Kaiser's Holocaust (50 page)

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.
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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’.
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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,

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

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 Africa 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.
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