(Mirror.)

Quoting William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, page 233:

The so‐called Nuremberg Laws of September 15, 1935, deprived the Jews of German citizenship, confining them to the status of “subjects.” It also forbade marriage between Jews and Aryans as well as extramarital relations between them, and it prohibited Jews from employing female Aryan servants under thirty‐five years of age. In the next few years some thirteen decrees supplementing the Nuremberg Laws would outlaw the Jew completely.

Some of us may remember reading somewhere that Imperial America’s so‐called ‘Jim Crow’ laws formed the basis of the Nuremberg Laws. There is certainly some truth to that claim, but chances are your understanding of this is minimalistic. The following paragraphs shall hopefully provide you with a clearer and more formal understanding of the matter:

The [Fascist] attorney and scholar Heinrich Krieger was a crucial actor in the process of [the Third Reich] 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 [Reich] 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 [the Third Reich] 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 [Fascist] 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 [Fascist] 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 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, 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 [Fascist] officials in their study of American race law in general.

One author, citing Krieger and other [Fascist] scholars, notes that Indian law was discussed by many [Fascists] “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 [Fascist] ideology of racial purity and cultural determinations.”303

This author concludes that “prohibiting mixed marriages [as American antimiscegenation 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 [Fascist] racial legislation, and eventually for racial discrimination.”304

There are more paragraphs therein, and further could be said about the Nuremberg Laws, such as looking directly at the Jews who suffered from them, but for the sake of brevity I’d like to end this excerpt here.

[Footnote]

One last thing: although it’s only tangentially related to the above, I feel that given how repetitively anticommunists like to equate the Soviet Union with the Third Reich, it may be necessary to have a look at intermarriage in the Soviet Union. Quoting from Albert Szymański’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union, page 89:

As a measure of the rapid integration of Jews into Soviet society, intermarriage, which was extremely rare before the Revolution, became quite common.57

Similarly, from Choosing One or Being Both: The Identity Dilemmas of Russian–Jewish Mixed Ethnics Living in Russia and in Israel:

As elsewhere, marriage to members of the dominant majority (Slavs in this case) has been a sign of the on‐going secularization and assimilation of the Jews under the Soviet regime. Despite institutional and social antisemitism, marriages between Jews and non‐Jews had been widespread and socially acceptable in the USSR/FSU since the 1920s and continued to increase during the post‐Soviet period.5 Among younger cohorts of Russian/Soviet Jews, over sixty percent have non‐Jewish spouses, with exogamy being more common among Jewish men.

Thus, in 1979, fifty‐one percent of married Jewish men and only thirty‐three percent of married Jewish women had spouses from another ethnic group; by 2002, the share of non‐Jewish spouses among Jewish men and women reached seventy‐two percent and fifty‐three percent respectively.6 Several generations of exogamy are reflected in the ethnic composition of younger cohorts whereby fifty to seventy percent has one Jewish parent or grandparent. The mixed ethnicity phenomenon is largely typical for Ashkenazi (eastern European) Soviet Jews, while non‐Ashkenazi Jews of Transcaucasia and Central Asia opt for endo‐gamy and ethno‐religious continuity.

Other events that happened today (September 15):

1913: Johannes Steinhoff, Luftwaffe fighter ace and later NATO official, existed.
1919: Angelo Fausto Coppi, Axis soldier (and cyclist), was born.
1935: The Third Reich officially adopted its new national flag bearing the swastika.
1940: The climax of the Battle of Britain, when the Luftwaffe launched its largest and most concentrated assault of the entire campaign.
1942: Axis torpedoes sunk the Allied Navy aircraft carrier USS Wasp at Guadalcanal.
1944: The Battle of Peleliu commenced as the United States Marine Corps’ 1st Marine Division and the United States Army’s 81st Infantry Division hit White and Orange beaches under heavy fire from Axis infantry and artillery.
1945: Anton Webern, ambivalent Axis musician, expired.
1975: Franco Bordoni‐Bisleri, Axis pilot, died.
1978: Willy Messerschmitt, Axis aircraft designer and manufacturer, perished.