Deconstructing Memes: What we need to learn from history books about Nazi Germany and US complicity

In today’s Deconstructing Memes, I want to take a look at a meme that oversimplifies history, creates a false equivalency, and fails to account for a more complete analysis of the rise of Nazism and what it has to do with US politics.

The meme, shown here, reads:

I suggest that everyone pick up a History Book or two and read about what took place in Germany in the Early 1930’s. Especially those of you who think a dictator isn’t such a bad idea.

It’s too bad that the meme’s creator doesn’t list or suggest some good history books on what was happening in Germany during the early 1930s, but that is probably because they don’t really want people to read about this history or at least a more robust and comprehensive aspect of this history.

The rise of Nazism and their leader Adolf Hitler, is more complex than what the meme suggests. Germany came out of WWI defeated and their economy was hurting, particularly for working class people. Germany, like the rest of the world, was deeply impacted by the Great Depression.

During economic hardships, political leadership will often direct working class people’s attention away from economic policy by laying the blame at the feet of other poor and working class people. Some of the targets are usually lobbed at immigrants and racial minorities. 

In James Whitman’s book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, he says that a great deal of the policies that the Nazi Party adopted that not only vilified Jewish people, but also demonized Roma, the queer community, immigrants and non-Aryan people, were based in large part on what they learned from policies in the US. Whitman states: 

The 1920 Party Program called for sharp limits on citizenship, which was to be restricted to persons of “German blood,” along with a scheme of disabilities for resident foreigners, who were to be threatened with expulsion. 

When the US adopted the the Naturalization Act of 1790, it opened naturalization to “any alien, being a free white person.” The Nazi Party learned from this as well as US immigration laws that were adopted in 1921 (Emergency Quota Act – which limited the amount of immigrants into the US) and 1924 (The Immigration Act of 1924), which prevented immigration from Asia and put limitations on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. The Nazi Party were paying attention to both of those US immigration policies and and wove them into their own citizenship law that emerged in 1935. 

Getting back to Germany’s post WWI economy, it should be pointed out that the primary investors in Germany after the 1929 depression were firms based in the US. In Christopher Simpson’s monumental book, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, he documents how Allen and John Foster Dulles, who were working for the corporate law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, collaborated with German banks and other financial institutions to help create the economic conditions that led to the Nazi Holocaust. 

US investment in Nazi Germany was not just limited to the the 1930s, but continued right through the end of 1945. In Edwin Black’s book, Nazi Nexus: America’s Corporate Connections to Hitler’s Holocaust, the author presents detailed information on corporations like IBM, along with the famous US Capitalists Carnegie and Rockefeller who embrace eugenics research to justify White Supremacy. 

Another important history book is entitled, Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot, by Charles Higham, who documents how Standard Oil Chase Bank, ITT and the Ford Motor Company were collaborating with the Nazi Party throughout most of WWII. In fact, the Ford Motor Company was manufacturing military vehicles in Detroit for Nazi Germany at least until 1944.

On the matter of racial laws that the Nazi’s adopted, which led to the Holocaust, the Nazi Party learned a great deal from US anti-miscegenation laws, according to Hitler’s American Model. The Nazi’s were obsessed with not wanting Aryans to inter-marry with anyone else, thus keeping the bloodline “pure.” On this matter, the Nazi Party once again adopted US anti-miscegenation laws, particularly around white and African American citizens, particularly during the Jim Crow era. In his book, Hitler’s American Model, Whitman not only talks about what the Nazi’s learned from Jim Crow segregation policies, but that some of the Nazi lawyers and jurists felt that in some policies the “Americans were too extreme.” Whitman is not the only historian who provides this insight. In Isabel Wilkerson’s book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, she writes:

While the Nazis praised the American commitment to legislating racial purity, they could not abide the unforgiving hardness under which an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins’ counted as blacks. The one-drop rule was too harsh. For the Nazis.

Again, I agree with the general sentiment of the meme cited above, which suggests that we read history books. I have two more books to suggest as well. First, there is David Wyman’s important book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941 – 1945. Wyman provides a detailed account of how the US Government would not allow European Jews that had fled Europe during the Nazi era, to migrate to the US. Lastly, in the book, Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America, we learn from Annie Jacobsen that the US methodically recruited Nazi scientists and former Nazi military personnel to come to the US to assist them during the Cold War against the Soviet Union. 

Therefore, the meme mentioned above is not only simplistic, but fails to address the fact the Nazi Germany had learned a great deal from the US regarding racial laws and immigration policy. In addition, the history books I am citing demonstrate that one contributing factor to the rise of Nazism from the 1930s through the end of WWII, was in part due to the collaboration between the US financial sector with Nazi Germany and numerous major US corporations that were profiting off of Germany war of expansion in Europe, along with profiting from the sale of technology that was used (IBM punchcard system) that was instrumental in the Nazi Concentration camps. 

I agree, we all need to learn from history. However, instead of making over simplifications about the possible re-election of Donald Trump, maybe we need to learn about how not to collaborate with dictators, something the US has been doing for a long time.