In his farewell lecture to Humboldt University, Michael Wildt pondered the current state of genocide studies and the position of Nazi genocide within it. Asserting that the “current debate regarding the Holocaust and colonialism is absolutely necessary,” Wildt addressed the question of what the singularity of the Holocaust might mean in a new research context. While recognizing the specificity of the Holocaust, he acknowledged that scholars have moved well beyond the tendency to quarantine it from broader discussions of other genocides and episodes of mass violence.Footnote 1 Endorsing Michael Rothberg’s plea for a shift toward “multidirectional memory,”Footnote 2 Wildt rejected the “zero-sum game of narratives of memory” and offered a plea for “more openness and a readiness to accept different perspectives on the past without seeking to level or hierarchize them.” For Wildt, “the Holocaust loses none of its horror, if it is placed in the context of European and global history.”Footnote 3
Such openness to what Rothberg has called the “colonial turn in Holocaust studies” remains controversial in some quarters.Footnote 4 This is particularly the case in Germany, where postcolonial and settler colonial approaches to comparative genocide studies have been branded by some scholars as tantamount to a new form of antisemitism.Footnote 5 Away from Europe, however, comparative approaches have long been viewed as important historiographical work. Some twenty years ago, for example, Neil Levi discussed an emerging wave of comparative research examining Nazi genocide and colonial violence in Australia, not least as undertaken by Australian Indigenous scholars studying the effects of colonialism on their people.Footnote 6 In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it was not entirely an exaggeration for Levi to argue that “explicit comparative historical memory represents the dominant form of Australian memory of the Holocaust,”Footnote 7 at a time when Dirk Moses was seeking lines of continuity between colonial genocide and the Holocaust as two instantiations of a genocidal “racial century,”Footnote 8 and Paul Bartrop was arguing that, when it came to “genocide, Holocaust, Jews, Aborigines, Australians…there is a certain legitimacy to be found in aligning the situation of the Aborigines with that of the Jews vis-à-vis Australia.”Footnote 9
This comparativist historiography remains hotly contested, and thorny questions within its domain remain unresolved. Scholars of colonialism still debate matters such as whether to describe events in Australia as genocide, whether linking these events to the Holocaust structurally makes sense, and whether there is a direct and observable relationship between settler colonialism and a propensity toward genocide.Footnote 10 Alongside these questions are others regarding how best to locate and represent Indigenous agency amid frontier violence, in order to ensure that a structuralist analysis of settler colonialism’s displacive tendencies does not give rise to a flattened historical determinism that forgets how Indigenous people made their own history even as their societies were purposively destroyed.Footnote 11 Despite these unresolved issues, however, the comparativist method that undergirds the field has long been viewed as methodologically generative in a way that is still viewed with deep suspicion in Germany.
Given this suspicion, and the fact that the history of the Holocaust has been brought into contact with the histories of other “extremely violent societies” (as Christian Gerlach has labeled them) such as Australia for more than two decades,Footnote 12 recent claims that putatively “postcolonial” historians have engaged in a relativization of the Holocaust by pursuing comparative research need to be seen within a broader, global field of research.Footnote 13 With this seemingly intractable controversy in mind, this article demonstrates why it remains absolutely necessary to examine the history of the Holocaust with close reference to the histories of other racist and violent societies. Doing so, it suggests, offers a chance to establish some clarity on the vexed question of whether structural links and continuities between colonial violence and Nazi violence might reasonably be sought.Footnote 14 In conversation with earlier works that view colonial history as a necessary but ultimately insufficient lens through which to view Nazi violence, it confirms that there remain enduring difficulties in viewing colonialism as the direct “pre-history of the Holocaust,”Footnote 15 and in representing Nazi genocide as the point of return for what Hannah Arendt once termed the “boomerang” effects of European colonial violence.Footnote 16 It warns that eliding various regimes of race and violence that reflected differing political and social imperatives will not necessarily assist scholars in understanding how and why different societies have, at specific moments and under specific conditions, embraced radical violence. It finds that, just as Ann Laura Stoler once saw comparative method as helping to “identify unexpected points of congruence and similarities of discourse in seemingly disparate sites,”Footnote 17 so too comparisons can often help to clarify where important political and material differences attend to seemingly analogous histories of violence.
To do so, the following takes up Michelle Gordon’s claim that “studies of British colonial violence are necessary for furthering our understanding of Holocaust and genocide studies,”Footnote 18 as well as Marcia Langton’s insight that in Australia, “Aboriginal writing, scholarship, research are all taking on the feel of Holocaust Studies” as Indigenous people have sought to “carry out research to try to understand the terrible, inexplicable past.”Footnote 19 Rejecting ahistorical attempts to deny the centrality of racial violence to Australian colonial history,Footnote 20 and the contrarian assertion that the White Australia Policy was “a rational and in a number of ways progressive product of its times,”Footnote 21 the following investigates several points of contact between two racial states, but ultimately confirms Alexander Yarwood’s observation that “there is good reason to distinguish” between Australian racial politics and the forms of racism and racial violence that characterized “Nazi Herrenvolk theories,”Footnote 22 and reaffirms the need to differentiate between what Hitler viewed as “bourgeois” imperialism on the one hand and “völkisch” expansionism on the other.Footnote 23 It takes seriously Patrick Wolfe’s insight that there is no single “discursive monolith called ‘race’” that drives violence in all contexts,Footnote 24 and posits that the genocidal violence from below driven by the radicalism of Australia’s settlers,Footnote 25 those whom Colin Tatz called “the ‘decent’ Australian democrats who…set out to kill the Aboriginal people they deemed ‘vermin,’”Footnote 26 followed the dispossessive logic of political imperatives that differed from those driving Nazi genocide, but which were familiar to settler colonial societies in other parts of the world,Footnote 27 colonies that shared the radical and foundational “illiberal liberalism” of their metropolitan centers.Footnote 28
As Rothberg has argued, if the important differences between colonial and Nazi violence are to be understood, this can only happen through the application of comparative historical method.Footnote 29 Indeed, it is only through a close examination of the points of contact between Nazi Germany and colonial societies such as Australia that the important differences between them might be discerned. With this in mind, the following assesses German understandings of British and Australian frontier violence,Footnote 30 particularly those of the ex-colonial official and Consul General to Australia, Dr. Rudolf Asmis, while seeking moments of similarity or affinity between Australian and German conditions. Beginning with Weimar-era views of the actions of the British Empire in Australia, it then assesses how colonial violence in Australia was represented by Nazi-era officials and commentators like Asmis. In doing so, it builds on Konrad Kwiet and Olaf Reinhardt’s earlier examination of the attitudes of Nazi-era German officials toward the radical violence of the Australian frontier.Footnote 31 It also examines German discussions of Australia’s strategies for maintaining a racially stratified society through the White Australia Policy.Footnote 32 Through these, the following demonstrates that Germans, while well versed in Australian conditions, were extremely circumspect in drawing links between the racism and racial violence of the British colony and that of the Nazi racial state.
Crucially, this article does not attempt to reconstruct and explicitly compare events on the Australian colonial frontier with those in Nazi Germany. Nor does it test the veracity of German views of events in Australia. Instead, it focuses on making clear that Germans, including Nazi officials, certainly believed that colonial Australia was the site of annihilatory racial violence. It shows that prominent Nazis never labored under the illusion that their attempt to build a racial state was an unprecedented endeavor in European history. At the same time, however, these same officials also argued that the aims, political context, and rationale for racial suppression in Germany differed greatly from those underwriting Australian racial politics. Nazi leaders, including Hitler, explicitly rejected the guiding assumptions and aims undergirding British colonialism and critiqued the policies that they engendered.Footnote 33 For these Nazi commentators, colonial sites such as Australia were recognized as promoting racially exclusionary policies that served a different structural logic. Accordingly, like the United States, Australia was considered by Germans both before and after 1933 not as a model to be followed but as a zone of “racial chaos” and a model of racialization to be avoided rather than emulated.Footnote 34
Australian Violence in Weimar Germany
“The doctrine of Germany’s guilt as a uniquely brutal and cruel colonial power originated during the First World War, not before,” wrote W. M. Roger Louis in 1967.Footnote 35 Louis’s judgement continues to resonate, not because Germany was unfairly maligned for its propensity for colonial violence by the war’s victors, but because, as the history of the contemporaneous British, Belgian, French, American, and Dutch empires show, it was far from unique in its brutality toward Indigenous peoples. In most respects, Germany had modeled its approach to colonialism prior to the First World War on the British model, pursuing a form of liberal imperialism that sought to globalize German commerce, population, and political influence.Footnote 36 The result was that “far from denouncing the Germans as inferior colonial rulers, most Englishmen held them in some esteem.”Footnote 37 Trans-imperial collaboration between the two powers and their subjects was, as recent research has shown, as common as competition and rivalry.Footnote 38
In the process of creating its global empire, Britain, like Germany, had made frequent use of radical violence to guarantee its primacy in its overseas possessions. This application of violence to consolidate imperial gains was viewed by both powers as a necessary part of what they termed, without the slightest trace of irony, “pacification,” a process of making the extra-European world safe for metropolitan priorities—for European settlers, missionaries, firms, and investments—through the application of force. As Ilan Zvi Baron et al. have argued, “the violence of pacification” was no aberration, much less a specifically German vice, but rather was “central to the liberal world order…particularly during the colonial and imperial projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”Footnote 39 Foremost among the instances of British pacifying violence familiar to Germans was the globally infamous treatment of Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Robert Schachner, for example, who had garnered an intimate knowledge of Australian settler society in Queensland before being called to the Chair of Political Economy in Jena, wrote in 1911 that “the complete brutality that the arrogant colonists exercised against the natives not only quickly depleted them but also hindered their adaptation to modern social and economic relations.… It is the old crude sport of the lazy Europeans that allows the blacks to be seen as game for shooting.”Footnote 40
Prior to the First World War, a reticence to criticize the “pacifying” violence and colonial conduct of other powers was not uncommon, as a degree of trans-imperial solidarity and a policy of non-interference in the application of force by other powers generally prevailed. When accusations of uniquely vicious colonial atrocities were first leveled against Germany in the British Blue Book after the First World War, however, and these accusations were used to justify the confiscation of Germany’s overseas territories, this solidarity was, at least in the minds of German officialdom, permanently destroyed.Footnote 41 Once Germany’s colonies were confiscated by the victorious powers on the grounds that Germany had conducted a uniquely savage form of colonial rule, Germany’s colonial revanchists could not help but point out that the Entente powers’ rewriting of prewar colonial history to paint Germany in a singularly violent light was simply a pretext for assuming control over ex-German protectorates that glossed over their own histories of colonial violence.Footnote 42 In this vein, in his critique of Versailles and British pretensions to moral superiority, the former Governor of Samoa, Erich Schultz-Ewerth, reminded Germans of Australia that “the treatment of the natives in Australia is seen as a shameful blemish on the name of England.” Quoting Charles Dilke, he bluntly asserted that “the Anglo-Saxon race is an extirpating race” for whom “the disappearance of weaker races was a blessing to mankind.”Footnote 43 It was the British, he reminded his readers, who, while wringing a “forced acknowledgement of guilt” from the Germans, had been “primary among those responsible for the end of native life everywhere in the world.”Footnote 44
In a more explicitly comparative vein, the most prominent leader of the colonial irredentists in Weimar Germany, ex-Governor of East Africa Dr. Heinrich Schnee, insisted that Germany’s colonial violence in Southwest Africa had shared the same structural logic as British settler colonial sites: “With regard to the…Herero Uprising in German Southwest Africa, this was caused by the gradual expansion of white settlers, through which the natives saw their ownership of their land threatened. It resembles the uprisings that the members of the white race experienced in earlier days in the settler colonies of North America and Australia and more recently in South Africa.”Footnote 45
So too in his 1930 book Der unvollendete Kontinent, Colin Ross argued that a commitment to ensuring Australia was populated solely by migrants from Northern Europe had engendered a “summary policy” of extermination under which “the original population and owners of the land were killed without any fuss as troublesome vermin.” Pouring scorn on those Australians who believed British claims to racial benevolence, Ross pointed out that once the continent had been “cleansed of Australian blacks,” Australians moved on to maintain a “purely white continent” by instigating the White Australia Policy aimed at halting Asian migration.Footnote 46 As Siegfried Mattl has argued, for Ross, the historical irony was that Australia was only at risk from Asia because of the brutal effectiveness of its anti-Indigenous massacres. Emptied of its Indigenous population, “the rich unworked northern Australia…must represent a lure for the overpopulated areas of Asia.” Indeed, Australia’s colonial killings and continuing racially exclusionary tendencies, and “the greed of the white Australians” in keeping such an enormous space to themselves, were endangering Australia and the Pacific by attracting new expansionist Asian powers such as Japan to the region.Footnote 47
Perhaps the most sustained Weimar-era comparison of Australia’s treatment of Indigenous Australians with those of Germany came with the official response to the British Blue Book, which took the shape of the German Colonial Ministry’s own book, Die Behandlung der einheimischen Bevölkerung in den kolonialen Besitzungen Deutschlands und Englands. Footnote 48 As part of its attack on British colonialism, it opened its discussion of Australia by citing the damning conclusions of the 1904 Roth Royal Commission in West Australia. Quoting numerous religious and political figures condemning the “West Australian atrocities,” the book argued that the commissioner, Dr. Walter Edmund Roth, had exposed beyond doubt the scope of frontier killings and the “bleak situation of the few still remaining natives of Western Australia.”Footnote 49 Beyond Western Australia, the book also reported on “the extermination and enslavement of the natives of Queensland.” This extermination process, it argued, had been conducted “systematically and brutally” while the few remaining Indigenous people had been subject to child trafficking and enslavement. Settlement of the Australian north, the German Colonial Ministry argued, had been possible only through “the annihilation of the native tribes.”Footnote 50 Similarly in the far south, it claimed, Australia had undertaken the “extermination of the Tasmanians,” a process once again described as “systematic.”Footnote 51
Clearly, these Weimar treatments of British colonial violence were products of the abrupt, post-Versailles end to trans-European colonial solidarity. They were also transparently programmatic attempts to further the geopolitical aims of German colonial irredentists. To do so, these German colonial experts sought to make clear that Britain too had not shied away from violence in securing and expanding its colonies. Remarkably, however, these Weimar-era texts did not seek to differentiate between the causes and nature of British and German colonial violence, but rather to present them as part of a shared liberal imperial experience. If Germany was to be castigated for its violent colonial past, they argued, then surely the British should be held accountable for theirs.
Nazi Officialdom—Rudolf Asmis in Australia
During the Nazi era, it was similarly viewed as a truism that British colonialism in Australia had caused the demise of its Indigenous peoples. As one German review of Adolphus Peter Elkin’s book The Australian Aborigines: How to Understand Them declared: “The English colonial history in Australia shows clearly and distinctly that for the British it is only a question of exploiting the land. Whether the natives perish in the process or not was a matter of complete indifference. The Tasmanians were exterminated to the last man within a few decades. On the continent the tribes were driven into the desert and similarly marginal lands.”Footnote 52
Beyond anthropologists, there were other Germans in the 1930s who were acutely aware of the violence that British colonialism had visited upon Indigenous Australians. Dr. Rudolf Asmis was one such individual. Asmis, one of Germany’s old Africa hands who had served as a young man in German Togoland,Footnote 53 had been Germany’s Consul General for only a few short months prior to the Nazis’ coming to power, having arrived in Sydney with his wife in October 1932.Footnote 54 Politically a Prussian patrician conservative and viewed by more ardent Nazis as an anachronistic “old style imperialist,”Footnote 55 Asmis’s relationship to the NSDAP was ambiguous, veering between a private distaste for its crass plebeian politics, support based on pragmatic careerism, and a loose identification with Nazi antisemitism and hypertrophic patriotism.Footnote 56 More enthusiastic Nazis in Australia such as Johannes Heinrich Becker and Johannes Frerck criticized Asmis, however, as an “opportunist” and identified him with a bygone era of global liberal imperialism, seeking “the restoration and extension of the country’s colonial empire” and “still living in the time of the Kaiser.”Footnote 57 Despite his initial ambivalence toward his more fervently Nazi compatriots in Australia, Asmis did his best to shepherd German Australians toward associational links with Hitler’s Germany.Footnote 58 Nevertheless, Asmis did not hurry to join the Nazi Party, waiting until 1938.Footnote 59 This did not stop him from rising to the position of head of the Berlin Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP in the early 1940s.Footnote 60
As the Nazification of the German Foreign Office got underway in 1933,Footnote 61 Asmis’s consular duties in Sydney included defending Germany’s reputation against charges of racial violence and reporting to Berlin on the role of racial politics in Australia. Both were part of the German Foreign Office’s attempt to deflect international criticism by pointing to the hypocrisy of those states around the world who had criticized the Nazis’ declared boycott of Jewish businesses.
In the course of defending the reputation of Nazi racial politics, in late March 1933 Asmis issued a flat denial of German government-sanctioned antisemitic violence to the Australian press, calling the accusations circulating in the international media “untrue and grossly exaggerated.” He represented Nazism’s antisemitic policies as both justified and firmly controlled by the party. What was happening in Germany, he argued, was the channeling of popular anti-Jewish sentiment into official actions that would prevent spontaneous acts of violence. The new Nazi government, he argued, had taken “strong measures” against antisemitic violence, and he could assure Australians that “Jews were not discriminated against, or their liberty interfered with in Germany, where hundreds of thousands of Jews are living peacefully, and Jewish stores and firms carry on unhindered.…” Itself redolent with antisemitic tropes, Asmis’s statement insinuated links between German Jews and profiteering, stock market manipulation, and corruption. Further proof that reports of attacks on German Jews were false, he argued, was the “continuing rise of shares at the Berlin exchange, many of which have reached record figures.” Insisting that “Jewish interests…are largely represented in exchange transactions,” Asmis reasoned that the stock market “would certainly not display such unbounded confidence in the stability of Germany’s internal position were there any truth in the allegations.”Footnote 62
His second task was to apprise the Foreign Office about the nature of Australian racism, in reply to an April 1933 German Foreign Office request for information to help the new Nazi state defend itself against accusations that its actions against Jewish Germans were out of step with the racial politics of modern states. The aim was to demonstrate definitively that “in those countries which now believe they have the right to be outraged by the events in Germany, the principle of equality of the races has by no means been implemented.” Accordingly, Asmis was directed to report on the nature of “differential treatment in public and military careers” and “discrimination in the social, economic, and similar domains.” Crucially, the Foreign Office stressed that this analysis should differentiate between different types of racial discrimination, insisting that “it would not be so much a matter of belonging to a national minority as of explicit racial characteristics which prevent promotion in the above-mentioned areas.”Footnote 63
The German Foreign Office’s request for evidence of racial inequality could not help but hit fertile ground in Australia, and at this point, in early 1933, political discussions regarding racial politics in Nazi Germany and Australia came closest to direct contemporaneous comparisons, before the Nazi Party lost interest in benchmarking its policies against those in the rest of the world. The report Asmis wrote in early August 1933 was entitled “Differential Treatment of the Races in Australia” and focused squarely on both the White Australia Policy and the treatment of Indigenous Australians, emphasizing that Australia’s population policy both excluded “all non-white, that is colored races” from settling in Australia and refused to allow Indigenous Australians “entry to society” at all.Footnote 64 Asmis added more detail to this report in 1935, at around the same time that the Nazified German Colonial Office was taking note of “settlement possibilities” for Germans in Australia.Footnote 65 In this 1935 report, Asmis extended his discussion of the situation of Indigenous Australians.Footnote 66 In it, Asmis showed that, like other European visitors to Australia (including those on the political left such as Schachner and Egon Erwin Kisch),Footnote 67 he had taken careful note of the extent of frontier violence that had characterized British colonialism in Australia. Asmis stressed to the German Foreign Office that “the history of the relations between the white population of Australia and the colored Aborigines of this continent is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the relationship between two races.” Not only spelling out the nature of the violence, including the kind of mass shootings attested to several decades earlier by Schachner, he also broached the topic of the deliberate erasure of this history of violence:Footnote 68
Hunts by groups of white landowners, after the pattern of the kangaroo and emu hunts still organized today, poisoning of food and drinking water on which the Aborigines were dependent in this dry country, shooting of individual colored people where this was possible without attracting attention—these things appear to have been everyday occurrences during the first 100 years of English rule and settlement in Australia. Only a fraction of what is said openly in private publications (but for those who know, also easily recognizable in official and semi-official publications) has to be true to make the notorious atrocities in the Congo seem harmless, while compared to the methods employed by the squatters and their employees, as well as the police of States and at least tolerated by the governments of the various states.Footnote 69
For Asmis, this racialized frontier violence was not an avoidable tragedy nor an expression of racial science but rather a structural, material matter, a product of “the simple fact of the white man’s taking possession of the land in the first place.” It was only after the fact, he wrote, that “a conscience seems to have begun to stir” among white Australians. Despite this, it was apparent to him that “the Aborigine is by no means always treated by the police and the settlers as a human being, even if on a lower cultural level, but often as a stupid and rather dangerous animal against which any attack is permissible.”Footnote 70
Asmis summarized for the German Foreign Office the racial principles used by Australians to stabilize their antipodean racial state. The “overriding principle for the relationship of the two races,” he reported, was “the division into Aborigines and non-Aborigines, the separation of black and white, the differences of the races.” On the question of who was counted and not counted as Indigenous, Asmis quoted the Aboriginal Ordinance 1918–1935 for the Northern Territory and, for Queensland, the law of 20 December 1934. According to these, he argued, Aboriginals were defined as:
-
a) any full-blooded Aborigine,
-
b) any half-caste person married to a full-blooded Aborigine,
-
c) any half-caste person who lives with a full-blooded Aborigine in a de facto relationship,
-
d) any half-caste person who, in the opinion of the Minister, is unable to look after his own affairs,
-
e) any half-caste person who is officially not regarded as being twenty-one years or older.Footnote 71
Indigenous Australians, Asmis pointed out, could not vote, while an Indigenous worker had “no claim to the wages he has earned.”Footnote 72 A European settler who married an Indigenous woman “loses his social status,” while Indigenous welfare was contained to “a thorough-going separation of whites and Aborigines.” Far from encouraging education or schooling, “segregation is the catch-cry,” a policy achieved through the establishment of Indigenous reserves “where they are kept as though in a national park,” albeit one whose borders might move “if a valuable mineral deposit is discovered.”Footnote 73
Although his appraisal of British approaches to “native policy” had certainly been more generous in his pre-1914 studies of British colonial methods in Africa,Footnote 74 as a representative of the Nazi state in 1935, Asmis did not recommend the British approach to racial affairs in Australia. Rather, according to the consul general, British settlers had squandered an enormous economic opportunity in their annihilatory land grab and segregationist policies. Instead of killing and quarantining Indigenous peoples, bringing them into the workforce “would permit an economic development of the country which would not exist with the use of white labour alone.” So too, the White Australia Policy, he continued, in its refusal to admit Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian workers into the country, had compounded Australia’s workforce problems. Instead of directing the various races into useful forms of labor, he concluded, white Australians had unwisely chosen to embrace a genocidal shortcut to economic advantage and the question of territorial sovereignty:
It is true that the extermination of a whole people has enabled a relatively small number of persons to take possession of enormous areas of land and provided them with large fortunes with a minimum of effort.… Nonetheless, to me it is very doubtful whether it would not have been much wiser and much more farsighted—completely regardless of an ethical obligation towards an indigenous population—had they adopted all possible measures from the time of the division of the land between white and black to try and maintain this population.… If one day Australia must open itself to mass Asian migration, whether through a forced agreement or through a military invasion, this would be repayment in kind for the unscrupulous annihilation of the original inhabitants of an entire continent that has been deliberately and silently carried out by the British and the white Australians since its occupation.Footnote 75
In November 1935, Asmis’s consular colleague Dr. Walter Hellenthal also reported on the effects of Australia’s discriminatory White Australia Policy, outlining the fears harbored by Australian political figures regarding the rise of Japan as a Pacific power, and their relief that Japan had found its “Lebensraum” in North China, thereby postponing the “point in time when sooner or later overpopulated Japan would make its claim for Lebensraum on the uneconomically thinly populated Australia.”Footnote 76 Australian officials nonetheless remained perpetually concerned about “the penetration of Japan in the Pacific,” and it was, Hellenthal argued, only a matter of time before “northern and northwestern Australia increasingly becomes a zone of Japanese economic interests.” Only by permitting a large influx of “white settlers” could they escape such a fate, Hellenthal surmised, but as he had been informed by the Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, even broadening the source nations for European immigration beyond the British Isles was extremely difficult to achieve in the xenophobic political climate of Australia.Footnote 77 Maintaining such a narrowly defined racial state in a region increasingly dominated by a large and expanding Asian power, Hellenthal argued, was going to be an immense challenge for White Australia.Footnote 78
Similarly discussing the putative threat to White Australia emanating from Asia and explicitly comparing the role of state racism in both Australia and Nazi Germany was a 1937 article, this time in the Deutsche Rundschau in Polen. In this, Australia’s racial policies were positioned as superficially analogous but practically different from that of Germany, lacking Nazism’s (putative) scientific rigor and clear direction in terms of approach and application. The newspaper proclaimed that just as “racial science and its implications constituted an axiomatic foundation of the concept of the state and its government in the Third Reich,” so too “other European states have inevitably also had to take a position on this.” Not everywhere, it stressed, had racial science been judiciously applied. While Australia had laudably “recognized the great danger” that was approaching from southern China and Asia as Australia became the “arena for the struggle between white and yellow,” it had made serious errors in its attempts to populate an “incomplete continent” with white settlers. Despite having made the “principle of white Australia a political foundation,” its decisions to stop migrants from other continental European nations such as Germany and Italy had meant, the newspaper regretted, that the “threat” from Chinese and Japanese workers was only growing.Footnote 79 Only racial solidarity between all Europeans, the author insisted, could offer the rates of migration required to halt the march of Asia toward the sparsely settled Australian continent.
Australian Overtures Toward Nazi Germany
German state racism and Australia’s two-pronged anti-Indigenous and anti-Asian racial policies were certainly no barrier to friendly relations between Nazi Germany and Australia before the Second World War. Most vociferous in its praise for Nazi Germany was the noisy but politically marginal National Socialist movement inside Australia, a band of around 200 members that had coalesced around vocal supporters like Becker and Frerck, the German-Australian Chamber of Commerce, and the German-language newspaper Die Brücke. In their statements, however, there is only scattered evidence that these Australian Nazi sympathizers sought to link German antisemitism to the exigencies of the anti-Asian White Australia Policy, largely because one of the main targets of this Australian policy, the Japanese, was a firm ally of the Third Reich.Footnote 80 Such dilemmas for Australian Nazis suggest that while Nazis in both states agreed race was an issue requiring strong political management, their views of precisely which races required managing and for what reasons differed markedly.
Within mainstream Australian political discourse, however, Nazi racial politics was seldom connected to local conditions. At a time when Australia was firmly in the grip of Stanner’s “great Australian silence,”Footnote 81 overt discussion of putative parallels between the situation of Jews in Germany and Indigenous people in Australia was few and far between, despite the continuation of active eugenic measures being taken in Australia in the 1930s to “facilitate the eventual demise of Indigenous peoples” (now to be pursued through racial assimilation rather than violence).Footnote 82 As Stanner argued in 1939, white Australia in the 1930s was still gripped by the “mass of solid indifference” toward the national trajectory of the destruction of Indigenous societies.Footnote 83
Indeed, it was only Indigenous Australians who publicly drew explicit parallels between the racial states of Germany and Australia. On 6 December 1938 (shortly after Kristallnacht), the Australian Aborigines League sent a delegation of Indigenous leaders, led by Yorta Yorta man William Cooper, to the German consulate in Melbourne armed with a resolution “on behalf of the Aborigines of Australia” that voiced their “strong protest at the cruel persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazi Government of Germany.”Footnote 84 Apart from its function as an expression of international solidarity, foremost in the minds of the Indigenous delegation was the imperative that Australians recognize that “like the Jews, our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation, and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another race.”Footnote 85 As Gary Foley has argued, their protest reflected a desire “to draw attention to the similarities between what was happening in Germany and how Aborigines were being dealt with in Australia.”Footnote 86 Indeed, just days later, the Australian Aborigines League also sent a letter to the Australian Federal Government that reiterated the link, protesting that “while we are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered.”Footnote 87 Cooper’s grand-nephew, Doug Nicholls, later echoed these sentiments between the two racial states in October 1940, writing, “Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?”Footnote 88
These Indigenous protests on questions of race did nothing to complicate Australian-German relations, and at the end of his tenure as consul general in Australia, Asmis found no shortage of Australian politicians keen to establish closer political ties between the governments of Australia and Nazi Germany. Asmis was instrumental in bringing about the Berlin visit of the Australian Minister for Trade and Customs Thomas White and the Attorney General Robert Menzies in 1938, despite opposition accusations that Australia’s government was engaging in “economic appeasement.”Footnote 89 After meeting the German Minister Hjalmar Schacht, Menzies became increasingly assertive in his desire for “an understanding with Germany,”Footnote 90 despite the fact that Menzies knew very well of the difficulties facing German Jews and other victims of Nazism. Far from condemning the racialization of Germany, Menzies returned to Australia as an “ardent supporter” of friendly relations with the Nazis, firmly convinced that “Hitler was a patriot bent on restoring Germany to its status as a great power.”Footnote 91 In the cabinet room of Prime Minister Lyons, it was again Menzies who insisted that “German intentions were defensive, not aggressive,” and that Hitler “had a prima facie case” in the Sudetenland issue.Footnote 92
Around the same time as Menzies and White were touring Berlin pleading the case for closer ties between Australia and Germany, some Nazi thinkers were considering Australia in a different light, speculating whether it might perhaps be possible to radically recast its population in line with the Nazis’ antisemitic priorities. In April 1938, immediately after the Anschluss and at a time when he was vying with Reinhard Heydrich for influence over Jewish policy through the Central Office for Jewish Emigration,Footnote 93 the prominent Austrian Nazi Ernst Kaltenbrunner picked up the threads of German discussions regarding Australian demographics to argue that Australia was a country with “a lot of land and few people.” Given this reality, Kaltenbrunner suggested that Germany ignore the 1934 suggestion of Egon von Winghene to ship European Jews to Madagascar,Footnote 94 and instead endeavor to send “20 million Jews” from Europe to Australia, with the British population of Australia repatriated to Europe in exchange. Australia, Kaltenbrunner reasoned, would offer European Jewry a settler colony of its own in the antipodes that they could defend alongside the remaining Indigenous Australians against “the Chinese and Japanese.” In his plan, he imagined European Jews as settler colonists in Australia where, he continued, European Jews would find everything they desired, including “cities, livestock, farms, European civilisation” as well as gold, diamonds, and petroleum. The fact that the continent was largely desert would not trouble them, he continued, given their historical experience of such landscapes during their earlier time in Palestine. It might take fifty to one hundred years to achieve this outcome, he concluded, but “Australia appears to be the right continent” and the “right solution” for wholesale Jewish resettlement.Footnote 95
This Nazi plan for resettling Europe’s Jews in Australia went precisely nowhere, but it was not entirely anomalous. Indeed, Kaltenbrunner’s plan unwittingly overlapped with a plan authored by territorialist Jews seeking refuge for those fleeing Nazi Germany by establishing a Jewish settler colony in northern Australia.Footnote 96 According to a 1942 record of Hitler’s dinner conversations, even the ex-British monarch King Edward VIII had proposed to the Nazis in the late 1930s that Germany could offer “an ideal shield” between the British and the Japanese in the Pacific by “possessing and settling” the north of Australia, an idea that found no favor with Hitler,Footnote 97 whose foreign policy since Mein Kampf had been predicated on avoiding overseas colonial possessions, particularly those engendering territorial disputes with the British.Footnote 98
While Nazis debated the role of Australia in their racial reordering of the globe, Menzies’s favorable impression of Nazi Germany continued to influence Australian politics. When Asmis returned to Germany on leave in April 1939, Menzies asked him to direct the overtures of the Australian government to powerful ears in Berlin. Although Australian public opinion had firmly turned against Germany in the wake of the occupation of Czechoslovakia,Footnote 99 when the grazier and informal foreign affairs conduit Richard James Boyer toured Europe in 1939, just three months before the outbreak of the Second World War and shortly after Menzies became Australia’s Prime Minister, he wrote to Asmis on Menzies’s behalf urging him to assist in broadening Australia’s ties with Nazi Germany. In his letter from 12 June 1939, Boyer even went so far as to accept Asmis’s April 1939 offer to secure for him an invitation to the (later canceled) Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg in September.Footnote 100 Boyer assured Asmis that, according to Menzies, Australia would now be “much more amenable to a more liberal policy of foreign trade” with the dictatorship, with Menzies “anxious to do anything that will improve the relations” between Australia and Nazi Germany.Footnote 101 At the very least, Menzies’s amenability included silence on racial matters and outstanding European border disputes. While Indigenous Australians protested the racial policies of both states, Menzies and Asmis worked to bring the two states closer together. The Australian Worker bluntly pronounced in July 1939 that “we have a Prime Minister who can’t conceal his admiration for Adolf Hitler.”Footnote 102
Criticizing Genocide During a Genocidal War
Any attempt to strengthen ties between the two states quickly dissipated once the war began and Menzies followed the British into hostilities. During the war, however, Asmis’s earlier reports on Australian racial matters did not simply collect dust in the Foreign Office. Just as the Holocaust was firmly underway, Asmis renewed his attack on Australia’s treatment of Aboriginal Australians, as well as what he called Australia’s Pacific “Monroe Doctrine.” In his 1942 book Das Ende eines Paradieses, he criticized British imperialism in the Pacific more generally but saved his most withering comments for Australia. Reproducing elements of his 1935 Foreign Office report verbatim, he wrote that “the most striking and shameful example of the displacement and annihilation of an Indigenous population is the fate of the native population of Australia.” His book also reprised his earlier indignation at the fate of Indigenous Australians who were, he said, hunted like animals by Australian pastoralists, with food and waterholes deliberately poisoned by the squatters. At the very moment in which Nazi Germany was itself beginning to undertake the systematic destruction of European Jewry, Asmis felt himself able to assert in condemnatory tones that “the history of the relations of the white population of Australia to the coloured natives of this continent is one of the darkest chapters in the entire history of two races,” a history of “brutal and unscrupulous extermination.”Footnote 103
Around the same time, another work appeared in the Deutscher Kolonialdienst, the official journal of the Nazi Colonial Office with a circulation of over 15,000 copies.Footnote 104 Its author, Jochen von Stechow, offered a lengthy article that discussed the fate of Indigenous Australians under the British with the uncompromisingly clear title “A Continent is Dying: British Colonial Methods in Australia.” Stechow’s article was a work of wartime propaganda so close to Asmis’s own work that it could only have been commissioned by or plagiarized directly from him. Indeed, it reproduced almost word for word the contents of Asmis’s 1935 report and his 1942 book dealing with Australian frontier violence and legal racial discrimination.Footnote 105 The accusations it leveled during the period of Nazi genocide are striking in their condemnation of genocidal colonial violence—in Australia.
Stechow began by stating that when he investigated the Australian “native question” during his time in Australia in 1936 and 1937, his “worst expectations were greatly exceeded” by what he saw. “British native policy in Australia,” he argued, “belonged to the darkest pages of a British colonial history that was by no means poor in atrocities.” While more proximate comparisons of genocidal violence eluded him, he asserted that, in comparison to Australia, the cruelties of the Belgian Congo seemed almost harmless. Stechow also highlighted the demographic crash in Australia’s Indigenous population over 150 years of colonization, arguing that many Australian states had all but achieved “the extermination of the original inhabitants.” This, he suggested (in a departure from Asmis’s work), had gone hand in hand with the growth in numbers of mixed-race “Mischlinge” who, he claimed, were the result of British rapes committed alongside massacres.Footnote 106
In terms of racial theory, Stechow posited that Indigenous Australians were racially separate from Africans. Following the views of German anthropologists such as Hermann Klaatsch,Footnote 107 Stechow presented Australian Aborigines as a “culturally inferior” people that was nonetheless racially far closer to the “Aryan race” than Africans and as such deserving of full protection.Footnote 108 Despite this ostensibly scientifically verifiable racial affinity, he argued, Indigenous Australians had been beset by “the most brutal and unscrupulous annihilation” imaginable by the “invading white immigrants.” Those that remained in the cities, he continued, had become “resigned to their pending extinction” while those in Australia’s interior had been killed en masse, either through hunting parties of farmers or through the poisoning of their food and waterholes. Alongside this were the dire effects of European imports such as alcohol and venereal diseases. Directly discussed as exemplifying this were the “bloodbath” of the Hunter River massacres of the 1820s, the atrocities of the native police in Queensland and, of course, the “extermination of the natives of Tasmania.”Footnote 109
Alongside these active efforts to destroy the Indigenous population, Stechow identified institutional neglect and systemic racism. Unlike in New Zealand, he argued, there was no Department of Native Affairs in Australia and no provision for Indigenous Australians to exercise a right to vote. Working Aborigines were not permitted to keep their wages, and the only half-hearted attempts to protect Indigenous Australians amounted to nothing more than concentrating them on “bleak areas of land unneeded by the whites.” Stechow concluded by recycling Asmis’s earlier threat to British colonialism in Australia, warning that, having all but exterminated its Indigenous population, European Australians could not complain if they found themselves colonized by the alien Asians that the White Australia Policy had sought to keep out. “If one day Australia must open itself to mass Asian migration,” he warned, “whether through a forced agreement or through a military invasion, this would be repayment in kind for the unscrupulous annihilation of the original inhabitants of an entire continent that has been deliberately and silently carried out by the British and the white Australians since its occupation.”Footnote 110
As Asmis well knew from his discussions with the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, Japan had no intention of invading Australia in 1942.Footnote 111 That did not stop him from again focusing on Australian racial anxieties regarding Asian migration and invasion in a November 1942 speech entitled “Australia Must Populate or Perish.” In it he reported the fears of mass Japanese migration to Australia, as expressed to him by John Latham, the Australian Ambassador to Japan in 1940–1941, and discussed how the war would put an end to the “Rassenpolitik” of the White Australia Policy. That the White Australia Policy could be maintained in a Japan-dominated future Pacific, he argued, appeared doubtful. “It is hardly to be believed,” he wrote, “that a victorious Japan would permit such discrimination, even if Australia remained outside of its East Asian Greater Economic Sphere.” Even if “millions of Japanese” were not to stream into Australia, “tens of thousands of hard working and frugal Japanese” would come to redefine the Australian way of life.Footnote 112
Asmis once again applied his knowledge of colonial conditions later in 1942, this time reflecting on his period as a colonial official in German Togo, to make further comparisons between Australia and Africa, particularly with regard to racial matters, in his autobiographical work Kalamba Na M’Putu. Footnote 113 Here, as the Holocaust intensified, he repeated his views that effective colonialism did not rely on annihilatory violence but rather on the use of the labor of colonized people to work on farms and plantations. With white settlers unsuited to sustained manual labor in tropical zones, local peoples ostensibly acclimatized to more arduous work could undertake the necessary labor for them. Asmis again railed against what he viewed as the calamitously wasteful misuse of Indigenous workers he had witnessed, declaring himself to be also against colonial conditions that led to colonized peoples being worked to death. From the vantage point of Germany in 1942, in the midst of Germany waging its own Vernichtungskrieg in Europe’s East and working its own imprisoned workers to death, Asmis recalled being shocked by the “miserable pictures of depopulated villages” he had seen in Africa as a result of European forced labor practices, and described in shocked tones the destruction of human life caused by the construction of the Congo railway that had “cost the lives of uncountable numbers of natives.” “If every kilometer of the 400-kilometre-long railway line between Matadi and Leopoldville had cost the life of a European,” he wrote, every railway sleeper in between was “the gravestone of a dead native.”Footnote 114
It was not only cruel forms of Indigenous corvée labor that he viewed critically but also foreign contract labor. Asmis wrote of having met a Chinese railway worker who was apparently the last surviving member of a contingent of 1,500 Chinese brought to the Congo by Belgium’s King Leopold II. As the group were afflicted by “mass deaths,” the few remaining workers had tried to find a way home, dying along the way until apparently only Asmis’s interlocutor remained alive.Footnote 115 Paired with this was another “unpleasant example” of contract labor in colonial Australia, in the form of “blackbirding” in the settler colony of Queensland, where Pacific Islanders had been, he argued, collected through deceit and violence and forced to work on Australian plantations, before being dumped far from home on any Pacific island the transporter decided was convenient. The effects of this human trafficking were pronounced, he argued, with places like the Ellice Islands (today’s Tuvalu) and the Solomon Islands seeing their population fall by up to seventy-five percent as a result of a murderous trade in workers.Footnote 116
Unsurprisingly, the example he offered of an enlightened use of colonial corvée labor was that which he had overseen between 1908 and 1911 for railway works in Togo, where workers were, he insisted, cared for by their communities. Whenever European foremen mistreated their African workers, he claimed, they had been removed from service or sent back to Germany. Doctors had been provided to ensure the health, Nutrition and hydration, of the workers, and all employed Africans had been, he claimed, vaccinated before commencing their six-month contracts.Footnote 117 Priding himself on his own apparent colonial benevolence, he nonetheless remained silent on the mass African casualties caused by German colonialism in German East Africa and Cameroon, as well as the genocidal warfare of German Southwest Africa. Instead, he ended his memoir with praise for an earlier era of German colonialism that “always had the best for the natives in view” and had ostensibly operated on the principle that “the most valuable commodity in the colony is its people, the whites and the coloreds.” In comparison to the imperialism of the other powers, he insisted (against the backdrop of annihilatory Nazi warfare in Eastern Europe), German colonialism had always been “dignified, professional and absolutely decent.”Footnote 118
As presented in his two 1942 books and his public lectures, Asmis’s representation of British approaches to race, the violence of colonial Australia, the White Australia Policy, and Queensland’s slavery-adjacent labor practices of “blackbirding” was clearly aimed at discrediting the British during the Second World War. They nonetheless also seem to reflect his decade-long sense of the correct management of racial questions in colonial settings. Many of the lessons he drew from Britain and Germany’s earlier colonial period were also spelled out not only in the educational Kolonialdienst publication but also in his internal party correspondence and wartime colonial plans. As Wolfe Schmokel made clear, Asmis’s 1940 “German colonial catechism” walked a complicated line on the question of a racial divide. On the one hand, “the principle of the separation of races” was to apply to the German colonies. On the other, in the vein of paternalist colonialism, “the separate folkish nature of the natives, their customs and mores and legal institutions will be honoured,” while they were to be “strictly protected from the alienation of their land and even involved in the administration of the German government.”Footnote 119 Such colonial imaginings, in line with Asmis’s evolving belief that overseas colonialism could only be conducted through indirect rather than direct rule, were far from the contemporaneous realities of the imperial expansion of the Nazis in the East.
As Nazi violence worsened across Eastern Europe, Asmis continued to critique Australia’s history of colonial violence in his April 1943 lecture delivered in Sofia, Bulgaria, entitled “Wandel und Werden in der Südsee.”Footnote 120 Once again, the timing of this (Nazi party approved) lecture is striking,Footnote 121 coinciding with some of the worst events of the Holocaust and one month after Bulgarian authorities had delivered up more than 11,300 Jews to German-occupied Poland, where they would be killed at Treblinka.Footnote 122 Perhaps it was because of this, and the broader genocidal context of Eastern Europe under the Nazis, that the passage in his speech on annihilatory violence was struck out from the text. Asmis wrote, but did not say, that “the European is not, in my opinion, quite entitled to deny the developmental capabilities of these peoples and to summarily characterize them as deserving of extermination (ausrottungswert) as was so frequently done before.”Footnote 123
Even in 1943, Asmis’s condemnation of the violent processes of colonialism was unmistakable. European colonialism had been characterized, he argued, by “brutal ruthlessness” in which the colonizers forced themselves on the colonized, “destroyed their inner world,” and “where they wanted land, annihilated them.”Footnote 124 Elsewhere in the same lecture, Asmis pointedly criticized the process of Australian nation building as one built on ethnic cleansing: “In Australia the natives were simply eliminated by the invading British in the most brutal and unscrupulous way…. They gave way before the white invaders, falling back into the centre of the country and died quickly there. Insofar as they continue to exist, they have become for the whites a quantité négligeable. In Australia therefore, the whites could build their own new empire without any consideration of the natives.”Footnote 125
Alongside Australia’s annihilatory processes of colonization, Asmis informed his Bulgarian audience, sat the White Australia Policy. This measure was aimed, he argued, in equal measure “against the native population of the continent and neighboring islands” as well as the “workers from the large worker reservoirs of the Far East…against Chinese, Javanese and Japanese.”Footnote 126 Not motivated by biological racism, this policy reflected, he wrote, Britain’s imperial “color bar,” a form of separation of whites and non-whites based not on “racial sensitivities” but on economic rivalry. Australia’s White Australia Policy, he insisted, had not “sprung from racial motives” but rather from the “purely economical” grounds of excluding the competition of foreign (particularly Asian) workers that would degrade the pay and conditions of white workers. The Australian worker, he suggested, was instinctively “protectionist,” and high wages and favorable working conditions were protected by an exclusionary migration regime and a high tariff wall. In that sense, he argued, the Australian racial state was not a product of a scientific racial sensibility (in the Nazi sense of biologically protecting the Volkskörper) but had only become a matter of race “belatedly” as a byproduct of “this economic divide.”Footnote 127
Protecting the economic advantage enshrined in the White Australia Policy, Asmis argued, entailed a willingness to use “military means” to safeguard settler living standards. To that end, there was also an Australian “Monroe doctrine” that covered “all countries south of the equator and east of Australia.” This “political expansion,” Asmis explained, was matched by Australia’s “strong economic expansion.”Footnote 128 With regard to the Australian fear of Japanese expansion in the Pacific, Asmis again viewed this as not primarily a question of racial politics, but as being in line with their earlier fears of Russian, French, and German expansion in the Pacific. In fact, prior to the Second World War, economic relations between Australia and Japan had brought them closer together, he pointed out, leading to several Australian universities teaching Japanese as a foreign language to their students.Footnote 129 Since then, however, the Second World War had brought Australia into an existential battle against the Japanese, which had seen Australia’s racial “paradise” sink into the sea with the British fleet. Asmis concluded his lecture by rehearsing his earlier prediction that “it is like the revenge of fate for everything that the British have done to the Aboriginal Australians, if the Australians in the same way are dragged out of their accustomed way of life just as the Australian blacks were supplanted by British immigrants.”Footnote 130
Conclusion
In 1932, the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble wrote a passage critiquing the effects of the radical violence visited by the British upon Indigenous Australians: “There is a page in our history that can never be written, and that is the full history of our dealings with the Aboriginal race. It would indeed be a black page. There are many who think that the ill-treatment of the Aborigines was confined to a certain period of our Australian history. They do not realize that injustice and cruelty have been the lot of this unfortunate people ever since our occupation began, down to the present time.”Footnote 131
According to Heinrich Himmler’s Posen speech, delivered just a few short months after Asmis lambasted Australia’s radical settler violence in Bulgaria, Germany too had inscribed its own “unwritten and never to be written” page of history through its systematic murder of European Jewry.Footnote 132 Such dark parallels between settler colonial genocide and Nazi genocide have proved tempting to many historians, who have foregrounded the broadly expansionist undertakings of both genocidal societies as evidence of an underlying structural unity. As the preceding reading of German views of Australian frontier violence has suggested, however, this urge should be tempered. While there is some obvious overlap between the two societies, particularly in the general (but hardly historically rare) belief that race was an operative category for political organization and exclusion, both their organizing principles and racial aims differed greatly.
To be sure, the awareness of the Australian example among Nazis (which sits alongside that of the Armenian genocide) demonstrates that the Germans were certainly cognizant of a longer global history of annihilatory violence,Footnote 133 and that, in its broader attempt to destroy the preconditions for the continued existence of an entire people, the Holocaust was never “uniquely unique” or understood to be.Footnote 134 To that extent, Donald Bloxham is entirely correct to seek out the more complex genealogies that made annihilatory violence intelligible in the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 135 Certainly, since the inception of the term “genocide,” Australia has stood alongside Germany as one of its primary exemplars, most notably in the work of Raphaël Lemkin.Footnote 136 Up to a point, one can productively seek “family resemblances” between different racialized and genocidal societies.Footnote 137
Yet, as German commentators stressed, Nazi Germany did not follow the same dispossessive or displacive logic as Australia. For Asmis and others, Australia’s racism and colonial violence were crudely economic in its motivations—an attempt to use annihilatory violence to claim an absolute monopoly over land and resources. The racism of the White Australia Policy too, he believed, was grounded in economic protectionism and a desire to preserve the wages and conditions of white workers. While settlers in Australia labored across decades to create the demographic terra nullius they desired,Footnote 138 the Nazis combed all of Europe from Scandinavia to Italy, from the Netherlands to Hungary, and from France to the Soviet Union in an attempt not to empty that expanded terrain of its previous inhabitants and replace them with Aryan Germans but to eradicate in a highly selective fashion from within Europe a minority population identified on slender racial grounds, without reference to the impact this would have on questions of territorial sovereignty and future settlement plans. Unlike Australia (and other sites of settler violence), the Holocaust was a process aimed at the liquidation of European Jewry without considering its effect on the economics of dispossession, as Gerhard Wolf has made clear in his argument that the Nazis were ultimately uninterested in the “Germanisation of the soil” they had conquered.Footnote 139 In this respect, Eric Kurlander is quite correct in his assertion that the Holocaust, as a product of both war and the cumulative radicalization of the Nazi state, was ultimately an emphatic rejection of the logic of settler colonialism.Footnote 140 Just as Patrick Wolfe argued, dealing with the multiple histories of radical racial violence requires a historiographical sensibility capable of distinguishing between differing paradigms and regimes of race and multiple causes for annihilatory violence.Footnote 141 To reduce the complex logics, operations, and mechanics of all racialized “extremely violent societies” to a singular trans-historical logic arguably obscures more than it reveals, flattening an extremely textured and variegated set of histories of violence.
In the Weimar period, German commentators had viewed their colonial violence as comparable to that of the British in Australia. When Germans under the Third Reich discussed Australian racism and settler colonialism, however, they did so through a different racial lens, in ways that repudiated colonial Australia’s crassly dispossessive political economy, critiqued its lack of an underlying or motivating völkisch sensibility, and prognosticated self-defeating consequences for its racial narrowness. For Asmis, Stechow, Hellenthal, and others, Australian settlers’ destruction of a potential Indigenous workforce and Australia’s suffocatingly restrictive White Australia Policy that screened out non-British European as well as Asian immigration represented a form of racism that was unlike the scientific racism of Nazi Germany. Even at the height of the Holocaust, they criticized Australia’s century of racial violence as a brutal and wrongheaded misunderstanding of the lessons of “racial science.” They remained scathing of Australia’s radically violent demographic shortcut aimed at securing British territorial possession of the continent through the destruction of Indigenous Australians, that is, the unrestricted primitive accumulation of British settlers who undertook the decades-long work of eliminatory violence for themselves. Settler colonial displacement in Australia, these Germans argued, was falsely predicated on the vulgar principle of territorial acquisition and failed to understand the logic of their putatively “scientific” racism that might (as it did in Germany) posit racial affinities between Australian Aborigines, Māori, Polynesians, and “Aryan” Europeans at the same time as it urged the excising (and ultimately elimination) of European Jews, Roma, and Sinti.Footnote 142
While the self-serving wartime assessments of Australian colonialism offered by individuals like Asmis cannot be accepted at face value, their verdict that Australian racism and the radical violence it engendered differed in important ways from Nazism is worth interrogating. So too are the few comparisons that were made between the two racial states. In Australia, these were made by Indigenous Australians keen to see Australian outrage at Kristallnacht redirected to their ongoing plight, while in Germany, these comparisons came only in the first days of the Nazi era as the regime sought to deflect international criticism by showing that there were numerous other racial states (like Australia) whose criticism could be branded as hypocrisy. There was, however, no attempt made by Germans to rationalize or explain Nazi racism as an emulation of the logic of settler colonialism. Instead, Nazi commentators like Asmis viewed Australia as a radically violent liberal-democratic polity whose racist policies reflected a specific and different settler colonial logic.
Even during the precise period when the processes of cumulative radicalization had reached their zenith in the genocidal late period of Nazi Germany,Footnote 143 Australia’s frontier violence of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continued to be explained as belonging to the unique set of problems created by the demand of European settlers to dispossess an Indigenous population so as to create a territorial tabula rasa that would allow settlers to profit from the demographic collapse their violence engendered. Accordingly, as late as 1943, settler colonial conditions and racism in the antipodes were viewed by German commentators as inapplicable and unrelated to their own situation.
Finally, methodologically speaking, these fine-grained distinctions between settler colonial genocide and the Holocaust can only come to light through a careful comparative (and indeed contrastive) historiography, which enables close examination of the similarities and differences that exist between forms of racism and racial violence. Only comparative historical work, which does not screen the Holocaust off from analysis alongside other radically violent societies, can offer historians the tools and evidentiary materials required to examine differing types of racial states, their structural logics and tendencies toward violence, as well as an understanding of how they viewed and interacted with one another. As Wildt argued in his Humboldt lecture, however, if this comparative work is to succeed it will require “more openness, more respect, more willingness to listen and deliberate and not least of all more trust in the cognitive and empathetic capabilities of people” than has been shown in the present debate.Footnote 144
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT210100448). Thanks to Catherine Kevin and Sacha Davis for commenting on an earlier version of this. Thanks as well to Astrid Eckert, Konrad Kwiet, and Jürgen Matthäus for assistance locating source material.
Open access
