I have a feeling there's a game of telephone going on here. The Nazis absolutely did not need lessons on how to be antisemitic, and anyone who makes that specific claim is clearly not familiar with the history of...basically all of Europe over the the preceding thousand year.
However, one place that we do know for a fact the Third Reich very much did borrow from the U.S. was in their legal code. And I have a feeling that claim is getting lost in the retelling and coming out as "The Nazis learned to be racist from the Americans."
There's a very good book by an academic on this called Hitler's American Model by James Whitman, which goes over the ways that the Nazis who built the legal machinery of the Holocaust very openly drew inspiration from both the reservation system in the U.S. and from Jim Crow laws.
It's been a while since I read it, but the author makes the point that, while Germany prior to the Third Reich certainly had what we might charitably call a shameful history of discrimination and violence against Jews, the Third Reich ushered in changes in the law that made the Holocaust, specifically, possible.
For instance, while the Nazis were obviously vehemently opposed to "race mixing" between Jews and other Germans, they needed to actually figure out how to make such a thing illegal, which is trickier than it sounds. We in the U.S. tend to forget that because we grew up learning about anti-miscegenation laws --- and in fact, those laws are the very thing that, according to Whitman, the Nazis were adapting for a German legal context.
From my copy that I just pulled off my bookshelf:
"What made the United States influential on the Blood Law [which outlawed mixed marriages] was not its race madness, but the distinctive legal techniques that Americans had developed to combat the menace of race mixing. Here, once again, America was a global leader. ...
"The notion that marriage between 'superior' and 'inferior' races should be avoided was widespread in the world in the age of the early 20th century eugenics. Never-the-less, actual legislative bans were a rarity; certainly the Nazis had a hard time uncovering non-American examples."
And he goes on to note that the U.S. was even more unusual because some states went beyond just not recognizing interracial marriages but even had criminal penalties for people who entered into mixed-race marriages; for most of Western history, the only time marriage is a crime is typically bigamy. This was exactly the sort of example the Nazis found useful.
All of this is not to say that the Nazis somehow got the idea for the Holocaust or their desire to persecute Jews from the United States. Obviously. Anyone who argues that has misunderstood something very important about the Nazis.
However, I do think that it's important, too, to recognize how the Nazis were able to do the horrible things they did and the mechanisms they relied on. They took inspiration from a lot of places, and one of them was the Jim Crow south.
And I think there's a lesson there, which is that struggles are connected. The same legal machinery used to oppress one group of people will be adapted to oppress another. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
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