To read that the Holocaust was “not ‘just’ a colonial genocide,” even if in part deployed “colonial and settler colonial exclusionary methods,” typifies the discursive style of this taxonomically rather than empirically ambitious book. It builds on deep reading in the now decades-old literature that, in reaction to conventional understandings of Nazi genocidal practice as unique and incomparable, sought to propose linkages to the European imperialist powers’ violence against indigenes in their overseas colonies. It was tempting to connect the Imperial German army’s mass murder of whole Namibian tribal communities, in the years 1904–08, to Adolf Hitler’s myrmidons’ hellish handiwork.

Yet scholarly efforts to establish such causal links have failed for lack of evidence that colonial genocidalists figured significantly in Nazi mass murder or that the Nazis honored them as pathbreakers. Ignoring Germany’s crimes in Africa, Hitler told his inner circle, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” (August 22, 1939, https://genocideeducation.org/background/hitler-and-the-armenian-genocide/).

Consequently, scholars in search of comparisons with the Shoah have turned to Poland, as Rachel O’Sullivan does. Like other Anglophones working in the colonial-comparative field, she bypasses the Polish language and the deep literature on the Nazi occupation Polish scholars have generated. Familiarity with Polish history is also absent, despite its easy attainability from distinguished translated Polish and western-language literature. Factual historical errors abound.

She deploys from earlier western scholars’ ill-informed study of anti-Polish German literature and propaganda concepts of Polish “primitiveness”—oft-invoked in this book—and of Poland as a vast under-developed “nowhere” awaiting the civilizing German plough. She is blind to Poland as a major European Christian nation—multi-cultural and multi-religious—with a millennium-old social hierarchy and aristocratic-republican political culture. Of the character and civilization of the people against whom the Nazis launched a second Holocaust her book is silent.

O’Sullivan recognizes that in her geographical focal point—occupied western Poland, annexed directly into Germany in 1939—Nazi policy moved swiftly to murder Polish nationalist leaders in their thousands, to expropriate and expel eastward Jews alongside propertied Poles in their hundreds of thousands, and eventually to initiate at Chełmno gas-chamber Judeocide. To generate productive “colonial comparisons,” as she defines her aim, she concentrates on Nazi settlement in the expelled population’s place of the “Volksdeutsche”—people of German descent, if not current language, from the Baltic region and western Soviet provinces. Upon them, whom O’Sullivan, following Nazi impulses, is quick to pronounce “primitive,” a regime of integration into German life was imposed comparable to colonialist “civilizing missions”—a “nationalization” process, comparable to what Eugen Weber described in Peasants into Frenchmen (1976), Yet, what analogue to this can be found in the overseas colonies? Were there backward Belgians in the Congo?

O’Sullivan upholds the uncontroversial understanding of the Nazi drive into Poland and deeper eastward as a colonial venture. She finds the presently much-invoked settler-colony paradigm appropriate to the case. Hitler’s vision of eastern empire in Mein Kampf, the noisy saber-rattling of Ostforschung, countless celebrations of Lebensraum-conquest in “the East,” the Hitlerian adage that Germanization could only be applied to soil, not people, and Nazi celebration of settling Volksgenossen on conquered land—all this was in its day and still remains common knowledge and incontrovertible evidence of the intent that the 1948 Genocide Convention requires to establish the fact of the great crime.

What then is new in O’Sullivan’s analysis? And why do decade-old works conveying the crux of her argument—such as Wendy Lower’s 2005 Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (see my review in these pages, vol. 66, no. 2, 335–36)—go unmentioned?

O’Sullivan seeks connections between Nazi practice and earlier colonialism but fails to find them in causally significant form in the German empire’s brief overseas imperialist history. She overlooks the real continuity between Nazi practice in Poland and the past, which stems from German seizure of historically Polish lands and peoples, beginning in 1772. Prussian Germany did indeed have a colonial hinterland, in the very provinces O’Sullivan examines. Settler colonialism began there with Frederick the Great and reached feverish pitch in the years 1886–1914.

It was because the Polish nationalist movement fielded such effective opposition to the Bismarckian Germanization program that Hitler and the Nazis preferred to expel, und eventually murder or work to death the uprooted Poles, rather than attempt to integrate them into the German nation. Only relatively few borderlanders seemed amenable to the latter privilege. It was the Poles’ strength in resisting subordination to German power—under Austro-German occupation 1915–18, in the Prussian Poles’ self-liberation 1918–19, in interwar Poland’s insistence on its sovereignty and, in the late 1930s, its refusal of vassalage to Hitler—that heightened Nazi aggression, not because they were easy prey.

The linkages between Imperial German and Nazi Polenpolitik have been traced, if not sufficiently interpreted. Its endpoint was the Nazi genocide of the Poles, infamously blueprinted in the Generalplan-Ost and swiftly initiated in millionfold murder and starvation. This genocide differed from the Shoah in that it entailed the extermination of one historically—and actually—Christian European nation by another European nation of Christian heritage, however much repudiated by the murderers. For this, on which O’Sullivan is silent, there is no precedent, although other east European nations stood in line after the Poles. It was the farthest thing from a “colonial genocide.” This was inner-European fratricide.

These remarks, while critical of the effort to integrate Nazi practice into an interpretive paradigm of overseas western colonialism, are not meant to gainsay the value reading O’Sullivan’s book conveys to anyone interested in the current state of that debate.