The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination1

Abstract

Historical analyses of the German conquest and occupation of ‘the East’ during the Second World War neglect an important tradition that can help in understanding National Socialist politics, namely, colonial rule. These two historical phenomena are structurally similar in that they both are based on the same concepts of ‘race’ and ‘space’. Zimmerer first examines the colonial elements of Nazi occupation policy, the war of extermination and genocide, and identifies precursors and models. A number of things that appear—from a narrow Eurocentric perspective—to be unique prove to be extremely radicalized variants of colonial practices. Second, he analyses the transmission of colonial knowledge by means of first-hand experience, institutional memory and collective imagination. To take the colonial roots of Nazi policy seriously helps us to understand why so many ‘ordinary Germans’ were willing perpetrators or untroubled observers. At the very least, colonialism, which had very positive connotations at the time, offered the Nazi perpetrators the possibility of exculpating themselves and obscuring the enormity of their own crimes. In conclusion, Zimmerer makes a case for a global perspective on the history of mass violence, occupation and genocide.