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In master human pose: Colonial soldiers in German East Africa (now Tanzania), 1894
Photo:
imagebroker / imago images
»The struggle for hegemony in the world will be decided for Europe by the possession of Russian space [...]. The Russian area is our India, and just as the English rule it with a handful of people, so we will rule this our colonial area. We supply the Ukrainians with headscarves, glass chains as jewelry and whatever other colonial peoples like. «(Adolf Hitler)
Adolf Hitler fantasized these sentences together in one of his monologues in the Führer Headquarters in 1941, a few weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union.
They illustrate one of the great controversies on the politics of remembrance in recent years, which is now also being carried out in public.
The question at stake is only seemingly simple: Is the German colonial experience limited to the time when Germany was formally a colonial power, that is, to the years from 1884 to 1919?
Or did the colonial idea also play a role beyond that, forming an important continuity in German history, with more fundamental explanatory potential, also and especially for the time of National Socialism?
The German colonial past is still being suppressed or belittled in public.
Instead, the German colonial empire is glorified nostalgically or somewhere between boy scout adventures and early development aid.
It was also only of a very short duration - and thus had an impact - as if duration were saying something about intensity and consequences.
After all, German colonial rule lasted 35 years and thus more than twice as long as the "Third Reich".
And German rule over Namibia lasted ten times as long as that over parts of the Soviet Union during World War II.
"People without space" - in Africa as in Eastern Europe
The catastrophic effects on the colonized are almost completely hidden from the public eye.
That alone is bad enough.
But beyond that, the colonial amnesia also leads to a critical void in the understanding of the crimes of the “Third Reich” - and thus also in their coming to terms.
Because at least the war of conquest and annihilation against Poland and the Soviet Union is unmistakably part of a colonial tradition.
Germany's colonial ambitions did not end with the loss of the colonies in Africa in 1919, but only in 1945. Now the second attempt to found a colonial empire, this time in the East, had finally failed.
German soldiers during the Eastern campaign (in Lithuania on June 24, 1941): 60 million people were to leave the planned German settlement area
Photo: Buss / picture-alliance / dpa / dpaweb
In the feuilletons, a kind of “culture war” is raging against post-colonial theory and the question of what memory can and must look like in Germany.
The memory of the crimes of National Socialism is often played off against the memory of colonialism.
The National Socialist crimes are fundamentally different, it is said, every comparison relativizes the Holocaust.
But with this one misses the chance to better understand how the crimes came about and why so many Germans willingly participated.
The Nazis' war of conquest and annihilation clearly had a colonial dimension.
This is illustrated by sentences like those of Hitler or Hanns Johst, secretary of Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS. In the winter of 1939/40, after a trip with Himmler through occupied Poland, Johst declared: “The Poles are not a nation-building people.
They lack the simplest prerequisites ... A land that has so little sense of the nature of the settlement ... is colonial land. "
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Nazi poster from 1935
Photo:
Galerie Bilderwelt / Getty Images
But this can also be found in letters from simple soldiers;
For example, a member of the 12th Air Force Regiment wrote home from Russia in 1941, lamenting: "Nothing of culture, nothing of paradise [is to be seen] a depression, a filth, a humanity that shows us that this is where our great task of colonization will lie."
But it is not only - and not even primarily - these requests to speak from which the colonial character speaks.
Rather, it is the politics and practice of conquest and annihilation that reveal parallels between the first and second German colonial empires.
Even the motives show similarities: the social Darwinist idea of the struggle of peoples among themselves, in which the strongest would prevail.
What the biologically understood "people's body" was missing was "living space".
Before 1919 this was sought overseas - and from 1933/39 in Eastern Europe, where it was possible to tie in with centuries-long ideas of eastern colonization.
"Every Herero is shot"
The National Socialist war of conquest and annihilation against Poland and then against Russia was a conscious implementation of these political ideas.
The local population should take on a purely serving function: "The Slavs are a born slave mass that cries out for the master," as Hitler said.
Even in the colony of German South West Africa (today's Namibia) the blacks were supposed to work for the white "masters".
With forced labor and total control, the German colonialists wanted to form a homogeneous working class from the indigenous population groups of the Herero, Nama, Damara and San.
The "native ordinances" issued in 1907 obliged Africans to wear a visible passport at all times.
Leaving the place of residence was only permitted with German permission, coexistence of larger groups was prohibited, as was the keeping of cattle.
Not only was no consideration given to traditional structures and ties - they should be deliberately destroyed in order to eliminate any "tribal consciousness".
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Surviving Herero in the Omaheke Desert: Driven to destruction by thirst and hunger
Photo: Fotosearch / Getty Images
The military genocide in previous years is now a little better known.
General Lothar von Trotha had it perpetrated in a German name when, on his orders, German troops drove the Herero into the Omaheke desert, to death of thirst.
In his “extermination order” of October 2, 1904, Trotha declared: “Every Herero within the German border is shot with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, I no longer take up women or children, drive them back to their people or leave them up they shoot. "
In Hitler's campaign to the east, too, the aim was to remove Slavs from the planned German settlement area: 60 million people should give way, according to the "General Plan East" of 1942/43.
As in German South West Africa, it was taken into account that the »expulsion« would mean death for the vast majority.
"Every commanding officer is authorized to have colored residents shot in treason."
General Lothar von Trotha
The "Eastern War" was to a large extent just as much a "race war" as the colonial war against the Herero and Nama, even if the mechanization of the war and the armies of millions can hide it.
The rules of "civilized" warfare did not apply.
For example, the martial law decree of 1941 authorized the German troops from the outset to carry out summary execution and shoot hostages as a retaliatory massacre.
All of this was part of the standard repertoire of colonial warfare.
"Every commanding officer is authorized to have colored residents of the country who are caught in the act in the act of treason against German troops ... shot," von Trotha had also ordered in June 1904.
Colonial continuities between the German Empire and the Nazi era are not only evident in the war aims and the manner in which the war was conducted.
The Nazi policy was aimed at a complete reorganization of the occupied "Eastern Land", regardless of established structures.
The colonial state in German South West Africa also saw the comprehensive restructuring as the key to the success of the colonial project with the goal of the perfect colony: the "racial state".
This "racial state" required a clear distinction between "white" and "black", between "masters" and "servants".
"Mixed marriages" were forbidden, "voluntary" sexual relationships were stigmatized as "sin against racial awareness".
At the beginning there was still a culturalist interpretation, according to which a certain "culture" and "civilization" were viewed as characteristics of "whiteness", but at the beginning of the 20th century a biological-racist definition prevailed.
"Natives" are "all members of the blood of a primitive people, including the descendants of native women who have conceived them from men of the white race, even if a mixture with white men should have taken place throughout several sexes.
As long as the descent from a member of a primitive people can still be proven, the descendant is a native because of his blood «, declared the court in Windhoek in 1909.
For the “Third Reich” the meaning of the “race question” does not need any specific examples.
It permeated the "Volksgemeinschaft", and even formed a core of the regime.
War of annihilation and genocide were part of the German repertoire
With all the obvious parallels in ideology and practice, however, there is one crucial difference: the role that was assigned to the Jews - or the role that was denied to them.
Anti-Semitism differs from anti-Slavism as well as from colonial racism through its centuries-long history and through the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy.
The latter makes Judaism particularly dangerous from the anti-Semite's point of view and therefore seemed to call for a global "final solution", the basis for the attempt at global murder, the Holocaust with its six million Jewish victims.
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Nazi Propaganda for the Reclamation of the German Colonies (1934)
Photo: Picture agency for art, culture and history
However, research on the initiation of the Shoah indicates that even the genocide of the Jews was not planned from the start, that situational contexts in connection with the war of extermination played a role in the radicalization in the transition from expulsion and "resettlement plans" to mass murder.
But that also means: Those who do not want to deny the connections between war and the Holocaust cannot doubt a colonial dimension of the crimes.
As wrong as the assumption of causality would be - because Germany had colonies and committed the genocide of the Herero and Nama, there had to be a war of extermination and the Holocaust - it would be just as wrong to deny that the war of extermination and genocide belonged to the repertoire of the German administration and the German military , decades before National Socialism.
Broadening your perspective and taking colonial similarities into account does not put the Holocaust into perspective.
On the contrary: it helps to expose the singular aspect of the Holocaust, precisely the specifics of anti-Semitism, even more precisely.
And this colonial perspective does not relativize German guilt and responsibility: it rather shows that crimes of the "Third Reich" were even more firmly anchored in German history than the Germans are generally willing to accept.
To person
Enlarge picturePhoto:
Michel Dingler / UHH
Jürgen Zimmerer
(born 1965) is Professor of Global History at the University of Hamburg and deals with the history of colonialism and genocide.
Since 2014 he has headed the project group “Research Center Hamburg's (Post-) Colonial Heritage”.
On Twitter: @juergenzimmerer
The colonial form of society helps to understand why many were so willing to serve the National Socialist cause.
Because in large parts it did not seem so new: Inhuman projects had a colonial tradition.
It was therefore not necessary to have been an anti-Semite to participate in the program of conquest in the East.
However, by participating in it, he or she was also involved in the Holocaust.
Such a post-colonial perspective on German history lies across the firewall that some want to build between Auschwitz and "normal" German history.
It exposes the racist roots of German history beyond anti-Semitism.
And so she builds the bridge to a better understanding of the increasing importance of racism of the present.
