I. Executive Summary: The American Model and the Nazi Radicalization

The creation of the foundational race legislation of the Third Reich, particularly the notorious Nuremberg Laws of 1935, was not a process of political and legal invention carried out in isolation. Rather, it relied heavily on established, codified models of systemic racism, with the jurisprudence of the United States—specifically the laws governing Jim Crow segregation, racial classification, and eugenics—serving as a central, studied precedent. The Nuremberg Laws, consisting primarily of the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, fundamentally transformed the definition of Jewish identity from a religious affiliation to a biological-racial category, stripping Jewish people of their civil rights and German citizenship.  

Historical documentation, including verbatim transcripts of key planning meetings, reveals that Nazi jurists and officials engaged in detailed and lengthy discussions of U.S. race law as they drafted their statutes. The striking paradox of this historical exchange is that the world’s foremost constitutional democracy provided critical legal templates for the world’s emerging totalitarian, genocidal state. The analysis confirms that the influence of Jim Crow was significant, particularly in codifying anti-miscegenation and second-class citizenship.  

However, a central nuance exists, confirming the premise of the inquiry: Nazi legal experts explicitly found certain American practices, especially those pertaining to segregation and classification, to be overly radical, arbitrary, or, most importantly, insufficient for their objectives. This rejection was not based on moral restraint but on a technocratic drive for efficiency and a recognition that the Jim Crow system, designed for the perpetual exploitation and control of an oppressed minority (a caste system), lacked the necessary centralized power and radical mechanisms required to persecute and ultimately eradicate a relatively assimilated population (genocide). This divergence between Jim Crow’s aim for stable oppression and Nazism’s drive for total extermination defined the ultimate fate of the two legal systems.  

II. The Quest for Legal Legitimacy: Why the Third Reich Looked West

A. The Legal Vacuum and the Need for Precedent Post-1933

When the Nazi regime took power in 1933, it faced the challenge of translating a radical, pseudoscientific ideology—the assertion of “Aryan” superiority and the threat of Jewish “contamination”—into enforceable, standardized national law. The regime needed domestic legal justification to solidify its power, undermine conservative opposition within Germany, and provide a veneer of technical legality to its policies. The existing German legal framework, even after initial adjustments, was inadequate for establishing a fully codified racial state.  

The study of American law offered a critical solution, presenting globally recognized precedents for codifying comprehensive racism within a modern, supposedly “enlightened” legal structure. By adopting elements of U.S. law, the Nazis could assert that their anti-Jewish policies were not entirely revolutionary but were based on internationally accepted, “scientific” precepts, particularly those related to eugenics and the management of “inferior” populations. The American legal system, which successfully utilized legal subterfuge to evade constitutional strictures (like the Fourteenth Amendment) and relegate entire groups to permanent second-class status, provided evidence that institutionalized racial hatred could be effective and sustainable.  

B. The Architects of Nazi Race Law and the American Dossier

The transatlantic influence was formalized through key Nazi architects and documented research. The foundational blueprint for the Nuremberg Laws, known as the Prussian Memorandum, began circulating among Reich jurists in September 1933. This document, central to early Nazi legal thinking, expressly cited U.S. racist lawmaking.

The pivotal moment occurred on June 5, 1934, when leading Nazi lawyers and officials, including Justice Minister Franz Gürtner and future judicial savage Roland Freisler, gathered to plan the anti-Jewish legislation. The stenographer’s transcript of this meeting reveals detailed discussions of the law of the United States. Minister Gürtner opened the meeting by presenting a memo on American race law, noting that “Almost all the American states have race legislation,” and detailing the many states that criminalized mixed marriages.  

One of the most radical Nazis present, Roland Freisler, stated that U.S. jurisprudence would “suit us perfectly, with a single exception,” noting that American laws focused on “coloreds and half-coloreds,” which did not include the Jews, the Nazis’ primary target. This statement confirms the active interest in the mechanisms of U.S. law, even while adapting the target population.  

The intellectual conduit for much of this information was Heinrich Krieger, a German lawyer who studied American race law, including Jim Crow and federal Indian law, as an exchange student at the University of Arkansas School of Law between 1933 and 1934. Krieger produced a critical memorandum detailing American legislation and judicial practice, which was directly utilized in the 1934 planning meetings. His subsequent major German-language study, Das Rassenrecht in den Vereinigten Staaten (Race Law in the United States, 1936), became a key reference, reviewing the Fourteenth Amendment, immigration and naturalization laws, and anti-miscegenation statutes.  

The meticulous Nazi study of American laws relating to Native Americans, immigration, and Manifest Destiny suggests a higher-order strategic objective. The regime sought not merely segregation but a model for institutionalizing racial hatred—a legal culture capable of treating targeted groups (Jews, and later Slavs in the context of Lebensraum) as internal or conquered colonial subjects without rights, echoing the status of American Indians and those affected by the Dred Scott decision. The American legal history thus provided a template for governance through racial oppression and territorial cleansing.  

III. Blueprint for Dispossession: U.S. Influence on the Nuremberg Laws (1935)

The two cornerstone laws promulgated at Nuremberg—the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor—demonstrate clear parallels and influence drawn from American statutory practices of exclusion and racial control.

A. The Reich Citizenship Law: Modeling Second-Class Status

The Reich Citizenship Law dictated that only those of “German or related blood” were eligible to be Reich citizens, effectively reducing Jews to the status of “state subjects” without full citizenship rights. This deprivation of political rights was a necessary step toward the isolation and eventual extermination of the Jewish population.  

In framing this legal structure for exclusion, Nazi jurists examined how the U.S. had historically managed to deny citizenship rights to designated groups, particularly African Americans, despite the constitutional guarantees of the post-Civil War amendments. They reviewed U.S. racist-based immigration laws, naturalization policies, and disenfranchisement tactics as precedents for creating second-class citizens within an established legal order. The infamous 1857 Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which officially denied Black citizenship, provided a powerful example of institutional exclusion that resonated with the Nazi project to legally nullify the rights of Jews in Germany.  

B. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor

The second major law, known as the “Blood Law,” was intended to prevent Rassenschande (race defilement) by prohibiting marriage and extramarital intercourse between Jews and Germans. It also placed specific restrictions on employment, such as forbidding Jews from hiring German females under the age of 45 in their households.  

This is the area where direct American influence was arguably the strongest. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage and even dating across several states, stood out to the Nazis as a model that could be “directly transferred to Germany” to prevent the interbreeding of designated racial types. Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was particularly instructional, as it was designed to prohibit interracial marriage, reinforce segregation, and codified the strict legal separation of “white” and “colored” populations. The Nazi focus on criminalizing miscegenation, punishable by harsh criminal penalties, mirrored this U.S. common-law tradition.  

IV. Eugenics as Global Science: The Shared Foundations of Racial Hygiene

Beyond citizenship and marriage restrictions, the overarching pseudoscientific ideology that justified the racial laws in both the U.S. and Nazi Germany was eugenics—the belief in state intervention to promote “racial hygiene.” The global acceptance of eugenics lowered the intellectual and diplomatic barriers for the Nazi regime’s radical policies.

A. American Leadership in Eugenics

During the interwar period, the United States was a global leader in “scientific” eugenics, pioneering intellectual thought that filtered into immigration and naturalization laws, and influenced policies in other Anglophone countries. Adolf Hitler himself studied and praised the work of American eugenicists such as Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, and Lothrop Stoddard. Documentation confirms an active intellectual exchange between American and Nazi eugenicists until the late 1930s, with Nazis explicitly looking to the U.S. as a “model” for racial purification.  

The existence of a widespread international intellectual respect for American science and law concerning eugenics provided a crucial layer of credibility for the Nazi regime in its early years. When Hitler’s state adopted mandatory sterilization, it was not an isolated radical step but a practice already sanctioned and praised in the U.S., making international outcry less potent than if the policy had been entirely novel.  

B. Sterilization Laws and State Control

A ruthless program of eugenics, designed to build a “healthy” society free of hereditary defects, was central to Nazi ambition. Soon after taking power, the regime passed the Law to Prevent the Birth of the Offspring with Hereditary Defects (1933). This law was directly inspired by American state laws. Otto Wagner, a prominent Nazi official, noted that Hitler studied “with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people”.  

American state laws demonstrated that compulsory sterilization could be legally codified and justified to manage perceived hereditary flaws. The institutionalization of state control over reproduction served as a prelude to the horrors to come. The initial sterilization laws quickly paved the way for systematic euthanasia programs, including the use of gassing, which prefigured the mechanization of murder in the Holocaust.  

The Nazi lawyers’ interest in U.S. laws also extended to the pragmatic challenges of racial categorization. American anti-miscegenation law offered practical guidance on how to classify Mischlinge (mixed-race people). Classification is a critical prerequisite for state persecution, and by studying U.S. legal mechanisms for drawing rigid racial boundaries, the Nazis gained the tools necessary to enforce their newly created racial hierarchy.  

The following table summarizes the primary statutory influences that crossed the Atlantic: