Racial hierarchy, dehumanization, concentration camps, settler expansion in the name of "living space," collective punishment and mass violence: at first glance, the continuities between colonial and Nazi violence appear obvious. In 1941, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler himself compared Eastern Europe to "Germany's India" after the British colonial model, declaring "like the English, we shall rule this empire with handful of men."
But the extent to which Nazism was shaped by the age of empire, and whether the two systems of violence can even be compared, remains the subject of intense debate. This is particularly true in Germany, where the fear is often expressed that any comparison risks relativizing or minimizing Nazi crimes, and particularly the Holocaust. Others have argued that the intense focus on the Nazi era has, at least in part, come at the expense of a meaningful reckoning with Germany's colonial history.
"I do think this is nonsense," says Stephan Malinowski, a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh. "If it were true then all other colonial countries who are not discussing the Holocaust, like Great Britain for example, or France or Spain or Portugal, they would then supposed to be very, very attentive to colonial crimes and to colonial history, which it seems to me is not the case."
