A New Look at the Origins of Nazism

Historians have traditionally tried to find the answer to the question of Germany’s “special path” before 1914 in the failure of the revolution of 1848, in the dominance of aristocratic elites over a subservient middle class, and in belligerent Prussian militarism. Shelley Baranowsky, the author of Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, is one of those who is looking elsewhere.

Her story begins with Bismarck’s reluctant agreement to establish colonies. By the time he was dismissed in 1890, and Kaiser Wilhelm II made policy single-handedly, Germany had a modest overseas empire, consisting of leftovers after the British and French had taken their share. The Germans found their new possessions unexpectedly difficult to handle and responded to resistance with policies of extreme harshness.

This conflicts radically with what, until not long ago, had been the general view of German colonial practices. They were thought to be relatively benign. Recent research demonstrated the opposite. From the beginning, Germany conducted military warfare against native peoples – the other imperial powers did not. Prussian doctrine dictated that the complete destruction of the enemy was the prime objective of war. Moreover, fear of guerilla attacks created a genocidal mentality. 150,000 Hebe were killed by starvation in Tanganyika and 300,000 natives in the Maji-Maji revolt. Sixty percent of Hereros and Nama were exterminated in Namibia. Obviously, military objectives became enmeshed with racism.

Gradually, Germany adopted an aggressive Weltpolitik – world policy – to gain a “place in the sun.” In the words of Richard Evans, the reviewer of Baranowsky’s book in the London Review of Books (February 3), “an uncontrollable imperialist enthusiasm bubbled up from the steamy undergrowth of pressure-group politics.” This focused on Europe as much as on the possessions overseas. There were demands for war in the east to rescue millions of imperiled German-speakers who lived in eastern Europe and incorporate them in an expanded Reich. The Pan-German League pressured the government to annex Holland, Flanders, Romania, Switzerland and the Habsburg Empire – all this before 1914.

Once Hitler was in power, memories of Germany’s overseas empire were revived. But the hundreds of concentration camps that the Nazis set up in the first half of 1933, and into which they drove 100,000 of their political opponents, were not a case in point. They bore little resemblance to the African camps. Their primary purpose was intimidation: almost all the inmates were released by 1934 when the task of repression was turned over to other authorities.

However, there were striking resemblances between the Nuremberg laws of 1935 and the anti-miscegenation laws passed in Namibia. Göring’s father had been colonial governor there and the eugenicist Eugen Fischer used his research on mixed-race groups in that region to argue against racial mixing during the Third Reich. Josef Mengele had trained in Fischer’s institute.

In the age of pre-war imperialism, European powers, including the Germans, tried to destroy the economic independence of conquered people and turn them into a docile labour force. They all engaged in ethnic cleansing of one kind or another.

However, the Nazis introduced an ideological element that had no parallel. The invasion of Poland was designed from the outset to destroy the Polish nation. Nazi policies culminated in the General Plan, enacted in 1942, which envisaged the extermination by starvation and disease of at least thirty and possibly as many as forty-five million Slavs, and the resettlement of Eastern Europe by German colonists. That was to be the Nazis’ “place in the sun.”

The “final solution,” i.e., the extermination of the Jews in gas chambers or killings as decided at the Wannsee Conference, had no precedent. Only the Jews, not the Slavs, were designated as the Weltfeind, the global enemy, not a regional obstacle posed by savages.

The proposition to draw parallels and distinctions between the colonial age and the Nazi empire constitutes an important new element in the search for the origins of the Third Reich.