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

by Casper Erichsen

  Over the course of this five-hour meeting, many of the states of Eastern Europe were redesigned as colonial administrative districts. Their borders were to be redrafted for the convenience of future German administrators. The Balkans would be renamed Ostland, other states were to be bisected or amalgamated. The Crimea was to be evacuated of its entire population – whom Hitler referred to as ‘foreigners’ – and resettled with ethnically German farmers. The Ukraine would become a sort of plantation colony with the produce of its wheat fields redirected into German mouths.

  Towards the end of the meeting, the viceroys who would rule these colonies were appointed. A list of Nazi functionaries were plucked from semi-obscurity and set on the road to infamy. The names of some still resonate in parts of Eastern Europe. Fritz Sauckel became the Gauliter of Thuringia, Heinrich Lohse the Reich Commissioner of the Baltic States. Erich Koch, whose brutal methods in Poland had gained Hitler’s approval, was given the task of transforming the Ukraine into a twentieth-century slave state. Others were appointed prematurely. Siegfried Kasche, whom Himmler once dismissed as ‘a man of the desk’, was never able to take up his post as Gauliter of Moscow, though he still nursed ridiculous hopes of doing so as late as 1944.2

  At eight in the evening the meeting was declared over. It was still light as the delegates left their seats and prepared for dinner. On a train called Amerika, on the outskirts of a Polish town, a German dictator had declared the birth of an empire in Russia. It was perhaps no more preposterous than the birth of any other empire.

  We are not accustomed to think of imperialism as a phenomenon that touched the continent of Europe itself. Yet Hitler’s war for Lebensraum was the greatest colonial war in history. It brought into existence a realm of genocide, slavery and barbarism that consumed half of Europe for four years. It saw slave-hunting parties, reminiscent of those sent into the forests of King Leopold’s Congo, scouring the woods of the USSR. Thousands of villages were wiped off the map in punitive raids, and 11 million civilians, 6 million of them Jews, were systematically murdered, many in industrial killing factories.

  By contrast, Germany’s struggle against the Western powers was mostly fought according to a code of military ethics whose immediate origins stretched back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Although there were a number of infamous atrocities committed against combatants and civilians in Western Europe, they pale in comparison to the routine barbarity of the East – fought by the same regime during the same years. But the war against the Jews, Poles and the peoples of the USSR was not barbarous simply because established European conventions of war were abandoned. Rather, it was shaped and directed by another set of conventions, those developed in Europe’s colonies and on the frontiers of America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although European history is not without its wars and massacres, the Nazi war for Lebensraum took much of its inspiration from the colonial world.

  In the 1870s and 1880s, colonialism in Africa and Asia had been transformed by the emergence of Social Darwinian racism. Its advocates had learned to reject the appeals of the missionaries and the ‘sentimentalists’ who believed that the dark races could be educated and raised to higher cultural levels. By the end of the nineteenth century imperialists had instead come to imagine the colonial process as the physical expression of racial superiority. Some envisaged its climax as the extinction of all but the higher Northern European race.

  Half a century later, Germany’s eastern colonial impulse underwent a similar shift. As it made the transition from the Second to the Third Reich, it entered its own Social Darwinian phase and fused with a strain of German anti-Semitism of appalling virulence. By the summer of 1941 the Nazis, and millions of their followers, had come to regard the Jews, Gypsies and Slavic peoples of the East in ways that were little different from how the Schutztruppe and settlers of German South-West Africa had regarded the Herero and Nama four decades earlier.

  In the Nazi world view, the East had changed little since General von Ludendorff’s armies had been driven out in 1918 and 1919. Without German leadership, the Slavs had supposedly remained in stasis, incapable of stamping even their limited culture on their landscape. The Jews – whom the Nazis regarded as a dangerous and parasitic race – had spent the inter-war years infecting Slavic USSR with the peculiarly Jewish poison of Bolshevism. Germany, by contrast, was a nation transformed: a ‘racial state’ in which marriage, reproduction, citizenship were governed by race laws. When the Nazis applied the same biological-racial certainties that governed the lives of German citizens to the peoples of the East, the sheer folly of her former policies became clear. By 1941 the paternalist belief that through spreading her language, wealth and Kultur, Germany could uplift the peoples of the East – both Slavs and Jews – was dismissed by the Nazis as a deluded fantasy, based on unscientific ideas. Nine months into the war against the USSR, Joseph Goebbels noted in his diary that the ‘nationalist currents’ encouraged by the Kaiser’s armies could be seen in the former Baltic States, then under German occupation. In the same entry, he went on to mock those among these Slavic minorities who erroneously ‘imagined that the German Wehrmacht would shed its blood to set up new governments in these midget states … One would have to take the imperial regime of Kaiser Wilhelm as a model if one were to inaugurate so short-sighted a policy. National Socialism is much more cold-blooded and much more realistic in all these questions. It does only what is useful for its own people.’3

  What is perhaps most surprising is not that the Nazis were capable of using against fellow Europeans ideologies and methodologies previously restricted to the frontiers and the colonies, but that the connections between the Nazi empire and the colonial violence of the age of empire should have been so little explored and little discussed in the decades since.4 This is especially surprising since there were those living and writing during the years of the Third Reich who recognised exactly that continuity.

  In 1942 Karl Korsch, a German Marxist émigré, became one of the first intellectuals to acknowledge that ‘the Nazis have simply extended to “civilised” European peoples the methods hitherto reserved for the “natives” or “savages” living outside so-called civilisation’.5 The eminent German political economist Moritz Bonn recognised the true face of Nazism even before the war had begun. In a paper probably written in the thirties, though never published, Bonn argued that Nazi violence against the Jews drew directly upon the racial ideologies that Germany had used to justify the Kaiser’s holocaust in German South-West Africa forty years earlier. The Nazis, Bonn argued,

  accept and amplify the racial theories by which General von Trotha had justified his policy of extirpating the rebellious Hereros by making them die of thirst in the Omaheke Desert: that according to the law of nature inferior races must die out when brought in contact with superior races. The Nazi creed is based on the same cheap conception of Darwinism, and like their colonial predecessors, they do not believe in the unaided working of this supposed law of nature

  He went on, ‘They are now doing on a much larger scale to the Jews what had been intended as punishment for the Hereros.’6

  Korsch and Bonn were not isolated voices. The Nazi elite themselves understood that they were part of a historical continuum. When speaking in private, Hitler, Himmler and Göring, along with many of the apparatchiks they appointed to administer the occupied territories, repeatedly compared their war in the East and the empire it was intended to create to earlier colonial ventures. The British Empire, as Göring and others pointed out, had been won by conquest. Its existence was routinely justified by claims of British racial supremacy over the subject peoples. Germany’s conquest of the European East was merely an extension of the same principles to Europe. Göring continued to insist that German colonialism was little different from that of Britain, France or the United States right up to the days before his suicide in Cell 5 of Nuremberg prison.

  It was Hitler who felt the greatest need to place his brutal policie
s within a wider historical framework. On numerous occasions he spoke lucidly of his genuine admiration for the British Empire and the pragmatic professionalism of the men who ruled over it. A month after launching Operation Barbarossa, he told guests at his headquarters that Germany needed to ‘learn from the English, who, with two hundred and fifty thousand men … govern four hundred million Indians’. A week later he stated: ‘What India is for England the territories of Russian will be for us. If only I can make the German people understand what this space means for our future.’7

  While Hitler praised the way the British had ‘learned the art of being masters’, he often turned his attention to the historical myths of the North American frontier for precedents as to how the war in the East was to be fought, and when explaining what Lebensraum in the East would mean for the German people.8 In Hitler’s mind, the rise of the United States as a world power demonstrated what might be achieved when ‘race’ and ‘space’ were combined. He believed that the North American continent had been a vast, blank canvas on which the Aryan race had been able to express its innate superiority. Through a series of historic and genocidal wars, the Aryan core of the American population had driven out or exterminated the racially inferior indigenous peoples. With the living space of a whole continent, they had created a nation of enormous industrial power with incalculable military might. In the summer of 1942, in discussions on the brutal war being fought behind the German frontlines against Stalin’s army of Partisans, Hitler warned that such a conflict would inevitably degenerate into ‘a real Indian war’. On another occasion he predicted that the German empire that would emerge from the war would become ‘Germany’s California’.9

  To Hitler, the decades of genocide and extermination visited on the peoples of Africa, Asia and the Americas were proof of his deepest conviction: that the unstoppable process of Social Darwinism was in operation across the globe. Yet when discussing the Nazi empire in private conversations, recorded by Martin Bormann during the years 1941 and 1942, Hitler focused not on the fates of the weaker races – the Jews, Slavs and Gypsies – but on how the endless Lebensraum and vast resources of the region would expand the power and enhance the racial health of his own German people. In this endeavour, too, he looked to European colonial history – including that of Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany – for precedents, inspiration and cautionary tales.

  In his most expansive fantasies, Hitler looked forward to a time after the war and beyond his own lifetime. He described a vast empire populated by 100 million German settlers. Even when imagining the near future, Hitler spoke of an empire built on an awe-inspiring scale and at a ferocious speed. ‘In ten years’ time’, he said in May 1942, ‘we must be in a position to announce twenty million Germans have been settled in the territories already incorporated in the Reich and those which our troops are at present occupying.’10

  Detailed planning of the geography, economics and ethnic make-up of the future empire had begun long before the Panzers started to roll East. It culminated in late 1941 with General Plan Ost (General Plan East). The Plan described how the Nazi empire would stretch from the borders of an expanded German Reich to the Ural Mountains. The eastern border, known as the ‘Eastern Wall’, was to be a living barrier of German settlements and fortresses, manned by a colonial militia of veterans and their families. Against this bulwark, future waves of Slavic barbarians would crash and be repulsed. Like many aspects of Nazi colonialism, the ‘Eastern Wall’ was a concept that had first emerged during the years of the Second Reich.

  On the western side of the wall, a new world was to be brought into existence. The first phase of Nazi colonisation envisaged the repopulation of European Russia with ethnic Germans. It was suggested that this aspect of the plan might be completed around the year 1970. Despite its astounding ambition, General Plan Ost was conservative and restrained when compared to some of the wild fantasies of the Führer. Whereas the planners estimated that initially only 10 million Germans could be resettled – and that even this would take thirty years to achieve – Hitler believed double that figure might be settled in a third of the time.

  The farms and villages to which these millions were to be sent, like the fields in which they would toil, would all be redesigned. National Socialism, like much of the right-wing German Völkisch theorising from which it was born, remained convinced of the existence of a mystical link between the soil and the Volk. The Slavic peoples of Russia and her satellites had shaped the landscape only as much as their lowly racial status would allow. The ‘East’ – as it was usually vaguely described in Nazi documents – was a landscape completely unsuited to the character of the higher German race. A wholesale transformation would have to take place: fields expanded, marshes drained and rivers re-channelled. The farms created for the settlers were to be modern and spacious and, along the best roads outside Germany, ‘a belt of handsome villages’ would run.

  Hitler believed that the task of transforming Russia into what he described as a ‘Garden of Eden’ would bring about an equally dramatic transformation of the German people themselves. Both Hitler and Himmler were convinced that through the task of taming the Russian wilderness, the Germans would realise their destiny and become ‘a frontier people’. The building of the German empire would draw the bravest and the best from the Reich. The East would be ‘a country where they will not find their bed nicely made for them’, Hitler warned. Having been toughened by life on the frontier, Germany’s new colonialists would become the future racial bedrock upon which the Thousand-Year Reich would stand.11 From among their ranks, a new generation of leaders would emerge. ‘In ten years’ time’, Hitler predicted in 1941, ‘we’ll have formed an elite whom we’ll know that we can count on … whenever there are new difficulties to master. We’ll produce from it all a new type of man, a race of rulers, a breed of viceroys.’12

  The Nazis’ ‘breed of viceroys’ would spring not just from the farmer settlers, but also from the SS – the masters of the master race. To the leaders of the SS, the Eastern empire was to become a sort of racial gymnasium in which the new German elite would be made fit for future struggles. It was Himmler who most clearly articulated how the empire would become the incubator of the new SS. In an infamous speech given at Posen in 1943 to the SS leadership – during which he openly discussed the extermination of the Jews – Himmler outlined his vision for the East after the war:

  If the peace is a final one, we shall be able to tackle our great work of the future. We shall colonise. We shall indoctrinate our boys with the laws of the SS … In twenty to thirty years we must really be able to provide the whole of Europe with its ruling class. If the SS together with the farmers … then run the colony on a grand scale, without any restraint, without any questions of tradition, but with nerve and revolutionary impetus, we shall in twenty years push the national boundary 500 kilometres eastward … We shall impose our laws on the east.13

  The collapse of Operation Barbarossa and the move to defensive warfare in the winter of 1941–2 meant that the extent of German colonisation during World War II was limited to a few small settlements in the Ukraine and Poland. The driving force behind these projects was Himmler and the SS. In his capacity as Reich Commissar for the Strengthening of Germandom, Himmler pushed through the creation of twenty-eight separate villages populated with German settlers and clustered around his field headquarters at Hegewald, in occupied Ukraine. The original Jewish inhabitants of the area were almost all exterminated and those of Slavic origin either retained as slave labour or ‘evacuated’ into the labour camps. Other German settlements were created at Zhytomyr, again in the Ukraine, and at Warthegau in Poland.

  Although short-lived, there were deliberate attempts to draw links between these settlements and the memory of Germany’s lost empire in Africa. In the colony of Zhytomyr, members of the Togo Ost Society applied models of colonial agriculture developed in the former African colony to the black soil of the Ukraine. The following year, German farmers from Eastern A
frica were transplanted into the Warthegau settlement, in the hope that their colonial expertise would inspire other Germans to come forward and take up the challenge of colonising the East, a task for which few of Hitler’s countrymen ever showed any great enthusiasm.14

  The purification by ordeal of the Aryan ‘master race’ would be only one effect of the Nazi’s Lebensraum policy. The other would be the displacement of the ‘lower’ races of the East. By the end of 1941 Germany had not only acquired a vast colonial territory, she had also brought a subject population of anything from 40 to 65 million under her control; 11 million were Jews, the rest mainly Slavs. In Nazi ideology and in modern historical memory, the Nazis’ racial contempt for the Slavs is overshadowed by their more fanatical and obsessive hatred of the Jews. Nazi anti-Semitism had Darwinian elements but was deeper, more complex and multi-layered. The Slavs’ place in the Nazis’ racial world-view was more directly shaped by colonial thinking.

  In preparing the army for the brutality of a ‘war of annihilation’, the Nazis found within the traditions, language and methodologies of European colonialism, pre-existing categories in which to reclassify the Slavs. By reducing the nationalities of the East to what Hitler was to call ‘colonial peoples’, the violence and excesses of both colonial war and colonial administration provided the regime with an inventory of military practices, terms and justifications. These practices, even within Germany’s own relatively modest colonial experience, included slavery, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and genocide.

  Even before the launch of Barbarossa, both Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry and the SS had waged campaigns specifically designed to reinforce the low racial status of the Slavic peoples. Propaganda onslaughts were directed at both the German public and the army. In 1942 the SS issued a pamphlet titled Der Untermenschen (The Subhumans) that stressed the racial differences between Slavs and Aryans. Der Untermenschen was designed to harden racial attitudes against the Slavs within the ranks of the army by setting photographs of supposed Aryan perfection alongside images of Slavic subhumanity. Four million copies were printed, helping to bring the phrase Untermenschen into the lexicon of wartime terminology. In the months before the invasion, the army command also encouraged its troops to make racial distinctions between the various ethnic minorities who filled the ranks of the Red Army. A directive of May 1941 on the behaviour of troops in the upcoming Russian campaign warned that ‘The Asiatic soldiers of the Red Army in particular are devious, cunning and without feeling.’15