We tell ourselves a comforting story about fascism. We say it was a European invention. We say it rose in the ruins of World War I Germany, a unique monster born of desperation and defeat. We say the United States defeated it. We point to the beaches of Normandy and the liberation of the camps. We tell ourselves that fascism is foreign. It is something that happens elsewhere. It is something we fought, not something we built.
This is not true.
The truth is that the architects of European fascism studied the United States. They did not learn from our failures. They learned from our successes. They looked at the American legal system and saw a blueprint for the hierarchy they wanted to build. The United States did not import fascism from Europe. Europe imported it from us.
Adolf Hitler was a student of American race law. In the 1920s, as he was formulating the ideology that would become the Nuremberg Laws, he read and admired the American statutes that banned interracial marriage. He studied the state laws that classified people by race and stripped them of rights based on the percentage of “Negro blood” in their veins. He studied the immigration laws that excluded Asians and restricted entry based on national origin. He saw a system that had legally codified white supremacy and called it democracy.
In 1925, Hitler praised the United States in Mein Kampf. He wrote that the American government had excluded immigrants on the basis of race and had “gunned down the scabs” to protect the nation. He specifically admired the American genocide of Native Americans, calling it a model for how a superior race should deal with an inferior one. He saw the conquest of the American West as the precursor to his own vision of Lebensraum, or living space, in Eastern Europe.
Nazi lawyers were even more explicit. In the 1930s, as the Nazi regime was drafting its own racial codes, they held regular meetings to discuss American law. They studied the statutes from states like Virginia and Alabama that banned marriage between whites and non-whites. They debated how to define a Jew in the same way American law had defined a “Negro.” They were frustrated by American federalism, which made the laws inconsistent from state to state, but they admired the underlying principle: that the state could legally categorize people by blood and deprive them of citizenship based on that categorization.
The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and banned marriage between Jews and Germans, were modeled in part on American anti-miscegenation laws. The “one-drop rule,” which defined a person as Black if they had any African ancestry, was seen by Nazi legal scholars as a useful, if extreme, approach to racial purity. They ultimately chose a slightly less rigid definition for Jews, but the inspiration was clear. They looked to America and saw a nation that had solved the “race problem” through law.
This is the history we refuse to teach. We want to believe that fascism is the opposite of democracy. But Jim Crow was not the opposite of democracy. It was a form of democracy that defined certain people out of the citizenry. The United States did not need a dictator to enforce white supremacy. It did not need a secret police to disappear Black Americans. It used sheriffs, judges, and local officials. It used the courts. It used the ballot box, or the denial of it. It built a system of totalitarian control and called it freedom.
The pillars of fascism were all present in the Jim Crow South, and they were supported by the full weight of the federal government.
The Supreme Court codified the caste system in 1896. Plessy v. Ferguson established the doctrine of “separate but equal,” giving constitutional blessing to segregation. The federal government did not stand idly by while the South built its apartheid state. It signed off on the blueprints. For decades, the United States Senate refused to pass anti-lynching legislation. More than 200 bills were introduced. Nearly all were killed by filibusters from Southern senators. The federal government had the power to protect its citizens. It chose not to.
The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover did not investigate lynchings. It investigated the victims. It surveilled the NAACP. It built files on Black leaders and civil rights organizations. The federal law enforcement apparatus was not a tool of justice for Black Americans. It was a tool of control. When Black soldiers returned from World War II, they came home to a country that had just fought a war against racial supremacy in Europe. The Double V campaign called for victory abroad against fascism and victory at home against racism. The soldiers had seen what a society without Jim Crow looked like. They had risked their lives for it. The United States responded with the GI Bill, which excluded Black veterans from its benefits. It responded with redlining. It responded with the same violence they had just defeated overseas. A nation that liberated Jews from concentration camps maintained its own caste system at home. The hypocrisy was not lost on the world.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union used American racism as a propaganda weapon. When the United States lectured the world on freedom and democracy, the Soviets pointed to Birmingham and Selma. They pointed to the lynchings and the fire hoses. The United States lost moral authority on the global stage because it practiced at home what it claimed to fight abroad. The world saw what we refuse to see. They called it by its name.
The first pillar of fascism is the state control of bodies. Under Jim Crow, the state had absolute power over the reproductive futures of Black women. The “Mississippi Appendectomy” was not a myth. Between the 1920s and the 1970s, thousands of Black women were sterilized without their consent. Government-funded programs targeted them for tubal ligations and hysterectomies as a form of population control. This was eugenics. It was state policy designed to reduce the Black population. It was the same biological fascism that the Nazis would later perfect in the camps.
The second pillar is the use of violence as governance. Lynchings were not random acts of passion. They were public spectacles designed to terrify a population. In 1916, a mob in Waco, Texas, tortured and burned a 17-year-old Black boy named Jesse Washington in front of 15,000 people. The mayor and the police chief watched. Photographs were taken and sold as postcards. The state did not prosecute the killers because the state was the killer. This is the definition of state terror. The government outsourced its violence to the mob, knowing the mob would enforce the racial order
The third pillar is the creation of a caste system through law. Sundown towns were not a Southern phenomenon. They existed across the North and Midwest. Towns with signs at the border warning Black people to leave before sunset or face death. This was not de facto segregation. It was official policy, enforced by police and vigilantes. It created a nation within a nation, where Black Americans were citizens in name but subjects in reality. They could not travel freely. They could not live where they chose. They existed at the pleasure of the white majority.
The fourth pillar is the economic function. Fascism always serves capital. Jim Crow was a labor control system. It ensured a permanent underclass of cheap workers for the agricultural economy of the South. The violence was precise. It targeted Black people who became too successful, who owned land, who competed with white businesses. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre destroyed “Black Wall Street,” killing hundreds and burning 35 blocks of Black wealth to the ground. The message was clear. You are here to work. You are not here to rise.
The body count of American fascism has no official number. The Holocaust has its six million. The American genocide has no monument, no agreed-upon tally. The death toll from the Middle Passage, from slavery, from lynchings, from race massacres, from forced sterilizations, from the denial of healthcare, runs into the millions. We do not count them because counting them would require us to name the system that killed them. We do not count them because we do not want to know.
Every fascist system relies on the bystander. The Germans who did not join the Nazi Party but did nothing to stop it. The Americans who did not join the lynch mob but did nothing to stop it. The good citizens who benefited from the hierarchy without questioning it. They were the ones who made the system possible. They were the ones who allowed the violence to continue. They were the ones who said nothing when their neighbors disappeared. We look back at them with judgment. We do not look at ourselves.
We are told that those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. But we cannot learn from a history we refuse to name.
The United States did not save the world from fascism in 1945. It saved Europe from one version of fascism while maintaining its own. The Nuremberg Trials prosecuted the crimes of the Nazis. No trials were held for the crimes of Jim Crow. The killers walked free. The judges kept their seats. The laws stayed on the books for another 20 years. The winners write the history. The winners get to decide what is called a crime and what is called heritage.
The United States was the classroom.
The Nazis were the students.
We are still living in the lesson we taught them.
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Most of the Internet searches I came across say that Hitler closely admired and was mostly inspired by Benito Mussolini and his fascist regime and modeled most of Nazi Germany’s structure and style on Italian fascism.
Good book that shows Hitler used American Jim Crow as a model – Hitler’s American Model from Whitman.
MS, MS, MS #sigh# This piece isn’t history, it’s a closing argument pretending to be a balanced historic analysis. You grab a few real facts, like Nazis looking at American race laws, and then stretch them until they break, turning “studied” into “modeled” and “influenced by” into “came from.” You play games with the definition of fascism, making it so broad that anything ugly fits, then declare the U.S. fascist while skipping what people usually mean by fascism in the first place. Jim Crow was brutal and wrong. Nobody serious denies that. But flattening everything into the same category just to make the point hit harder is dishonest.
The bigger problem is what gets left out. Nazi ideology didn’t come out of nowhere and it didn’t come from one place. There were a lot of influences already baked into Europe long before that, right there for Hitler to glom onto. That gets brushed aside so the spotlight stays fixed on the U.S. That’s convenient. If you actually look at the full picture, it’s messier and doesn’t support your clean “America taught them everything” storyline. Leaving out context like that is the whole argument doing its work by fact assassination.
And then there’s the tone of the whole thing, which keeps landing in the same place. Every example is arranged to uniquely indict the United States, like that’s the destination from the start. The U.S. has done terrible things. That’s not in dispute. But it did not build a system of factories designed to industrially wipe out entire populations by the millions the way Nazi Germany did. That distinction matters and ignoring it doesn’t make the argument stronger. It just makes it feel like the conclusion was decided first and the history was bent to fit it. Sound familiar, like every day, same Vanguard time, same Vanguard channel: a good summary of your articles is: 1) Pick a subject; 2) Make it make the US look bad; 3) Ignore opposing facts; 4) Start out with laying out crumbs before introducing subject; 5) Make all facts fit the day’s subject in a way that trashes the US and ignores any opposing arguments.
Lather rinse, repeat, repeat, repeat.