“Everyone knows how bad slavery was, but hearing about it for months now is getting old,” complained a Caswell County resident in response to Mark Robinson’s “F.A.C.T.S.” commission. “I don’t hear any of these teachers talking about Hitler and how he tried to take out a whole group of people!” This individual’s fragile distaste for racial reckoning is hardly unique, but his or her juxtaposition of slavery and Hitler is interesting. In fact, Adolf Hitler was deeply influenced by the American racism of the past and in his own time. If we are to teach about both Hitler and America, it would behoove our students to learn about where these two foes intersected.

Mark Robinson and other conservatives would prefer that children learn “American Exceptionalsim.” In other words, our country slipped the bounds of history in 1776 and soared into a long flight of unparalleled greatness. But Hitler didn’t see it that way. He was more interested in the similarities between American history and the Nazi movement. Naturally for an insane racist, his interest centered on our country’s history of racial atrocities.

Hitler envisioned an Aryan Empire stretching from the Atlantic ocean to the Ural Mountains. To achieve this, he advocated the conquest of “Lebensraum,” or “living space,” for the Master Race. Hitler admired America’s genocidal colonialism, in which white settlers violently removed an “inferior” race from land the settlers coveted and erected a new Caucasian civilization. What Europeans did to the Indigenous tribes, Hitler wanted Germans to do to the Slavs: Expel them, and leave almost no one alive. Consider one dark irony. Hitler referred to Slavic land as the rightful Aryan “Garden of Eden.” America has towns with names like Eden Prairie–and Eden, in North Carolina, where anti-CRT activist Phil Berger lives.

Hitler was so taken with American colonization that he even told a morbid “joke” about the Sioux rejecting the idea of peaceful American expansion. But it was not the colonizers who most captured his fancy; it was the Confederates. As the first attempt in human history to found a nation on the explicit grounds of racial supremacy, the Confederacy provided the ultimate model for Hitler’s Third Reich. The Confederates were unapologetic racial supremacists, and so were the Nazis. Hitler’s contempt for the America of his day stemmed from the fact that the North crushed the Rebels and thus set the stage for a multi-ethnic “mongrel” country rather than a race-proud supremacist state.

If the Nazis were deeply influenced by American racial history, their interest in our country had more contemporary manifestations as well. When they were building the architecture of the Nuremberg Laws, they looked across the Atlantic for a model of institutionalized racial apartheid. The system of apartheid inflicted upon European Jews was directly modeled on Jim Crow laws in America. Laws relating to citizenship and lineage were adopted from the American South. This history was told in chilling detail by Yale Law School professor James Q. Whitman.

America played an instrumental role–and paid a heavy price in lives lost–in the fight against Nazism. In no way are we responsible for Germany’s crimes or for Hitler’s bloodlust. But we are entirely not innocent in this story either. From exterminating Native tribes to building the edifice of oppression copied in the Nuremberg laws, the American nation had commonalities with the most evil regime in history. If we’re to teach our students anything, it should be truths like this.