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Racial Ideology, Imperialism,

and Nazi Genocide

JOHN COX

John Cox is an associate professor of Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies at the
University of North Carolina Charlotte. His first book, Circles of Resistance: Jewish, Leftist, and
Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany, was published in 2009 (Peter Lang Publishing), and his To
Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century is forthcoming from Pearson Prentice Hall.

he coming war with the Soviet Union would constitute a struggle for the very existence of
Germany. It would be “the old battle of Germans against the Slavs ... the defence of
European culture against Muscovite–Asiatic inundation [Überschwemmung]” and

conclude with “the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism”, dramatically announced the German leader
seven weeks before the 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. It “must be conducted with
unprecedented severity”, each military engagement aiming for “the merciless and complete
annihilation of the enemy”.

This bloodcurdling edict could easily be mistaken for one of the Führer’s harangues. It was

delivered  not  by  Hitler,  though,  but  by  Colonel-General  Eric  Hoepner,  who  three  years  later
would be executed for his involvement in the July 1944 assassination attempt. Hoepner was not
saying anything exceptional or controversial within the military leadership, nor was this outlook
original  to  Nazism.  A  half-century  earlier,  in  1894,  Bismarck  roused  himself  from  semi-
retirement to “sound the battle-cry of German nationalism against the Poles” and described the
border  regions  as  a  racial  battlefield  between  Germans  and  Slavs.

Three years later, Friedrich

Ratzel coined the term Lebensraum (living space), and within another ten years German military
authorities had orchestrated the century’s first genocide—against the Herero and Nama peoples
of German South-West Africa.

The German Nazis drew upon the philosophies and practices of European racism and

imperialism as well as their own country’s shorter, recent colonial history. Germany became a
unified state a few years after the “Scramble for Africa” had begun, and its imperialism emerged
after European nationalism had acquired an explicitly ethnic character. Nazism was “born into a
European world of empire” after European imperialism had shed most of its liberal pretences.

Driven by a near-desperate sense of urgency—which they shared with other genocidal regimes,
particularly in the Ottoman Empire and later Cambodia—the Nazis exceeded previous and future
imperialists in their wanton crimes against humanity. Their chief strategic goal was the conquest
of Lebensraum at the expense of native inhabitants; this would protect the German people “from
division and disintegration for all time”.

The Nazis’ ultimate ambition was unprecedented in its

radicalism: to forge “an ideal future world, without ‘lesser races,’ without the sick, and without
those who they decreed had no place in the ‘national community’ ”.

The greatly expanded Reich

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would usher in a period of national regeneration and free its Volk from intolerable if imaginary
burdens. During the course of this quest, a genocidal “final solution” to the so-called Jewish
question emerged, and other groups were also targeted for genocidal destruction as part of a
unified if uneven process.

The mass murders of non-Jews are often compartmentalised or treated as separate crimes,

listed formulaically at the end of a lecture, course semester, or a book. This essay integrates the
targeting of diverse “racial” enemies into an over-arching political and demographic quest, with
common ideological origins. Although non-Jewish Soviet victims were more numerous, Hitler’s
Jewish victims are correctly recognised as targets of the most radical of the Nazis’ multiple
genocides.

Hitler and his accomplices perceived Jews as an existential and eternal threat and

source of subversion, and were determined to erase their presence completely. Nazi anti-
Semitism and anti-Jewish policy were intertwined, however, with other “racial” prejudices and
goals, and these should be viewed as a whole and analysed within the wider context of European
imperialism and racism.

Racism and Imperialism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, racial ideologies had come to dominate European

and American thought, permeating all corners of Western culture. Influential writers such as
Arthur de Gobineau had already divided the human race into multiple, unequal categories. Social
Darwinism invested racism with even greater potential for violence: competition among races is
the driving force in history, it argued, and thus humanity benefited from the inevitable
disappearance of “inferior races”.

When not revelling in conquest and violence, Americans and Europeans developed a

somewhat wistful, elegiac way of referring to the “vanishing races”, as if the causes of their
disappearances were completely mysterious.

But such subterfuge was usually not necessary: it

became perfectly acceptable to speak without embarrassment about the eradication of “inferior”
peoples. Referring to the “savage races” in 1866, one prominent British writer and theologian,
Frederic William Farrar, intoned, “They are without a past and without a future, doomed … to a
rapid, an entire, and, perhaps for the highest destinies of mankind, an inevitable extinction.”

the end of the nineteenth century, no less a figure than the British prime minister, Lord Robert
Cecil, could express similar genocidal fantasies without fear of embarrassment or censure: “One
can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.”

Social Darwinist–fuelled thinking created an “ideology of inequality” that encompassed

racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, contempt for the disabled, and other assorted social and class
prejudices.

When Adolf Hitler later asserted that “the victory of the best race” is “the

precondition of all human progress”, he was simply articulating the viewpoint of many European
elites of his era.

Racism also rejuvenated anti-Semitism and imbued it with a more lethal

character. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, anti-Jewish prejudice had
weakened as secularisation undermined its theological basis. But with the advent of “scientific
racism”, Jews now came to be seen by many Europeans as a “race”. Therefore, the negative

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qualities that had been falsely imputed to Jewry were now seen as genetic, and therefore
immutable and unchanging.

Colonialism in the Second Reich

In Germany and other parts of western Europe, racist ideologies were also widely applied

against  Slavs  and  Africans,  two  groups  that  would  later  suffer  (albeit  in  vastly  unequal
proportions)  from  Nazi  imperialism.  In  strident  and  militaristic  tones,  the  Pan-German  League
(Alldeutscher  Verband)—co-founded  by  Alfred  Hugenberg,  who  later  played  a  key  role  in
elevating  Hitler  above  the  rest  of  the  ultra-right  rabble  in  the  last  years  of  the  Weimar
Republic—noisily agitated for expansion. “We shall be a conquering people” that must seize “its
portion of the world itself! Germany awake!” blared a newspaper ad taken out by the league in
1890.

Though enthusiastic about African colonisation, the colonial lobby believed Germany’s

destiny lay primarily to the east, and considered the Slavic peoples to be “massive, primitive”
and alien.

Friedrich Ratzel, another co-founder of the Pan-German League, coined Lebensraum

in 1897 and developed it further in the last years of his life (he died in 1904). In Ratzel’s
conception, as in Hitler’s, a Volk requires Lebensraum in order to sustain itself; the German Volk
must expand its territory by any means, including conquest, in order to obtain resources for an
expanding population; and the people and its land must have a strong agricultural basis.

In addition to the aggressive campaigning of the colonialist fanatics, Germany’s colonial

experience in Africa intensified these racist, militaristic and imperialistic politics, which would
reach their fullest expression under Hitler. Although Germany was late to the colonial carve-up
of  Africa,  by  the  turn  of  the  century  it  had  become  a  major  colonial  power  in  the  continent,
possessing  Europe’s  third-largest  expanse  of  territories.  Nationalists  rhapsodised  about  the
benefits of exporting German farmers to Africa, where they would regain a true German spirit,
which had been corrupted by modernity and urbanism. Resistance to the depredations of German
colonists  and  military  authorities  prompted  the  Germans  to  launch  a  genocidal  war  against  the
Herero and then the Nama people of present-day Namibia, a genocide that claimed 80 per cent of
the  Herero  population  and  roughly  one-half  of  the  smaller  Nama  population.  The  genocide
featured  the  use  of  concentration  camps,  as  the  Germans  called  them  at the  time.  Shark  Island
was the most notorious. For its miserable conditions, exterminatory use of slave labour, and high
mortality,  it  could  aptly  be  labelled  a  “death  camp”,  although  it  lacked  the  efficiency  and
murderous technology of the later extermination centres in German-occupied Poland. A Rhenish
missionary observed this fairly typical scene in September 1905: “A woman, who was so weak
from illness that she could not stand, crawled to some of the other prisoners to beg for water. The
overseer fired five shots at her,” injuring her severely. “In the night she died” unattended.

The

ugly  term  Untermenschen  (subhumans)  was  frequently  assigned  to  the  Slavs,  “Gypsies”,  and
above  all  the  Jews  by  Hitler  and  many  other  Third  Reich  officials.  Some  of  Africa’s  German
colonisers—such  as  the  notorious  general,  Lothar  von  Trotha,  who  initiated  the  Herero
genocide—managed  to  go  further  in  dehumanising  their  subjects,  referring  to  the  Herero  and
Nama as Unmenschen.

Germany’s colonialist period in Africa was significant, and should be placed more squarely

into the pre-history of Nazism. As historian Benjamin Madley argued in an important 2005

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article, German colonialism in Africa helped erode the “moral and political barriers to genocide”.
The  Third  Reich  adopted  and  expanded  upon  certain  ideas  and  practices,  Madley  contended.
“Genocidal  rhetoric,  a  new  definition  of  Vernichtungskrieg,”  the  systematic  mass  murder  of
POWs as well as civilians, and the deportation of POWS and non-combatants to labour and death
camps—these  were  all  introduced  into  German  thought  and  practice  through  the  Namibian
colonial  era.

And as in Nazi-occupied Europe, private German business interests greedily

profited from  slave  labour,  in  the  process  working  many  labourers  to  death.  Herero  and  Nama
were  also  subjected  to  grisly  medical  experiments.  Severed  heads  and  other  body  parts  were
shipped to Germany to be scrutinised by, among others, Eugen Fischer, the infamous eugenicist
who  greatly  influenced  German  racial  “science”  over  subsequent  decades.  He  resumed  his
distinctly criminal, inhumane activities under the Third Reich; employed and mentored the likes
of Josef Mengele; and in post-war West Germany was allowed to retain his career and prestige
and then settle into a peaceful retirement.

Nazism’s obsession with advancing the nation’s “health”, as understood in the logic of Social
Darwinism and eugenics, is another area that reveals significant parallels with German colonial
Africa. General von Trotha wrote to Alfred von Schlieffen, architect of the “plan” that figured so
fatefully in the First World War, “I think it is better that the [Herero] nation perish rather than
infect our troops and affect our water and food.” Another German officer transmitted an order to
burn Herero women alive in their huts, because “they might be infected with some disease”.

Nazi  ideals  of  racial  “purity”  were  fully  entangled  with  “health”,  which  for  the  Nazis  “was  a
rather  all-encompassing  metaphor  for  physical,  mental  and  moral–social  condition  alike”,
observes  Aristotle  Kallis;  it  was  “a  concept  that  was  used  in  order  to  sanction  both  the
elimination  of  some  categories  and  the  growth  of  others  ...  Countries  with  ‘racially  inferior’
stock  (in  particular  Slavs)  were  excluded”  from  the  Nazis’  grandiose  demographic  re-ordering
project “and provided a horrifying testing ground for the most extreme Nazi racialist fantasies”.

As Madley notes, Himmler and other leading Nazis used imagery and metaphors that had much
in common with the discourse of their colonial predecessors in the Second Reich. “SS gas
chamber operators were called Desinfektoren, or disinfectors,” for example.

Madley is careful

to add that the African experience “was not the sole inspiration” for the Nazi genocide, and it is
more accurate to speak of parallels, precedents, and influences rather than direct links.

War, Revolution, and ‘Jewish Bolshevism’

Through much of Europe, the Great War and its immediate aftermath strengthened aggressive

nationalism, tinged with a quest for vengeance or the recapture of lost glory; glorification of war
and  of  martial  values;  racism  and  anti-Semitism;  extreme  anti-communism;  and  a  longing  for
authority rather than freedom. In Germany, the battlefield’s cheapening of life and the harshness
of  the  war  brutalised  post-war  politics as  disoriented,  embittered  soldiers  returned  to  the  home
front—often  to  join  the  ranks  of  the  Freikorps  and  similar  squads—and  the  conviction  spread
that  political  differences  should  be  resolved  by  force.  The  poisonous  right-wing  “stab  in  the
back” myth was widely embraced by Germans: the brave soldiers at the front had been betrayed
by  pacifists  and  socialists  as  well as  by  domestic  politicians  who,  far from  the front, conceded
the  war.  In  the  imagination  of  Hitler  and  others  of  his  ilk,  “the  Jew”  lurked  behind  the

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unpatriotic, foreign forces of socialism and communism. (Throughout his political career, Hitler
made very little distinction between the numerous variants of socialism or Marxism.)

The Bolshevik takeover of November 1917 in Russia sharpened the fear of anti-capitalist

revolution  among  European  elites,  conservatives,  and  rightists  of  all  stripes.  These  fears  were
further  inflamed  by  the  leftist  revolutions  of  1918–19  in  Germany,  Austria,  and  Hungary.  For
Hitler and others in Munich’s murky right-wing netherworld, these upheavals demonstrated the
ascent  of  “Jewish  Bolshevism”.  While  the  myth  of  “Jewish  Bolshevism”  was  unoriginal,  for
Nazism it served to join anti-Semitism with anti-Slav prejudice. Jews were linked not only to the
homeland of Marxist revolution (the Soviet Union) and the centre of Jewry (Poland), but to the
suddenly  more  immediate  threat  of  socialism  or  communism.  Nazi  propaganda  and  oratory
incessantly invoked the names and presumed Jewishness of Béla Kun and  Kurt Eisner, leaders
respectively  of  the  ill-fated  Hungarian  and  Munich  Soviets  of  1918–19,  and  of  German
revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (all of whom were “Jews” only in the anti-
Semitic “racial” sense). Alfred Rosenberg’s unbearably turgid writings often mentioned Philipp
Scheidemann, with no concern for the fact that he was a leader of the right wing of Germany’s
Social  Democratic  Party  and  had  helped  crush  the  Spartacist  workers’  uprising  of  1919.
Rosenberg and his cohort of émigrés, who could claim to have witnessed the horrors of “Jewish
Bolshevism”, influenced Hitler’s thinking about these matters in the pre–Beer Hall Putsch years.
Hitler actually labelled Lenin “Jewish”, and in the style of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—
a text that Rosenberg helped introduce to Germany—viewed the Jews as the masters of capital as
well as the crafty leaders of subversive movements. Russia’s “upper strata” had previously been
Germanic, Hitler reported with considerable creativity, but had “been extinguished and replaced
by the Jew”, who now, through Bolshevism, strove for “world domination”.

In this last quotation we see another element that fuelled Nazi racial fanaticism and

expansionism, one that is more delusional (if possible) than the others and that has been
commented upon recently by A. Dirk Moses, Wendy Lower, and other genocide scholars. In the
view of the Nazis, Jews themselves were the colonisers, taking control of Germany and other
countries through financial exploitation and other means.

“The Nazis regarded Germans as an

indigenous people who had been colonised by Jews, principally from Poland,” writes A. Dirk
Moses.

In Hitler’s view, Germany had endured unbroken occupation or “Jewish domination”

since the First World War; the impending war would actually be one of German national
liberation.

This “colonisation” could of course not be illustrated with concrete examples, as

none existed. The Germans’ colonisation or enslavement was sometimes metaphorical in Nazi
lore. A pronounced theme of Nazi literature and of Hitler’s oratory in the early 1920s was that of
Germany’s exploitation by “interest slavery” (Zinsknechtschaft), an idea elaborated by the self-
styled (but untrained) “economist” Gottfried Feder, who also swayed Hitler’s thinking during the
Nazi party’s very early years.

In its assertion that its own people, as it defined them, were

trampled upon and oppressed by their “racial” enemies, exhibited a feature later seen in Hutu-
power propaganda. Allison des Forges refers to a propaganda tactic of “accusation in a mirror”:
to convince the public that “the enemy” will bring war, oppression, murder, and so on, ascribe to
the enemy what you yourselves are planning, thereby justifying preventive, “defensive” action.

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Poland: ‘Close Your Hearts to Pity’

Strange though it sounds in retrospect, Hitler had hoped to lure Poland’s right-wing

government into a joint invasion of the Soviet Union; the Poles declined, and a few months later
the German government concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop (or “Non-Aggression”) Pact of 23
August 1939.

Preparing for the impending attack on Poland, Hitler instructed his military

commanders the day before to “close your hearts to pity”. “All men, women, and children of
Polish descent or language” should be killed, he continued. “Only in this way can we obtain the
Lebensraum we need.” On 1 September, Germany invaded, sparking world war in Europe. Hitler
saw the war against Poland as both a war for territory or Lebensraum and a racial war against
“dreadful [racial] material”, as he viewed the Poles.

His chief of staff explained that it was “the

intention of the Führer to destroy and exterminate the Polish people”. The first task would be to
“decapitate” Poland. “Only a nation whose upper levels are destroyed,” characteristically intoned
Hitler, “can be pushed into the ranks of slavery.”

One week into the invasion, Reinhard

Heydrich, chief of the German Reich Security Main Office, ordered his police and SS forces to
wipe out the Polish elite and expel Jews; the “nobility, clergy, and Jews must be killed”, he
instructed.

Roughly two million Polish Christians—in addition to Poland’s three million Jewish

victims—were ultimately murdered (through starvation, executions and massacres, ill treatment,
disease, and other means) while under German occupation. Poland lost one-fifth to one-sixth of
its pre-war population, a higher proportion than any other country, with the exception of the
Belarusian republic. An additional 1.7 million Poles were enslaved as “forced labourers” in
factories and camps and, most often, as farm workers throughout the Reich.

Inverting a practice seen in most wars—to portray civilian victims, after the fact, as

combatants—following at least one battle, German soldiers forced their captured Polish troops to
shed their uniforms in order to look like partisans, who could therefore be treated without regard
for any laws of war, which were quickly jettisoned anyway.

(The doomed Poles were forced to

disrobe and then shot.) Germans unleashed other forms of unrestrained modern warfare: for forty
years, Europeans had rained bombs from the air upon colonial peoples, but in September 1939
the Luftwaffe conducted the first mass bombing of a major European city, killing roughly twenty-
five thousand civilians in Warsaw in that month alone. In the first days of the invasion, special
German units, the Einsatzgruppen, were unleashed upon Poland’s defenceless civilians, both
Jews and non-Jews. Several of these SS death squads, composed of roughly 4,200 men,
murdered fifty thousand Poles, mostly non-Jews, by the end of 1939.

Their role in Poland was

primarily to kill Poles; twenty-two months later in Lithuania and elsewhere, they would play a
prominent and indispensable role in the murder of Soviet Jews.

The Germans annexed much of western Poland into the “Greater German Reich”, establishing

the huge territory labelled the “General Government”. The General Government was a dumping
ground  for  displaced  persons  as  well  as  a  colony.  Several  hundred  thousand  German  civilians
migrated  there,  either  coerced  or  lured,  like  other  colonial  settlers  through  history,  by  the
prospect  of  material  gain  and  a  social  status  they  could  not  acquire  at  home.  German  forces
squeezed Jews into sealed-off quarters of numerous cities in late 1939 and early 1940. They later

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extended this policy into other corners of occupied Europe, but the largest ghettos remained in
Poland, until their occupants were deported en masse to death camps later in the war. Appalling,
degrading conditions prevailed. In Lodz, the second-largest ghetto, an average of more than
seven people resided in the average apartment, only one in forty of which had running water.
Typhus and tuberculosis competed with starvation, and “potato peels became a prized item”.

The Nazi leadership could foresee the future integration of “Aryans”, including Danes and the

Dutch, into the racially recast order they envisioned; therefore, “occupation reverted to civilian
control that ensured better conditions”—although not without repression, occasional reprisals,
and so on—“for the indigenous population” in certain countries.

Yet there was at least one

group that suffered much more severely in the Western military campaign. As Raffael Scheck
argues in one of the few books devoted to the topic, Hitler conducted a “race war against black
Africans in the Western campaign of 1940”.

This “race war” was not a mere “hiatus between

the race wars in the east”, but through the involvement of the regular army and the impetus
provided by racist propaganda was connected to “Wehrmacht atrocities in Poland and the full-
fledged race war [the Wehrmacht] later conducted in the Balkans and the Soviet Union”.

The

army’s  lingering  obsession  with  the  “terrorism”  of  the  franc-tireurs—the  irregular  or  guerrilla
units  that  had  hounded German forces  during  the  Franco-Prussian War  of  1870–71—helped to
inspire  the  atrocities  against  France’s  African  troops  (and  later  against  Slavic  combatants  and
potential combatants). Again displaying their delusional creativity, the Nazis were able to depict
certain Africans as real or potential colonisers. At the end of May 1940, shortly after the defeat
of France, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter ran a photo from 1918 of French colonial troops
with  the  caption:  “The  black  representatives  of  French  civilisation  march  into  the  Rhineland.
Several  hours  later  they  throw  themselves  like  wild  beasts  on  German  women  and  girls.  They
rape, plunder, murder, and commit arson wherever they can.”

Barbarossa and the Genocidal Frenzy

Though Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941—caught

Stalin by surprise, there should have been little doubt that Hitler would eventually put an end to
their  marriage  of  convenience.  By  the  summer  of  1940,  Hitler  routinely  bellowed  to  his
colleagues  that  the  Soviet  Union  must  be  “utterly  destroyed”  and  its  occupants,  like  the  Poles,
reduced  to  “a  people  of  leaderless  slave  labourers”.

On 30 March 1941, Hitler instructed his

generals that the war would be one of “extermination” (a Vernichtungskrieg).

One 6 June, the

infamous “Commissar Order” had been issued, calling for the execution “as partisans” of Soviet
political officers, Communist Party members, and supposed saboteurs. “In the battle against
Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of humanity [Grundsätzen der
Menschlichkeit] or international law is not to be counted on.”

In May 1941, German leaders devised the unsubtly dubbed “Hunger Plan”, an avowedly

genocidal strategy that called for the “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the
population” in “deficit regions” (that is, entire nations, including Russia and Belarus).

In those

regions and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the Hunger Plan envisioned the destruction of the
cities and the starvation of roughly thirty million people during the first winter of the invasion.

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The  plan’s  chief  author,  SS  Obergruppenführer  and  long-time  party  radical  Herbert  Backe,
presented with utter clarity the plan’s envisioned consequences to a 2 May 1941 conference of
state  secretaries  of  ministries  that  would  be  involved  in  the  occupation.  Point  Two  casually
announced, “Tens of millions of people will undoubtedly starve to death.” “With no evidence of
protest or disagreement,” reports Stephen G. Fritz is his recent Ostkrieg, “key representatives of
the  German  state  agreed.”

“The chilling wartime scheme for the ‘reduction’ of the Slav

population in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe ‘by one-third,’ ” observes Aristotle Kallis, “serves
as an eloquent reminder of the eliminationist focus of the regime’s plans” for the Slavic peoples
it ruled or hoped to conquer.

Soviet POWs

The Soviet Union lost more than twenty-five million citizens in the war. About one-third of

this total died in combat, serving either in the Red Army or in partisan groups, but the majority
died  as  a  direct  and  desired  consequence  of  Nazi  policy.  Many  millions  of  non-Jewish
Ukrainians,  Belarusians,  and  other  Soviet  civilians  were  shot  by  German  forces  or  starved  or
froze to death; as many as one million Russians perished during the thirty-month-long siege of
Leningrad alone, and an additional three million Soviet citizens starved to death elsewhere in the
western  Soviet  Union.  They  were  all  victims  of  Nazism’s  racial  warfare.  Soviet  POWs  were
targeted for distinctly genocidal killing.

As genocide scholar Adam Jones recently lamented, the extermination of 3.3 million Soviet

POWs remains “one of the least-known of modern genocides; there is still no full-length book on
the subject in English”.

Roughly one million of the hapless captives were systematically shot or

gassed,  while  the  others  succumbed  to  starvation,  disease,  beatings,  arbitrary  executions,  or
simply  froze  to  death  after  capture.  During  the  first  four  months  of  Barbarossa,  most  of  the
captured soldiers were transported in open freight cars. Even after closed cars were deployed in
late  November,  a  German  document  the  following  month  reported  that  “between  25  to  70
percent of prisoners” died en route, “not least because no one troubled to give them any food”,
Richard  Evans  pointedly  notes.

Those who survived the transport were herded into “camps”,

for lack of a better word. Even such a monstrous creation as Auschwitz-Birkenau, though,
provided greater opportunities for survival. Antony Beevor describes the “camps” as “barbed-
wire encirclements under open skies”.

While “camp” is misleading, “prisoners of war” is also imprecise. Captured Soviets

immediately lost any status or protections afforded POWs under international law by even the
most inhumane regimes; in the worst camps, they were viewed and treated in a manner closer to
that of the despised, dehumanised Jews, and subjected to appalling torments. “The German
guards used the inmates as target practice and set their dogs on them, placing bets on which dog
would inflict the worst injuries.”

A Hungarian officer who visited one camp—or enclosure—

reported seeing “tens of thousands of Russian prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring.
Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their
sockets. Hundreds were dying every day”.

German guards amused themselves by “throwing a

dead dog into the prisoners’ compound”. Russians scrabbled to “fall on the animal and tear it to

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pieces with their bare hands”.

Many hundreds of thousands were sent to camps including

Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they—along with Polish POWs—were subjected in September 1941
to the first experiments upon humans in the use of Zyklon B.

In contrast to a mortality rate of 4 per cent for British and American POWs held by the

Germans, nearly 60 per cent of Soviet POWs died in Nazi captivity.

Approximately two

million  had  perished  before  the  Wannsee  Conference  to  determine  the  “final  solution”  of  the
“Jewish question” convened in January 1942, and most of the remaining victims perished before
that  year’s  summer.  Another  two  million  POWs  survived  the  war.  Most  of  them  were  then
arrested upon return to their homeland on suspicion of collaboration with their captors and were
sentenced  to  long  terms  in  the  Gulag,  where  many  tens  of  thousands  perished  before  Stalin’s
death.

Cold War politics conspired to keep this sad tale hidden. It was not in the Soviet Union’s

interest to draw attention to such a deplorable example of its own lack of preparedness and
weakness in 1941, nor was it a Western priority to remember or honour the terrible suffering and
sacrifice of the Soviet peoples. It is worth noting that for each American victim of Pearl Harbor,
roughly fourteen hundred Soviet POWs were starved or murdered. Had Nazi Germany somehow
been defeated in early 1942 this would have been known to posterity as Hitler’s gravest crime.

The Peak of Nazi Genocide of the Jews

After its initial military successes, in the summer and autumn of 1941, the Nazi empire found

itself in possession of several million more Jews, in addition to those in the General
Government.

At this point, the Nazi leadership moved quickly towards the decision for a

genocidal “final solution” (its term) to the so-called Jewish question. Decisions were now being
shaped by a climate of euphoria over the initial successes in the Soviet campaign, tinged by
anxiety, and multiple conflicting proposals and initiatives, over what to do with the millions of
Jews now within the Reich. Ironically, in the quest for a Judenfrei German empire, the Nazis had
vastly expanded its Jewish population. This anxiety was heightened as the German advance into
Russia stalled outside Moscow by mid-October 1941.

Two years after the attack on Poland,

localised mass murder, driven by racial and demographic schemes and the brutality intrinsic to
them, had evolved into systematic genocide. Once the decision for a genocidal “final solution to
the Jewish question” was made and conveyed, by late October, administrators like Hans Frank
adapted with alacrity. “Gentleman, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity,” Frank
announced to subordinates in Krakow on 16 December. “We must annihilate [vernichten] the
Jews, wherever we find them.”

Long before we encountered the evocative title of Patrick Desbois’s 2008 Holocaust by

Bullets, the great Russian-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman had referred to “the Shoah by bullets
and the Shoah by gas”.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is so closely associated with common

understanding of the Nazi killing processes, did not expand its gassing operations until the
summer of 1943.

The monstrous camp complex is rightly regarded as the epitome of Nazi evil,

and was the graveyard of one million Jews. Yet hundreds of thousands of the Nazis’ other Jewish
victims had already been killed through less impersonal, less industrialised means—and the
death camps, where half the six million were murdered, were not as antiseptic or depersonalised

127

as implied by the adjective “industrial”. Millions of Jews and other victims of Nazism were shot
at close range and dumped into mass graves; starved to death; or succumbed to disease.

An Einsatzgruppe unit commanded by Friedrich Jeckeln, who was executed by the Soviets

soon after the war, shot 23,600 Jews at Kamenetsk-Podolsk (south-western Ukraine) in late
August 1941, the first massacre by German troops of Jews in such numbers.

The open-air

massacres quickly accelerated; the Babi Yar shootings of 33,000 took place five weeks later, and
by the end of January 1942 Einsatzgruppe A reported that it had shot 229,000 people, one-third
of them in Lithuania in mid-October alone; the other three Einsatzgruppen each shot close to
100,000 people, the very large majority of whom were Jewish, in the autumn of 1941 and early
1942.

Tens of thousands of German Jews were deported to the east to be shot in October and

November  1941,  by  which  time  Hitler,  Goebbels,  Himmler,  and  others  were  speaking
unambiguously of the “extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe” (Alfred Rosenberg) and
triumphantly  recalling  Hitler’s  January  1939  “prophecy”  that  the  “Jewish  race”  would  be
destroyed  in  the  war.  Awaiting  his  execution  four  years  later,  Jeckeln  stated  that  Himmler
ordered him in November 1941 to kill “all Jews in the Ostland down to the last man”.

In the autumn of 1941, the Nazis began operating extermination centres in German-occupied

Poland. Chelmno was the first such centre, and also the first to use gas. One hundred and fifty
thousand  victims  were  killed  in  this  fashion—Russians,  Poles,  and  Romanies  as  well  as  Jews,
who  as  elsewhere  were  the  large  majority.  The  Germans  had  opened  the  Auschwitz  camp  in
1940,  and  in  October  1941  they  began  a  large-scale  expansion,  adding  a  second  camp,
Auschwitz-Birkenau, which included gas chambers and crematoria. As they began to expand and
transform  Auschwitz  in  the  autumn  of  1941,  the  Nazis  initiated  “Operation  Reinhard”.  The
programme’s  task  was  to  murder  the  Jews  who  were  trapped  in  the  General  Government.
Operation Reinhard entailed the construction of four additional death camps—Belzec, Majdanek,
Sobibor,  and  Treblinka.  Two  million  Jews  perished  in  “Operation  Reinhard”,  most  of  them
during the most intensive period of the Holocaust: between early 1942 and early 1943, roughly
half the Nazis’ Jewish victims were murdered.

Much has been written on the role of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi genocide, and on the

motivations  of  German  and  non-German  killers.  An  issue  that  merits  further  exploration  is  the
connection  between  Jews  and  Slavs  in  the  Nazi–German  imagination.  Letters  from  German
soldiers in the East reflect the influence of Nazi teachings about “Jewish–Bolshevist” aggression
and barbarity. In a bizarre variant of the “blood libel”, one soldier wrote that he had witnessed
the  “bestial  murder”  by  “Bolshevists  and  Jews”  of  “12,000  Germans  and  Ukrainians.  I  saw
pregnant  women  hanging  by  their  feet”  in  an  alleged  Soviet  secret-police  prison.  “Some  even
had their hearts cut out. 300 orphans between the ages of 2 and 17 had been nailed to the wall
and butchered [zerfleischt]”. Other letters from the summer and autumn of 1941 repeated these
fantastical and lurid accusations, replete with the crucifixion motif. “I was in Lemberg yesterday
and  saw  a  bloodbath  …  Many  had  their  skin  stripped  off,  the  men  were  castrated  [entmannt],
their eyes poked out, arms or legs chopped off. Some were nailed to the wall, 30–40 were sealed
into a small room and suffocated. About 650 people in this area,” added the soldier, “must have

128

died in such ways.” Most of the crimes were committed by “the Jews”, he wrote. “Now they
have to dig the graves.”

The Exterminatory Impulse

After experimenting with other methods to settle the “Jewish Question” of their imagining,

the Nazis by the autumn of 1941 were dedicated to killing every Jew they could get their hands
on—and even those beyond their grasp. The genocides of Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and the mass
murder of Africans and political and social enemies lacked the urgent priority and determination
that, by late 1941, drove the Jewish Holocaust. But these crimes originated in closely related
goals and congruent ideological roots in racism and imperialism.

NDNOTES

1. Generaloberst Hoepner, “Befehl des Befehlshabers des Panzergruppe 4”, 2 May 1941,

reprinted in Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion: “Unternehmen Barbarossa” 1941, ed.
Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
1991), p. 251.

2. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin,

2008), p. xxxvii.

3. Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, N.C.:

University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 373.

4. Shelley Baranowski, “Against ‘Human Diversity as Such’: Lebensraum and Genocide in

the Third Reich”, in German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany, ed.
Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 59.

5. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 306.

6. A more complete summary of Nazism’s crimes would of course include the many hundreds

of thousands of Romani victims of the Porrajmos (“Devouring”; see the article by Ian Hancock
in this issue of Global Dialogue); the roughly two hundred thousand victims of Operation T-4,
which targeted for extermination the mentally and physically disabled and which was extended
into  Poland  and  the  Soviet  Union;  the  tens  of  thousands  of  German  communists  and  socialists
who  were  killed  under  the  Third  Reich;  the five  or  six  thousand  homosexual  men  who  died  in
German  concentration  camps,  where  they  could  not  expect  sympathy  or  solidarity  from  their
fellow  prisoners;  and  approximately  fifteen  hundred  Jehovah’s  Witnesses  (mostly  but  not  all
German) who died in camps or were executed.

129

7. While we have made great progress in transcending a dead-end debate about Holocaust

“uniqueness”,  it  is  still  worth  stating  explicitly  that  “victimhood  competition”  is  indecent  and
misguided.  I endorse  the  approach  indicated  by  Michael Rothberg’s  question,  “Does  collective
memory  really  work  like  real-estate  development?”,  in  his  Multidirectional  Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2009), p. 2. Rothberg argues persuasively that we should view “race and violence … in a
comparative framework that allows those interested in the Holocaust to benefit from a relaxation
of  the  border  patrol  that  too  often  surrounds  and  isolates  discussion  of  the  Shoah”  (p.  132).
Recognition of humanitarian disasters should not be a “zero-sum game”, as if we possess a finite,
limited quantity of compassion, sympathy, sorrow, which if we expend it in one direction must
be subtracted elsewhere.

8. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races

(Ithaca,  N.Y.:  Cornell  University  Press,  2003).  Thomas  Jefferson  was  given  to  the  most
astonishingly passive, obtuse ruminations: “It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented,
that  we  have  suffered  so  many  of  the  Indian  tribes  already  to  extinguish”;  the  whites  had
“suffered”,  he  continued,  because  they  had  neglected  to  collect  a  scientific  record  of  the
languages  of  the  vanishing  peoples  (Brantlinger,  p.  52).  Andrew  Jackson  spoke  in  more  blunt
and  pitiless  terms,  but  was  capable  of expressing  a  sense  of  “melancholy”  as  we  “tread  on  the
graves of extinct [Indian] nations” (ibid., pp. 57–8).

9. Frederic William Farrar, quoted in Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One

Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York:
New Press, 1997), p. 135.

10. Ibid., p. 140.

11. See Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final

Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 1.

12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), p. 317.

13. 24 June 1890 newspaper ad sponsored by the Pan-German League, available in translation

Fordham’s

Modern

History

Sourcebook

[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1890pangerman.asp].

14. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 182.

15. See Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South-West Africa

Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe”,
European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), p. 432. Ratzel first used the term in 1897, and in
1901 published his essay “Der Lebensraum” in Festgaben für Albert Schäffle, ed. Karl Bücher et
al. (Tübingen: Laupp, 1901).

130

16. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten

Genocide (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 210.

17. Ibid., p. 140.

18. Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz”, pp. 457, 458.

19. Ibid., p. 445.

20. Aristotle A. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life: Ideological and

Structural Determinants of National Socialist Policy-Making”, Journal of Genocide Research 7,
no. 1 (2005), pp. 7, 10.

21. Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz”, p. 445.

22. Ibid., p. 430.

23. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 641, 654, 661.

24. See David Furber and Wendy Lower, “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied

Poland and Ukraine”, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern
Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 375.

25. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History”, in

Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Moses, p. 37.

26. Ibid., p. 39.

27. Fortunately, few of Feder’s early writings are available today. See Feder, “Manifesto for

Breaking the Bondage of Interest”, in Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Reader, ed. Barbara Miller
Land and Leila J. Rupp (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1978). Hitler repeated many of
Feder’s ideas at the time, and the “economist” was one of the few individuals—and the only
Nazi—whose influence Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf. Like most important figures during
the Nazi Party’s very early years, though, Feder lost influence by the time the Nazis took power.

28. Allison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York:

Human Rights Watch, 1999), pp. 65–6. The Tutsi-led rebels were intent on reimposing Tutsi
“feudal” rule, preached Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (the infamous radio station,
RTML) from 1991 to 1994.

29. Lithuania, still an independent nation in 1939, also declined German offers to join an anti-

Soviet war; it would be annexed by Moscow, with Hitler’s tacit support, in June 1940.

30. David Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (New York: Westview,

2008), p. 159. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on 1 September and occupied

131

slightly more than half the country. Of the one and a quarter million Jews in the Soviet zone,
about two hundred and fifty thousand were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan, while the
remaining population saw its synagogues, schools, and aid organisations shut down on Stalin’s
orders.

31. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,

2010), pp. 121, 126.

32. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press,

2009), p. 105.

33. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 121. The German army massacred three hundred POWs in this

incident near the village of Ciepeilów in Mazovia Province on 8 September.

34. Crowe, Holocaust, p. 160.

35. Bloxham, Final Solution, pp. 112–13.

36. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life”, p. 10.

37. Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French

Soldiers in 1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 9.

38. Ibid., pp. 151, 11.

39. Ibid., p. 106.

40. Robert Gellately, “The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide”, in

The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben
Kiernan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 259.

41. Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), p.

189.

42.

“Der

Kommissarbefehl”,

June

1941

[http://www.ns-

archiv.de/krieg/1941/kommissarbefehl.php]

43. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 163.

44. Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington, Ky.:

University Press of Kentucky, 2011), pp. 61–2.

45. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life”, p. 16.

132

46. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.

271. The genocide of the POWs is discussed at length in Alexander Werth’s and Alexander
Dallin’s major works on the war and occupation in Russia.

47. Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 183.

48. Beevor, Second World War, p. 209.

49. Evans, Third Reich at War, pp. 183–4.

50. Quoted in Jones, Genocide, p. 177.

51. Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New

York: Picador, 2007), p. 290.

52. Mann, Dark Side of Democracy, p. 186.

53. Jones, Genocide, p. 273. Soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, there were widespread

amnesties and releases from the camps.

54. Roughly one million Soviet Jews fled eastward, out of the regions occupied by the

Germans, sparing themselves the fate of those in the German zone.

55. For the most persuasive, detailed account of Nazi decision-making as it evolved into the

“final solution”, see Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of
Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press,
2004).

56. Stanisław Piotrowski, ed., Hans Franks Tagebuch (Warsaw: PWN-Polnischer Verlag der

Wissenschaften, 1963), p. 112. Piotrowski quotes from Frank’s 16 December 1941 address to a
cabinet session in Krakow.

57. See Beevor, Second World War, p. 210.

58. See Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 68–70.

59. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 224. Many of these victims had been deported earlier by
Hungary.

60. Ibid., p. 254.

61. Ibid., pp. 289, 298–9. “Ostland” was the German occupation zone in the Baltics, which

included a section of northern Poland as well as Minsk and other parts of western Belarus.