If race-thinking were a German invention, as it has been sometimes asserted, then “German thinking” (whatever that may be) was victorious in many parts of the spiritual world long before the Nazis started their ill-fated attempt at world conquest.
– Hannah ArendtFootnote 1Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.
Following the (not entirely dissimilar) controversy about the violent legacy of Communism and its relationship to Nazi atrocities, which was triggered by publications such as Ernst Nolte's “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,”Footnote 2 François Furet's Le passé d'une illusion,Footnote 3 and Stéphane Courtois's Livre noir du communisme,Footnote 4 the current “colonial turn” in historiography is posing yet another challenge to the Holocaust's long-standing “narrative monopoly” on extreme mass violence.Footnote 5 Convinced that the idea of the Holocaust's “uniqueness” or “singularity” has too long overshadowed “lesser,” “marginal,” or “incomplete” genocides in various colonial contexts (from Australia, Asia, and Africa to Latin and North America), scholars such as Enzo Traverso, Sven Lindquist, Dirk Moses, Mark Levene, and Dan Stone have recently offered challenging reinterpretations of colonial genocides and their repercussions on the western World.Footnote 6 Most importantly, Moses and others have linked the colonial genocides of the “racial century (1850–1950)” and the Holocaust to a single modernization process of accelerating violence that culminated in Auschwitz. Rejecting the idea that the roots of fascism can be found in German history alone, they argue that rather than “taking a ‘special path’ to modernity or standing apart sui generis from the other European powers, Germany is the exemplar of an experience they all underwent in varying degrees of intensity. It is the country where the process occurred most radically.”Footnote 7
The “new” school of genocide studies draws heavily on ideas that were first formulated within the context of the highly politicized French decolonization debate; prominent intellectual critics of colonialism such as Aimé Césaire, Octave Mannoni, and Frantz Fanon pointed to the enduring psychological deformation of the “colonial masters” and interpreted fascism as European colonialism turned inward.Footnote 8 As Aimé Césaire famously remarked in his Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), the white Christian bourgeois could not forgive Hitler for unleashing colonial violence within Europe and for treating the White Man in a manner previously reserved for Indians, Africans, and Arabs.Footnote 9 Even before Césaire, the African-American intellectual W. E. B. DuBois wrote in The World and Africa (1947) that “there was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women, or ghastly blasphemy of children—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folks in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”Footnote 10 In short, colonialism, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously argued, was a “boomerang” that returned to Europe in the form of fascism.Footnote 11
The most intellectually influential interpretation of the connections between the era of imperialism and National Socialism was, however, offered in Hannah Arendt's masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which offered a challenging (though not empirically proven) interpretation of the destructive effects of imperialism on normative political and moral values within Europe. According to Arendt, during the late nineteenth century, European imperialism served as a laboratory of amalgamated racial doctrines and anonymous bureaucratic policies that were based on “decrees” rather than the rule of law. These ideas and practices were subsequently reimported into Europe where they merged with a newly secularized and racialized anti-Semitism that went hand in hand with the völkisch nationalism promoted by pan-movements in the multiethnic empires of Russia, Germany, and Austria.
In recent years, Arendt's arguments have been rediscovered by various academic disciplines, ranging from postcolonial studies to genocide studies.Footnote 12 The current wave of scholarship has challenged many orthodoxies in the field of genocide studies and has uncovered stimulating new ways of overcoming Eurocentric perspectives on the history of mass killings. But the hypothesis of the Holocaust's non-European roots has also been taken too far, most notably in some of the most recent literature on the German “genocides” against the Herero and Nama in Southwest Africa between 1904 and 1907 and their alleged role as “models” for the Nazi war of extermination after 1939/41.Footnote 13 According to Jürgen Zimmerer, the most productive and challenging proponent of this particular argument, the connections between the “genocidal” war in German Southwest Africa and the Nazi war of extermination in east-central Europe go far beyond mere phenomenological similarities. Although Zimmerer has repeatedly distanced himself from any mono-causal explanations of the Holocaust, the apparent causal nexus between “Windhoek and Auschwitz” remains at his arguments' core, implying that, by ignoring the “African roots” of the Holocaust, international scholarship on the history of the Third Reich has overlooked a central element in explaining the Nazis' mass murder of European Jewry. The German colonial wars against the Herero and Nama represent, he argues, a “decisive link to the crimes of the Nazis” and were an “important source of ideas” for Germany's war of annihilation in eastern Europe after 1939/41. Both Germany's “obsession” with “space and race” and the fact that the expulsion and murder of the European Jews was not viewed as a “taboo violation” are represented as direct legacies of Germany's colonial past.Footnote 14 “The willingness to exterminate certain groups of people” is the “ultimate taboo violation,” which first took shape in the colonies and ultimately assumed “its most radical form in the Holocaust.” The campaign against the Herero was therefore “paradigmatic for the Nazi war of extermination”: “even the murder of the Jews” would “probably not have been possible” without Germany's colonial experience.Footnote 15 The title of Zimmerer's most recent book, From Windhoek to Auschwitz,Footnote 16 suggests the Herero War as the starting point of a genocidal path that ended in the Holocaust, and represents the semantic climax of a thesis that challenges whole libraries of literature on the origins of the Holocaust as well as recent general histories of the Third Reich in which Germany's colonial past plays no role whatsoever.Footnote 17
Building on Zimmerer's articles as well as other ideas on “totalitarian continuities” between German Southwest Africa and Nazi Germany put forward by Henning Melber,Footnote 18 the American historian Benjamin Madley also suggested that the idea of Lebensraum and the concept of concentration camps was first tested in German Southwest Africa and that the Nazis “borrowed ideas and methods from the German Southwest African genocide that they then employed and expanded upon. Genocidal rhetoric, a new definition of Vernichtungskrieg, executing POWs, murdering civilians en masse, and deporting POWs and noncombatants to work and death camps were all introduced to modern German history through the Namibian colonial experience.”Footnote 19
One problem with these arguments is that their chronological and spatial boundaries are not always clearly stated, making critical engagement difficult. In the majority of Zimmerer's numerous articles on the subject, the German war against the Herero and Nama takes center stage.Footnote 20 His key argument is that the war of 1904 and the accompanying or subsequent expulsion and extermination of the Herero and Nama in concentration camps represented an unprecedented “taboo violation” (the “first genocide of the twentieth century”) and a new level of state-sponsored violence against civilians with devastating long-term effects. In other publications, however, the German colonial massacres of 1904 are for Zimmerer only one case among a number of historically and geographically diverse examples, suggesting the more encompassing nature of colonialism's destructive potential and legacy. Even within this considerably more expanded perspective, however, Zimmerer emphasizes the German war against the Herero and Nama as an “outstanding event in a global history of the unleashing of violence.”Footnote 21
The idea of direct continuities of “colonial violence” from Windhoek to Auschwitz has received both support and sustained criticism. While Michael Brumlik has recently suggested that the “exemplary character of the German colonial wars” for the Nazis' extermination policy is “gaining increasing plausibility,”Footnote 22 scholars such as Pascal Grosse and Birthe Kundrus have pointed to some important structural shortcomings of the continuity thesis. On the one hand, Grosse has emphasized that the peculiarities of German colonialism are to be found less in its violent suppression of indigenous uprisings than in its abrupt end in 1918. The Versailles Treaty made Germany a postcolonial power in a colonial world and contributed to the reorientation of colonial fantasies toward east-central Europe: “While the major colonial powers underwent a process of decolonization much later and as a result of independence movements in the colonies themselves, Germany was stripped of its colonial possessions as a direct consequence of its defeat in World War I, which left a complete vacuum in the sphere of expansionism exactly when expansionist aspirations had reached their height.”Footnote 23 Kundrus, on the other hand, has convincingly argued that superficial phenomenological similarities between colonial and fascist violence should not be confused with direct lines of continuity and that colonial rhetoric is not the same as colonial policy.Footnote 24
Building on these first reactions, this essay will engage more systematically with the hypothesis of “connections” and structural similarities between “Windhoek and Auschwitz.” First, it will critically examine the allegedly “exceptional” character of the German colonial wars within the broader transnational context of colonial violence, a context that was central to Hannah Arendt's arguments about the origins of totalitarianism. It argues that the “taboo violation” of 1904 was in fact very much in line with common European colonial standards and practices. Neither massacres of an indigenous population classified as “inferior” nor the scope, nature, and objectives of the violence unleashed in German Southwest Africa constituted genuinely “new” or exceptional levels of violence previously unknown to European colonialism. Second, the essay will highlight the lack of evidence for direct personal and structural continuities between Windhoek and Auschwitz. Rejecting some of the rather constructed continuity arguments that have been suggested so far, it will be argued instead that National Socialism and the German war of annihilation constituted a break with European traditions of colonialism rather than a continuation.
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If Hannah Arendt's hypothesis about the colonial roots of European fascism is to serve as a genuine starting point for an investigation into the interconnectedness of colonialism and fascism, then the inter- and transnational nature of colonial violence must remain at the center of any analytical framework. The assertion of a peculiar German “taboo violation” in Southwest Africa that consisted of the declared intention of “exterminating a certain group of people” may appear plausible within a nation-centric framework of investigation, but it is highly questionable when placed within the broader context of western colonialism.Footnote 25 Unlike some scholars in recent years, Hannah Arendt never advocated the notion that “taboo violations” and colonial careers, institutional practices, and mentalities reached all the way from the Waterberg to Auschwitz. On the contrary, in her chapter, “Race-Thinking before Racism,” Arendt explicitly argues that neither the Germans nor the Nazis invented racial theories. The continuing appeal of Arendt's interpretation partly stems from the fact that she analyzed anti-Semitism, racism, and colonialism as transnational, European phenomena. Her focus on elements of totalitarian rule (a word that was omitted from the English title of Elemente und Ursprünge totalitärer Herrschaft), whose effects could be felt at different times and in different places, is one of the study's great strengths. In Arendt's analysis, Gobineau and Rhodes, Conrad and Kipling are more important than Trotha, Maercker, and Epp. The relevance of the German colonial experience is outweighed by the Boers, the building of the Suez Canal, the “alliance between capital and the mob,” as well as by the attempt to reorder “humanity into master and slave races.”Footnote 26 All of these ideas and violent colonial practices existed long before General von Trotha unleashed his extermination campaign against the Hereros. Transgressions of “civilized warfare” in the colonial sphere were common currency among Europe's colonial powers, and it is no coincidence that Joseph Conrad's frequently invoked metaphor of the “heart of darkness,” which originally referred to the Belgian Congo, quickly became the international synonym par excellence for parallel colonial universes of violent suppression and exploitation. Even defenders of the “positive achievements” of colonialism do not deny that the violent usurpation of land and resources, the systematic destruction of the economic and cultural infrastructure of the vanquished, and the introduction of racist legislation by European colonial powers were standard procedure rather than an exceptional “taboo violation.”Footnote 27
Three cases of colonial mass violence may suffice as examples to illustrate this point: the American conquest of the Philippines, the Spanish colonial wars in Cuba, and the French massacres in nineteenth-century Algeria.Footnote 28
The American conquest and colonization of the Philippines between 1898 and 1902 and the ensuing expulsion and extermination of an indigenous civilization defined along racist criteria reveal several structural similarities with the subsequent events in German Southwest and Southeast Africa. A number of military orders exist that can be seen as the functional equivalents of Lothar von Trotha's frequently quoted “extermination order” of 1904, including Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith's order that “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States.” Smith had previously described how his experiences in the wars against Native Americans had taught him how to combat “savages” and threatened to transform the entire region into a “howling wilderness.”Footnote 29 When, like Trotha in 1904, Smith was asked to clarify his order, he said that every person over the age of ten was to be shot.Footnote 30
In quantitative terms, the American colonial massacre (to which Rudyard Kipling dedicated his frequently quoted poem The White Man's Burden) exceeded the death rates in German Southwest Africa many times over.Footnote 31 It resulted in the deaths of some 4,000 Americans, 20,000 Philippine soldiers, and between 250,000 and 750,000 civilians.Footnote 32 In explaining the vastly greater number of Philippine “casualties,” the commanding general, Arthur MacArthur, stated that whites were less likely to succumb to their wounds than members of lower races.Footnote 33
A useful conceptual tool in this context is the notion of a common western “colonial archive,” to be understood as common knowledge on the treatment, exploitation, and extermination of “sub-humans” accumulated by the western powers over the course of colonial history. Once established, the knowledge accumulated in the “colonial archive” could be “activated” in different geographical areas.Footnote 34 The fact that twenty-six of the thirty U.S. generals operating in the Philippines had gathered previous combat experience in the wars of annihilation against the Native Americans and explicitly referred to aspects of this warfare against “savages” as an important learning process for the Philippine campaign exemplifies the transcontinental character of this colonial archive.Footnote 35 In a Senate hearing on the atrocities in the Philippines, MacArthur himself emphasized the transnational character of colonial practices: “Many thousands of years ago our Aryan ancestors raised cattle, made a language, multiplied in numbers, and overflowed. By due process of expansion to the west they occupied Europe, developed arts and sciences, and created a great civilization, which, separating into innumerable currents, inundated and fertilized the globe with blood and ideas, the primary bases of all human progress, incidentally crossing the Atlantic and thereby reclaiming, populating, and civilizing a hemisphere. The broad actuating laws which underlie all these wonderful phenomena are still operating with relentless vigor and have recently forced one of the currents of this magnificent Aryan people across the Pacific—that is to say, back almost to the cradle of its race—thus initiating a stage of progressive social evolution which may reasonably be expected to result in substantial contributions on behalf of the unity of the race and the brotherhood of man.”Footnote 36
MacArthur's emphasis on the Aryan “civilizing mission” in particular underlines the transnational nature of the colonial archive. Similar observations can be made for the Spanish-Cuban war between 1895 and 1898. Before the commanding Spanish general Valeriano Weyler started his infamous “reconcentration” program, which herded much of the rural population into Spanish-held towns and which cost the lives of at least 155,000 Cuban civilians, he had gathered experience in suppressing and exterminating indigenous populations in the Spanish-occupied Philippines. The parallels with the German (and American) case go beyond the use of extreme violence against a local population. Just like von Trotha's (and MacArthur's) extermination campaign, Weyler's actions met with fierce criticism from parts of the Spanish public, and in 1887 Valeriano “The Butcher” Weyler was replaced with a more moderate military commander who abandoned the Spanish camp system.Footnote 37
Weyler's concentration camps soon, however, assumed a prominent place in the European colonial archive. By 1900, the Spanish term reconcentración had already been translated into English and was used to describe British “concentration camps,” initiated by Lord Kitchener during the Second Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). Just like Weyler in Cuba, Kitchener had become increasingly frustrated with the Boers' guerrilla tactics and duly “concentrated” native civilians into camps in order to deprive the enemy combatants of shelter and support. Once again, misery and famine as well as soaring mortality rates were the result. The connection between the South African camps and the Cuban camps was clear to contemporaries; at the time, the British were both praised and attacked by the international press for adapting “General Weyler's methods” to the Transvaal.Footnote 38 Shortly afterward, the American army used concentration camps for Philippine civilians, particularly in the rebellious province of Batangas, where the vigorous implementation of a policy of reconcentración led to horrific death rates among the civilian population.Footnote 39 Two years later, the same “successful” policy was adopted in another colonial setting, German Southwest Africa.Footnote 40
Racist discourses and the administrative planning and execution of policies of colonial conquest, expulsion, and extermination can, however, be traced back even further. In the French conquest of Algeria, to name a third example, estimates of the (largely civilian) victims between 1830 and 1872 range from 250,000 to 900,000.Footnote 41 Here, too, the murder of civilian men, women, and children, and the systematic destruction of infrastructure and livelihoods were standard practice for decades. In 1841, General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud proclaimed the long-term aim of the Algerian extermination campaign by stating that “the goal is not to persecute the Arabs, which would be entirely useless. The point is to prevent the Arabs from sowing, harvesting, pasturing, using their fields. Swarm out every year and burn their harvest. Or else exterminate them all to the last man.”Footnote 42
The American and French cases in particular illustrate that colonial violence was by no means confined to authoritarian states. Quite the opposite: the states with the longest and ultimately most violent colonial record—France, Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands—remained democracies throughout the twentieth century, thus confirming rather than contradicting Alexis de Tocqueville's famous observations about the expansionist and potentially violent nature of democracies.Footnote 43
The thesis of the unique quality and significance of the German colonial massacres in Africa is therefore difficult to uphold. If one rejects the hypothetical possibility of a German colonial Sonderweg and interprets the use of colonial violence as a common European legacy, the issue of direct continuities becomes much more complicated. Why are the countries with the longest and (over the course of centuries) most violent colonial traditions not identical with those countries that unleashed the greatest degree of racist destruction both at home and abroad after 1918? If the intensive experience of colonial subjugation and extermination contributes to an individual and institutional brutalization that can be transferred back to Europe, then the discrepancies between England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands on the one hand, and Germany (and one could also add Austria) on the other are difficult to explain. In other words, the hypothesis of unbroken continuities between “Africa and Auschwitz” fails to account for the fact that Britain and France practiced policies of violent colonial suppression long before (and after) 1945, but simultaneously remained the bastions of democracy and never pursued policies of genocide within Europe.
In a cautious attempt to explain this discrepancy, Dirk Schumann has recently argued that the relative domestic stability of interwar France and Britain (relative, that is, when measured against the situation in Germany) was partly due to the fact that their violent potential was relieved in the colonies, an option no longer available to Germany after 1918.Footnote 44 This argument complements Pascal Grosse's suggestion that while there “was probably no innate difference” between European colonialisms before 1914, there “certainly was in their experience of decolonization.” In Grosse's view, Germany's unique experience of decolonization and its “colonialism without colonies” after 1918 became a “fundamental factor in the interwar radicalization of pre-World War I ideas and practices of expansionist biopolitics.”Footnote 45
Even if one does not subscribe to an interpretation of National Socialism as a substitute for lost opportunities to “discharge” violence in the colonies or view World War II as a “recolonization” conflict, Schumann's and Grosse's interventions point to experiences of violence between Windhoek and Auschwitz that were of crucial significance for the personal development and careers of future protagonists in the Third Reich, but which are largely absent in the debate about continuities between 1904 and 1941. What is surprising about the course of the current debate on the continuation of colonial traditions by Nazi Germany is the extent to which World War I has been neglected.Footnote 46 The experience of the Great War, during which both qualitatively and quantitatively new dimensions of extermination were attained, the special forms the war assumed in the east as well as the years of border fighting, civil wars, and Freikorps campaigns that profoundly impacted east-central Europe between 1918 and 1923, play no role whatsoever in any of the studies advocating direct lines of continuity between Windhoek and Auschwitz. Instead, it is implicitly assumed that a genocidal German military machine stopped at the Waterberg and went into gear again during the attack on Poland and the Soviet Union, this time backed by a “strong state.” Yet it can reasonably be argued that the roots of Germany's deviation from the path of other European colonial powers should not be sought in the year 1904 but rather in the immediate postwar period. Alongside the Great War, the experiences of defeat, revolution, and civil war retain a central significance in explaining an enhanced potential for and willingness to use violence.Footnote 47 It is no coincidence that the greatest destructive potential after 1918 emanated from those revisionist states that were either among the “official” losers of World War I or, in the case of Italy, considered themselves to have won the war but lost the peace.
Another important objection to the continuity argument is the lack of direct personal linkages between 1904 and 1939/41. A twenty-year-old soldier, who participated in the mass killings of the Herero and Nama and who survived World War I, would have been a sixty-year-old man during the Nazis' Operation Barbarossa. The commanding officers of the 1904 campaign were born between the 1840s and 1860s. Assuming that they were still alive at the beginning of the Nazi war against the Soviet Union, they would have been between eighty and ninety years old. Previous studies have sought to bridge this “gap” between 1904 and 1941 by pointing to “knowledge transfers” from one generation to the next. Benjamin Madley, for example, has suggested that the Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele was profoundly influenced by the anthropologist Eugen Fischer, who had conducted racial field studies in Southwest Africa in 1908. He also argued that Hermann Göring became a proponent of colonialism (in his case of eastern Europe) through his father, the first German Reichskommisar of German Southwest Africa (1885–91). However important these findings may be, the exact significance of such influences on the future careers of prominent Nazis is impossible to measure.Footnote 48 “Traditions” and “knowledge” can certainly be handed down from one generation to another, yet as easy as it is to assume the existence of “teacher-student relationships” and indirect transmissions of genocidal practices within the framework of individual or institutional memory, it is extremely difficult to determine the exact impact of such influences on individual careers and mentalities.Footnote 49 “Students” generally have more than one teacher, and institutions feed their “collective memory” from a vast pool of different traditions.
Even if it is possible to trace a handful of violent careers between Windhoek and Auschwitz, it is unclear what the depiction of twenty or even two hundred such military careers can contribute to our understanding of the German war of extermination. Even in the highly unlikely event that all of the few thousand veterans of Southwest Africa participated in the German war effort on the Eastern Front, they would have been a marginally small group within a German army that already amounted to roughly three million men at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa.Footnote 50 The quantitative ratio alone raises questions about the impact that Germany's African experiences of violence could have had on this enormous invasion army and its military leaders. Advocates of the continuity hypothesis have often referred to the case of Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, a former colonial officer, Freikorps leader, and subsequent director of the Third Reich's Colonial Office, as “living proof” of continuities between Africa and the Third Reich. Yet Epp had no influence on the extermination policies of the Third Reich whatsoever and was increasingly marginalized after the abandonment of the Madagascar Plan, a process that culminated in the dissolution of the Colonial Office in 1943.Footnote 51 To what extent the far more influential Reich Security Main Office's fanaticized personnel, who were directly responsible for the planning and execution of the “Final Solution,” was influenced by knowledge of the German colonial massacres in Africa and the ideological concepts underpinning Wilhelmine colonialism remains an open question. Thus far the flourishing field of Nazi perpetrator studies has revealed no evidence of the significance of African colonial traditions for the radicalization of this Generation des Unbedingten.Footnote 52
The sole proof offered in support of the continuity theory is therefore a handful of overlapping biographies and a number of Hitler and Himmler quotations that suggest an analogy between colonialism and the German war of annihilation, most famously an excerpt from Hitler's table talk of September 1941: “The Russian space is our India, and just like the English have ruled it with a handful of men, so will we rule this colonial space of ours.”Footnote 53 Yet, as Birthe Kundrus has argued convincingly, colonial rhetoric should not be confused with colonial practices. Far more striking than a few rhetorical references to British colonialism by Hitler, Himmler, and others are the structural differences between European colonial rule and the Nazi war of annihilation concealed by such misleading colonial fantasies. Hitler's verbal references to India, for example, may have reflected his admiration for Britain's ability to rule the world's largest empire with a handful of colonial officers, but they hardly constitute proof of the argument that Hitler pursued colonial policies in eastern Europe. Regardless of the numerous puppet regimes that were set up in some German-occupied territories (such as the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia), Nazi Germany de facto never implemented a policy of indirect rule in any part of occupied eastern Europe. From the interwar period in particular, Britain (and to a lesser extent France) promoted the systematic “westernization” of small indigenous elites in order to raise standards of efficiency and to facilitate trade, while at the same time violently suppressing uprisings against colonial rule.Footnote 54 It is difficult to find analogies in the German war of extermination to this combination of development and force so characteristic of late western European colonialism. “Development” in Poland, Belorussia, and the Ukraine, for example, meant the physical annihilation of the indigenous elite, and no member of this elite was ever able to follow the example of Nehru or Gandhi by studying law at the best universities of the “colonial motherland.” This observation extends to the countless collaborators from the Ukraine, Latvia, and elsewhere who were welcome to support the German crusade against “Judeo-Bolshevism” as willing executioners, but whose place in the Nazi postwar order was never clearly defined.
Although mass killings of indigenous civilians in the context of conquest of new territories and the suppression of resistance constituted a recurring pattern in the history of western colonialism, it is certainly wrong to suggest that “colonialism” is synonymous with extermination.Footnote 55 During the German war in east-central Europe, on the other hand, the policy of the extermination of “racially inferior” populations was not a means to bring the war to a triumphant end or to “restore order,” but an end in itself. It constituted the very purpose of the entire Operation Barbarossa and the Generalplan Ost.
An equally important difference between colonialism and Nazi Germany lies in the crucial role of settler communities in bringing about military confrontations in extra-European settings.Footnote 56 Colonial wars and colonial massacres (including those against the Herero and Nama) were particularly common and brutal where a small minority of white settlers felt existentially threatened by indigenous resistance against their rule. In the case of the German attack on Poland, however, there was no “thin white line,” no settler minorities that stood in conflict with an indigenous population. On the contrary, throughout the German military campaign, the aim was to expel or exterminate the indigenous population before “Aryan” settlers moved into the east.Footnote 57
Advocates of the thesis of structural parallels between colonialism and fascism have attempted to explain the numerous quantitative and qualitative differences between the violence unleashed in 1904 and 1939/41 by suggesting that the key difference is to be found in the more developed bureaucratic terror apparatus of the Third Reich.Footnote 58 Neglected in this perspective is the complete absence of a “critical public” and (potentially moderating) civil institutions in the Third Reich. Massacres of indigenous populations in the colonies were frequently criticized in the contemporary press or in the parliaments in London, Paris, or Berlin (often leading to the dismissal of the officers in charge). Even if those interventions came too late for the victims, for example in the case of German Southwest Africa (or indeed in the cases of the Spanish war on Cuba and the American-Philippine War), it is important to acknowledge the existence of civil institutions that were willing and able to intervene in colonial massacres. Lothar von Trotha, whose military orders were largely responsible for the escalation of mass violence in German Southwest Africa, had influential and outspoken critics within Germany's Social Democratic Party, among the missionaries and settlers in the colonies, and even within the German officer corps.
The same cannot be said about Nazi Germany. Recent studies on the Third Reich have reinforced Ernst Fraenkel's argument—put forward in his seminal book The Dual State (1941)—that the traditional German bureaucracy collaborated willingly and neatly with the newly established terror apparatus of the Third Reich, an observation that cannot be extended to the situation in German Southwest Africa in 1904.Footnote 59 It is therefore highly questionable whether the Third Reich can be seen as a particularly radical example of the “modern state” or whether it constituted a new type of political regime that broke with older traditions of “checks and balances,” as well as the ambivalent traditions of colonialism.
In a similar recent debate about the French war in Algeria between 1954 and 1962, the historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet rejected comparisons with Auschwitz by pointing to the important fact that in Algeria some generals acted against the existing laws of the French state, whereas Himmler, Eichmann, and Heydrich acted in accordance with them.Footnote 60 The same holds true for comparisons between German Southwest Africa and Auschwitz. Whereas the replacement of von Trotha would have made an essential difference for the escalation of the conflict in 1904, it is not clear what difference Heydrich's replacement with Kaltenbrunner made for the history of the Holocaust.
In one of the most convincing and empirically sound books on the Herero wars, Isabel Hull has recently contrasted a specifically German, unrestrained “military culture” with the British ability to control the escalation of violence, for example during the Boer Wars.Footnote 61 But even Hull's findings do not support a simplistic continuity thesis between 1904 and 1941, demonstrating instead that the events of 1904 were less the result of a peculiarly German form of racism than of the implementation of unsuitable military strategies that had been devised and tested in a European context several decades before. Although Hull convincingly points to the dramatic consequences of these destructive military strategies during the Great War, it remains questionable how relevant the legacies of Imperial Germany's “military culture” continued to be during the Third Reich. After all, the Third Reich was not a military dictatorship. The particular destructiveness of Nazi Germany and Hitler's crusade in eastern Europe resulted from the smooth cooperation between civil and military institutions rather than the marginalization of civil institutions, which Hull rightly describes as a peculiarity of Imperial Germany's “military culture.”
The Nazis' systematic persecution and murder of every Jew in the Nazis' sphere of influence—regardless of age, gender, or nationality—further raises the important (but often side-lined) question about the exact relationship between, and interconnectedness of, colonial racism and genocidal anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany.Footnote 62 Arendt herself argued that racism was not a uniquely German attitude and that it preceded late-nineteenth-century colonialism rather than being a product of it. In her chapter “Race and Bureaucracy,” she states that the connection between colonialism and Nazism is indirect, but that it had important “boomerang effects” on European public opinion that made racism altogether more acceptable than it had been before. Yet, it still remains to be empirically proven where the boomerang originated and where it landed.
One important difference between colonial, color-coded racism and European anti-Semitism lies in the obvious fact that colonial racism was directed against non-European (i.e., non-white) populations, whereas the Nazis' anti-Semitism before 1939 was primarily directed against the “internal enemy,” including secular and fully integrated German Jews. As Omer Bartov has convincingly argued in this context, the Nazis' anti-Semitism differed from color-coded racism in that the “Jewish enemy” was perceived to be both distinctly alien to European civilization but also capable of appearing physically and culturally “just like us.”Footnote 63 From the Nazis' perspective, it was this ability of the Jewish enemy to disguise himself as European while simultaneously working toward the collapse of European civilization that made him so dangerous.
How and in what ways the immensely radicalized German anti-Semitism after 1918 was influenced by the ideologically motivated and biologically defined racism of European colonialism remains an open question, even though this very question should be at the heart of any investigation of continuities between “Windhoek and Auschwitz.” It may indeed be fruitful to investigate the coinciding loss of Germany's colonies (and hence their main theater of racially motivated violence before 1918) and the simultaneous actualization of violent anti-Semitism within Germany, but such an investigation aiming to explain Germany's deviation from European patterns would have to focus on the years around 1918, not a non-existent unique “taboo violation” in 1904.
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This essay has presented a number of objections to the much discussed thesis of direct continuities and structural similarities between the German colonial massacres of 1904–1907 and the Nazi war of extermination in east-central Europe between 1939 and 1945. As welcome (and long overdue) as the renewed scholarly interest in colonial massacres is, it remains questionable whether this important research is qualitatively improved by constructing direct linkages to Auschwitz. The thesis of a direct personal and structural continuity from Windhoek to Auschwitz can be dismissed on empirical grounds without making the German or European track record of colonial violence look “better.”
It is equally questionable whether it is sensible to conceptualize “fascism” as a form of “colonialism” and the Holocaust as a “colonial genocide.” Even though it has become fashionable to label the Nazi war of extermination a war of “colonial conquest,” recent studies on the German occupation of eastern Europe have uncovered few structural parallels with western colonialism. Thus far, the “colonial turn” in the historiography of the Third Reich has been confined to a primarily semantic redefinition of the German war of extermination.
Future research in this field will also have to address the question how useful the term “genocide” is for historians interested in the comparative aspects of mass killings. Raphael Lemkin's term “genocide”—coined in 1944 and codified in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention—constitutes an important legal instrument for the prevention of intentional mass killings or indeed for the persecution of perpetrators. It remains debatable, however, whether a legal definition that focuses on the genocidal intention (even if there are no victims at all) rather than the structural causes of mass violence is equally useful for historians.Footnote 64 Whether the destruction of the native peoples of central and southern America by Spanish or Portugese conquistadores,Footnote 65 the extermination of the Aborigines of Tasmania by British settlers in the 1830s,Footnote 66 and the Russian army's brutal expulsion of perhaps two million Circassians and Turkic peoples in the 1830sFootnote 67 can be retrospectively classified as acts of “genocide” according to a legal definition of 1944 is a question of secondary importance to historians. It may in fact distract from the far more important historiographical task of explaining how and why European states at different times unleashed campaigns of mass violence against populations they considered “inferior.”
Furthermore, the German “taboo violation” of 1904 must be placed more consistently within the European or “western” context of violent colonial practices than has thus far been the case. Mass killings of indigenous civilian populations previously classified as racially or culturally “inferior” were common currency in Europe's colonial empires and are not indicative of a German colonial Sonderweg. The post-1945 colonial wars and massacres, such as those in Madagascar (1947), Kenya (1952–60), and Algeria (1954–62), suggest that even full knowledge of the Holocaust was no guarantee against a certain type of colonial warfare.
Half a century after the publication of the The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt's thesis of racist imperialism as a laboratory for totalitarianism continues to pose an intellectual challenge for historians of the Third Reich.Footnote 68 Despite the doubts about direct linkages between “Windhoek and Auschwitz” expressed in this essay, it remains plausible to assume that the ideas and practices that characterized Europe's colonial mastery over the world had some repercussions on inner-European history and that “knowledge transfers” occurred in some areas (such as eugenics and “racial hygiene,” settlement planning, and racist legislation). But the extent to which these transfers affected the decision-making processes that led to the Holocaust has thus far not been convincingly demonstrated. Further empirical studies on eugenics and racist anthropology will be needed to determine the exact impact of such knowledge transfers.Footnote 69 Here, too, it will be important to remember that the other colonial powers had been active in these fields just as intensely as (and considerably longer than) Germany.
The examination of such transfers calls for an approach that can encompass both the common construction of a European colonial archive and its very different applications in various geographical contexts. Such an approach would also have to take into account the dramatic wave of violence between 1914 and 1923, a wave of violence that had a much more immediate impact on the protagonists of the Nazi war of extermination. Only this perspective can explain why the countries that possessed the longest experience with colonial violence were not identical with those states that developed the greatest destructive potential after 1918.
It is also worth mentioning in this context that some historians who have previously focused on the effects of overseas colonialism on Europe have now modified their question as to whether inner-European decolonization processes, for example in the form of the dissolution of the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, or the detachment of territories belonging to the German and Russian empires after 1918, can explain more about “recolonization” fantasies than the distant memories of a short-lived German colonial empire in Africa.Footnote 70 Such inquiries, which can build on a growing literature on the “colonial nature” of Germany's Drang nach Osten before 1914, seem infinitely more plausible than the abstract search for the Holocaust's “African roots.”Footnote 71 Hannah Arendt herself was keen to emphasize the crucial role of inner-European pan-movements in the destruction of traditional models of the nation-state and the effects of territorial dissolution in 1917–18.Footnote 72 Although frequently quoted as the “mother” of the continuity thesis between Africa and Auschwitz, Arendt was, in fact, quite explicit in her argument that the roots of Nazism were not to be found in Africa: “The immediate predecessor of totalitarian imperialism is not the British, Dutch, or French version of overseas colonial rule, but the German, Austrian, and Russian version of a continental imperialism which never actually succeeded, therefore is neglected by students of imperialism, but which in the form of the so-called pan-movements—pan-Germanism and pan-Slavism—was a very potent political force in central and eastern Europe.”Footnote 73
An interpretation that emphasizes the common European patterns of colonial violence, the discontinuities in German history between 1904 and 1941, and the European colonial powers' dissimilar experiences in November 1918 may be less provocative than the conceptualization of the Nazi war of extermination as a “colonial conflict”—the culmination point of a genocidal path that originated in Africa and ended in Auschwitz. Compared to the construction of direct continuities between the German colonial wars of 1904–1907 and Auschwitz, however, such an interpretation would have an important advantage: the advantage of being empirically sound.
