Abstract
Theoretical discussions of the Holocaust are often couched in terms of whether or not it was unique. It is possible to understand the Nazi attitude to ‘Eastern Europe’ as a continuation of a 19th-century German view that Poland was not European and could be colonized. The Nazi racialization of the Jews as non-white and the procedures such as concentration camps, slavery and extermination used against the Jews are practices drawn from the colonial periphery of the modern European world and used by other European powers in that context. We can construct a German colonial history in which the treatment of the Herero and other tribes in Southwest Africa prefigures the Nazi attitude to the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Jews across Europe. From this point of view, the Jews in Europe were an alien migrant people within the boundary of white Europe.
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