These eugenic policies of racial engineering and the clear prejudices held against minorities are reminiscent of laws promulgated by the [Third Reich], and it is unsurprising that, although American eugenics did not engage in the systematic removal of an entire race, it nevertheless served as a model for the [Third Reich] in terms of citizenship and race law, one Californian eugenics leader going so far as to say that American eugenics “played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who [were] behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.”
Leading up to the 1930s, the United States was a “global leader in ‘scientific eugenics,’” and its influence and collaboration with German eugenicists resulted in the 1933 [Fascist] sterilization Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.
Furthermore, the American legal culture that institutionalized Jim Crow, anti-miscegenation, and forced sterilization appealed to [anticommunist] lawyers when constructing a German equivalent.
These [anticommunist] lawyers “made repeated reference to American models and precedents in the drafting process that led up to the Nuremberg Laws and continued in their subsequent interpretation and application.”
The Nuremberg laws were thus informed by existing American paradigms of racial engineering and prejudice, even if the [Third Reich] undoubtedly authored a distinctly cruel and distinguishable variety of racism and ethnocentrism.
Nonetheless, though the connection has been made between the United States and [Fascist] Germany, scholarship has yet to direct any significant attention to the manner in which the American public reacted to the policies and practices of [Fascist] eugenics when unquestionably racist and ableist policies were on the books domestically.
Given that public opinion oftentimes varies regionally (especially when considering the historically conflictual North-South relationship in the United States), and that [Fascist] Germany would become a pronounced enemy of the U.S., determining perceptions of [Fascist] eugenics and potential changes over time is valuable study in understanding America’s role as an observer and influencer of [Fascist] policies and therefore the holocaust itself.
The following research thus endeavors to begin filling the gap in the existing literature by engaging in the following question: to what extent did the United States favor, oppose, or remain neutral to [Fascist] eugenics, and is there a correlation between opinions of [Fascist] eugenics temporally: before and after U.S. involvement in the Second World War, or spatially: by U.S. region?