The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

by Casper Erichsen

  The critical role of the colonial soldiers of the Second Reich in the birth of the Third has been almost completely forgotten. The best visual record that reveals the links between the colonial army and the Nazi movement is stored in the film canisters of the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. The first and most striking feature of the early Nazi films is their amateurism. More accustomed to the later films of Leni Riefenstahl, we have come to imagine the Nazis en masse as ordered, symmetrical, purposeful and always on the move. These early films are static and banal by comparison. They show the first Nazis and their supporters in Munich’s squares, and on rain-soaked parade grounds waiting for speeches or assembling for marches. Most of the framings are wide shots, capturing as much of the action and as many of the players as possible. Only occasionally are there close-ups of groups or individuals; even Hitler rarely appears alone. The framing hints at the confusion of the times, as if the cameraman was uncertain as to the significance of the events he was recording and, to be safe, filmed as widely as his lens would allow, in case some figure in the margins was destined for greatness or power.

  In Riefenstahl’s films of the vast Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s, the Nazis appear in the uniforms and symbols of the Third Reich. In these early party gatherings the men filmed shuffling together for the photographers wear a bewildering array of uniforms, hats, insignia, tunics and medals – the symbols and honours of the Reich that had so recently collapsed. Through this muddle of uniforms, the spectrum of various military and paramilitary subcultures from which the Nazis drew their early support is clearly visible. Alongside the old Prussian generals with their spiked Pickelhaube helmets and ex-Freikorps commanders proudly wearing their modern Stalhelm is a uniform that is now almost completely unrecognisable: that of the Schutztruppe officers. The desert-brown tunic and wide-brimmed hat of the men who had avenged Germany after the Boxer Rebellion and exterminated the Herero and Nama appears time and again in these films. In the 1920s the uniform was a potent reminder of the painful loss of Germany’s colonies and their living space. Today the Stalhelm is an instantly recognisable icon of Nazi aggression and the Pickelhaube, although rendered slightly comical by historical distance, is firmly associated with the sabre-rattling militarism of the old Prussian-dominated Germany of the Kaisers. The Schutztruppe uniform, in its obscurity, is untarnished by any association with Nazism.

  One feature of the Schutztruppe uniform has a direct association with Nazism, though that connection has been obscured. The brown shirts of the SA, the first symbol of Nazi brutality, were surplus Schutztruppe uniforms. They had been manufactured for von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Schutztruppe units in German East Africa, but as von Lettow-Vorbeck and his men had been cut off from Germany for the entire duration of the war, the uniforms had become unwanted army surplus. They were procured for the SA probably by Gerhard Rossbach, another former Freikorps commander and reputedly the homosexual lover of Ernst Röhm.

  Nazism as a political ideology emerged, half-formed and half-baked, from the primordial, Völkisch soup of the Munich beer halls. Just as the soldiers of the lost colonial empire in Africa were key players in the emergence of the party as a political and paramilitary force in Munich, the philosophers of colonial expansion, racial inequality and Völkisch nationalism were among its most important intellectual benefactors.

  In this early stage – between 1919 and 1923 – what is most striking about Nazism as an ideology was its unoriginality. There was little within the party’s manifesto – the ‘twenty-five points’ – that distinguished the Nazis from many of the other conservative parties that had sprung up in Munich and across Germany. Other than its opposition to the Treaty of Versailles, the party’s programme was remarkably similar to the stated aims of innumerable pre-war Völkisch parties, such as the Pan-Germanic League and the Fatherland party.

  Nazism’s roots in Völkisch mysticism and nationalist politics of the Second Reich have encouraged some historians to look for a single inspirational figure from whom Hitler might have derived political inspiration. The fact is that Nazism was not so much invented as reassembled from the enormous array of traditional nationalist obsessions and the racial pseudo-sciences that had mushroomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The acute fear of encirclement by other European powers, a determined belief that Germany was chronically overcrowded and an unshakeable suspicion that the nation was being denied her rightful place in the world – these were all concerns that exercised the Kaiser and his clique as much as the future Führer and his party. The prejudices and neuroses of the Second Reich were passed down to Hitler and the Nazis like family silver.

  Perhaps the most critical stage of the synthesis and appropriation of old ideas took place between 1923 and 1925. In November 1923 the Nazis attempted to seize power in Bavaria by force. The Munich Beer Hall Putsch was a spectacular mistake, an absurdly premature grasp for power. General von Epp considered it to be so badly organised that he refused to participate, but was persuaded to help clean up the political mess left in its wake. Yet this crass miscalculation provided Hitler with the time and space to complete his political education.

  Imprisonment at Landsberg Castle, on the edge of Munich, should have been the end of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the end of the Nazi party. He was, to all intents and purposes, a washed-up beer-hall agitator, yesterday’s man. As his trial began, the newspapers confidently predicted the end of his political career. Yet when Hitler was released at the end of 1924, he was politically stronger, and had codified and ordered Nazism into a political ideology. At the heart of that process was his autobiography and political manifesto – Mein Kampf.

  Away from the Munich beer halls and the task of organising the party and dominating its membership, Hitler peered back into the history of German mysticism, Völkisch nationalism and the history of German colonialism, in both Africa and the East. He communed with the philosophers and scientists who had travelled the same intellectual paths before him and took from his fellow travellers only what he needed to support his own simplistic ideas. With fellow prisoner Rudolf Hess taking dictation in their comfortable suite of prison rooms – and they were more rooms than cells – Hitler explored the scientific racism that had flourished during the age of empire. His reading took him back to Friedrich Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory, Arthur Gobineau’s theories on racial mixing and the principles behind Francis Galton’s pseudo-science of eugenics – by then distorted by an army of eugenicists and race hygienists, including Eugen Fischer. Years later, when describing his time in Landsberg, Hitler claimed to have also read Nietzsche’s philosophy, the memoirs of Bismarck and the works of Heinrich von Treitschke, the nationalist German historian and teacher of Heinrich Class, the leader of the Pan-Germanic League. Although many aspects of the political credo that appear in Mein Kampf had certainly begun to emerge before Hitler’s imprisonment, it was within the walls of Landsberg Castle that his ideas crystallised. Many of the conclusions he reached remained unshakeable convictions for the rest of his life.

  At the core of the ideology outlined in Mein Kampf was Hitler’s dedication to the Social Darwinian notion of the struggle for existence. Mein Kampf is littered with analogies of the struggle for life taken from the natural world – as were the speeches that Hitler gave in the months leading up to the Beer Hall Putsch. What was true for animals and plants, he believed, was true for humans: life was a perpetual battle for existence in which the strong were predestined to overwhelm and destroy the weak. Hitler’s belief in ‘the struggle’ provided him with a theor etical framework through which to see the world and a pseudoscientific language with which to describe it. Social Darwinism also permitted Hitler, like the militarists and racists of the previous century, to explain away terrible acts and justify the destruction or enslavement of other peoples as being natural, inevitable and therefore somehow moral. Of course, many Germans who accepted the apparent logic of Social Darwinism did not support imperialism, anti-Semitism or militarism. Yet much of the medical profession
, the criminal justice system, the army and the ruling elite had by the 1920s come to view conflicts between races, nations and classes in similar ways to Hitler. This great cultural shift had taken place long before the Nazis emerged as a major political force, and similar ideas had taken root in most European nations, as well as in America and Japan. However, the widespread acceptance of the general principles of Social Darwinism and equanimity with which millions in Germany had come to view the displacement or destruction of the ‘weak’ eased Hitler’s rise to power. The same phenomenon later helped soothe the conscienses of those millions of Germans, soldiers and civilians who chose to follow Hitler’s orders.

  Of all the theories to come from the nineteenth-century world of Social Darwinism and scientific racism, the one Hitler accepted most unquestioningly was Friedrich Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory. Hitler was probably well versed in the principles of Lebensraum theory long before his incarceration but, as with a range of other ideas that became central to Nazi ideology, he was able to explore it further at Landsberg Castle. Before he had become embroiled in the Nazi party, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess had been the protégé of the foremost living authority on Lebensraum theory and the work of Friedrich Ratzel: Professor Karl Haushoffer. Haushoffer lectured in geopolitics at the University of Munich, and at one point had appealed to Hess to abandon politics and return to his studies. The evidence suggests that, while in prison, Hitler read Haushoffer’s theories and discussed them with Hess. After the war Haushoffer claimed that Hitler had read Ratzel’s Political Geography while at Landsberg.13

  Professor Haushoffer is known to have visited his former pupil Hess and Hitler in Landsberg. Speaking years later, Haushoffer recalled discussing Lebensraum theory, claiming that ‘Hitler never understood these things and did not have the right outlook for understanding them.’ Haushoffer also stated that during his visits he had always made special efforts to avoid being left alone with Hitler. ‘I always had the feeling’, he told an interviewer, ‘that he felt the distrust of a semi-educated person towards a scientifically educated person.’14

  Whether or not Hitler was inspired by Haushoffer and Hess, or took his ideas directly from Ratzel, it is clear that the notion of Lebensraum, as outlined in Mein Kampf, was little different from that of the Pan-Germans or Second Reich colonialists like Paul Rohrbach. Like them, he believed that nations were essentially organisms whose health was determined by their ability to expand. Borders, in Hitler’s view, were mere lines on maps. The limit of a people’s geographic spread was determined by their racial vitality.

  In 1923 Hitler believed that Germany’s future Lebensraum lay in the East, the lands from which her armies had so recently been expelled. He regarded his crusade for Lebensraum as the continuation of a tradition of German conquest and colonisation of the East that had begun in the thirteenth century and been briefly revived during World War I. There was, however, one critical grain of originality in the way Hitler viewed the East and its people. In World War I, the most prominent supporters of Eastern colonisation, including General von Ludendorff, the Pan-Germanic League and the various nationalist movements, had envisioned an Eastern empire in which the Slavic and Jewish peoples would be rendered economically dependent and culturally subservient to Germany. Germany’s role in the East had been one of Kulturträger – the bringers of culture and civilisation. The introduction of German Kultur in the East would help raise the Poles, Ukrainians and Baltic peoples from their current state of backwardness and lethargy. Hitler’s vision was profoundly different. He cast people of the East into racial categories devised in the nineteenth century, giving them the status of ‘colonial peoples’ – a term Hitler used to describe the Ukrainians.

  Before the German Volk could take on the great task of creating ‘living space’ in Russia and apply Hitler’s racial policy to the Slavs and Jews, they would need to undergo a process of racial purification. The degenerate, defective and alien elements that had, in Hitler’s view, contaminated the Aryan bloodline had to be weeded out. The Reich was to be purged of the weak, and foreign races would have to be driven out or prevented from breeding with Germans. The National Socialist state, Hitler declared in Mein Kampf, ‘must set race in the centre of all life’.15

  Like much of Hitler’s core ideology, his dream of a racial state was in large part unoriginal. The Pan-Germanic League and the Deutschbund, two of the most influential Völkisch societies of the Second Reich, had, in the late nineteenth century, declared their determination to keep ‘fighting intermarriage with non-Aryans’.16 Hitler believed that medical and racial science had advanced to such a point that it was now possible in a practical sense to forge a state in which the racially undesirable and the weakest in society could be excluded from the German bloodline. In his quest for evidence to substantiate this vision and for inspiration as to how it might be realised, Hitler turned to the pseudo-science of race hygiene – the Germanic strain of Francis Galton’s science of eugenics. Hitler’s search for scientific legitimacy again brought him into contact with the men of the lost colonial empire and the ideas that had been partly developed in Africa.

  German race hygiene was born in 1895 when Alfred Ploetz had published The Foundations of Racial Hygiene. In 1904, the year Germany had begun her war to annihilate the Herero people, Ploetz had helped launch the eugenics journal The Archives of Race Science and Social Biology, a periodical which was published by Julius Lehman’s family company. In 1923, as Hitler began to draft Mein Kampf, Julius Lehman re-enters our story. Following his arrest as a member of the Kampfbund Thule in 1919, Lehman had been briefly imprisoned, and was incarcerated when a fellow Thule Society member, Anton Drexler, founded the German Workers’ party. On his release, Lehman quickly joined the party in 1920 and even published some of its early propaganda literature.17 By 1923 he had become one of the wealthy patrons who helped bankroll the party. Lehman had also developed close personal links to Hitler himself. Unlike many of Hitler’s other influential backers, Lehman was willing to get his hands dirty and had even played a marginal role in the Beer Hall Putsch, allowing his villa to be used to hold hostage a group of Bavarian government officials whom Hitler needed out of the way for the duration.18

  The year Hitler was sent to Landsberg Castle, Lehman’s publishing house was busy producing the second edition of what fast became the most influential German book on race hygiene and biological racism. Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene was cowritten by Erwin Baur, Fritz Lens and Eugen Fischer. Fischer’s chapters were based on his research into the Rehoboth Basters in South-West Africa. The book had been warmly received and well reviewed in Germany, translated into English for wider publication and had helped advance the careers and reputations of all three of its authors. For Eugen Fischer, Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene was the first step in his journey to becoming one of the most powerful figures in Nazi racial science.

  Fischer’s contribution to the book set his study of the Rehoboth Basters within the context of a wider survey of the various racial types of humanity, as he categorised them. Fischer argued that for the highest races to mix with the lowest was a degenerative act, a pollutant that threatened the health of the higher race. To address this acute danger, Fischer and his coauthors suggested that a programme of positive selective breeding was needed. This would help purify the Aryan race and accentuate its inherently noble qualities and innate talents, creating a true and undiluted Master Race.

  While he was in Landsberg, Hitler was given a copy of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene by Julius Lehman. Historians have long argued that Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene helped shape Hitler’s views of race and racial purity, and one of the authors, Fritz Lens, was himself utterly convinced that the book had been one of the key influences on Hitler as he wrote Mein Kampf. In 1931 Lens claimed that ‘many passages in it [Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene] are mirrored in Hitler’s expressions’.19 Although there is much in the book that Hitler might have disagreed with, if he read his copy he would have surely taken fr
om it, as always, only those passages that supported his own opinions.

  Hitler’s personal copy of Human Heredity and Racial Hygiene survived the war. It is housed in the rare books division of the US Library of Congress. The dedication to Hitler, written by Lehman on the frontispiece, reads: ‘To Adolf Hitler, the primary fighter for the meaningful recognition of the race question as the most important cornerstone in our deepening knowledge.’20

  Notes – 16 A Passing Corporal

  1. Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 274.

  2. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 99.

  3. David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 25.

  4. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 122.

  5. Large, Where Ghosts Walked, p. 91.

  6. Count von Arco-Valley survived the left-wing governments that followed the regime of Kurt Eisner. He also outlived both the Nazis and the war, only to be run over and killed by an American army jeep in 1945.

  7. Harold J. Gordon, Jr, The Reichswehr and the German Republic 1919–1926 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 281.

  8. Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler (London: Robinson, 2004), p. 176.

  9. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 81.

  10. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 148.

  11. John Lukacs, Tocqueville: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 187.