Background
In some parts of the United States, many non-white people were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. The belief in racial superiority was widely accepted. Whites had used their political and economic power to segregate public spaces and facilities in law and establish social dominance over blacks in the South. Immigration legislation enacted in the United States in 1921 and 1924 was interpreted widely as being at least partly anti-Jewish in intent because it strictly limited the immigration quotas of eastern European nations with large Jewish populations, nations from which approximately 3 million Jews had immigrated to the United States by 1920.
Contents
Interbellum
Under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or Nazi Party, grew into a mass movement promoting German pride and anti-Semitism, and expressed dissatisfaction with the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The party's early financing is believed to have been partially handled by Eckart along with the money raised at Beer Hall Parties by Feder.,
In the end of 1922, the New York Times reported rumors that Ford was financing Hitler's nationalist and anti-Semitic movements in Munich. In 1938, Ford was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle medal by Hitler. Ford's anti-Semitic views echoed the fears and assumptions of many Americans during the mid-1920s: a time when Ku Klux Klan membership had reached four million and discriminatory immigration policies were enacted favoring immigrants from northern and western Europe over other parts of the world.
Beginning in 1930 the Rockefeller Foundation provided financial support to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, which later inspired and conducted eugenics experiments in the Third Reich. The Rockefeller Foundation funded Nazi racial studies even after it was clear that this research was being used to rationalize the demonizing of Jews and other groups. Up until 1939 the Rockefeller Foundation was funding research used to support Nazi racial science studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWIA). Reports submitted to Rockefeller did not hide what these studies were being used to justify, but Rockefeller continued the funding and refrained from criticizing this research so closely derived from Nazi ideology. The Rockefeller Foundation did not alert "the world to the nature of German science and the racist folly" that German anthropology promulgated, and Rockefeller funded, for years after the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg racial laws.