Nazi lawyers carefully studied the statutes, not only of states such as Virginia, but also states such as Montana. It is true that the US did not persecute the Jews – or at least, as one Nazi lawyer remarked in 1936, it had not persecuted the Jews ‘so far’ – but it had created a host of forms of second-class citizenship for other minority groups, including Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans, scattered all over the Union and its colonies. American forms of second-class citizenship were of great interest to Nazi policymakers as they set out to craft their own forms of second-class citizenship for the German Jewry. Not least, the US was the greatest economic and cultural power in the world after 1918 – dynamic, modern, wealthy. Hitler and other Nazis envied the US, and wanted to learn how the Americans did it; it’s no great surprise that they believed that what had made America great was American racism.