From Windhoek to Auschwitz?: Reflections on the Relationship between Colonialism and National Socialism

In: European Colonialism in Global Perspective

Abstract

Forty years before the war of annihilation in eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South West Africa perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? interrogates the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the 'racial state', and systems of forced labour as points of departure for comparative observation. The book is an indispensable document in the intensive debate among German and international scholars about the postcolonial expansion of German history, and it offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and also the 'Third Reich'.; Forty years before the war of annihilation in eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South West Africa perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? interrogates the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the 'racial state', and systems of forced labour as points of departure for comparative observation. The book is an indispensable document in the intensive debate among German and international scholars about the postcolonial expansion of German history, and it offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and also the 'Third Reich'.