review -- Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by J. Q. Whitman

In a memorable scene from the movie "Judgment at Nuremberg," the defence lawyer played by Maximilian Schell reads a legal opinion to the court: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange indeed, if it could not call upon those who already sapped the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices in order to prevent our being swamped by incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offsprings for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent their propagation by medical means in the first place. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Snapping the book closed, Schell continues, “The opinion upholds the sterilization law in the State of Virginia, of the United States and was written and delivered by that great American jurist Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes.” It is an unsettling moment in the film. Although the American precedent is not developed any further, it hints at a disturbing reality.

Could Oliver Wendell Holmes really have written such a thing? Could the words have been taken out of context? Could it be more than a rhetorical flourish? While racism was there for all to see in the American South with its segregationist Jim Crow laws, putting America side-by-side with Nazi Germany sounds almost obscene. And even if we must acknowledge that the Nazis regularly quoted U.S. eugenicists and U.S. race laws as precedents, we want to believe that such efforts were sheer propaganda, a shabby effort to put a veneer of respectability on their own odious regime.

Unfortunately, as J. Q. Whitman shows in Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, the truth is much uglier than this. The truth is that the Nazis undertook a deep and sustained study of the laws of America as they were designing their infamous anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, because America was for them, as Hitler himself said in Mein Kampf, the one state that had made progress in developing a “healthy racial order.” To be sure, Britain was no slouch, along with its colonies and dominions, when it came to racist immigration preferences, treatment of non-whites, and so on. But America appealed to the Nazis more by being explicit in its laws—and harsher. Until at least 1936 Nazi Germany remained hopeful that it could “reach out the hand of friendship” to the U.S. on the basis of a shared commitment to white supremacy.

This may seem at first to be an extreme interpretation, but doubts quickly disappear as Whitman, Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale Law School, offers copious quotations from German texts of the 1930s. With chilling effectiveness, Hitler's American Model reveals how deeply a second current runs in the American system, counter to its high ideals of freedom, equality, and the rights of man, a current of white, even Aryan, racism.

While today Jim Crow laws probably come to mind most easily for us, they were not the focus of the Nazis who, after all, did not plan to create an apartheid regime. Their aim was—before the 1942 Wannsee Conference and its genocidal Final Solution—to drive non-Aryans out of the country and create a racially pure state. Their tools would be new laws on citizenship and sexual relations.

Citizenship law in America drew a clear race line as far back as 1790 when the Naturalization Act allowed citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person.” In the following century denying citizenship to Asians became the focus. Indigenous peoples were marginalized by being deemed “nationals” but not citizens. And when the Spanish-American War brought new non-white peoples into the American system, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the creation of second-class citizenship for Puerto Rican and Filipino subjects, a disempowered status of “non-citizen nationals,” “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.”

African-Americans presented a special difficulty as a result of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which gave them citizenship rights; however, the Nazis were careful to note that, especially at the state level, “all means are used to render the Negro’s right to vote illusory” through petty measures such as poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. Most states, too, had laws to restrict African-Americans in their freedom of movement and career possibilities. The few Asians and Mexicans who had made it into the country had their voting rights blocked with similar legislation. Legal ingenuity such as this was appreciated by the Nazis, and in the case of the Czechs they did use a second-class status similar to the American example. But within Germany they were determined to be direct in their purposes by instituting straightforward racist laws.

According to Whitman, from the late nineteenth century to the 1920s and 1930s the United States came to be regarded not just by the Nazis but throughout Europe as “the leader in developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration.” As the National Socialist Handbook put it, until the coming of Hitler, the United States had held “the leadership of the white peoples” in the “Aryan struggle for world domination”—although it had merely groped its way toward the historic mission to be undertaken by Germany.

The passing of the U.S. Immigration Act in 1924 delighted Hitler. He took as a given its Asian Exclusion Act (an extension of the 1922 Cable Act which revoked the citizenship of American women who married an Asian), but the National Origins Act struck him as especially revealing, for it favoured immigrants from the “Nordic” countries while limiting immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. For him it was a prime example of völkisch citizenship legislation—in fact, the only in modern times. Hitler spoke of it in combination with the earlier genocidal wars on indigenous peoples, believing that it showed clearly that the U.S. was “the model of a state organized on principles of Rasse and Raum,” that is, on the principles of race and the seizure of territory for a völk defined by race.  

But immigration and citizenship laws are not enough to create a racially pure nation. There had to be metrics to determine the degree of acceptable racial purity and laws to prevent racially mixed births ("mongrelization," in Germany, "miscegenation" in America). Here again America provided the precedents for Germany, and in particular for the Nuremberg Blood Law where, according to Whitman, the American model is seen at its most influential. In many societies mixed marriages have been discouraged through social constraints and sometimes they have been annulled as a matter of civil law, but historically bigamy has been the only form of marriage subject to criminalization and prosecution. In their review of American legislation, the Nazi researchers found that thirty states had passed criminal laws against miscegenation, some of them with penalties as severe as ten years imprisonment. (Virginia continued to enforce its miscegenation statute until 1967, when the Supreme Court, in the case of Richard and Mildred Loving, struck it down. See the 2016 Hollywood film, “Loving.”) The Nazis passed their own criminal laws against race mixing, but the Americans, they thought, had been too harsh, especially with the “one-drop” rule that some states used to define Negroes. As a result, the Reich Citizenship Law of 1935 was milder, defining a Jew as a person having three Jewish grandparents; and it allowed as a mitigating factor the degree of a person’s assimilation into non-Jewish society. The Jim Crow laws, too, were seen by the Nazis as going too far; German laws prohibited German women from consorting “indecently” with black men in public, but they did not place sanctions on private behaviour, as in the U.S.

Nazi Germany showed racism in its ugliest, most murderous form. However, a clear-eyed look at the historical record, such as we get in Hitler's American Model, is a healthy reminder that the nations that banded together to destroy Nazi Germany were also infected by the same disease, the difference being simply in the degree of toxicity.

Review -- Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb

Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb

by Thomas Powers

A Founder of Modern Physics

By the late 1930s Werner Heisenberg’s fame as one of the founders of modern physics was firmly established. His paper on the “uncertainty principle,” published when he was 26, revealed an amazing, fundamental feature of the subatomic world. Our knowledge of the physical world, he announced, would never be complete, because in principle it is not possible to know both the position and momentum of a particle (or better, that the more precisely we know its position, the less precisely we can know its momentum, and vice versa). In 1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics." His work, combined with that of his mentor and friend, the towering figure of Niels Bohr, formed the background to a series of historic debates Bohr held with Einstein about how to make sense of the bizarre findings of modern quantum mechanics. While Einstein argued powerfully for the idea that fundamentally the physical universe is comprehensible, governed by causality and predictability, that “God does not play dice with the universe,” Bohr, to the satisfaction of most physicists, refuted him, arguing for the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, an idea he shared with Heisenberg, the view that the physical world is indeterminate, governed not by certainties and traditional causality but ultimately by probabilities.

On a tour of America in the summer of 1939 Heisenberg was repeatedly invited by various scientists he met there to emigrate, as many of them had done, and make a clean break from Hitler’s Germany. While despising Nazism, Heisenberg felt bound by a deep loyalty to his native country and replied rather optimistically that he was needed at home to offer a voice of reason, to “create islands of decency,” to protect young German scientists from conscription, and to keep German science on the right path in the face of appalling nonsense about “Jewish science.”

The Most Dangerous Man in Germany

A month after his return home hostilities broke out, and soon thereafter Heisenberg was made leader of atomic research in Germany. Although scientists outside Germany struggled to maintain contacts, friendships, and a semblance of internationalism, their efforts wobbled under the pressures of war. To some, Heisenberg, who they feared might put an atomic bomb in the hands of Hitler, became “the most dangerous man in Germany because of his brain power.” Ever since, suspicion has hung over his name. How morally compromised was he by working under the Nazis? How committed was he to developing a German atomic bomb? How far did the project get? And even—was the failure of Germany to produce an atom bomb the result of his scientific incompetence?

In Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Atomic Bomb, a work of extraordinarily detailed research, Thomas Powers sorts through a vast range of sources to answer those key questions. The weighing of evidence is subtle and complex, but the conclusions Powers comes to are clear.

Hero or Traitor?

Powers provides evidence that Heisenberg did deliberately prevent Germany from working on an atomic bomb, although after the war he was not entirely forthcoming about his role. In the early years of fission research, soon after it was discovered in 1939 by Otto Hahn, all scientists acknowledged that, if a bomb were feasible, developing it would require a gargantuan, resource-draining effort. As the war began, German scientists agreed that such an effort would take too long to produce results before the war was over. In June 1942 Albert Speer called a crucial meeting between government officials and scientists to determine whether Germany should pursue an atomic bomb (about the same time, incidentally, that the Manhattan Project got underway). Heisenberg addressed the meeting, clearly spelling out all the difficulties. Soon afterward, all work on a German atomic bomb came to an end, with nuclear research restricted to small-scale work on an “energy machine” or reactor. Heisenberg had managed, in Powers’s words, “to guide German atomic research into a broom closet where scientists tinkered until the end of the war.” Germany’s stockpile of uranium was used to make armour-piercing shells.

Was Heisenberg simply being realistic in his assessment for Speer, or was he deliberately discouraging bomb development? After the war Heisenberg maintained that he had honestly believed a bomb to be impractical at the time, adding that German scientists were thus “spared the moral decision” of whether to work on a bomb. (On August 6, 1945 he and the other German scientists being held in detention in Britain were stunned by the news of the Hiroshima attack, shocked that American scientists had worked on the bomb and horrified that President Truman had used it to destroy a city.) Yet Powers points out that Heisenberg’s post-war account omitted important details. What he had told Speer may not have been untruthful, but it was carefully crafted to dampen interest. While outlining the extreme difficulties of separating the fissionable U-235 isotope from uranium, Heisenberg did not mention the relatively easier path to a bomb using plutonium. Asked whether a nuclear explosion might set the entire world on fire, he did not rule it out as a possibility. His talk emphasized all the difficulties and, most important of all, buried in technical language the most alarming possibility, the mere fact that there was an outside chance that someone—if not Germans, then Americans—might build a bomb for use in the war. Phrased differently, his presentation could have put Speer on high alert and ensured that Germany would set to work full bore on an atomic bomb. The crucial moral decision had, in fact, been made by Heisenberg and his colleagues, and they had chosen to block Hitler. His fudging of that fact after the war was probably an attempt to escape being branded a traitor by some of his countrymen.

During the war Heisenberg made a number of very risky efforts to let Allied scientists know that Germany was not working on a bomb. His intention—his “vague hope,” as his wife described it—was that he might inspire all scientists everywhere to refuse to work on a bomb, thus preventing the horror of a world armed with nuclear weapons. The hope, however, was as naive as it was vague. Americans, especially the émigré scientists who had fled Nazism, distrusted him for remaining behind, wondering whether his assurances were aimed at stopping Allied efforts, thus clearing the way for Germany to become the sole nuclear power. The mere mention of a bomb by Heisenberg prompted the Allies to undertake the most intense efforts to find information about a German bomb program—the American effort, under General Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project, never relaxing an iota until Germany was occupied and its last laboratory was inspected.

Kill or Kidnap?

In its 500 pages Heisenberg’s War covers a great deal of material other than Heisenberg and the moral culpability question. The SS came close to arresting him twice. There is the adventure-movie story of the attacks on the heavy water production facility in Norway (“The Heavy Water War,” a Norwegian series on Netflix gives a too-dark portrayal of Heisenberg).  Heisenberg’s famous visit to Bohr in 1941 is given close scrutiny. The visit led to such a chill in their relations that it never fully rewarmed; it has been the subject of endless comment, including in the 1998 play “Copenhagan.” Powers’s conclusion is that the break occurred, first, because Bohr was shocked to hear his old friend speaking of atomic bombs and, second, because he was deeply angered by several pro-German remarks Heisenberg made about the necessity of occupying various European countries, including Denmark, and the great good Germany was doing for Europe by attacking Russia. With supreme insensitivity he once remarked how much better off Europe would be dominated by Germany than dominated by Russia.

One thread that runs through many chapters is the deep concern the Allies had over what to do about Heisenberg. A first step was to determine the exact nature of his research projects, leading to several fascinating cloak-and-dagger operations involving more than one outlandish character. By the summer of 1943 the British reached the conclusion that there was no German atomic bomb program, mainly on information coming from their contacts with scientists in neutral countries who were still in touch with sympathetic German scientists, but also because the code breakers at Bletchley Park had never deciphered a single message referring to atomic bombs or Heisenberg. Because the Brits shared their conclusion but not their sources, they failed to convince the Americans, who remained implacable. Robert Oppenheimer’s opinion was that Heisenberg should be killed. General Groves considered recommending a bombing raid on Heisenberg’s lab in Berlin with the object of killing the scientists. More elaborate and enduring were several plans to kidnap Heisenberg as he attended a conference in Switzerland. At one point, an agent with a pistol in his pocket sat in the front row of a lecture hall as Heisenberg talked, ready to shoot him if he dropped the slightest hint about a German atomic bomb.

After Germany was occupied, the Allies were stunned to realize the primitive stage of German nuclear research, and the story was born that Heisenberg and his team had made grave scientific blunders. On the night of Hiroshima, Otto Hahn, in detention with them, called them “second-raters.” (Hahn himself was on the verge of suicide over his discovery of fission.) Power spends about ten pages considering the evidence before finally concluding that Heisenberg’s apparent mistakes were really a ruse to prevent the development of a bomb. He knew the world’s most dangerous secret, and he kept it from even his closest colleagues.

Review -- Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story—How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War by Nigel Cliff

Khrushchev’s desire to mark a new era in Soviet life had a drastic effect on an American musician, enmeshing concert pianist Van Cliburn so thoroughly in Cold War politics that to the end of his life he seldom broke free. In 1958, at the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, Khrushchev learned that the judges were in a quandary. The rules of the game had been rigged to ensure a Soviet performer would win, but the judges, including greats such as pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels and composers Dmitri Kabalevsky and Aram Khachaturian, agreed that the 23-year-old Texan clearly outshone all the others. His grand, expressive, Romantic style was more Russian than the Russians’. Khrushchev said simply that if Cliburn was the best, the gold medal should go to him. When the win was announced, it created a sensation in the midst of Cold War hostilities, with Cliburn gaining instant, world-wide fame, on a rock-star scale. In New York he was given a ticker-tape parade. In the Soviet Union where, even before the win, his warm, open-hearted personality had charmed the public, waves of adulation swept across the country, never really to subside.

Moscow Nights by Nigel Cliff tells the story of Van Cliburn’s Russian connections. The book begins, perhaps appropriately but very oddly, with a chapter on Stalin, Molotov, Beria, and the internal Soviet politics that led up to the Tchaikovsky Competition. Although Cliburn had not traveled outside the U.S. before arriving in Moscow, Russian music was in his blood, inherited directly from his mother and teacher, a pianist whose great boast was that she once met Rachmaninoff at a minor concert in Louisiana. And at the Juilliard School in New York Cliburn was immersed even more deeply in Russian Romantic pianism by the great Russian teacher, Rosina Lhévinne. The Tchaikovsky competition was a natural for him.

As its title suggests, Moscow Nights presents Cliburn’s life with a strong Russian filter. Given the source of his fame, this is not so objectionable. It certainly makes for a pleasant and readable book, sure to be treasured by his die-hard fans. Anecdote piles upon anecdote, sometimes amounting to an hour-by-hour narrative of a concert and reception or a weekend in Washington or Moscow. At the same time the Russian filter is constraining. We learn little about his repertoire beyond Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff or his career outside the U.S.-U.S.S.R. nexus or his personal life. Of his homosexuality there is only the barest mention, even though it must have been difficult for him in his early years as a good, church-going boy, as well as later when he was being watched closely by both the FBI and the KGB. While much more than a fanbook, Moscow Nights is less than a full biography. And the non-fanatic might wish the editors had rejected some of the anecdotes that did not really make a point.

Although he lived for 55 years after the Moscow triumph, Van Cliburn’s fate was forever wedded to his one greatest moment. His later career, almost to the end of his life, seems to have consisted in being trotted out to perform for every black-tie event held for Russian leaders. 

Review -- The Noise of Time: A Novel by Julian Barnes

After decades of bans, smears, and threats by Stalin and his stooges, in 1949 Dmitri Shostakovich, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union—temporarily and under supervision, of course—to attend a peace conference in New York. The new leader of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, was promising a more open and tolerant regime. Under Stalin Shostakovich had endured many public degradations and might look forward to a little relief; but now the Americans were about to take their turn and serve him the worst humiliation of his life. At the news conference a journalist working for the CIA was waiting with a list of questions designed to expose the repressive Soviet system. Shostakovich’s dignity would be collateral damage. The questions would force him to deny beliefs that went to the core of who he was, beliefs the whole world knew were dear to him, and to ignominiously spout the official line of the Communist Party.

Did he agree, he was asked, with the condemnation of Western music expounded daily in the Soviet press and by the Soviet government? Yes, said Shostakovich, lying, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Did he support banning from Soviet concert halls the works of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Here the knife dug deeper, because, in Shostakovich’s view, Stravinsky was the greatest composer of the twentieth century. Meekly he replied that, yes, he did personally subscribe to those opinions. Then came body blows. “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed in your speech today about the music of Stravinsky?” Before he went on stage an apparatchik had handed him a speech to read condemning the works of Stravinsky. Hoping to indicate that he did not believe what he was saying, Shostakovich had read mechanically, as if to say, “See the mask I am wearing!” But now his attempt at irony was removed and everyone saw, even in the age of Khrushchev, the iron hand of Soviet Communism in the arts. “Yes,” he said, “I personally subscribe to such views.” Finally there was the question, “And do you personally subscribe to the views expressed about your music and that of other composers by Minister Zhdanov?” Zhdanov had been one of Shostakovich’s chief persecutors for many years, once comparing his music to the sound of a road drill. Poor Shostakovich, the great composer, his integrity in tatters, replied for all the world to hear, “Yes, I personally subscribe to the views expressed by Chairman Zhdanov.”  

Underlying The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes’s novel about Shostakovich, is the assumption of a standoff between art and power, between the transcendence of music and the ugliness of the real world. The final paragraph expresses it poetically. Shostakovich is drinking vodka with two other men. As they clink their glasses together, the composer observes, “A triad.” ”A sound,” adds Barnes, “that rang clear of the noise of time, and would outlive everyone and everything. And perhaps, finally, this was all that mattered.” It’s a nice flourish, climactic and uplifting, yet out of tune with the rest of the book, perhaps even a little precious. Barnes’s story depicts only the ugliness of Shostakovich’s life, only “the noise of time,” only the relentless depredations of the brutal tyranny. Endlessly kicked and spat upon, the composer endlessly cowers and complies. Even when the harsh Stalinist years are over, he submits, sacrificing one of his last remaining principles by joining what he called the “party that kills.” And he suffers the indignity of seeing articles published under his name without being consulted. What could have sustained him through all this misery? Barnes has little to say. Personal happiness is mentioned once, in connection with his third wife, whom he married at age 56. Some believe that she, age 27, was a perq for him arranged by the KGB.

The Noise of Time presents the unedifying spectacle of an artist with his neck firmly under the jackboot of a tyrant, not bravely resisting, not negotiating, not manoeuvring for space, but forever meek and fearful, suffering everything in silence. A last-minute tribute to the glory of art in the clinking of three glasses is a featherweight when balanced against the rest of the book.