Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archeology of Genocide

The German war against Poland and the USSR was without doubt the largest colonial war of conquest in history. Never before were so many people and resources mobilized by a conqueror, and never before were war aims so expansive. Unprecedented, too, was the deliberately planned murder of such a large number of people, or at least the willing acceptance of their death. All of this served the goal of conquering "living space" (Lebensraum) in the East, a colonial empire to which the Germans were supposedly entitled and that reached far beyond the Ural Mountains. It was clear to those responsible on the German side, and above all to Hitler, that if there was a historical precedent, then only the history of colonialism could possibly provide an example for their plans. Although Hitler evoked the British Empire as a model, the Third Reich and its efforts at expansion are rarely considered from the perspective of the history of colonialism, either because colonialism is automatically regarded as applying to regions outside Europe, or because the common understanding of colonialism is inadequate. This chapter aims to bridge this gap in scholarship by analyzing the Third Reich's desire for expansion through the lens of colonialism.