How Jim Crow Inspired Hitler

 This morning I set out to write a journal or blog entry about Holocaust Remembrance Day. On this day, in 1945, the Soviet Army liberated those starved and near-death Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz concentration camp. I thought I knew what I was going to write: about the books I’ve read, the book I’m reading now, and all I’ve learned about the universal hatred people have for “other” people (other countries, races, religions, gender, sexual preference and on and on).

Then I read Katie Couric’s Morning Wake-Up Call article and followed her link to an interview she conducted with Lynn Novick, co-director of a PBS mini-series called The U.S. and the Holocaust.  I was gobsmacked by some of what I read. I learned some more shameful and outrageous actions taken by the white majority in our country. It’s awful. It shouldn’t continue to be covered up, although it would make people very uncomfortable and it should.

The first thing I learned had to do with immigration to this country and how it changed. Yes, I learned that there were waves of immigrants arriving in the United States from the beginning. Our history classes in high school (circa the early 1970s) took us almost to the Civil War but not quite. We got a passing nod at the Know Nothing Movement, which was explained as a group of legislators elected that sat around and did nothing. Ha. As an adult, I learned what that movement was about. It was a group of people similar to the MAGAs we have today: they were against people of color and people of different religions because they were afraid those groups would “take over.”

The United States used to have an open-door policy for immigrants. My maternal grandparents and paternal grandfather immigrated here before World War I. In 1924, a law was passed. It was called the Johnson-Reed Act. This wasn’t covered when I was in school, of course, and I don’t remember ever seeing it by its title. In books like Hawaii by James Michener, I did read about quotas on how many Asians were allowed to come to the US. 

What I did not know was that the law was intended to allow more white people to immigrate from northern Europe and the British Isles. It was intended to limit immigration from “undesirables”. That is, people from Eastern Europe, Greece, Italy, the other southern European countries, the Middle East, and Africa had difficulty coming to America. Jewish people were especially targeted as “undesirable”.

It's nauseating. Antisemitism and anti “other” have been baked into American policies for centuries. So this Johnson-Reed Act was meant to ensure America grew with a nearly all-white population. It’s disgusting enough to have citizens denigrating other citizens for their religion or color. It’s disheartening to realize the level of bigotry and racism in our leaders, especially today.

As an adult, I learned that by 1939, Jewish people realized what Adolf Hitler was about and desperately tried to get out of Germany. They wanted to come to America, where they could be free of persecution. But America said NO. In 1976, there was a movie called “Voyage of the Damned”. It was about a ship bringing refugees and being denied a port anywhere in the US. The ship traveled to Cuba and was also denied. The ship ended up having to go back to Europe. Some passengers were lucky and survived by escaping the Nazis. Most perished.

I was about 21 or 22 when the movie came out, and I was upset by it. How terrible! How could we have denied those people refuge when Hitler was instituting these horrible, regressive policies? Their citizenship was stripped so they couldn’t vote; they weren’t allowed to work at the jobs they used to have; they were forced to move to ghettos; they couldn’t shop in the places they used to. Where would it end? Well, I knew. So why didn’t we help them?

I see now that we didn’t help because of how deeply racism is ingrained in our country. It’s sickening.

Then came the real kicker. I’m not sure I can put it into my own words, so I’ll share this partial answer from Lynn Novick about Hitler:

“…in his career, developing his ideology, Hitler looked to America as an example. He most admired the way that we had either subjugated or exterminated our native populations as we had moved west across the continent. And he envisioned Germany moving east across Eastern Europe and doing the same thing to the people there. And he also thought that the model for how we had created a caste system, and basically put white people at the top and Black people at the bottom, was admirable.

When he came to power a few years later, he sent his lawyers to the United States to study our Jim Crow laws. What kind of laws do you need? How do you define, for example, who was a Jew or who was a Black person? What are the rules? How do you start to strip away what people can and can’t do, whether they can be married, whether they can have certain jobs. The infrastructure that we had created under the Jim Crow system, the Nazis were emulating. Isabel Wilkerson wrote about this in her extraordinary book, Caste, and there’s a professor at Yale Law School, James Whitman, who wrote a whole book about this. We’re not responsible for the Holocaust — we’re always very clear about that. Hitler took these ideas to a grotesque extreme. But the ideology behind a type of racial-purification project, we have some responsibility for that.”

That’s what did it for me.  My mind was blown, and I had to go away and sit down and think things through. My first thoughts were of the hatred that exists everywhere in the world, and there seems to be no end to it. Humans don’t seem to want to love and care for each other. See how many wars and killings and mass shootings there are. We are a pestilence, I thought. Right now, we are very much like the Germany of the 1930s.

So, today is Holocaust Remembrance Day. In the US, we have many who deny there was a Holocaust. I suppose it’s because they don’t want to take responsibility for our part in it. They would like to erase it from history, sanitizing it as it goes. When I was young, there were survivors from Auschwitz and other concentration camps. They would speak and tell of their experiences. The survivors are very old now and soon there won’t be a living person to tell their stories. The only voices left will be in the books written by Anne Frank, Elie Wiesel, and others who put their stories into words.

Learning about the Holocaust should be required in schools. Anne Frank: Diary of A Young Girl should be in classroom discussions. Another good book to read and discuss would be Exodus by Leon Uris. That’s what should happen. But just as discussing Black History and Native American history is prohibited in some states, I am sure these same states would also ban books about the Holocaust.

I must have hope. The next two years are going to be hell. My hope is that in 2024, we can begin to undo the evil actions being taken now and begin to face the damn truth. Yes, it hurts, yes, we suck, and yes, we need to face up to it…if we really want to heal. If. I hope.