Desolation Without Peace: Nazi Germany's Imperialism and Colonialism

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Table of Contents

Introduction..3

Historiography..4

Empire, imperialism, and colonialism8

Ideological and theoretical foundations of Nazi Imperialism.10

Hitlers Empire12

Conclusion...16

Bibliography17


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Introduction

Empires are created through conquest, subjugation, exploitation, and domination. The empires

of the ancient world relied on superior military force and aggressive diplomacy to extend their

influence over wide swathes of territory. The seaborne empires of early modern history were

driven to expansion enticed by trade, wealth, and competition with other European powers. Theempires of the 19thcentury scurried for colonies in a frenzied series of conquests motivated by

economic exploitation and great power politics. Yet none of these empires were entirely bereft of

positive qualities. Some offered peace and stability, others economic and political modernization,

and all possessed a modicum of inclusivity which provided opportunities for at least some of its

imperial subjects. The expansion of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, however,

constituted a novel and vitriolic form of imperialism, inspired only by the worst practices of its

predecessors. Germanysruthless conquest, subjugation, starvation, massacre, genocide, and

exploitation of populations in Eastern Europe was a harrowing vision of what it means to have

imperialism without restraint. What sets the Nazi Empire apart from other empires in world

history is that none of these were ever quite so destructive, nihilistic, and deeply perverted by anyvalue that goes against the very thread of humanity. The Nazi Empire, writes Michael Burleigh,

was created by violence, lived by violence and was destroyedby violence. In contrast to other

empires created by armed might, which bequeathed art and literature that are still widely

admired, or administrations, customs, languages and legal codes that Europeans and non-

Europeans still adhere to, from Ireland tot India, the tawdry Nazi anti-civilization left nothing of

any worth behind, except perhaps its contemporary function as a secular synonym for human

evil.1

Yet the idea of a Nazi Empire has long been contested. Even though the notion that Germanys

expansion during the Second World War was imperial in nature dates back to the 1940s, itremains to some extent controversial. In part this is because imperialism and colonialism are

concepts normally understood to apply to extra-European conquests held for considerable

periods of time. Mostly, however, it is the absolute terror of the Holocaust and the deep

cynicism with which the Germans massacred entire Eastern European populations which seem

somehow removed from the very concept and logic of empire. Yet the establishing of a colonial

empire was exactly what Hitler had in mind when he imagined the future of the European

continent under German domination. The intention to establish an empire in the heartlands of

Europe, combined with the colonial practices applied by German military, SS, colonial and civil

administrations, constituted an imperial ideology as well as a colonial reality. The extremism of

Nazi Germanys policies has long induced historians with a certain reluctance to apply thecolonial paradigm, but in recent decades they have turned to this analytical tool in order to better

understand this darkest episode of German history. The field, although still contentious, is now

rapidly expanding with lively debate and fascinating scholarship. This paper surveys the recent

historiography on the colonial and imperial paradigms of the Third Reich, reflects on their

validity for the understanding of Nazi German policy in Eastern Europe, and elaborates on the

notion of Nazi Germany as an imperial and colonial state in the European tradition of

imperialism.

1Burleigh, The Third Reich, p. 481


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Historiography

The debate on whether or not the Nazi expansion during the 1930s and 40s constitutes an

episode of imperialism is as old as the war itself. During the war it was asserted by continental

academics in exile that the contentious German academic discipline of geopolitics constituted an

imperial ideology which informed Hitlers decisions, shaped his conception of the world, and ledhim to establish an empire in Europe. In 1943 the Austrian migr Strausz-Hup wrote of the

geopolitics of Karl Haushofer, a preeminent geopolitician widely understood to have influenced

the Fhrer, that it transmitted something that the vaporous cerebrations of Adolf Hitler had

failed to providea coherent doctrine of empire.2Franz Neumann, another migr, wrote in

1942 that geopolitics is nothing but the ideology of imperialist expansion exemplary for the

perversion of scientific thought under the influence of National Socialism. Neumann

extrapolated his imperialism argument to Germanys occupation of the East, writing that

colonial methods have been introduced in their worst forms in Poland.3These remarks fell

within the politicised boundaries of a geopolitical debate which had escalated into real-world

politics when the Nazi leadership did indeed adopt, or rather pervert, existing academic ideas ofgeopolitics such as Lebensrauminto its foreign policy programme. The debate to what extent

German geopoliticians should be held responsible for outlining a Nazi expansion programme

remains undecided, but American wartime authors were quick to blame German academics for

infusing the uncultivated Nazi minds with the blueprint for empire.4

Raphael Lemkin, the progenitor of the concept of genocide, took the argument a step further by

drawing an explicit relation between colonialism and genocide in hisAxis rule in occupied Europe.

Genocide, he wrote, consisted of two phases. One of cultural extermination, and one of cultural

imposition. This latter phase could well result in the removal of oppressed populations

altogether, followed by colonization of the oppressed territory.5

Genocide in Lemkinsconception, however, did not equate mass killing. It referred to a national extermination, which

could occur without executions or gassings. Lemkin argued that these were intrinsic to Nazi

imperialism and colonialism in Europe alone, although he did consider the Holocaust as an

extreme continuation of the genocidal character of colonialism through the ages.6In 1951

Hannah Arendt was among the first post-war authors to draw a direct connection between

Hitlers frenzied expansionism in Europe, and the longer tradition of European imperialism. She

argued that a certain continuity existed between the seaborne empires of history and the

continental imperialism that had characterized the turbulent preceding decades. The main

difference between the two, she asserted, was that the cohesive expansion of continental

imperialism did not allow for any geographic distance between the methods and institutions ofcolony and of nation. This meant that the effects of colonialism were directly felt in Europe, in

opposition to the more gradual boomerang effect throughwhich, Arendt argued, European

states were normally influenced by colonial practices. Continental imperialism truly beg[an] at

home.7In Arendts analysis the actions of Nazi Germany were not historical singularities but

2As quoted in Kaplan, The Revenge of Geography, p. 853Neumann, Behemoth, p. 124, 1474See for instance Strausz-Hup, Geopolitics: the struggle for space and power, and Neumann, Behemoth5Lemkin,Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 796

McDonnel & Moses, Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas,Journal of GenocideResearch(2005) 7:4, p. 5027Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 223


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rather the logical conclusion of a deeply rooted European tradition of imperialism, albeit taken to

extremes.

A version of the imperial continuity paradigm was presented by Fritz Fischers Germanys War

Aims in the First World War, in which he argued that there existed a certain continuity between the

war aims of the Second and the Third Reich, but this rapidly evolved into the Sonderweg debateon the German deviation from Europeshistorical tradition rather than its integration in the

narrative of a wider European (imperial) past. Germany was not considered to be an empire

because the parallels with other European states and their empires were unconvincing. As the

debate on the Sonderweg took centre-stage the thesis of an imperial nexus which might account

for Nazi Germanys pathology during the Second World War remained a relatively marginal

issue. With certain spasmodic exceptions the debate on colonial dimensions remained relatively

unexplored until the last decade, when scholars began to draw links between Europes colonial

past and the colonial reality created by Nazi Germany on the European continent in the years of

the Second World War. The colonial nexus became increasingly popular as an explanatory

paradigm for contextualizing and understanding the manner in which Nazi Germany handled itsconquered territories, how Hitler envisioned Europes future, and how the Holocaust could have

become conceivable. Recent debates on the Imperial and Colonial dimension to Nazi policies

have attempted to contribute to a more comprehensive historical understanding of Nazi

Germany by placing it in a longer tradition of imperialism and colonialism. Although historian

Jrgen Zimmerer writes that there has long been an inadequate understanding of colonialism

which led to an overemphasis of colonialism as something applying only to regions lying outside

of Europe.8

Preceding the resurgence of the imperial continuity debate was Woodruff Smiths1986 book The

ideological origins of Nazi imperialism, which firmly rooted the extremist tendencies of Naziimperialism in the long and complex tradition of German imperialist ideology. Smith argued that

the Nazis had adopted a wide range of ideas broadly relating to the concept of Lebensraum,

combined this with German industrial interest and married this construction to the more

classically colonial notion of Weltpolitik. The primordial Nazi feat was to create an ideological

foundation for imperial expansion that combined two fundamentally irreconcilable ideas: the

necessity for expansion within Europe to create the necessary space for Germany to flourish,

and the dream of a world empire built on trade and economic exploitation. The impressive land

empire conquered by Germany in the war was rapidly torn apart, in part because Nazi Germany

aimed to execute the mutually contradictory policies of Lebensraumand Weltpolitik. The aggressive

land grab in Eastern Europe was severely undermined by declaring war on the United States inpursuit of vaguely defined world-political goals, uniting all Germanys enemies in an

overwhelmingly superior front.9

The argument remained largely in the realm of the ideological until after the turn of the

millennium, when historians began to take a more acute interest in the ideas presented in

Arendts Origins of Totalitarianismand started applying imperialism and empire as analytical

categories to acquire fresh insights in Germanyshistorical trajectory. Two competing

perspectives rapidly came to the fore, the first arguing that there existed a long-term impact of

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Zimmerer, Colonialism and the Holocaust: towards an archaeology of genocide, in Moses (ed.),Genocide and settler society, p. 509Smith, The ideological origins of Nazi imperialism, p. 231, 238-239, 257


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Germanys maritime colonialism from before the First World War which allowed for continuities

between the Wilhelmine Empire and the Third Reich. The second perspective argues that

Germany, including the pre-nation state German political entities, had long been an empire with

permanent interests in Eastern Europe.10Increasingly, the notion that the Third Reich was

indeed an empire is becoming less controversial in academic circles, although avenues for further

research remain, particularly in drawing effective parallels between the Third Reich and otherEuropean empires that reach beyond a generalized and metaphorical comparison. The most

cogently argued contribution to this debate has been provided by the proponents of the colonial

continuity thesis. These scholars contend that there exists a nexus between colonialism and

National Socialism stemming from a shared obsession with the biopolitical notion of having to

acquire space in order to safeguard race from vaguely menacing racial threats to continued

existence. Jrgen Zimmerer describes this colonial connection as an archeology of the idea of

population economy and genocidal thinking which provided important precedents for Nazi

imperialism and possibly the Holocaust, as the racist and genocidal policies implement in

German South West Africa effectively breached a taboo which made Nazi policies in Eastern

Europe thinkable.11

Related, but somewhat opposed, to this line of thinking is the thesis proposed by historian A.

Dirk Moses, that the concept of subaltern genocide can be employed to better understand

connections between empire, colonialism, and genocide. Moses argues that the founding of

empires can be linked to the experience of having been colonised, leading to a desire to expel or

destroy the former colonizer, becoming an imperial state in the process. The destruction of the

colonizer by the colonized is referred to as subaltern genocide.12According to Moses the

Holocaust must be understood in the context of subaltern genocide, and therefore be separated

from the praxis of Nazi Germanys imperialism such as its genocidal practices against the Slavic

peoples. The extermination of the Jews was of an entirely different nature, for in the Nazicerebrations the German people were an indigenous people conquered by the Jews. Hitler spoke

of the Jews as colonies of parasites who settled in Germany, Poland and Russia after they had

been chased out of Spain and France in earlier ages. From there they had set out to colonize the

world, sapping the strength of nations and subjecting entire peoples to their will. The Nazis

therefore considered themselves a movement for national liberation from the Foreign Jewish

oppressors, involved in a war of national liberation to expunge all Jewish influence and redeem

the German nation from its subjugation. Besides a belief in the existence of a Jewish domination

of Germany there also existed the fear for a Jewish fifth column in German society, which would

actively strive to subvert its war effort from within and advance the interests of Judeo-

Bolshevism. According to Moses, the Holocaust cannot be understood as a colonial genocide,but rather an event, or multitude of events that united four different, even contradictory,

imperial and colonial logics into one terrible paranoid mentality and praxis borne of a frustrated

imperial nation struggling against a perceived colonizer. The Four elements being genocidal

policies against natives in the context of colonial warfare, subaltern genocide, pre-emptive

counterinsurgency, and the customary treatment of the colonial other as a workforce until food

shortages led to executions of useless eaters.13

10Baranowski,Nazi Empire, p. 211Zimmerer, Colonialism and the Holocaust: towards an archeology of genocide, in Moses (ed.), Genocide

and settler society, p. 67-6812Moses (ed.),Empire, Colony Genocide, p. 3113Ibid., p. 37-40


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Overall, the historiography of the colonial and imperial dimensions of Nazi Germany treats the

Holocaust rather carefully, given that it is the defining characteristic of the otherness-theses on

German history. A distinction is generally made between the rapaciously genocidal character of

(German) colonialism in general and the Holocaust specifically. Historian Benjamin Madley

bears out Zimmermans taboo-breaking thesis, arguing that German colonial rule in Africa hadset precedents that helped erode barriers to colonial and genocidal practices in Europe.

Institutionalized racism, brutal treatment of colonial subjects, and the implementation of

Lebensraumtheories had all been pioneered in German South-West Africa.14Historian Patrick

Grosse, however, argues for a more nuanced approach overall. He states that arguments for a

direct link between colonial genocide and the Holocaust are essentially Sonderweg arguments,

because if German colonialism led in some causal wayto National Socialism, then the German

colonial order must have been different from its imperial rivals a thesis for whichno convicing

evidence exists.15Historians like Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, also treat the

continuity thesis with a certain degree of scepticism. Arguing instead that German practices of

annihilation in Eastern Europe constituted a break with European colonialism rather than acontinuation thereof, and that the evidence for a continuity from Windhoek to Auschwitz is far

from conclusive. If imperialism truly was the Treibhaus des Totalitarismus, the authors note,

one would expect states with a longer tradition of it than Germany to have developed totalitarian

tendencies with more conviction. Gerwarth and Malinowski conclude that mit guten saclicken

Grnden lsst sich die These einer direkten personellen wie strukturellen kontinuitt von

Windhuk nach Aschwitz zurckweisen and that die von Hannah Arendt vor ber 60 Jahren

aufgeworfenen Fragen bleiben weiter actuell. Hinreichend beantwortet worden sind sie noch

nicht.16

In fact, most empires in history can best be described as large political units, expansionist orwith a memory of power extended over space, polities that maintain distinction and hierarchy as

they incorporate new people.17Modern European empires applied this expansionist urge in a

colonial periphery, while the imperial centre was usually a nation state in the heartland of

Europe, a single people in a single territory constituting itself as a unique political

community.18Both political entities are incorporative, but whereas the nation state seeks to

impose homogenization upon its populace, empires accept the politics of difference as a

consequence of the sheer extent of territories they administrate. The concept of empire hence

necessitates that different peoples within the polity will be governed differently.19Khne

placidly observes that should one accept this characteristic of empire, it is considerably more

difficult to place the Nazi expansion in Europe under the banner of an imperial entity seeing asthe Nazi occupation was more preoccupied with systematic extermination than governance. The

only way in which the Nazi practice of empire can be brought together with the longer European

tradition of more cosmopolitan imperialism is if the specific types and features of colonialism

14Madley, From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa incubated ideas and methodsadopted and developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe,European History Quarterly(2005) vol. 35, p. 45815Grosse, What does German Colonialism have to do with National Socialism?, in Ames et. al. (eds.)Germanys Colonial Pasts, p. 115 - 13416Gerwarth & Malinowski, Der Holocaust als kolonialer Genozid? Europische Kolonialgewalt undnationalsozialistischer Vernichtigungskrieg, Geschichte und Gesellschaft(2007) vol. 33, p. 464-46517Burbank & Cooper,Empires in World History, p. 8

18Ibid.19Ibid.


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and imperialism which served as inspirational models for various Nazi occupational regimes,

systems of exploitation, and strategies of annihilation are identified andhow these were

translated into Nazi practice and ideology.20Presumably this will be the next step in the

development of the field.

Empire, imperialism, and colonialism

The concepts of empire, imperialism and colonialism are of a singular ambiguity, and academic

consensus on what constitutes an empire is elusive. In part this is because the images that the

word empire evokes vary considerably from observer to observer, and the concept itself defies

clear definition. The connotations one can have with empire are practically limitless, even insofar

as there is a consensus that allows scholars to broadly agree on a range of states that constituted

empires at given points in history, it continues to be a diffuse and emotive subject.21If the

perspectives of imperial and colonial history are to be applied to the study of Nazi Germany,

however, some clarity must exist on the meaning of these terms. The most succinct definition of

empire has been posited by the political scientist Michael Doyle, who argued that empires arerelationships of political control imposed by some political societies over the effective

sovereignty of other political societies.22Although this is an exceptionally workable, and

therefore popular, definition, it is far from precise. Its inclusivity allows the classification of

empire to be used by virtually any political entity that controls another political entity. Political

scientist Michael Mann has proposed a theory that redresses this overly broad interpretation. His

concept of empire relies on broad categorizations rather than narrow definitions. Mann

determined that imperial power is derived from military, political, economic and ideological

foundations. Any imperial entity will fit into some, or perhaps even only one, of these categories,

but only rarely will an imperial power derive much power from all four. 23Historian Dominic

Lieven has furthered this rather vague understanding of imperial power by also includingdemographic and geographic categories as contributing to defining an imperial state. In his

fascinatingly vague approximation an empire is a very great power that has left its mark on the

international relations of an era [] a polity that rules over wide territories and many peoples

[] by definition not a democracy [] not a polity ruled with the explicit consent of its

peoples.24

Imperialism is hence a nebulous concept which defies clear definition, but remains a useful

analytical construct since it embodies political entities which are themselves as multifaceted as

the frequently inadequate terms used to describe them. Besides the complexities with using the

term imperialism it should also be noted that it is not interchangeable with the term colonialism.According to Jrgen Osterhammel there are six types of expansion which relate to imperialism

and colonialism: migration of entire populations; mass individual immigration; overseas settler

colonialism; empire-building wars of conquest; frontier colonialization; and networks of naval

bases. From such classifications of migration it follows that different sorts of colonies are

established. The nature of colonialism varies with intention, a different sort of governance is

20Khne, Colonialism and the Holocaust: continuities, causations, and complexities,Journal of GenocideResearch, vol. 15 no. 3 (2013), p. 34721Porter,European Imperialism, p. 122

Doye,Empires, p. 1923Ibid., p. 41424Ibid.,p. xi


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practiced in a settler colony than in one reserved for economic exploitation or strategic

advantage. The final difference is between empires which rely on local administrative structures

to run their colony, and empires which destroy these to replace them with a new framework of

rule.25Following from Osterhammels analysis, the term empire falls into two separate categories.

One constituting a structure of rule and expansion driven from an imperial centre for financial,

ideological or geopolitical reasons, the other constituting a haphazard structure of settler ortrading colonies driven more by practical than ideological reasons. The first category is

imperialism, the second colonialism. Whereas imperialism is typically an ideology-driven

phenomenon where imperial centres project a vision of empire on subjugated peripheries,

colonialism is constituted solely by activities on the periphery. Therefore imperialism as a

concept is more susceptible to theorization and analysis than colonialism, for the one is an

ideological vision of power, the other is a series of practices which defy generalization.26Still a

rough division between types of colonialism can be drawn, Young argues that European empires

generally possessed two kinds of colonies: the settled and the exploited. The original use of the

term colonization referred to the transfer of communities who aimed to settle elsewhere rather

than subjugate others. The subjugation was a by-product of colonialism rather than its originalintention, as European colonists usually held firm to the belief that the lands they took

possession of were not settled in the European sense of the word, meaning that they were not

cultivated agriculturally or otherwise. From this later grew an understanding that the colonists

must form a separate society from the native inhabitants, a practice which varied in intensity

from colony to colony, but usually ensued in some form of a hierarchical society in which the

colonial newcomers played to part of imperial overlords. Colonialism came without a civilizing

mission, its practitioners were not overly concerned with the ideal of spreading European values

or civilization, nor found it necessary to create an ideological rationale for their actions. The

objectives of colonialism were trade, economic exploitation and settlement, ideology and

progress were merely by-products of these intentions.27

The sort of imperialism most commonly referred to when using the term is the 19thcentury New

Imperialism, which, in its essencewas an international system of mutual rivalry for control of

territories and resources between the different powers.28In this imperial rivalry there usually

existed the possibility to avert conflicts between colonial powers by diverting tensions from the

European stage to the colonial periphery where lands were still up for grabs and agreements

could be hammered out through colonial conferences or symbolic showdowns. The nature of

imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s was considerably different. Historian John Darwin writes

that it was in this period that the struggle for empire reached its savage climax as it was infused

by three conditions which had not been quite so sever in earlier periods. First was the depth ofthe economic crisis in the 1930s and the seriousness of the fear for social breakdown that it

engendered in European states. Second was the violence of the ideological warfare that raged

between statescommunist, fascist and liberaland the gulf of mistrust that this served to

widen. Third was the continually growing fear of encirclement, economic, racial or

geostrategic, by a world which envisioned a future of rivalling ideological blocs. The regimes

which considered themselves most at risk from these turbulent shifts in political balance,

Germany and Japan, were uninclined to partake in the balance of power politics which had

25Osterhammel, Kolonialismus, p. 9-1526

Young, Postcolonialism, p. 16-1727Ibid., p. 19-2428Ibid., p. 31


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limited imperial adventurism in earlier ages. The result of these changes to a complacent world

order was an anxious, lawless, insecure world which engendered the creation of a novel kind

of imperialism.29Hitlers imperialism thus constituted a reaction to a changing world order in

which he attempted to find for Germany a new geopolitical, ideological and economic security. It

was in the execution of Hitlers vision that the horrors of colonial subjugation under a new sort

of imperialism came to be. The brutal imperialism of the 1930s as executed by Nazi Germanywas the crucible from which would spring the terrors witnessed in Eastern Europe in the 1940s.

Ideological and theoretical foundations of Nazi Imperialism

Carl Schmitt wrote an essay in 1941 which defended German expansion in the East by arguing

thatwhile Germanys war in the East violated the laws of war generally upheld in conflicts

between European nations, it did not traverse the laws and practices applied to colonial warfare.

Germany had been denied access to colonies in the past, and was therefore forced to expand

within the colonial space of Eastern Europe.30Schmitt was not alone in his ideological

justification of Nazi imperialism in the East. Although these consisted mostly of thinly veiledracial contempt and a haphazard ideology constructed through vicarious and unoriginal cherry-

picking from any intellectual tradition that offered something valuable or popularly appealing, it

cannot be dismissed altogether for there did exist an ideological drive behind the imperial effort.

A drive which rested on existing German political traditions and perversions of older ideological

justifications for imperial expansion.

The Nazi leadership had the tendency to take what they could from existing ideas and ideologies

while discarding or ignoring what did not fit their Weltanschauung. This was no different with

imperialism.According to historian Charles Reynolds the three main strands of Hitlers thought

that related to imperialism were racial notions of blood, the nation, and space.31

Hitler believedhis historic destiny, as both ideologue and political executioner, was to create a healthy German

nation with abundant living space for racially pure Germans. This blueprint for a racial empire

found its outlet in the perversion of existing ideologies. As Woodruff Smith has pointed out,

long traditions of Weltpolitikand Lebensraumexisted in Germany. The former was essentially a

form of economic imperialism heavily influenced by business interest and modernity. While the

latter was fundamentally a conservative drive for external settlement. The original philosophy of

Lebensraumconceived of the possibility to maintain the achievements of modernity at home,

while preserving preindustrial German culture and values by creating a greater living space for

Germans in Europe and overseas through the establishment of colonial societies.32These two

notions, while both expressions of imperialism in their own way, in fact represented ratherdifferent opinions on what German foreign policy should be, and had represented two opposing

sides in the Nazi foreign policy debates of the 1930s. This mattered little to Hitler, who ignored

the disparity between Lebensraumand Weltpolitik, instead fusing them both into one grandiose

structure of imperialist plans and expectations. What resulted was an ideological entity

29John Darwin,After Tamerlane, p. 41730Furber & Lower, Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied Poland and Ukraine, in Moses (ed.)

Empire, Colony, Genocide, p. 37331Reynolds,Modes of Imperialism, p. 13032Smith, The Ideological Originis of Nazi Imperialism, p. 18 - 19


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containing at least two fundamentally irreconcilable frameworks for national political action,

treated as though they had, in fact, been reconciled.33

With the apparent reconciliation of German imperialist ideologies followed the actual imperial

expansion into Eastern Europe. The Nazi leadership justified this, insofar as justification was

deemed necessary, by reaching back to notions of empty space, geopolitics and the necessity of(German-dominated) international order. The concept of empty space stemmed from ancient

Roman and early modern European legal traditions, which held that unoccupied territories (res

nullius) would become the possession of the first person to discover and cultivate them. John

Locke later applied this to English imperial expansion in the Americas by arguing that empty

lands (terra nullius) were defined by lack of cultivation rather than habitation. Uncultivated lands

fell outside the civilized world and were therefore available for colonisation.34The Nazi

conquests were inspired by a similar doctrine, though its conception of empty space differed

considerably from the doctrines employed by the English in North America. Historian Ulrike

Jureit has argued that the Nazi version of the empty space ideology no longer entertained the

conventional spatial paradigms employed by previous generations of colonizers. Rather thanimagining the newly conquered territory to have been empty through lack of habitation or

cultivation, the Nazi conquerors set forth to actively cleanse territory of its original inhabitants,

thus creating empty space where formerly there was none.35 As Hitler believed the assimilation

of lower races in Germandom to be impossible, Germanization could only be applied to soil and

not to people. Therefore cleansing the space was an essential feature of imperial acquisition and

colonial incorporation.36As timothy Snyder has demonstrated, the cleansing of land was a

totalitarian rather than an exclusively National Socialist urge. The Soviet Union was equally apt

to mould newly claimed territories into earthly utopias, regardless of the sufferings such

experiments would inevitably cause for the local populations. The Soviet Union lacked Nazi

Germanysvitriolic racial hatred, but possessed a similarly destructive ideology along class andnational lines. The realization of both totalitarian fantasies were to terrorize the population of the

Eastern European Bloodlands time and again during the bloody decades between the World

Wars.37

Geopolitics was the second concept avidly applied in the justification of Eastward expansion. Its

main proponent in early Nazi Germany, before he fell from grace and the subject took a life of

its own, was Karl Haushofer. Haushofer, as the preeminent German geopolitician in the 1920s

and 1930s, was greatly involved in the pseudo-scientific shaping of a vaguely defined academic

field. While geopolitics as a general concept is already as equally vague a term as empire, in the

German pre-war tradition it stood for a series of vague geographic and economic

commonplaces, torn apart between scientific rationalism and the popular mysticism of an

irrational Zeitgeist.38Although Haushofer never clearly defined his understanding of Geopolitik,

one academic extrapolated from his writings that it was a science of world politics in its

dependence on a geographical base and knowledge of its practical application in foreign policy.

33Ibid., p. 23834Macmillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World, p. 9; Armitage, The ideological origins of theBritish Empire, p. 90 - 9935Jureit, Das Ordnen von Rumen, p. 31336Epstein, Germanization in the Warthegau: Germans, Jews and Poles and the making of a German

Gau, in Szejnmann & Umbach (eds.), Heimat, Region, and Empire, p. 9437Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin38Pierik, Karl Haushofer en het Nationaal-Socialisme, p. 11 - 13


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Its purpose is to give the necessary intellectual support for protection and extension of German

Lebensraumfor the benefit of able settlers.39Political scientist John OLoughlin concluded that

the reliance of this ephemeral field on vague concepts like Lebensraumturned it into little more

than a pseudoscientific instrument for a war-promoting political propaganda.40In its essence,

Geopolitikwas useful as it propounded vague notions which could be taken to mean almost

anything, but essentially all referred to the necessity for German expansion in order to create agreater political, economic, and strategic sphere from which the nation could be defended against

undefined outside threats. The idea of a greater German sphere instinctively relates to the final

strand of justification for German expansion in the East, Carl Schmitts theory of the Groraum.

The concept of Groraumjustified German dominance over large geographical spheres because

of the necessity for order. Schmitt argued that sovereign nation states, and the existing global

order which was founded on conventional European public law, were breaking down under the

pressures of a changing world. Schmitt argued that the collapse of existing international order in

an increasingly restless world could well result in the emergence of political voids, a spaceless

political order which would need to be filled by competing spheres of influence to prevent thedominance of anarchy. The German Groraumwas to fulfil that role within Europe and realize

Germanys historical destiny in creating a unified German space. German expansion into Eastern

Europe was justified by its effort to create a more stable world order, one in which other powers

were denied the right to intervene.41In combining the tradition of Geopolitik, personified in the

writings of Haushofer, and the theory of Groraum, cogently argued by Schmitt, Nazi ideological

justifications for empire combined the mystical with the rational. Whereas Haushofers ideas on

geopolitics and the necessity for German Lebensraumin the East were mostly vague and verbose

declarations widely open to interpretation, Schmitts ideas concerning the disintegration of the

existing global order and the establishment of a multipolar world with competing spheres of

influence bore a certain resemblance to what the world would come to look like during the ColdWar political divide. Had the German campaigns on the Eastern front taken a different course,

the resulting world order might very well have also been an ideological and geopolitical struggle

between competing superpowers, with Nazi Germany taking the place of the Soviet Union.42

Hitlers Empire

In December 1941 a conference was organized in Prague on the economic development of the

Danube Basin. The focus of the conference was drawn, however, to the opportunities offered by

the rapid advances made on the Eastern Front. The keynote address was given by economics

minister Walther Funk, who informed his audience that the vast territories of the EuropeanEast, rich in raw materials and not yet opened up for Europe, will be Europes promising

colonial land of the future.43Although Funk readily used the term colonial, many Germans were

unable to regard their actions as constituting colonialism for the same reason as many later

historians would not to classify them as such: colonialism was considered to be a type of rule

39As quoted in Heske, Karl Haushofer: his role in German geopolitics and in Nazi politics, PoliticalGeography Quarterly (1987), vol. 6, no 2, p. 13640As quoted in Pierik, Karl Haushofer en het Nationaal-Socialisme, p. 1141Barnes & Minca, Nazi Spatial Theory: the dark geographies of Carl Schmitt and Walter Christaller,Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103:3 (2013), p. 671, 67642

A world fascinatingly rendered in Robert Harriss novel Fatherland43As quoted in Furber, Near as far in the Colonies: The Nazi occupation of Poland,The InternationalHistory Review, (2004) xxvi: 3 p. 541


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practices exclusively outside Europe.44This conceptual denial has influenced the interpretation

of Nazi Germanys expansion to this day, as the concept of colonialism is deeply influenced by

specific notions of cultural and economic exploitation as developed over the long period of

European overseas expansion. German expansion during the war was landlocked within Europe,

devoid of a civilizing mission or a White Mans Burden.45The poet Aim Csaire certainly had a

point when he stated that Hitler applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then hadbeen reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of

Africa.46What Csaire could have added was that the manner of treatment which the Nazi

leadership had in mind for the populations of Eastern Europe was considerably worse than what

most colonial peoples ever had to face from older European empires. Although the German

population at large, and some of its leadership, did not consider German policy in the East as

colonial, the establishment of a colonial empire certainly was what Hitler had in mind. Hitlers

vision of Thousand-Year Reich, a racially pure state in which the German people would be free

to realize Utopia without fear for foreign oppression was the blueprint for an imperial state,

which derived its resources, security, and living space from conquest and oppression. Hitler

frequently referred to the British in India as an imperial example47, although German policy inEastern Europe was to show no resemblance whatsoever to this imperial model.

The imperial idea of Nazi Germany was more than a blueprint for the rearrangement of Europe.

Rather it provided an insight in the deep perversions of the Nazi mind. The colonial East

constituted a laboratory for testing how the cynical political morality and morbid Weltanschauung

of the Nazi leadership would work under the constraints of reality.48This analysis corresponds to

the reflections written by Alfred Rosenberg on the failures of Nazi policy in the East in 1944. It

was the boastful arrogance, which in wide circles, indeed sometimes even in public, proclaimed

the inferiority of the subject peoples without the elementary political awareness that such an

attitude must provoke hatred and resistance in any people that, according to Rosenberg, hadcaused the Nazi dreams of empire to collapse in ruins. In a memorandum he drafted for

purposes of future Nazi expansion in the East he argued that next time round, Germany should

guarantee national, civil and religious rights.49Such sentiments would have been familiar to

earlier generations of British or French imperial administrators. Although crucially, these had

bequeathed a type of rule and a way of life which flickered in the imaginations of many of the

conquered having left political institutions, languages, cultural stereotypes, games and

regimental silver when they abandoned their imperial outposts, whereas Nazi administrators

left literally nothing but scorched earth and loathing.50

Hitlers vision of empire in Eastern Europe was bleak in the extreme, and itsrealization swayedbetween grand visions of astounding morbidity in its planning and chaotic excesses in its

44Ibid. p. 54145Ibid. p. 54246As quoted in Parsons, The Rule of Empires, p. 35947Conversation between Hitler and close associates on 27 July 1941, as quoted in Cameron & Stevens,Hitlers table talk 1941 44, p. 1548Steinberg, the Third Reich Reflected: German Civil Administration in the Occupied Soviet Union,1941-4,English Historical Review,(1995) cx, p. 620. [the adjectives cynical and morbid are the presentauthors addition]49

Rosenberg as quoted in Steinberg, the Third Reich Reflected: German Civil Administration in theOccupied Soviet Union, 1941-4,English Historical Review,(1995) cx, p. 62350Ibid., p. 624


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execution. In 1941 Hitler elaborated on his plans to his close associate Martin Bormann by

stating that: in principle the issue is to slice up the huge cake in such a way that we first control

it, then administer it, then exploit it. The Russians have declared a partisan war against us behind

the front. The partisan war has its positive aspect: it gives us the possibility to wipe out anybody

in ourway.51Once cleansed, Eastern Europe was to become both Germanys bread basketand

its shield, peopled with healthy and wholesome German farmer-soldiers. Speaking with referenceto Southern Ukraine, Hitler stated that it was to be an exclusively German colony and that

there would be no harm in pushing out the population that is there now as the German

colonist will be the soldier-peasant so that the future German Reich would have an army of a

million and a half to two million men standing ready to beat back any Soviet resurgence. 52It

was from this mind-set that the great imperial schemes of the Second World War originated. The

dual aspiration of Lebensraumand autarky, both deep-seated insecurities in German history,

coupled with the aggressive and astounding expansionary visions of Hitler fostered an

environment in which radical solutions to age-old geopolitical dilemmas could flourish.

Historian Mark Mazower argues that Hitlers desire to establish a colonial empire stemmed fromthe German failure to participate successfully in the 19th century conquests and the post-World

War One imperial rivalries, forcing Germany to thrust itself upon the world stage once more to

claim its rightful place. The vision Hitler hoped to realize was of himself as empire-builder who

would lead his people to the imperial European ideal, a militarily self-sufficient post-war

Europe behind barbed wire, in which nations dominated by Germany could expect little

leniency and less freedom. 53The existence of such imperial blueprints, the utterances of Hitler

on the topic, and the cynical cruelty with which the German administrations in the East set

about reorganizing and cleansing space, all indicated a deep-seated intent coupled with a

vigorous resolution, Germany planned to stay in Eastern Europe indefinitely.54Colonialism

occurs when a new political organization is created through conquest or settlement. A minorityof rulers governs a majority of colonial subjects while holding the interests of the imperial centre

closer at heart than that of the colonial periphery. As David Furber points out this interpretation

of colonialism does not necessitate that a colony exists for an extended period of time, the sheer

facts of conquest and possession coupled with the intention to hold it for a long period of time

constitute colonialism. Furthermore the political structure of the colonized area is dependent

upon the imperial centre, and the colonial administrators consider themselves foreigners in a

country under their control. Finally a perceived line of civilization divides conqueror and

conquered. The civilized colonizer encounters conditions in the colony which offend his

sensibilities and establishes a colonial other through perceived differences in modernity,

civilization, race and respectability. Furber argues that this is the reason why recognizablycolonialist behaviour by Nazi overlords could mostly be found in the East. The Nazi empire

stretched from Cherbourg to the outskirts of Stalingrad, but it was only in the East that the

social structure and customs challenged the Germans sense of being civilized.55

51Ibid., p. 62952Conversation between Hitler and close associates on 27 July 1941, as quoted in Cameron & Stevens,Hitlers table talk 1941 44, p. 1653As quoted in Mazower, Hitlers Empire, p. 254Conrad, Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth

History, (2013) vol. 41 no. 4, p.54955Furber, Near as Far in the Colonies: The Nazi Occupation of Poland,The International History Review,(2004) xxvi: 3, p. 547-8


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The first outline of radical colonial planning was the Generalplan Ostwhich stipulated that huge

numbers of German settlers were to be exported to the conquered territories to farm and form a

barrier against the perpetual Russian menace, even if such plans had little bearing on reality. This

initial imperial blueprint argued for the necessity to transfer 4,850,000 Germans to the East,

whereas the Ostministerium protested that at the most 850,000 people could initially be resettled,

and only if so many were found willing.56When the pressing need for wartime food suppliesbecame evident, designs for the conquered territories acquired a more acute relevance. Working

from the presupposition that the feeding of German soldiers operating in the East without

drawing food from the Reich would necessitate the starvation of large number of Eastern

European civilians, Grings Four-Year Plan Office implemented many of the policies which

would become emblematic of the Nazi empire. In a message to senior army and civil personnel

operating in the occupied Soviet Union Gringwrote that you have not been sent here to serve

the general good of those peoples entrusted to your tender care, but to extract what you can so

that the German people can live it is utterly indifferent to me if you tell me your people are

falling over from hunger. Let them do so as long as no German faints from hunger.57From this

German-centred nihilism was born the exploitation that created arguably the most oppressiveimperial regime in history, one that took everything and created nothing.

The period of Nazi domination in Europe constituted an empire, and its policy in Eastern

Europe constituted colonialism rather than occupation. In the words of Mazower, Hitler

accepted the basic geopolitical tenets of nineteenth-century imperialism, while jettisoning its

liberalism.58Indeed it was the darkest form of imperialism and the most perverted colonial

practice, devoid of all notions of liberalism and civilizing mission that was practiced in the Nazi

occupation of the East.What ultimately destined Hitlers experiment in empire to fail was the

complete and utter lack of any humanity in a regime of devastating and deeply counterproductive

racism. Rosenbergs civil government accepted the same basic racist premises as did the SS.Although this racism was, in principle, little different from other European empires outside of

Europe, other imperial powers left at least some social advancement, some opening for cultural

assimilation and some model to emulate, whereas German rule offered nothing but varying

gradients of oppression and destruction.59

56Steinberg, the Third Reich Reflected: German Civil Administration in the Occupied Soviet Union,1941-4,English Historical Review,(1995) cx, p. 62957Ibid., p. 63158

Mazower, Dark Continent, p. 7259Steinberg, the Third Reich Reflected: German Civil Administration in the Occupied Soviet Union,1941-4,English Historical Review,(1995) cx, p. 648


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Conclusion

The imperial fantasies unleashed with such terrifying vigour upon Eastern Europe originated

from a desire to join the ranks of imperial powers. Hitlers war ultimately was a realization of the

European will to power, a desire to expand and control.60In this manner Hitlers intentions were

reminiscent of earlier generations of empire builders. The Nazi empire, however, remained oneof extraordinary nationalism.Only the interests of Germany mattered, those of its allies and

conquests could be ignored at will. Disregarding the popularity of puppet regimes Nazi Germany

worked only with administrations which were at its constant beck and call, with all of Europe

existing fundamentally to serve the interest of Germany.61The little potential for enduring

success such a narrowly national imperial destiny had was eradicated by the strictness of its

implementation, which effectively barred any conquered subject from participating in the

imperial structure to advance socially or acquire citizenship of the Greater German Reich.

European nation states which were involved in 19thcentury imperialism accepted the

consequences of being both a nation state and an empire, implementing the politics of the one at

home, and the politics of the other abroad. Nazi Germany never managed to bridge the divide,remaining always a xenophobic nation state obsessed with racial purity while incorporating an

increasing number of foreigners within its borders. The extremism and exclusionist drive of the

Nazi empire made its success as an imperial polity impossible, as there was no potential for its

subject peoples to ever rise above the station of helots in a political system which recognized

only the rights and needs of Germans. The Nazi empire, insofar as the term does indeed apply,

was a nation state in temporary control of a large and increasingly restless helot population. Its

ideology of expansion rested on vague allusions to geopolitical concepts, strained comparisons to

earlier generations of empire builders, and the self-righteousness and extremism of the insecure.

Its colonialism was of the most cruel and inhumane variety, its heritage was destruction. As an

empire it was devoid of hope, meaning, purpose or future. As a totalitarian experiment, however,it was eerily successful in demonstrating the perversity of the human spirit when endowed with

power without benevolence, only desolation can follow in its wake.

The application of colonial and imperial paradigms provide fascinating insights in the

phenomenon of Nazi Germanys expansion and the pathology of the Nazi leadership. Hitler

certainly conceived of Nazi Germany as an imperial state, and German policy in Eastern Europe

certainly was harshly colonial. Questions remain to what extent this harshness was indeed

derived from a European tradition of imperialism beyond general references to a similar racist

framework, policies of exploitation and genocidal tendencies. Furthermore it would be

interesting to see if effective parallels can indeed be drawn between previous generations ofcolonizers and the Nazi colonists, or if Nazi Germanys actions constituted new forms of

colonialism and imperialism altogether. This latter thesis, referred to by John Darwin in hisAfter

Tamerlane, could fuel a fascinating new avenue of historical research, adding a chapter to the

existing scholarship of empires, which continues to have a problematic relationship with the

notion of an imperial Nazi Germany.

60

Khne, Colonialism and the Holocaust: continuities, causations, and complexities,Journal of GenocideResearch, (2013) vol. 15 no. 3, p. 35361Mazower, Hitlers Empire, p. 7


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Documents

Desolation Without Peace: Nazi Germany's Imperialism and Colonialism