A viral social-media post recently struck a deep chord with me:

“If you’re flabbergasted that we are ‘turning into Nazi Germany,’ perhaps it’s worth remembering that the Nazis based many of their policies on segregated America. This is not new. We were Nazis before the Nazis were Nazis.”

It’s easy to dismiss a line like that as inflammatory and rhetorical exaggeration, but history supports it.  The architects of Hitler’s racial state openly studied, borrowed from, and admired American culture, race law, segregation codes, and settler-colonial practices.  The United States’ laws and policies did not merely inspire Nazi Germany; in many respects, it offered a functioning prototype.

The American Blueprint for Racial Law

When the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933, one of its first major legal projects was to codify racial hierarchy.  The “Nuremberg Laws” that followed in 1935 outlawed intermarriage between Jews and so-called “Aryans,” restricted citizenship to those of “German blood,” and prohibited a range of social interactions across racial lines.

Where did these ideas come from?  Nazi legal scholars and government officials, among them Heinrich Krieger, who had studied at the University of Arkansas—explicitly analyzed American law to find precedents.  They examined U.S. anti-miscegenation statutes, Jim Crow segregation, Native-American “wards of the state” policy, and immigration exclusions against Asians.  The Nazi jurists concluded that the United States offered the most elaborate system of race-based law in the modern world.

James Q. Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model (2017) documents how the Nazis pored over state-by-state marriage laws and census definitions to determine how the U.S. legally defined “whiteness” and “Negro blood.”  Some German officials even thought the American rules were too extreme, one Nazi lawyer remarked that the “one-drop rule” was “too harsh” for Germany.

Segregation and the Science of Race

Long before the Nazi regime institutionalized racial science, the United States had made pseudo-science the basis of national policy.  The eugenics movement, funded by American philanthropies such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, produced research that Nazi scientists later relied upon. Prominent U.S. eugenicists like Madison Grant, author of The Passing of the Great Race, were widely read in Germany; it is said anecdotally that Hitler himself called Grant’s book “my Bible.”

From compulsory sterilization laws to forced institutionalization of the “feeble-minded,” America’s obsession with racial purity and hierarchy provided moral and procedural cover for the Nazis’ own biological nightmares.  By the time German lawyers drafted the Nuremberg racial codes, thirty American states already had sterilization statutes upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927).  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s infamous declaration—“Three generations of imbeciles are enough”—was quoted approvingly in Nazi propaganda.

Learning From the Reservation and the Boarding School

Less well known is the Nazi interest in how the United States treated Native peoples.  In the 1930s, visiting German anthropologists, bureaucrats, and SS officers toured American Indian reservations and federal boarding schools.  Their purpose was to observe how a modern state could simultaneously destroy Indigenous cultures and yet claim to be “civilizing” them.

They studied the reservation system’s capacity to contain and control populations within specific geographic areas, an idea that paralleled Nazi plans for Jewish ghettos and later concentration camps.  They also examined the Indian boarding school model, where children were separated from their parents, punished for speaking their languages, and indoctrinated with Christian and nationalist ideology.  Nazi educational planners saw in this an example of cultural genocide through schooling—a method that could be adapted for occupied territories.

As my WMU colleague Dr. Dee Sherwood has theorized in private conversation based her reading of the book Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography by historian John Toland, these visits may even explain how Nazi officials encountered the swastika symbol in American contexts because of its widespread use in American culture.  The ancient hooked cross existed for millennia among Indigenous peoples of North America and across Eurasia.  Early 20th-century Native regalia, art, and even U.S. Army insignia incorporated it without stigma. When the Nazis later appropriated the swastika as their emblem, they stripped it of its spiritual meanings and weaponized it as a symbol of racial conquest.  In a sense, the swastika’s journey from Native art and ancient European pottery to fascist flag encapsulates the broader story of how cultural symbols, and entire policies, were stolen, twisted, and globalized.

“Study Abroad” for Fascism

Archival records show that Nazi officials literally went on study tours to the United States.  They observed how the U.S. Census categorized people by race; how the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded non-“Nordic” immigrants; how police enforced segregation in southern towns.  Delegations attended criminology conferences and met with American prison administrators to learn about “modern” penal colonies.  Hitler’s government sought to build a world-spanning empire, and in America it saw the first modern racial empire already realized.

This history undermines the comforting myth that fascism was a foreign aberration.  The roots of Nazi ideology were nourished by the same soil that produced the Trail of Tears, the Chinese Exclusion Act, and the Tuskegee experiment.  What the Nazis did was to amplify America’s own racial logic to its most monstrous conclusion. So when Americans invoke Nazi Germany as the ultimate evil, we often treat it as something alien to our national character.  But this moral distance is a luxury built on forgetting our own history.  Jim Crow segregation, the genocide of Indigenous nations, and the exclusion of entire immigrant groups were not historical footnotes, they were the scaffolding upon which Hitler built his Reich.

That is why the viral social media post resonates so sharply today.  The claim that “we were Nazis before the Nazis were Nazis” isn’t a cheap provocation; it’s an invitation to historical honesty.  The United States demonstrated that a self-proclaimed democracy could systematize racial hierarchy, disenfranchise millions, and rationalize violence as progress.  Nazi Germany merely copied the lesson.

The Power of Selective Memory

After World War II, the U.S. cast itself as the first Antifa, liberators of the world from fascism. Yet many of the same segregationists who condemned Hitler continued to maintain apartheid in America for another two decades. Black soldiers who fought in Europe and Asia, including my grandfather, returned to find themselves barred from voting, housing, and education by the very nation they had defended.  The federal government that dismantled concentration camps was still running Native boarding schools well into the 1970s. This dissonance, condemning racism abroad while practicing it at home, remains one of the great contradictions of American identity.  It explains why discussions of fascism in U.S. culture so often sound like projection: we see in others what we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves.

The lesson is not that America is Nazi Germany, but that the structures of racial domination developed here set historical precedents that others copied.  Our moral task is to confront those continuities rather than hide behind exceptionalism and expunge this sordid history from our educational curriculum.  The same nation that inspired the Nuremberg Laws also produced the civil-rights movement; the same legal system that once codified segregation has the capacity to defend equity— if we choose to use it that way.

Recognizing this lineage does not diminish the awful horrors of the Holocaust. It reveals how genocidal systems often grow out of ordinary institutions—laws, schools, hospitals, police, and bureaucracies that appear neutral until they are not. It shows how the language of efficiency, purity, and protection can become the machinery of exclusion and extermination. When people insist, “It can’t happen here,” history replies: it already did—and others took notes.

Conclusion: Reclaiming What Was Stolen

If the past century has taught us anything, it is that ideas migrate easily: across borders, ideologies, and generations. America exported both democracy and racism, both freedom and fascist technique. Which legacy we choose to nurture now depends on whether we are willing to see ourselves clearly in history’s mirror.

This is not about guilt; it is about responsibility. The same nation whose laws helped shape the Nuremberg Codes also gave birth to the civil rights movement, the Voting Rights Act, and the enduring belief that moral courage can bend the arc of history. We are the heirs of both atrocities and awakenings. Facing that dual inheritance honestly is not self-hatred, it is the first step toward redemption. Denial keeps us trapped, but recognition opens the door to repair.

The truth is that history does not repeat itself, it rhymes and reverberates. The forces that created Jim Crow, Native boarding schools, and eugenic laws are not relics; they are patterns that reemerge whenever fear triumphs over empathy. The antidote is vigilance: education that names injustice, leadership that prioritizes truth over comfort, and citizenship that refuses to mistake silence for civility.

And yet, we must also confront an uncomfortable continuity: our history is inspiring the politics of today too. Scholars and activists have traced how the American settler-colonial project, rooted in displacement, broken treaties, and the myth of Manifest Destiny, continues to echo in global politics. In Truthout, Steven Salaita writes about how the logic of U.S. westward expansion mirrors Israeli colonization of Palestinian lands. Walter Hixson, in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, argues that Israeli identity must be understood through the same lens of settler colonialism that defined the United States. He wrote that early discourse in Israel even invoked American myths of “winning the West” as models of national destiny. In Indigenous Studies, Salaita and others have shown how scholars now use “settler colonialism” as a shared analytical frame, linking the treatment of Native Americans and Palestinians as parallel histories of dispossession. (See “Native Americans and Native Palestinians” in The Harvard Crimson and the The New Arab) These parallels are not meant to sensationalize or collapse histories, but to expose how the same moral quandaries—national exceptionalism, divine entitlement, racial hierarchy—keep being reborn in new forms.

This is the real power of history: it reveals the moral DNA that societies pass forward. America’s racial state was not only a warning to the world; it was also THE manual. The racial laws that guided Nazi Germany were built from American statutes. The reservation and boarding school systems inspired new techniques of population control. And the myth of manifest destiny continues to justify occupation and inequality today. These are not coincidences, they are unfortunate lineages.

But lineage is not destiny. The same ingenuity that built systems of domination can also dismantle them. The same bureaucracies that once enforced racial hierarchy can guarantee human dignity. The same nation that exported exclusion can now model repair. Reckoning with this history is not an act of despair, it is an act of reclamation. We reclaim the moral potential buried under centuries of denial and cloaking of inequity. We reclaim the possibility that the descendants of the raciallly oppressed can become the architects of justice.

Our task now is to transform the mirror into a window, to see through history’s reflection and into a future where the lessons of our own unfortunate cruelty become the foundation of our collective wisdom. We cannot undo what was done, but we can ensure that the world we leave behind testifies to our refusal to repeat it. America provided the blueprint for fascist oppression, and now it can now offer one for repair. That would be the truest form of patriotism, not denial or the worship of myth, but the courage to confront our contradictions and build a nation worthy of the ideals it has too often betrayed.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a nationally recognized policy scholar, public intellectual, and civil rights advocate. A trusted voice in public policy, he has testified for state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, the United Nations, and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, while also advising presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. His work has been cited by major outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, and he has appeared on networks from MSNBC and PBS to NPR and DemocracyNow!. He is a recipient of more than 30 honors, including the 2025 NAACP Keeper of the Flame Award, Vasquez Heilig brings both scholarly rigor and grassroots commitment to the fight for equity and justice.