German border colonialism

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German border colonialism is the form of border colonization envisaged in the 19th century , which, under imperialist-colonialist auspices, was to follow on from the European expansion in the form of the medieval German eastern settlement . Since the beginning of the 19th century, this eastern settlement has been referred to as "eastern colonization" and, with its orientation towards Eastern and Southeastern Europe, German imperial theorists in competition with the existing European colonial powers as a model worth imitating for acquiring German ones before the founding of the first German nation-state Propagated colonial area. We can speak of “ colonialism ” instead of “ colonization ” because the conquest of land against the neighboring Slavs should initially take place in disregard of their nation-state aspirations and then against the new nation-states founded after the end of the First World War , i.e. the Slavs as a natural part from the outset excluded the European peoples. A fate was determined for them, as it had struck the indigenous peoples overseas on the part of the European colonial powers (cf. also Fremdvölkische and Code de l'indigénat ).

Perspectives on German border colonization since the 19th century

The discussion about the eastern border of the future German nation-state

Poland-Lithuania in the borders of 1771 and the three partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795

In the 19th century, historians, philosophers, politicians and publicists from a Prussian perspective led, initially in connection with the goal of creating the first German nation-state, the discussion about its constitution, structure, borders and positioning towards its Eastern European neighbors, where Prussia after the partition Poland had shifted its borders to the east. It was about being able to derive the legitimizing national ancestry from history and its corresponding interpretation. The criticism of the Habsburg empire played a role from the beginning , which was expressed by the fact that the medieval emperors, with their coronation by the pope, in contrast to the king and Rome who stayed away from Saxony, Henry I (919-936), were national 'Was accused of betrayal and negligence towards the East, which is more auspicious for Prussia. Charlemagne could already make this accusation . In 1860, after many others, the most important Heinrich researcher of the 19th century, Ranke student Georg Waitz , stated that “German culture, German population [have] the job of spreading towards the east”. This was also presented in this way by the East Prussian MP Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Jordan in the Paulskirche in 1848 (see Drang nach Osten ) and became the case in the first German historians' dispute over the 'national' evaluation of medieval imperial policy, the Sybel-Ficker dispute , from 1859 onwards a permanent topic, the discussion of which extended to the 1950s with the last foothills.

The preference for the east orientation was accompanied by the fact that the Slavs were characterized as culturally inferior people and the MP Jordan already spoke in the Paulskirche of a "genocide" which was rightly committed against the Poles, so that after the partitions of Poland it was only more about "the burial of a corpse that has long since been dissolved". Slavs have also been compared to the Indians of North America and their displacement and annihilation. Frederick the Great already did this when he colonized the Warthebruch when he compared the newly acquired Polish West Prussia with Canada and “the dissolute Polish stuff” with “Iroquois”. "After the Slavic fishermen gave way to the German farmers and the geometricized German villages replaced the Kietz settlements, the new settlements were given names such as Florida , Philadelphia or Saratoga ." The Prussian historian Johann Friedrich Reitemeier compared Prussia in his history (1801 -1805) the medieval east settlement with the "colonization and immigration of Europeans to North America". In 1847 MW Heffter equated the Slavs with the North American Indians and said of them that he had barely understood "how to exploit the simplest, open resources of his country". From this observation, Alexis de Tocqueville had concluded that the Indians were “not only pushed back”, “they were destroyed”. From a Prussian perspective, the comparison with the USA also served to emphasize that the New World, like Prussia, is “Protestant and Germanic”.

“The small German writers recalled that Frederick the Great helped to liberate the colonists; they praised him for having been a 'sincere and enthusiastic friend of the American Republic'. And when later, in the 1960s, the American Civil War ended with the victory of the northern states, while at the same time the German Civil War had the same outcome (see German Wars of Unification ), the historical parallels were not missing. "

The dispute over border or overseas colonization in the German Empire

After the so-called small German nation-state was founded under Prussian auspices (cf.German Empire ), the new state was required to join the European colonial powers England and France, so that the first colonial acquisition overseas came in the 1880s ( see German colonies ). Influential journalists such as Paul de Lagarde , however, revived the ideas of the American-experienced imperial theorist Friedrich List, in favor of continental expansion to Eastern and Southeastern Europe, with Lagarde referring to the Saxon and Salian rulers and his idealized image of a guild Middle Ages. When the Pan-German Association was founded in 1891, it immediately said in its organ of the association: "The old urge for the East should be revived." The background to these demands was the uninterrupted German emigration , especially to the USA, which Friedrich List had already worried because he saw important labor for the German economy being lost. The German Ostmarkenverein, founded in 1894, pursued its border colonization claims with a more specific focus on Poland .

As a political writer, Constantin Frantz appeared in sharp contrast to Bismarck 's “mutilating” German nation-state formation. Like Friedrich List, he strove for a Central European federation of states under German leadership that would extend into the Danube region to the Black Sea. For Lagarde, “Greater Germany” would have stretched “from the mouth of the Ems to the Danube, from Memel to Trieste, from Metz to around the Bug”. As for Friedrich List, Frantz's goal was to shape Europe with Germany as the leading power in cooperation with Great Britain vis-à-vis the USA and with hostile orientation towards Russia into an economic power of equal standing. Other “ Greater German ” representatives argued similarly: In 1861, for example, Johann Karl Rodbertus wrote in a pamphlet published by Berg and Lothar Bucher , Seid deutsch! the Germans including the Austrians described as "colonizing people". Victor Aimé Huber followed this point of view by portraying the Hohenzollerns alongside the Habsburgs as leaders of German colonization in 1866 , as did Eugen Trautwein von Belle, editor of the Allgemeine Preußische (Stern) Zeitung , in the German quarterly journal 1870, issue 1, in 1870 .

"Frontier colonization" was the term used in 1895 to propagate the empire's expansion beyond the national borders, because "no natural borders were set to the southeast and east [...] of the development of Germanness," and the chairman of the Pan-German Association saw it, Ernst Hasse , first, who wrote under the heading Greater Germany and Central Europe around 1950 that the German people would put their border posts there with “border colonization”.

With Friedrich Ratzel, these demands were given a geographical scientific foundation. It was wrong for him to think that colonies must be overseas. Border colonization is also colonization with the advantage that the closer the conquered land is, the easier it is to adapt and defend it to one's own living conditions. The Russian expansion into Siberia and Central Asia is an important example of this. For the politician and publicist Ottomar Schuchardt (1856–1939), friend and student of Constantin Frantz ', his estate administrator and first biographer, “Germany's natural situation not only permits, but imperatively demands [...] such a form of settlement soon transferred to the interior (border colonization) ”. The border colonization was supposed to go in two directions, namely beyond the Prussian East Marks and Austria as the old East Mark of the empire, because "Germany's course of development has been largely mapped out by the urge to the East - like all of German history, insofar as it grows and moving forward means, essentially a description is of the interdependence of Germany with its eastern brands ”.

This was the first time that a nation-state-based colonial discussion was being held, which overseas colonies were superfluous for Germany, which, in contrast to England and France, was very late in getting involved. Invoices were issued to show that overseas colonies were not lucrative and too costly for Germany.

During the First World War , the demands for Ostpolitik had become part of politics. The former Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow wrote in 1916, varying the momentous statement made by Gustav Freytag in 1859 about the "expansion of the German soil" in the east as the "greatest act of the German people in that period":

"The work of colonization in the east of Germany, which began almost a millennium ago and is not yet finished today, is not only the greatest, it is the only one that we Germans have achieved so far."

"This new territory in the east, conquering in the time of the highest German imperial power, soon had to become a state and, above all, national substitute for lost old land in the west."

"The tremendous work of colonization in the east is the best, the most lasting result of our illustrious medieval history."

Orientation towards the East in World War I.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937), first president of the Czechoslovak nation-state founded after the war and the Versailles peace treaty , was a close observer of Heinrich von Treitschke , Friedrich Ratzel, Paul de Lagarde, the "Pan-Germans" and in Germany also determined by Wilhelm II (German Empire) discussion with its East and Southeast European objectives and made it the basis of his analysis of the war. He identified them all as Pan-Germans and saw no reason to differentiate between Prussia and Austria, since both of them looked at the Slavs with cultural condescension and neither of the two would tolerate a Slavic nation-state of Poles, Czechs or Slovaks, as the philosopher Eduard had von Hartmann in 1885 in an article addressed to the Poles from “Ausrotten!” and the historian Theodor Mommsen in the press in 1897 spoke of the fact that the independence-minded Czechs should be hit on the head. Their national independence would stand in the way of the imperial Prussian-Austrian plans to expand to the east.

A preliminary confirmation of his fears was shown in 1917: The Central Powers ( German Reich , Austria-Hungary , Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria ) negotiated conditions in the peace treaty of Brest-Litovsk on December 5, 1917 with regard to Soviet Russia , which had been weakened by the October Revolution , which included: Soviet Russia renounced its sovereign rights in Poland, Lithuania and Courland . The future of these areas should be regulated with the German Reich in agreement with the peoples there according to the right of self-determination. Estonia and Livonia as well as western Belarus (west of the Dnieper) remained occupied by German troops, Ukraine and Finland were recognized as independent states. The Central Powers renounced annexations and reparations. Through this peace treaty, Russia lost 26% of the then European territory, 27% of the arable land, 26% of the railway network, 33% of the textile and 73% of the iron industry and 73% of the coal mines. The fringe peoples of the former Russian Empire exchanged Russian rule for the “Protectorate of the Central Powers”. This contract went beyond what Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff had achieved with the establishment of the military state " Upper East ". In the "Land Ober Ost", as the military state was also called, a self-sufficient area was to emerge under the auspices of colonialism, which was to supply the empire with urgently needed food.

The soldiers stationed there had decisive experiences that seemed to confirm all of the clichés gathered in the border colonization discussion about the cultural inferiority of Eastern Europe and the peoples living there and the civilizing mission of the “Christian Occident” (see hostility to Slavs ).

“German Volkstum” and the “Grenzland” discussion in the interwar period

With the Peace Treaty of Versailles in 1919, a dispute with the new East and East Central European nation-states began, especially around the new imperial borders drawn in the east. In the German discussion, the word “border” experienced a revaluation, which can be seen in terms such as “ Grenzland ”, “Grenzkampf”, “Grenzlandarbeit”, “ Grenzlanddeutsche ”, “Grenzland Einsatz”, “Grenzlandpolitik”, “Grenzlanduniversität” (Breslau, Königsberg, Kiel; from 1938 Graz, Innsbruck and from 1940 Strasbourg). Important research into the East was carried out primarily by the Leipzig Foundation “ Folk and Cultural Soil Research ”, founded in 1920 , with the aim of dissolving the recently established Polish nation-state. Karl Christian von Loesch founded the “Institute for Border and Foreign Studies” (IGA) in Berlin together with the national politician and publicist Max Hildebert Boehm in 1925. “Border” was generally placed in the foreground instead of the border line valid under international law as a border area extending beyond German territory through German nationality . This could be done in a more targeted manner after the Locarno treaties concluded in 1926 , in which the western border of the Reich was guaranteed, but to the east Gustav Stresemann was also able to consider a revision of the demarcation with the aim of transferring all German people living in the east to the Reich to connect.

For Adolf Hitler it was clear for a long time that in the solution of population-political problems “people, space and power” must not be separated from one another:

“We do not see the solution to this question in a colonial acquisition, but exclusively in the acquisition of a settlement area that increases the area of ​​the mother country itself and thereby not only receives the new settlers in the most intimate community with the home country, but also the entire amount of space those advantages that are in their combined size. "

In 1942, the Ostforschung scientists published a summary of their results, Deutsche Ostforschung. Results and tasks since the First World War as volume 20 and 21 in the series Germany and the East, which has existed since the Weimar Republic . The volumes are edited by Hermann Aubin , Otto Brunner a . a. and Albert Brackmann on the occasion of his 70th birthday. (See also Polish West Research .) The first sentence of the preliminary remarks outlines the political integration into the " Operation Barbarossa " that has already started :

“The tremendous upheaval in Eastern Central Europe, which the war had brought about since the summer of 1939, when the pseudo-order created in the Paris suburbs finally collapsed under the blows of our Wehrmacht, has opened up numerous old and new problems. Thanks to the preparatory work that had been carried out since 1919, German science found itself better equipped than it had been during the World War. "

Now, in 1942, the "long and urgently needed cross-section of the work results of East German ethnicity and regional research" is being drawn. And A. Brackmann is recognized because the research he oversees "was able to make a significant contribution to the struggle for German law and reputation in the East" and "a tried and tested working group of German scientists was available".

In the imagination of contemporaries, the comparison with America was not lacking when they thought about the eastern border. This was evident until the 1950s, when Hubertus Prinz, who had fled to American emigration from the Nazi regime, returned to Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg and wrote:

“The similarity between his (ie, the German East) rise and that of the United States of America, which likewise encompass ancient cultural assets and old settlements, but are nevertheless new as political creations, has often been noticed. [...] Ricarda Huch calls the eastern parts of the Prussian Kingdom virtually 'America of the Reich - Adventure Land', where the mysterious root network of history is missing. The incorporation of the countries that separated the various provinces of the northern German state corresponds in broad terms to the development of ever new borders in America, the purchase of Louisiana and the annexation of those vast areas that originally belonged to Mexico. "

In 1953 , Hans Rothfels , who also returned from emigration, taught at the “Grenzlanduniversität” Königsberg and worked on Eastern research, described the character of the East German class of people, which he “in a personal sense of independence, a 'rugged individualism' like the American tradition derives from the 'frontier' ”, sees reasoned. Because: "It was, especially in the earlier centuries, 'pioneers' who went east."

1956 from the expellees milieu found in the "Federal Association of German East customer in the classroom" with a view to sustained German territorial losses in the "German East": "There could be as in the narrow home with a strong grab, there was room, there were Opportunities for the able: the East became the America of the Middle Ages! "

The second World War

The Second World War as a colonial war

In Mein Kampf Hitler had seen only two or three notable achievements of German foreign policy in the past, the first two of which date back to the 10th century and the Ottonians: The conquest of the Ostmark (= later Austria) after the Lechfeld Battle , the Conquest of the area east of the Elbe and the subsequent creation of the Brandenburg-Prussian state as a result.

When the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was established as the first step towards eastward expansion after the annexation of Austria in March 1939 , the constitutional law teacher Carl Schmitt commented that "international law [...] presupposes a minimum of internal state organization and external resilience in every state". An “incompetent people” like that of Czechoslovakia cannot be a “subject of international law”. To clarify, he used a comparison with Italian colonialism, namely the Italian-Ethiopian War of 1935/36 led by Benito Mussolini : "In the spring of 1936, for example, it became clear that Abyssinia was not a state." From 1935 to 1941, Italy looked at it as its "Protectorate Abyssinia", as the term " Protectorate " is to be assigned to the colonial sphere, the "German Empire" officially designated its German colonies as "German Protected Areas".

First resettlement campaign to colonize the Warthegau in 1939

With the territorial conquests in Poland after the beginning of the war, Hitler's situation was as follows on October 7, 1939 in a secret decree for the "consolidation of German nationality":

“The consequences of Versailles in Europe have been eliminated. This gives the Greater German Reich the opportunity to take in and settle German people who previously had to live in a foreign country and to shape the settlement of the ethnic groups within its limits of interest in such a way that better dividing lines are achieved between them. I entrust the execution of this task to the Reichsführer-SS. [...] In the formerly occupied Polish territories, the Ober-Ost administration chief carries out the tasks assigned to the Reichsführer-SS according to his general instructions. The head of administration Ober-Ost and the subordinate heads of administration of the military districts are responsible for the implementation. "

The designation "Ober-Ost" refers to the "Land Ober Ost". Hinrich Lohse , who worked as Reich Commissioner for the East , had the information material from "Ober Ost" used in his headquarters in Riga in 1941 to compile atlases and statistics. Some of his employees had already worked there during the First World War or after its end and ensured personnel continuity.

Immediately after the attack on Poland, Albert Brackmann had the book Crisis and Construction in Eastern Europe ordered by the SS . A picture of world history composed. It was intended to instruct the SS and the Wehrmacht , which ordered 7,000 copies in 1940. Brackmann introduces a picture of Heinrich I and Otto I as the first representatives of a German expansion to the east. Otto's plan to "subordinate the entire Slavic world" to the Archdiocese of Magdeburg is presented as "the most comprehensive plan that a German statesman has ever drawn up with regard to the East". In the course of his treatise, which goes back to prehistory, it varies on 61 pages in addition to the term "German settlers" (including its numerous derivatives) in Eastern Europe to the Black Sea, across the Caucasus to Tbilisi and beyond Europe to Turkestan and Siberia 34 times the term "colonize" ("colony", "colonization", "colonizer", "colonial area", "colonial land").

The national instrumentalization of the Middle Ages in the 19th century and all historical relationships with the Slavic countries thus found symbolic political form in the imperialist-colonialist enterprises of the “ Third Reich ”: the annexation of Austria was called “ Enterprise Otto ” by Hitler , the war against the Soviet Union 1941–1945 “Operation Barbarossa”, and Heinrich Himmler saw himself as reincarnated Heinrich I in his program. Heinrich continued his campaigns against the Slavs and the expansion to the east.

How familiar Hitler was, for example, with the ongoing discussion about reversing German emigration since Friedrich List is shown by a statement made after the start of the "Operation Barbarossa" in September 1941:

“We are not allowed to allow any more Germans from Europe to go to America. We must all lead the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes, and Dutch into the eastern territories; they become members of the empire. "

In October 1941 he spoke of the Ukrainian Slavs as "natives", taking up the comparison with the border colonization struggles of the Americans against the Indians:

"The natives? We'll move on to sifting them. [...] There is only one task: to Germanize by taking in the Germans and to consider the natives as Indians. "

Display board for the exhibition “Planning and Construction in the East” in 1941, which illustrates the dimensions of the “evacuation” of Jews and Poles for the “return” of ethnic Germans to the eastern territories

In 1942 he compared the suppression of partisan resistance in the occupied territories with "fighting like the Indian fighting in North America". Enzo Traverso explains: “The 'natives' should not be Germanized, but rather traced back to the condition of slaves. By extending his comparison of the Slavs of habitat to the Indians of the English colonies and to the population of Mexico prior to its conquest by Cortez, he made them non-Europeans. "

Under the direction of the " Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Volkstum " Heinrich Himmler , a number of variants of the " General Plan East " were created by December 1942 as the key document for the National Socialist colonization plans . The " SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt " published numerous articles on the German settlement and development of Eastern Europe in the SS = Leithefte - war edition published for the SS under the editorship of "Der Reichsführer SS, SS = Hauptamt = Training Office". In a speech at the SS Junk School in Bad Tölz on November 23, 1942, Himmler himself drafted the draft under the heading Today a colony, tomorrow a settlement area, the day after tomorrow Reich! a revealing picture of his own ideas.

Difficulties in perceiving the war in the East as a colonial war

Karl Korsch wrote in 1942 in the American emigration: “The novelty of totalitarian politics arises from the fact that the Nazis extended to the 'civilized' European peoples the methods that were previously reserved for the 'natives' and the 'savages', who lived outside the so-called civilization. "In 1943, Simone Weil wrote her last text on the colonial question for France libre in London and wrote that" Germany uses colonial methods of conquest and rule on the European continent and, in a more general sense, on the countries of the white race " . The Czechs and Bohemians protested against being the first to be subjected to such a regime in Europe. If one examines the procedures of the European colonial conquests, the agreement with the "Hitlerist methods" is obvious. However, when Aimé Césaire proposed the speech text On Colonialism (French 1955, German 1968) as an examination subject for the French Abitur in 1994 , the then Education Minister François Bayrou had to withdraw the text because it was offended by the National Assembly was that Césaire was comparing National Socialism and colonialism with one another when he claimed that Hitler would not be forgiven for having committed “the crime against white people” and for having Europeans become his victims. In science, however, the text continuously unfolded its effect with Frantz Fanon , a student of Césaire in Martinique, with the Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo , the teacher of political philosophy at the Sorbonne Louis Sala-Molins and in 2001 with the Afro-Colombian journalist living in France Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe , who in her book La férocité blanche. Des non-Blancs aux non-Aryens: génocides occultés de 1492 à nos jours (German 2004: White barbarism. From colonial racism to racial politics of the Nazis , Rotpunktverlag: Zurich) most emphatically takes up the trace of colonialism in National Socialism, which Césaire repeatedly mentioned and pursued.

The Swedish writer and Lettre International author Sven Lindqvist (* 1932) also assumes that there is a close connection between the policy of conquest practiced by the colonial powers and the later Nazi war over “ living space in the east ”, mediated by Friedrich Ratzel and Heinrich von Treitschke as momentous German voices in the international imperial concert. For Ratzel, the American, Australian and Russian experiences with border colonization were exemplary and the Jews were destined to perish, because “together with the small-grown hunter peoples of Inner Africa” and “countless similar existences” like the gypsies, they scattered the class of the “landless peoples” Distribution '”are to be attributed. Treitschke expressed himself accordingly in his work “Politics” in 1899: “International law becomes a phrase if one wants to apply such principles to barbaric peoples. A Negro tribe has to set fire to its houses as a punishment, without such an example one does nothing. It is not humanity and [...] a sense of justice, but shameful weakness, if the German Reich does not follow these principles today. "

This view of understanding National Socialism as the long-prepared German form of expression of racist colonialism meets with reservations in Germany and Europe: on the one hand because of the "religiously overloaded term ' Holocaust '" ( Arno J. Mayer ) and the uniqueness seen in it to highlight it from all genocides, and on the other hand from the former colonial powers, who fear that their colonial rule will be put in parallel with the war waged by the National Socialists for "living space in the east" with all its accompanying phenomena. Enzo Traverso sees one reason for this in the fact that “the work that the Nazi crimes seek to illuminate in the light of German and, more generally, European culture and practices of colonialism, appear exceptionally modest”. The accent is "placed on the special characteristics of anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but not on its anchoring in the theory and practice of the annihilation of 'inferior races', which was the common fate of Western imperialisms".

In his analysis Traverso comes to the following conclusion: "The murder of the Jews was planned and carried out during that total war, which was simultaneously a war of conquest, a 'race war' and a colonial war and which was radicalized to the extreme." the statement made by Wolfgang Reinhard regarding the imponderables of all colonial ventures with regard to the result, especially since nothing but a trace of devastation remained from the border colonization intentions for the establishment of the "Greater Germanic Empire" with borders on the Urals: Besides the murdered Jews, Sinti, Roma and victims of other Slavic peoples, 27 million Soviet citizens died between 1941 and 1945, “a number that many in this country still do not know today. Or do not want to take notice ”. In return, almost all people of German origin who were supposed to be demographically increased by millions of “Germanic” settlers disappeared from the “ German East ”.

According to Sebastian Conrad, the high number of “ resettlers ” since the 1990s who “returned” to Germany above all because of the question of their citizenship revealed in them - after the change in the Nationality Act of 1913, settlers should become “New Germany “Do not lose your citizenship and continue to count yourself to the German nation - the importance of the colonial legacy in German history. - The Germans who emigrated to America for centuries and en masse in the 19th century , on the other hand, make up around 60 million of the US population according to the last census of 1990, without the question of continuing German citizenship having to be clarified in relation to them so far. Her partial return as a German citizen to implement the General Plan East was included in the calculation of the required number of settlers for the “General Settlement Plan” of December 23, 1942.

German research

In the historical scholarship of the 1950s it was still obvious to consider National Socialism in connection with colonialism. This happened with Walther Hofer , who in 1957 wrote in his collection of documents on the NS that "a historical development lasting several centuries, namely the German colonization in the East, had been reversed" and that twelve years would have been enough "to squander the historical work of a thousand years" . This means that for Hofer, at the end of the war, Germany had become an object of decolonization in the east .

In 2008, Sebastian Conrad sums up what German research has so far contributed to the understanding of National Socialism as a form of colonialism. It is undisputed for him that parallels can be drawn between Eastern European Nazi occupation policy and colonial rule. However, he does not find the approach of Jürgen Zimmerer and Jürgen Zeller conclusive, for example to place the “Holocaust” as a German “Sonderweg” solely in the tradition of the Herero genocide in German South West Africa . Cruel colonial wars had also been waged by other nations against the background of cultural superiority and social Darwinism . There were continuities between overseas colonialism and Nazi domination in another way, namely in the form of Franz Ritter von Epp or Viktor Böttcher , who was Deputy Governor in Cameroon in 1914 and later President of Posen in the Warthegau . A number of companies with colonial experience were also involved in the Nazi eastward expansion, such as the Togo Society as a newly founded Togo-East in Zhytomyr , Ukraine , and German farmers from the former German East Africa were sent to the Warthegau in 1943, to make their experiences of the NS settlement policy available.
For Conrad, it seems more convincing to compare the colonialism expressed in NS with the colonial policies of other European powers that were taking place at the same time. He refers to a statement by the British historian David Blackbourn , who teaches at Harvard University , that "the actual German counterpart to India or Algeria [...] was not Cameroon". "If Bismarck's famous map of Africa was in Europe, the Germans' mental map of colonization and settlement also referred to Europe: Central Europe, Eastern Europe." The German expansion in Eastern Europe has geopolitically (and also discursively) in the context of political, economic and demographic formation of large power blocs since the 1920s. “They relied on colonial resources and settlement areas that could be in India and Rhodesia, in Manchuria or in Ukraine. The National Socialist eastward expansion must also be seen in this synchronous context of the global transformation of colonial empires. "

In 2009, Jürgen Osterhammel specified in his work on the 19th century The Metamorphosis of the World - the terminology of the colonialism outlined by Sebastian Conrad in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe and speaks under the heading of settlement colonialism of the “ fascist imperial dreams” in those of Germany and Italy and Japan between 1930 and 1945 developed “state-colonial settlement projects”: Italy in Libya and Ethiopia , Japan in Manchuria , where a military utopia was to emerge, and Germany, which wanted to establish “Aryan” racial tyranny in conquered Eastern Europe. As early as the 19th century, whole peoples were decimated or at least plunged into misery on the " frontiers ". Here, however, something new emerged from the destruction, namely democratic constitutional states. The settlers of fascist imperialism were only instruments of state policy. "It was the state that recruited them, sent them and provided them with land in the colonial fringes and overseas territories, and which persuaded them that they were fulfilling a particularly important national duty and that they should endure the inevitable hardships of everyday life for the good of the 'people as a whole'." They were - whether in Africa, Manchuria or on the Volga - only guinea pigs in imperial dreams.

Remarks

  1. ^ Wolfgang Wippermann : The 'German urge to the east'. Ideology and reality of a political catchphrase. Darmstadt 1981, pp. 32-46.
  2. ↑ Wippermann (1981), p. 44.
  3. ↑ Quoted in Michael Imhof, Poland 1772 to 1945 , p. 183. In: Wochenschau No. 5 (Sept / Oct.), Frankfurt / M. 1996, pp. 177-193.
  4. ↑ David Blackbourn , The Conquest of Nature. A history of the German landscape , Munich (Pantheon) 2008, p. 369; For more details, see under Warthebruch .
  5. ↑ Wippermann (1981), p. 27 (Reitemeier), p. 39 (Heffter).
  6. ↑ Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Kampf um die Geschichte. Historical revisionism and its myths , Cologne 2007, p. 233.
  7. ^ Franz Schnabel , German History in the 19th Century . Vol. 2: Monarchy and popular sovereignty , Munich (dtv) 1987, p. 192 f. - America was also a role model in the French colonial discussion of the 19th century: cf. “Far West” in Algeria, p. 14.
  8. ↑ See Ulrich Eisele-Staib, England and industrial development in Germany. In: Stadt Reutlingen (ed.): Friedrich List and his time. Economist, railway pioneer, politician, publicist. 1789-1846 , Reutlingen 1989, pp. 184-197.
  9. ↑ Ulrich Sieg, Germany's prophet. Paul de Lagarde and the origins of modern anti-Semitism , Munich (Hanser) 2007, pp. 57, 64.
  10. ^ Wippermann (1981), p. 87.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Sieg (2007), p. 174.
  12. ↑ Quoted in Ottomar Schuchardt, Die deutsche Politik der Zukunft , Vol. 1, Celle 1899, pp. 61–63 (Rodbertus); P. 296 f. (Huber); Vol. 2, Celle 1900, pp. 289 f. (Trautwein von Belle). - For the later Nazi propagandist Wilhelm Ziegler , in his introduction to the politics of Prussia and Austria , published in 1929, “colonial powers” ​​(p. 274 f.)
  13. ↑ Quoted from Klaus Thörner: " The whole south-east is our hinterland " . P. 179. With Ernst Hasse and the role of continental imperialism for Pan- Germanism and Pan-Slavism , which historians have neglected at the expense of the "extraordinary successes of overseas imperialism", Hannah Arendt deals extensively with the elements and origins of total domination . Anti-Semitism, imperialism, total domination . Piper, Munich-Zurich 1986, 8th edition 2001; ISBN 3-492-21032-5 , pp. 472-477.
  14. ↑ Friedrich Ratzel, Politische Geographie , 3rd edition. Reviewed and supplemented by Eugen Oberhummer (first 1897), Munich-Berlin 1923, p. 28. - Cf. also Sven Lindquist, Through the Heart of Darkness. A traveler to Africa on the trail of the European genocide . With a foreword by Urs Widmer , Frankfurt / M.-New York (Campus) 1999, p. 194.
  15. ↑ Ottomar Schuchardt, The German Policy of the Future . Vol. 2, Celle 1900, p. 64. - On Schuchardt's concept of the state and colonization in the East, cf. Bert Riehle, A New Order of the World: Federative Peace Theories in German-speaking Countries between 1892 and 1932 , Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2009, pp. 125–129; ISBN 3-89971-558-6 .
  16. ↑ Ottomar Schuchardt, The German Policy of the Future . Vol. 3, Celle 1902, p. 344 (emphasis in the text). - In a very similar way, Wilhelm Ziegler stated in 1929 that "since the days of the Carolingians the trend in German history has gone from west to east" (Ziegler, 1929, p. 12.)
  17. ↑ Ottomar Schuchardt, The German Policy of the Future . Vol. 1, Celle 1899, pp. 10-45. - Dirk van Laak stated in 2005 that “the question of the financing of German colonialism […] had remained central throughout its existence” and that (overseas) colonialism in Germany did not create a “coherent and widely accepted 'imperial culture'” let. (Dirk van Laak, Über alles in der Welt. German Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries . CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 978-3-406-52824-8 , pp. 65, 121.)
  18. ^ Gustav Freytag, Gesammelte Werke 18: Pictures from the German Past , Vol. 2, Leipzig 1888, p. 161.
  19. ^ Fürst von Bülow, Deutsche Politik , Berlin 1916, pp. 218, 220, 221.
  20. ^ Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, The New Europe . Der Slavische Standpunkt , Berlin 1991, p. 13. (After the Czech edition of 1920, the German one appeared in 1922.)
  21. ↑ Masaryk (1991), pp. 26, 161.
  22. ↑ Masaryk (1991), p. 16 ff.
  23. ↑ On "Upper East": Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Warland in the East. Conquest, colonization and military rule in the First World War , Hamburg 2002. On the clichés about the Slavs cf. Klaus Thörner, The Beginnings of German Southeast European Policy .
  24. ↑ Quoted in Rupert von Schumacher, People in front of the borders. The fate and meaning of external Germanism in the all-German interdependence , Stuttgart-Berlin-Leipzig undated (1937), p. 67.
  25. ↑ German East Research. Results and tasks since the First World War . Edited by Hermann Aubin u. a., Vol. 1, Leipzig 1942, p. 1.
  26. ^ Deutsche Ostforschung (1942), Vol. 1, p. 11.
  27. ↑ Hubertus Prince zu Löwenstein, German History. The way of the empire in two millennia , Frankfurt / M. 1956 (2nd edition; first edition 1950), p. 251 f.
  28. ↑ Hans Rothfels, East Germany and the Occidental Political Tradition , p. 204, in: Hermann Aubin (Hrsg.): Der Deutschen Osten und das Abendland , Munich 1953, pp. 193-208.
  29. ↑ Heinrich Wolfrum : The emergence of the German East, its essence and its meaning , p. 25. In: The German East in Classes , ed. by Ernst Lehmann , Weilburg / Lahn 1956, pp. 19–30.
  30. ↑ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf . Second volume, The National Socialist Movement , Munich 1933, pp. 733–742.
  31. ↑ See Domenico Losurdo (2007), p. 138.
  32. ↑ See Secret Decree
  33. ^ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Warland in the East. Conquest, colonization and military rule in the First World War , Hamburg (Hamburger Edition) 2002, p. 329 f.
  34. ^ Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of 'Ostforschung' in the Third Reich . London 2002, pp. 134, 168 ff.
  35. ^ Albert Brackmann, Crisis and Development in Eastern Europe. Ein Weltgeschichtliches Bild , Berlin-Dahlem ( Ahnenerbe -Stiftung Verlag) 1939, pp. 16-19 (emphasis in the original).
  36. ↑ Insignificantly shortened text of the crisis and development in Eastern Europe here (PDF; 417 kB).
  37. ^ Harry Picker: Hitler's table talks in the Führer Headquarters 1941–1942 . Introduced, commented on and edited by Andreas Hillgruber , Munich (dtv) 1968, p. 31.
  38. ↑ Adolf Hitler, Monologues in the Führer Headquarters, ed. by Werner Jochmann, Hamburg 1980, p. 90 f.
  39. ^ Enzo Traverso , Modernity and Violence. The European Genealogy of Nazi Terror , Cologne (Neuer ISP Verlag) 2003, p. 76.
  40. ↑ See reprint and analysis of the speech in Himmler's and Hitler's symbolic politics with medieval rulers , pp. 50–79. (PDF; 1.9 MB)
  41. ↑ Quoted in Enzo Traverso (2003) p. 53 f.
  42. ↑ Simone Weil, On the Colonial Question in Connection with the Fate of the French People. In: Lettre international, Issue 89, Berlin 2010, ISSN  0945-5116 , pp. 34-38; here p. 35.
  43. ↑ See RA Plumelle-Uribe: “White barbarism”. Rotpunkt-Verlag, Zurich 2004, ISBN 3-85869-273-5 . - Gert von Paczensky followed a similar approach with Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon as reference points in his 1979 book White Rule. A history of colonialism (Fischer: Frankfurt a. M.). See G. v. Paczensky
  44. ↑ Sven Lindqvist (1999), p. 193.
  45. ↑ Quoted in Lindqvist (1999), p. 207.
  46. ↑ On the "living space" concept of the European colonial powers recently: Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison , La République impériale. Politique et racisme d'État , Fayard: Paris 2009, pp. 329-352; ISBN 978-2-213-62515-7 .
  47. ^ Enzo Traverso (2003), p. 57.
  48. ↑ Enzo Traverso (2003), p. 80.
  49. ↑ Wolfgang Reinhard (1996), p. 5.
  50. ↑ Peter Jahn: 27 million killed Soviet citizens and Peter Jahn: The thoughtless dead
  51. ↑ Sebastian Conrad, German Colonial History , Munich (CH Beck) 2008, p. 95 f.
  52. ^ General settlement plan of December 23, 1942
  53. ↑ Walther Hofer (Ed.): The National Socialism. Documents 1933–1945 , Frankfurt a. M. (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag) 1957, p. 367.
  54. ^ Jürgen Zimmerer / Joachim Zeller (eds.): Genocide in German South West Africa. The colonial war (1904–1908) in Namibia and its consequences , Berlin 2003.
  55. ↑ An expanded concept of colonial rule for the explanation of NS in Jürgen Zimmerer, The birth of the "Ostland" from the spirit of colonialism. The National Socialist policy of conquest and domination from a (post-) colonial perspective. In: Sozial.Geschichte 19, New Series, H 1 (2004), pp. 10–43. See also Gregor Thum , The Eastern Frontier as a “frontier” in World War II. In: Dreamland East. German Pictures from Eastern Europe in the 20th Century , ed. by Gregor Thum, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) 2006, pp. 193–199; ISBN 3-525-36295-1 .
  56. ↑ Sebastian Conrad, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte , Munich (CH Beck) 2008, p. 97.
  57. ^ David Blackbourn, Das Kaiserreich transnational. A sketch , p. 323. In: S. Conrad / J. Osterhammel (Ed.): Das Kaiserreich transnational. Germany in the World 1871–1914 , Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht) ²2004, pp. 302–324.
  58. ↑ Sebastian Conrad (2008), pp. 96-106; here p. 104 ff.
  59. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel, The Metamorphosis of the World. A history of the 19th century , 4th, updated edition, CH Beck, Munich 2009; ISBN 3-406-58283-4 , p. 531 f. - In contrast to Osterhammel, Conrad and Blackbourn, to whom Jürgen Zimmerer also came across with an article from 2009 (PDF; 143 kB) (cf. literature), for example Birthe Kundrus (University of Hamburg) takes a point of view from which In the Nazi regime, there is much more obviously incompatible than anything comparable with overseas forms of colonialism, and settlement colonialism is not considered as a comparative concept: cf. (dis) continuities of colonialism and National Socialism .

literature

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