Moyers: You quote the German writer Wahrhold Drascher, whose book was titled Supremacy of the White Race: “Americans took care to guarantee that the decisive positions in the leadership of the state would be kept in the hands of Anglo-Saxons alone.”
Whitman: Yeah, that’s what he said. And the Nazis, in their interpretation of the American theme, thought that they were seeing concerns parallel to their own in Germany. What they were worried about in the early stages was precisely that Jews might take over Germany, so the Jews had to be kept out of government, out of the legal profession, and out of any other situation in which they might exercise what the Nazis always called influence. The Nazis used exactly the same language in discussing the situation of American blacks.
Moyers: You quote one prominent Nazi lawyer who admired the Democratic Party of the South for using “racist election law” to build a one-party system.
Whitman: Yes. And the Nazis weren’t the only ones to notice this. Other observers too, including much more palatable ones, looked at the South and saw what they thought was the creation of a one-party system very similar to what was emerging in fascist Europe.
...
Whitman: Well, many of them said exactly what American observers still say today, what political scientists will say today — that there were two competing currents in American law: on the one hand, a commitment to universal equality, but on the other hand, a deeply racist tradition, which the Nazis often called the realistic racism of the United States. They liked to think of themselves as realists and they admired the realist racism of the United States too.
http://billmoyers.com/story/hitler-america-nazi-race-law/
