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A new exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin explores the complex and contentious connections between European colonial rule and Nazi atrocities. While elements like racial hierarchies, forced labor, and mass violence show apparent continuities, historians remain deeply divided on whether the two systems of violence can be directly compared without minimizing Holocaust crimes.
From Colonial Brutality to Nazi Rule
Titled “Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence” and curated by University of Edinburgh Modern European History Professor Stephan Malinowski, the exhibition does not seek to resolve the debate but to present its history. The display opens with a hippopotamus-hide whip from African colonies next to a canister of Zyklon B, highlighting both the contrasts between colonial violence and industrialized mass murder and their historical links, such as whips used in concentration camps and chemical weapons deployed by Fascist Italy in Ethiopia during 1935 and 1936.
In the 1930s, anti-colonial thinkers drew parallels between colonial subjugation and fascist exploits. German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt argued in her 1951 work “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that colonies acted as testing grounds for racial ideologies and domination practices that eventually returned to shape European totalitarian politics.
Forced labor, a central pillar of the Congo Free State’s rubber production under Belgium’s King Leopold II, reappeared on an unprecedented scale under Nazi rule. The Nazi regime mobilized roughly 13 to 14 million forced laborers—including Poles, Ukrainians, Soviet citizens, and Jews—in a system of “extermination through work” that matched the scale of the transatlantic slave trade.
Racism, Antisemitism and Extermination
Malinowski notes that while racism underpinned both empires and Nazism, their objectives differed fundamentally. Colonial powers often used assimilation and cultural pressure to serve imperial interests, occasionally offering elite opportunities to a select few, whereas the Nazi regime offered no such paths to Poles, Russians, or Jews.
Edward Kissi, a historian at the University of South Florida, explains that while colonial violence was extreme, Nazi violence was uniquely annihilatory and exterminatory. He highlights that the Nazis actively pursued the elimination of Black-Germans and people of African descent through forced sterilization, setting colonial color-based racism apart from Nazi antisemitism.
Germany’s colonial past also includes the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, now Namibia. Following an uprising, General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order in 1904, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people due to racial ideology, terror, and resource control.
Despite these overlapping themes, the exhibition draws a firm boundary at the industrialized killing in Nazi death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau. Malinowski points out that the systematic mass murder of European Jews was driven by the purpose of murder itself, citing the deportation of Jews from Rhodes and Kos in July 1944 even when military and economic logic dictated otherwise.
The Politics of Historical Comparison
The debate surrounding historical uniqueness resurfaced during the 1980s “Historikerstreit” and has evolved into “Historikerstreit 2.0” since 2020. This modern dispute centers less on the legitimacy of comparison and more on its implications for German memory culture alongside colonialism and empire.
While the German government recognizes the 1904–1908 atrocities against the Herero and Nama as genocide from a modern perspective, it has not accepted legal liability or agreed to formal reparations. This hesitation parallels broader international struggles with difficult national pasts, according to Kissi, who argues that contemporary German identity cannot be fully comprehended without examining colonial history and the roots of Nazi legacies.
“Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence” remains open to visitors at the German Historical Museum until April 11, 2027.
