From colonial rule to the Holocaust?

Racial hierarchy, dehumanization, concentration camps, settler expansion in the name of “living space,” collective punishment and mass violence: At first glance, the continuities between colonial and Nazi violence appear obvious. In 1941, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler himself compared Eastern Europe to “Germany’s India” after the British colonial model, declaring that “like the English, we shall rule this empire with a handful of men.”

But the extent to which Nazism was shaped by the age of empire, and whether the two systems of violence can even be compared, remains the subject of intense debate. This is particularly true in Germany, where the fear is often expressed that any comparison risks relativizing or minimizing Nazi crimes, and particularly the Holocaust. Others have argued that the intense focus on the Nazi era has, at least in part, come at the expense of a meaningful reckoning with Germany’s colonial history. 

“I do think this is nonsense,” says Stephan Malinowski, a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh. “If it were true, then all other colonial countries who are not discussing the Holocaust, like Great Britain for example, or France or Spain or Portugal, they would then supposed to be very, very attentive to colonial crimes and to colonial history, which it seems to me is not the case.”

“Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence,” a new exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin curated by Malinowski, does not aim to settle the debate but to tell its story.

From colonial brutality to Nazi rule

The exhibition begins with a hippopotamus-hide whip used in African colonies displayed alongside a canister of Zyklon B, the poison used in Nazi gas chambers. The juxtaposition highlights the contrast between colonial violence and the industrialized mass murder of the Holocaust. Yet it also points to connections: Whips were used in Nazi concentration camps, while Fascist Italy deployed chemical weapons against civilians and soldiers during its invasion of Ethiopia (then Abyssinia) in 1935-36.

In the 1930s, anti-colonial thinkers from India to the Caribbean argued that colonialism and fascism were two sides of the same coin. “There is nothing new or original about the blustering exploits of Hitler and Mussolini,” observed the Trinidadian journalist and Pan-Africanist George Padmore in 1938. “They have all been used before by the British in their efforts to obtain the subjection of less powerfully armed and more industrially backward people.”

European colonial rule was marked by the ruthless exploitation of people and resources, often enforced through extreme violence. In “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951), German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt argued that colonial territories served as laboratories for racial ideologies and practices of domination that could be applied beyond the legal constraints of Europe. Arendt described how these later “boomeranged” back into Europe and helped shape totalitarian politics in distinct and unprecedented form.

The Congo Free State, King Leopold II of Belgium‘s private colony from 1885 to 1908, became notorious for its extreme brutality, as colonial authorities used executions, amputations and sexual violence to ensure rubber production quotas were met. Forced labor was central to Nazi rule, with millions of Poles, Ukrainians, Russians and others from the Soviet Union, and Jews, subjected to exploitation and “Vernichtung durch Arbeit” (“extermination through work”). Within a few years, the regime mobilized around 13 to 14 million forced laborers, a scale comparable to the transatlantic slave trade over more than three centuries. The Nazis sought to extract value from their victims at every stage, confiscating their property, exploiting their labor, and even harvesting gold teeth and hair from the dead.

Racism, antisemitism and extermination 

While racism underpinned both colonial empires and Nazism, Malinowski says the goals were different. The colonial powers tended to present assimilation as a path to advancement, forcing colonized people to adopt European culture, serve imperial interests, and suggesting that a select, educated few could gain opportunities at elite institutions such as Oxford or Cambridge. “This is definitely not something that the Nazi regime is offering to Poles or to Russians or let alone to Jews,” added Malinowski.

“In terms of violence, colonial violence was just as extreme as Nazi violence. But Nazi violence was annihilatory and exterminatory compared to colonial violence in the colonies,” says Edward Kissi, a historian at the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. He points to the example of how, unlike European colonial powers in Africa, the Nazis pursued the elimination of Black-Germans or peoples of African descent in Germany through forced sterilization. “Even in racism, colonial color-based racism and colonial anti-Jewish sentiments were fundamentally different from what the Nazis pursued.” 

On October 2, 1904, German General Lothar von Trotha issued the “Vernichtungsbefehl” (“extermination order”) following the Herero uprising in German South West Africa (present-day Namibia). Historians generally attribute the order to a combination of racial ideology, a desire to terrorize the population into submission, and efforts to secure colonial control over land, labor and resources. Between 1904 and 1908, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Herero (around 80% of the population) and 10,000 (around half the population) Nama died.

One area where the exhibition draws no direct parallel is the industrialized killing carried out in Nazi death camps such as Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. “Where the two things really diverge is the Holocaust and is the systematic mass murder of the European Jews and it’s murder for the very purpose of murder,” explains Malinowski. The deportation of around 1,800 Jews from the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kos in July 1944 illustrates how Nazi persecution often defied military or economic logic. Even after the war was effectively lost, the community was transported to Auschwitz, where most were murdered immediately upon arrival.

The politics of historical comparison

The issue of the “singularity” of the Holocaust came to the fore during the 1980s “Historikerstreit” (“historians’ dispute”). Historian Ernst Nolte argued that Nazism should be understood in the wider context of 20th-century political violence, and as a response to Bolshevik terror in particular. Critics accused him of downplaying German responsibility for Nazi crimes. 

Since 2020, a renewed debate dubbed the “Historikerstreit 2.0” has focused on whether the Holocaust should be viewed as a unique reference point in German memory culture or be understood alongside the histories of colonialism, racism and empire. The dispute now is less about the legitimacy of comparison than about its implications. 

The mass murder of tens of thousands of the Herero and Nama during four years of German colonial rule is now regarded as the first genocide of the 20th-century. In 2016, Nama representatives walked out of talks after Germany’s chief negotiator said what happened was “incomparable” to the Holocaust. The German government has since recognized the events as genocide “from today’s perspective,” but it has not yet accepted legal liability or agreed to pay formal reparations.

Rethinking Germany’s culture of remembrance

Martinican intellectual Aimé Césaire argued in “Discourse on Colonialism” (1950) that Europe condemned under Nazism forms of violence it had long accepted in its colonies. The exhibition opens amid renewed debates over settler colonialism, the definition of genocide, and the meaning of “never again,” sharpened by Nicaragua’s case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over German support for Israel during the war in Gaza. These tensions are reflected in visitors’ comments in the exhibition’s epilogue, even though the exhibition itself does not address Israel or Palestine beyond a reference to Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, appointed Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921.

Germany has unequivocally accepted responsibility for the Holocaust, which is front and center of the country’s culture of remembrance.  However, Kissi likens Germany’s apparent reluctance to reckon with its colonial history to debates in the US over slavery, in Cambodia over the Khmer Rouge, and in Turkey over the Armenian genocide. According to him, Germany’s contemporary identity cannot be fully understood without examining its colonial history and the ways the Nazis appropriated and transformed aspects of that legacy. “I think Germans and all other human beings who have experienced violent pasts and difficult pasts should be very careful not to delink or dissociate those facts from their present,” Kissi said. “These are historical patterns. It is better to deal with these historical patterns and discomforts than to just fight them and then say this has absolutely nothing to do with German national identity.”

“Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence” is on show at the German Historical Museum until April 11, 2027.