Amen. There are parallels and differences in the racial injustice of Europe and America, and the self-effacing, self-flagellating American will always over estimate our role in shaping the Nazis. Eugenics wasn't even uniquely American, even if it was formalized here. A lot of the early "scientific" studies that led to the eugenics movement were pioneered in Britain, because British people have thought of themselves as genetically superior for a really long time (and the largely British descended WASPs of America followed in that tradition).

American racialism has always been about what everything in America is about: economics. The economy of the South was based completely on using humans as commodities, and we've never reckoned with that. Nazism was based on Hitler's perverse ideas about "Natural Law", which in his view was being subverted by the Jewish-Communist. Both slavery/Jim Crow (and the other racial laws passed here that affected other groups such as Jews, Chinese, etc.) and the Holocaust are are obviously abhorrent, but I think the parallels are flimsy.

What was it you said last week about blaming the party planner for blocking an exit after Godzilla stomps on the party? Beautiful turn of phrase and also very apt comparison when blaming America for the rise of Nazism. Nazis caused the Holocaust and any attempt to shift blame away from that (even in the context of historic inquiry) is wrong factually and morally. Einsatzgruppen weren't studying the writings of Agassiz when machine gunning pits full of innocent citizens.