and can do better in the future. As I write this, California is using prisoners to fight forest fires, paying them $1 an hour, and public scandals over police murders of black men are frequent occurrences.
As racist as the U.S. was prior to WWII, it was made more racist by WWII -- something that happens with each major war. In 2018, Frontline PBS and ProPublica reporter A. C. Thompson produced a film called “Documenting Hate: New American Nazis,” in which Thompson interviewed professor Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement in Paramilitary America.122
KATHLEEN BELEW: One thing to understand is that throughout American history there’s always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. So if you look, for instance, at the surges in Ku Klux Klan membership, they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements—those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.
A. C. THOMPSON: Postwar periods tend to correspond then with an upsurge in white power, white supremacist activity?
KATHLEEN BELEW: Always. Yes.
A. C. THOMPSON: Wow.
A. C. THOMPSON: Belew outlines a long history of military men who became key figures in the white power movement: George Lincoln Rockwell, World War II veteran and founder of the American Nazi Party; Richard Butler, World War II veteran and founder of the Aryan Nations; Louis Beam, Vietnam veteran and grand dragon of the KKK; Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran and Oklahoma City bomber.
KATHLEEN BELEW: It’s important to remember, too, that returning veterans that join this movement, and active-duty troops, we’re talking about a tiny, not even statistically significant, percentage of veterans. But within this movement, those people who did serve are playing an enormously important role in instruction of weapons, in creating paramilitary activist mentality and training.
It’s not hard to understand how wars feed off racism and feed back into it. William Halsey, who commanded the United States’ naval forces in the South Pacific during WWII, thought of his mission as “Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs,” and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell.123 LIFE magazine showed a picture of a Japanese person burning to death and commented: “This is the only way.”124 Dr. Seuss, whose The Butter Battle Book depicts war as idiocy, and who thought child refugees should be saved, churned out racist war propaganda, including a cartoon depicting Germans and Japanese as insects being sprayed with insecticide by Uncle Sam,125 and another with the caption “Slap that Jap! Bugswatters cost money!”126
A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth.127
