The Holocaust: a colonial genocide? A scholars' forum

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeView correction statement:Erratum Notes on ContributorsShelley Baranowski is Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Akron (Ohio). Her most recent book is Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (2011). She is currently working on a book on Axis imperialism.Zygmunt Bauman is a Professor Emeritus of the University of Leeds. Among his recent publications are Collateral Casualties (2011), Liquid Surveillance (with David Lyon, 2012), and Moral Blindness (with Leonidas Donskis, forthcoming).Doris L. Bergen is the Chancellor Rose and Ray Wolfe Professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Toronto. She previously held academic positions at the Universities of Notre Dame and Vermont. The author and editor of five books, she is currently working on two projects: a study of the Wehrmacht chaplains and the Holocaust; and an examination of ethnic categorization and extreme violence, with a focus on the Volksdeutschen of Eastern Europe and definitions of Germanness during the National Socialist era.Roberta Pergher is an assistant professor at Indiana University, currently a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Her research centers on the history of Modern Europe, Italy and Germany in particular, and focuses on comparative fascism, colonialism, and borderland studies. She is the co-editor of In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence and Agency in Mussolini's Italy.Mark Roseman is Pat M Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in History at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of, among other titles, The Past in Hiding (2000), The Villa the Lake the Meeting (2002), and Jewish Responses to Persecution, 1933–1946: Volume I, 1933–1938 (with Jürgen Matthäus, 2010) and editor of a number of volumes including Conflict, catastrophe and continuity: Essays on modern German History (with Frank Biess and Hannah Schissler, 2007) and German history from the margins (with Neil Gregor and Nils Roemer, 2006).Jürgen Zimmerer is Professor of History at the University of Hamburg/Germany and President of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS). Between 2005 and 2011 he served as Editor/Senior Editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and between 2007 and 2011 as Founding Director of the Sheffield Centre for the Study of Genocide and Mass Violence. His research interests include German colonialism, comparative genocide, colonialism and the Holocaust, critical prevention studies and genocide and the environment.Notes1Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press), 2000, 36.2Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951).3Charles S. Maier, “Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era,” American Historical Review 165, no. 3 (June 2000): 807-831.4The authors would like to thank Donald Bloxham for helpful suggestions.5Jürgen Zimmerer has been a principal exponent here. His analysis of German rule in Africa is careful and nuanced and offers important structural parallels with later genocides. It is not the structural similarities but the evidence of continuity and transfer we are skeptical about. . Jürgen Zimmerer, Deutsche Herrschaft über Afrikaner : staatlicher Machtanspruch und Wirklichkeit im kolonialen Namibia, 3. Aufl. ed., Europa-Übersee (Münster, 2004).6Mark Mazower, Hitler's empire : how the Nazis ruled Europe (New York, 2008); Shelley Baranowski, Nazi empire : German colonialism and imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge; New York, 2011).7A notable exception is Wendy Lower, Nazi empire building and the Holocaust in th Ukraine (Chapel Hill, 2005). Though not explicitly making an imperial argument Götz Aly and Susanne Heim and others have drawn out the connection between population policies affecting both Slavs and Jews, and the Holocaust. Götz Aly, ‘Final Solution’ : Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews. (London; New York, 1999.8See Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations (Santa Fe, 2007).9Birthe Kundrus, “From the Herero to the Holocaust? Some Remarks on the Current Debate,” Africa Spectrum 40, no. 2 (2005): 299–308. Birthe Kundrus, “German Colonialism: Some Reflections on Reassessments, Specificities, and Constellations,” in Volker Max Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German colonialism : race, the Holocaust, and postwar Germany. (New York, 2011), 29–48, here 29–31.10On the complex interactions between colonialism and antisemitism, see now Christian S. Davis, Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Germans of Jewish Descent in Imperial Germany (Ann Arbor, 2012).11Ulrich Herbert, Best : biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn, 1996), 51–69.12See Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann, Hitler's politisches Testament,. cited in Richard Steigmann-Gall, unpublished paper Aryan and Semite, Christ and Antichrist: Rethinking Religion and Modernity in Nazi Antisemitism from conference “Rethinking German modernity”, Toronto, 2005 and Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, 2006).13See his stimulating discussion in A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, colony, genocide : Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, colony, genocide : conquest, occupation, and subaltern resistance in world history. Studies on war and genocide (New York, 2008), 3–55, here pp.29–34.14For typologies of empire, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in world history : power and the politics of difference (Princeton, N.J., 2010), 8–11.15 One exception here are the Australasian settler colonial states.16See Norman M. Naimark, Fires of hatred : ethnic cleansing in twentieth-century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).17Mark Levene, The rise of the West and the coming of genocide, Genocide in the age of the nation-state (London; New York, 2005), 215–337.18Burbank and Cooper, Empires in world history : power and the politics of difference: 404.19Mazower, Hitler's empire : how the Nazis ruled Europe; Lower, Nazi empire building.20David Furber, “Near as Far in the Colonies: The Nazi Occupation of Poland,” The International History Review 26, no. 3 (2004): 541–579.21Cited in Gerhard Wolf, Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalität : Nationalsozialistische Germanisierungspolitik in Westpolen, Studien zur Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Hamburg, 2012), 11.22Ibid.23Donald Bloxham, The final solution : a genocide, Oxford histories (Oxford; New York, 2009), 23. Of course, faced with realities on the ground, the Nazis were often forced to compromise with local populations, and in annexed Polish territories even to adopt assimilatory policies where it was expedient. On this see Wolf, Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalität op.cit.24Roberta Pergher “The Consent of Memory. Recovering Fascist- Settler Relations in Libya,” in In the Society of Fascists, edited by Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher. (New York: 2012); Patrick Bernhard, “From Libya to Poland: Italian Colonialism as a Model for German Planning in Eastern Europe”, paper given at the conference: “Modern Germany, Italy and Japan: towards a new perspective”, Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, June 14–15, 201225Louise Young, Japan's total empire : Manchuria and the culture of wartime imperialism, Twentieth-century Japan (Berkeley, 1998).26Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and authenticity : Manchukuo and the East Asian modern (Lanham, 2003).27J. Adam Tooze, The wages of destruction : the making and breaking of the Nazi economy (London, 2006), xxiv.28Alex J. Kay, “Germany's Staatssekretäre, Mass Starvation and the Meeting of 2 May 1941,” Journal of Contemporary History 41, no. 4 (October 2006): 685–700.29Burbank and Cooper, Empires in world history : power and the politics of difference: 352.30Mazower, Hitler's empire : how the Nazis ruled Europe: 4–5.31On this latter point, see Bloxham, The final solution : a genocide: 188.32Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust : crimes of the local police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York, 2000).33Christian Gerlach and Götz Aly, Das letzte Kapitel : Realpolitik, Ideologie und der Mord an den ungarischen Juden 1944/1945 (Stuttgart, 2002).34Bloxham, The final solution : a genocide: 241–243. Herbert, Best : biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989: 368–372.35For a more detailed examination and references see: Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011). For a summary in English see: Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust. Towards an Archaeology of Genocide”, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.): Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn 2004), 50–76; Jürgen Zimmerer, “The Birth of the ‘Ostland’ out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219; Jürgen Zimmerer, “The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in Southwest Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide,” in Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation, edited by Doris L. Bergen (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 34–64.36Quoted in: Robin Kelly, “Poetics of Anticolonialism,” Monthly Review 51 (1999): 6, accessed August 29, 2012, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1199kell.htm.37Aime Cesaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (1950), quoted in: Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 246.38Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944), 79. (emphasis mine)39Gustav Frenssen, Peter Moors Fahrt nach Südwest. Ein Feldzugsbericht (Berlin: G. Grote'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906), 200. (my translation) This book saw numerous editions and was the most popular youth book before 1945 in Germany, often read at Hitler Youth camping excursions.40Hitler, 17.9.41, in Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier, edited and annotated by Werner Jochmann (Hamburg: Knaus, 1980), 60–64 (Translation: mine).41Hitler according to Borman, quoted in Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe (München: Blessing, 2005), 529.42Bemerkungen über Mischehen und Mischlinge aus der Praxis für die Praxis, Missionar Wandres [copy; undated], National Archives Windhoek, Namibia, NAW F.IV.R.1., 143b-145b.43As evidenced by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997).44Discourse on Colonialism, in Postcolonial Criticism, eds., Bart Moore-Gilbert, Gareth Stanton, and Willy Maley (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 74–7.45Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards and Archeology of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2004): 49–76; “Holocaust und Kolonialismus: 1098–119; “Die Geburt des ‘Ostlandes’ aus dem Geiste des Kolonialismus: Die nationalsozialistische Eroberungs-und Beherrschungspolitik in (post-)kolonialer Perspektive,” Sozial.Geschichte: Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. Und 21. Jahrhunderts, 19, no. 1 (2004). For a challenge to Zimmerer, see Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonial Genozid’? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 22 (2007): 439–66. Beitrag zu einer Archäologie des genozidalen Gedenkens,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 51, no. 12 (2003): 439–66.46Sebastian Conrad, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2006), 124–67; Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire & the Globalization of the New South (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).47Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front; Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).48Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006), 544–9.49Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 1.50Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, Political Violence in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11–39.51Many thanks to Sean Hawkins, University of Toronto, for comments on a draft.52Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York: Mariner, 1999).53Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951); Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals of Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944); Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 1972); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1967).54Jürgen Zimmerer, “The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in South-West Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide,” in Lessons and Legacies, vol. 8, From Generation to Generation, ed. Doris L. Bergen (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2008): 34–64.55Ludwig Weichert, “Kwami,” in Evangelium im Dritten Reich, no. 1 (16 Oct. 1932); clipping in Landeskirchenarchiv Bielefeld, 5,1/289.2. The context of this statement was colonial, too. The article defended a speaking tour by a pastor from Togo named only as “Kwami”. Protests erupted in Oldenburg, calling it “Kulturschande” that a black man would preach to the “splendid blond farmers of east Friesland.” The author assured readers that Kwami's presence would not challenge but reinforce racial barriers. See Doris L. Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996), 29–31.56Victor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, vol. 1, 1933–1941 (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 7.57Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (New York: Collier, 1959) and Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989). See lexicon in Isabella Leitner, Isabella: From Auschwitz to Freedom (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 228: “A Musselmann meant that you weigh only about fifty pounds and by the afternoon you will be in the Kremchy”; also “Muselmanns,” 47–51.58Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone, 1999).59Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab: A History of the Enemy (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003).60 Léon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe rev. ed. (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 220.61Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: U of California P, 1997).62Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Race, and Nation in Pre-Colonial Germany, 1770–1871 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997); Geoff Eley and Bradley Naranch, eds., German Cultures of Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, forthcoming).63Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Marvellous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), 63.64Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2000); Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, The Language of Nazi Genocide: Linguistic Violence and the Struggle of Germans of Jewish Ancestry (New York: Cambridge UP, 2009); Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011).65Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale UP, 2007), 3.66Ibid., 35–6.67Isabel V. Hull, “Military Culture and the Production of ‘Final Solutions’ in the Colonies: The Example of Wilhelminian Germany,” in Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan, eds., The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003): 141–162; also Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2005).68Raffael Scheck, Hitler's African Victims: The German Massacre of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006).69Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford UP, 2009); Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Imperialism and Colonialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); also Michael Meng, “Eastern Europe as an Imperial Space,” paper from the 2009 conference, “Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany.”70Doris Reiprich and Erika Ngambi ul Kuo, “Our Father was Cameroonian, Our Mother, East Prussian, We Are Mulattoes,” in Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out, eds. May Opitz, et al (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1992), 56–76.71Poliakov, 3172Eric T. Jennings, “Writing Madagascar Back into the Madagascar Plan,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 2 (Fall 2007): 187–217.73Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005); Ben Shepherd, War in the Wild East: The German Army and Soviet Partisans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004).74Poliakov, 7975Instructive in different ways are Mahmoud Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2002); Philip D. Morgan and Sean Hawkins, eds., Black Experience and the Empire (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006); and Emily Osborn, Our New Husbands Are Here: Households, Gender, and Politics in a West African State from Slave Trade to Colonial Rule (Columbus: Ohio UP, 2011).76Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's ‘Heart of Darkness’,” Massachusetts Review 18.4 (1977): 782–94.77Alan E. Steinweis, “Eastern Europe and the Notion of the ‘Frontier’ in Germany to 1945,” Yearbook of European Studies 13 (1999): 56–69.78Kristin Kopp remarks at German Studies Association 2008; also Kopp, “Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland,” in German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany, eds. Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia UP, 2011): 146–63.79See the forum, “German History beyond National Socialism,” in German History 29, no. 3 (2011): 470–84.80See A. Dirk Moses, “Redemptive Antisemitism and the Imperialist Imaginary,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, eds. Christian Wiese and Paul Betts (London: Continuum, 2010): 233–54.81Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008), 372–3.82Phillip T. Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2007).83Christian Streit, Keine Kameraden: Die Wehrmacht und die Deutsche Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy New York, 2006); Peter and in The Oxford of Holocaust Studies, eds. Peter and (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010); Destruction of the European Jews (New Yale UP, ed., also Saul Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, (New York: 1996), L. of World War The 2011 C. in Military History, The Journal of Military History 2011): The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From to the Final (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, “Die der aus dem der in Max der & in Twentieth-Century German Culture (Ann U of P, and eds., The Diary of Adam (New York: and 1979), in ed., The Nazi Genocide of the and (New York: Berghahn, National and the for Children in the (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008); in Nazi Rule and (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, Doris L. Bergen, “The Nazi of and the of in Eastern Journal of Contemporary History (October also and and the Nazi Policy in the and Gerhard Wolf, and Racial The in from “Beyond the Racial Klemperer, Language of the Third (New York: European Empire: Italian Occupation during the World War (New York: Cambridge UP, 2006); beyond the Jews and the Experience of in the paper at on to the of Jews in the German Reich and the Thomas and eds., in the Alternative of the Between and the (London: also Peter in the of no. 3 (2003): L. and of the paper at the German Studies see also and Martin Nazi The for the Extermination of the Jews in (New York: Holocaust A Jewish Perspective (London: in and eds., vol. War and Racial Extermination U of P, “The and the in Jewish in by in by ed. (New York: the Holocaust in the of (Stanford: Stanford UP, Aly and Susanne der Auschwitz und die für die : a on 6, with the of the of European the Reich for the of für die into a with numerous in to of and of See also Götz Aly, für der des J. Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism New York, London: Harcourt & Genocide: A Perspective The History and of Genocide: Analysis and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 23.