Racial Ideology, Imperialism,

and Nazi Genocide

JOHN COX

John Cox is an associate professor of Holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies at the
University of North Carolina Charlotte. His first book, Circles of Resistance: Jewish, Leftist, and
Youth Dissidence in Nazi Germany, was published in 2009 (Peter Lang Publishing), and his To
Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century is forthcoming from Pearson Prentice Hall.

T he coming war with the Soviet Union would constitute a struggle for the very existence of
Germany. It would be “the old battle of Germans against the Slavs ... the defence of
European culture against Muscovite–Asiatic inundation [Überschwemmung]” and
conclude with “the repulse of Jewish-Bolshevism”, dramatically announced the German leader
seven weeks before the 22 June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. It “must be conducted with
unprecedented severity”, each military engagement aiming for “the merciless and complete
annihilation of the enemy”.1

This bloodcurdling edict could easily be mistaken for one of the Führer’s harangues. It was
delivered not by Hitler, though, but by Colonel-General Eric Hoepner, who three years later
would be executed for his involvement in the July 1944 assassination attempt. Hoepner was not
saying anything exceptional or controversial within the military leadership, nor was this outlook
original to Nazism. A half-century earlier, in 1894, Bismarck roused himself from semi-
retirement to “sound the battle-cry of German nationalism against the Poles” and described the
border regions as a racial battlefield between Germans and Slavs.2 Three years later, Friedrich
Ratzel coined the term Lebensraum (living space), and within another ten years German military
authorities had orchestrated the century’s first genocide—against the Herero and Nama peoples
of German South-West Africa.

The German Nazis drew upon the philosophies and practices of European racism and
imperialism as well as their own country’s shorter, recent colonial history. Germany became a
unified state a few years after the “Scramble for Africa” had begun, and its imperialism emerged
after European nationalism had acquired an explicitly ethnic character. Nazism was “born into a
European world of empire” after European imperialism had shed most of its liberal pretences.3
Driven by a near-desperate sense of urgency—which they shared with other genocidal regimes,
particularly in the Ottoman Empire and later Cambodia—the Nazis exceeded previous and future
imperialists in their wanton crimes against humanity. Their chief strategic goal was the conquest
of Lebensraum at the expense of native inhabitants; this would protect the German people “from
division and disintegration for all time”.4 The Nazis’ ultimate ambition was unprecedented in its
radicalism: to forge “an ideal future world, without ‘lesser races,’ without the sick, and without
those who they decreed had no place in the ‘national community’ ”.5 The greatly expanded Reich
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would usher in a period of national regeneration and free its Volk from intolerable if imaginary
burdens. During the course of this quest, a genocidal “final solution” to the so-called Jewish
question emerged, and other groups were also targeted for genocidal destruction as part of a
unified if uneven process.

The mass murders of non-Jews are often compartmentalised or treated as separate crimes,
listed formulaically at the end of a lecture, course semester, or a book. This essay integrates the
targeting of diverse “racial” enemies into an over-arching political and demographic quest, with
common ideological origins. Although non-Jewish Soviet victims were more numerous, Hitler’s
Jewish victims are correctly recognised as targets of the most radical of the Nazis’ multiple
genocides.6 Hitler and his accomplices perceived Jews as an existential and eternal threat and
source of subversion, and were determined to erase their presence completely. Nazi anti-
Semitism and anti-Jewish policy were intertwined, however, with other “racial” prejudices and
goals, and these should be viewed as a whole and analysed within the wider context of European
imperialism and racism.7

Racism and Imperialism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, racial ideologies had come to dominate European
and American thought, permeating all corners of Western culture. Influential writers such as
Arthur de Gobineau had already divided the human race into multiple, unequal categories. Social
Darwinism invested racism with even greater potential for violence: competition among races is
the driving force in history, it argued, and thus humanity benefited from the inevitable
disappearance of “inferior races”.

When not revelling in conquest and violence, Americans and Europeans developed a
somewhat wistful, elegiac way of referring to the “vanishing races”, as if the causes of their
disappearances were completely mysterious.8 But such subterfuge was usually not necessary: it
became perfectly acceptable to speak without embarrassment about the eradication of “inferior”
peoples. Referring to the “savage races” in 1866, one prominent British writer and theologian,
Frederic William Farrar, intoned, “They are without a past and without a future, doomed … to a
rapid, an entire, and, perhaps for the highest destinies of mankind, an inevitable extinction.”9 By
the end of the nineteenth century, no less a figure than the British prime minister, Lord Robert
Cecil, could express similar genocidal fantasies without fear of embarrassment or censure: “One
can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.”10

Social Darwinist–fuelled thinking created an “ideology of inequality” that encompassed

racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, contempt for the disabled, and other assorted social and class
prejudices.11 When Adolf Hitler later asserted that “the victory of the best race” is “the
precondition of all human progress”, he was simply articulating the viewpoint of many European
elites of his era.12 Racism also rejuvenated anti-Semitism and imbued it with a more lethal
character. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, anti-Jewish prejudice had
weakened as secularisation undermined its theological basis. But with the advent of “scientific
racism”, Jews now came to be seen by many Europeans as a “race”. Therefore, the negative

119
would usher in a period of national regeneration and free its Volk from intolerable if imaginary
burdens. During the course of this quest, a genocidal “final solution” to the so-called Jewish
question emerged, and other groups were also targeted for genocidal destruction as part of a
unified if uneven process.

The mass murders of non-Jews are often compartmentalised or treated as separate crimes,
listed formulaically at the end of a lecture, course semester, or a book. This essay integrates the
targeting of diverse “racial” enemies into an over-arching political and demographic quest, with
common ideological origins. Although non-Jewish Soviet victims were more numerous, Hitler’s
Jewish victims are correctly recognised as targets of the most radical of the Nazis’ multiple
genocides.6 Hitler and his accomplices perceived Jews as an existential and eternal threat and
source of subversion, and were determined to erase their presence completely. Nazi anti-
Semitism and anti-Jewish policy were intertwined, however, with other “racial” prejudices and
goals, and these should be viewed as a whole and analysed within the wider context of European
imperialism and racism.7

Racism and Imperialism

By the middle of the nineteenth century, racial ideologies had come to dominate European
and American thought, permeating all corners of Western culture. Influential writers such as
Arthur de Gobineau had already divided the human race into multiple, unequal categories. Social
Darwinism invested racism with even greater potential for violence: competition among races is
the driving force in history, it argued, and thus humanity benefited from the inevitable
disappearance of “inferior races”.

When not revelling in conquest and violence, Americans and Europeans developed a
somewhat wistful, elegiac way of referring to the “vanishing races”, as if the causes of their
disappearances were completely mysterious.8 But such subterfuge was usually not necessary: it
became perfectly acceptable to speak without embarrassment about the eradication of “inferior”
peoples. Referring to the “savage races” in 1866, one prominent British writer and theologian,
Frederic William Farrar, intoned, “They are without a past and without a future, doomed … to a
rapid, an entire, and, perhaps for the highest destinies of mankind, an inevitable extinction.”9 By
the end of the nineteenth century, no less a figure than the British prime minister, Lord Robert
Cecil, could express similar genocidal fantasies without fear of embarrassment or censure: “One
can roughly divide the nations of the world into the living and the dying.”10

Social Darwinist–fuelled thinking created an “ideology of inequality” that encompassed

racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, contempt for the disabled, and other assorted social and class
prejudices.11 When Adolf Hitler later asserted that “the victory of the best race” is “the
precondition of all human progress”, he was simply articulating the viewpoint of many European
elites of his era.12 Racism also rejuvenated anti-Semitism and imbued it with a more lethal
character. In the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, anti-Jewish prejudice had
weakened as secularisation undermined its theological basis. But with the advent of “scientific
racism”, Jews now came to be seen by many Europeans as a “race”. Therefore, the negative

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qualities that had been falsely imputed to Jewry were now seen as genetic, and therefore
immutable and unchanging.

Colonialism in the Second Reich

In Germany and other parts of western Europe, racist ideologies were also widely applied
against Slavs and Africans, two groups that would later suffer (albeit in vastly unequal
proportions) from Nazi imperialism. In strident and militaristic tones, the Pan-German League
(Alldeutscher Verband)—co-founded by Alfred Hugenberg, who later played a key role in
elevating Hitler above the rest of the ultra-right rabble in the last years of the Weimar
Republic—noisily agitated for expansion. “We shall be a conquering people” that must seize “its
portion of the world itself! Germany awake!” blared a newspaper ad taken out by the league in
1890.13 Though enthusiastic about African colonisation, the colonial lobby believed Germany’s
destiny lay primarily to the east, and considered the Slavic peoples to be “massive, primitive”
and alien.14 Friedrich Ratzel, another co-founder of the Pan-German League, coined Lebensraum
in 1897 and developed it further in the last years of his life (he died in 1904). In Ratzel’s
conception, as in Hitler’s, a Volk requires Lebensraum in order to sustain itself; the German Volk
must expand its territory by any means, including conquest, in order to obtain resources for an
expanding population; and the people and its land must have a strong agricultural basis.15

In addition to the aggressive campaigning of the colonialist fanatics, Germany’s colonial

experience in Africa intensified these racist, militaristic and imperialistic politics, which would
reach their fullest expression under Hitler. Although Germany was late to the colonial carve-up
of Africa, by the turn of the century it had become a major colonial power in the continent,
possessing Europe’s third-largest expanse of territories. Nationalists rhapsodised about the
benefits of exporting German farmers to Africa, where they would regain a true German spirit,
which had been corrupted by modernity and urbanism. Resistance to the depredations of German
colonists and military authorities prompted the Germans to launch a genocidal war against the
Herero and then the Nama people of present-day Namibia, a genocide that claimed 80 per cent of
the Herero population and roughly one-half of the smaller Nama population. The genocide
featured the use of concentration camps, as the Germans called them at the time. Shark Island
was the most notorious. For its miserable conditions, exterminatory use of slave labour, and high
mortality, it could aptly be labelled a “death camp”, although it lacked the efficiency and
murderous technology of the later extermination centres in German-occupied Poland. A Rhenish
missionary observed this fairly typical scene in September 1905: “A woman, who was so weak
from illness that she could not stand, crawled to some of the other prisoners to beg for water. The
overseer fired five shots at her,” injuring her severely. “In the night she died” unattended.16 The
ugly term Untermenschen (subhumans) was frequently assigned to the Slavs, “Gypsies”, and
above all the Jews by Hitler and many other Third Reich officials. Some of Africa’s German
colonisers—such as the notorious general, Lothar von Trotha, who initiated the Herero
genocide—managed to go further in dehumanising their subjects, referring to the Herero and
Nama as Unmenschen.17

Germany’s colonialist period in Africa was significant, and should be placed more squarely
into the pre-history of Nazism. As historian Benjamin Madley argued in an important 2005
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article, German colonialism in Africa helped erode the “moral and political barriers to genocide”.
The Third Reich adopted and expanded upon certain ideas and practices, Madley contended.
“Genocidal rhetoric, a new definition of Vernichtungskrieg,” the systematic mass murder of
POWs as well as civilians, and the deportation of POWS and non-combatants to labour and death
camps—these were all introduced into German thought and practice through the Namibian
colonial era.18 And as in Nazi-occupied Europe, private German business interests greedily
profited from slave labour, in the process working many labourers to death. Herero and Nama
were also subjected to grisly medical experiments. Severed heads and other body parts were
shipped to Germany to be scrutinised by, among others, Eugen Fischer, the infamous eugenicist
who greatly influenced German racial “science” over subsequent decades. He resumed his
distinctly criminal, inhumane activities under the Third Reich; employed and mentored the likes
of Josef Mengele; and in post-war West Germany was allowed to retain his career and prestige
and then settle into a peaceful retirement.

Nazism’s obsession with advancing the nation’s “health”, as understood in the logic of Social
Darwinism and eugenics, is another area that reveals significant parallels with German colonial
Africa. General von Trotha wrote to Alfred von Schlieffen, architect of the “plan” that figured so
fatefully in the First World War, “I think it is better that the [Herero] nation perish rather than
infect our troops and affect our water and food.” Another German officer transmitted an order to
burn Herero women alive in their huts, because “they might be infected with some disease”.19
Nazi ideals of racial “purity” were fully entangled with “health”, which for the Nazis “was a
rather all-encompassing metaphor for physical, mental and moral–social condition alike”,
observes Aristotle Kallis; it was “a concept that was used in order to sanction both the
elimination of some categories and the growth of others ... Countries with ‘racially inferior’
stock (in particular Slavs) were excluded” from the Nazis’ grandiose demographic re-ordering
project “and provided a horrifying testing ground for the most extreme Nazi racialist fantasies”.20
As Madley notes, Himmler and other leading Nazis used imagery and metaphors that had much
in common with the discourse of their colonial predecessors in the Second Reich. “SS gas
chamber operators were called Desinfektoren, or disinfectors,” for example.21 Madley is careful
to add that the African experience “was not the sole inspiration” for the Nazi genocide, and it is
more accurate to speak of parallels, precedents, and influences rather than direct links.22

War, Revolution, and ‘Jewish Bolshevism’

Through much of Europe, the Great War and its immediate aftermath strengthened aggressive
nationalism, tinged with a quest for vengeance or the recapture of lost glory; glorification of war
and of martial values; racism and anti-Semitism; extreme anti-communism; and a longing for
authority rather than freedom. In Germany, the battlefield’s cheapening of life and the harshness
of the war brutalised post-war politics as disoriented, embittered soldiers returned to the home
front—often to join the ranks of the Freikorps and similar squads—and the conviction spread
that political differences should be resolved by force. The poisonous right-wing “stab in the
back” myth was widely embraced by Germans: the brave soldiers at the front had been betrayed
by pacifists and socialists as well as by domestic politicians who, far from the front, conceded
the war. In the imagination of Hitler and others of his ilk, “the Jew” lurked behind the

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unpatriotic, foreign forces of socialism and communism. (Throughout his political career, Hitler
made very little distinction between the numerous variants of socialism or Marxism.)

The Bolshevik takeover of November 1917 in Russia sharpened the fear of anti-capitalist
revolution among European elites, conservatives, and rightists of all stripes. These fears were
further inflamed by the leftist revolutions of 1918–19 in Germany, Austria, and Hungary. For
Hitler and others in Munich’s murky right-wing netherworld, these upheavals demonstrated the
ascent of “Jewish Bolshevism”. While the myth of “Jewish Bolshevism” was unoriginal, for
Nazism it served to join anti-Semitism with anti-Slav prejudice. Jews were linked not only to the
homeland of Marxist revolution (the Soviet Union) and the centre of Jewry (Poland), but to the
suddenly more immediate threat of socialism or communism. Nazi propaganda and oratory
incessantly invoked the names and presumed Jewishness of Béla Kun and Kurt Eisner, leaders
respectively of the ill-fated Hungarian and Munich Soviets of 1918–19, and of German
revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (all of whom were “Jews” only in the anti-
Semitic “racial” sense). Alfred Rosenberg’s unbearably turgid writings often mentioned Philipp
Scheidemann, with no concern for the fact that he was a leader of the right wing of Germany’s
Social Democratic Party and had helped crush the Spartacist workers’ uprising of 1919.
Rosenberg and his cohort of émigrés, who could claim to have witnessed the horrors of “Jewish
Bolshevism”, influenced Hitler’s thinking about these matters in the pre–Beer Hall Putsch years.
Hitler actually labelled Lenin “Jewish”, and in the style of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—
a text that Rosenberg helped introduce to Germany—viewed the Jews as the masters of capital as
well as the crafty leaders of subversive movements. Russia’s “upper strata” had previously been
Germanic, Hitler reported with considerable creativity, but had “been extinguished and replaced
by the Jew”, who now, through Bolshevism, strove for “world domination”.23

In this last quotation we see another element that fuelled Nazi racial fanaticism and
expansionism, one that is more delusional (if possible) than the others and that has been
commented upon recently by A. Dirk Moses, Wendy Lower, and other genocide scholars. In the
view of the Nazis, Jews themselves were the colonisers, taking control of Germany and other
countries through financial exploitation and other means.24 “The Nazis regarded Germans as an
indigenous people who had been colonised by Jews, principally from Poland,” writes A. Dirk
Moses.25 In Hitler’s view, Germany had endured unbroken occupation or “Jewish domination”
since the First World War; the impending war would actually be one of German national
liberation.26 This “colonisation” could of course not be illustrated with concrete examples, as
none existed. The Germans’ colonisation or enslavement was sometimes metaphorical in Nazi
lore. A pronounced theme of Nazi literature and of Hitler’s oratory in the early 1920s was that of
Germany’s exploitation by “interest slavery” (Zinsknechtschaft), an idea elaborated by the self-
styled (but untrained) “economist” Gottfried Feder, who also swayed Hitler’s thinking during the
Nazi party’s very early years.27 In its assertion that its own people, as it defined them, were
trampled upon and oppressed by their “racial” enemies, exhibited a feature later seen in Hutu-
power propaganda. Allison des Forges refers to a propaganda tactic of “accusation in a mirror”:
to convince the public that “the enemy” will bring war, oppression, murder, and so on, ascribe to
the enemy what you yourselves are planning, thereby justifying preventive, “defensive” action.28

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Poland: ‘Close Your Hearts to Pity’
Strange though it sounds in retrospect, Hitler had hoped to lure Poland’s right-wing
government into a joint invasion of the Soviet Union; the Poles declined, and a few months later
the German government concluded the Molotov–Ribbentrop (or “Non-Aggression”) Pact of 23
August 1939.29 Preparing for the impending attack on Poland, Hitler instructed his military
commanders the day before to “close your hearts to pity”. “All men, women, and children of
Polish descent or language” should be killed, he continued. “Only in this way can we obtain the
Lebensraum we need.” On 1 September, Germany invaded, sparking world war in Europe. Hitler
saw the war against Poland as both a war for territory or Lebensraum and a racial war against
“dreadful [racial] material”, as he viewed the Poles.30 His chief of staff explained that it was “the
intention of the Führer to destroy and exterminate the Polish people”. The first task would be to
“decapitate” Poland. “Only a nation whose upper levels are destroyed,” characteristically intoned
Hitler, “can be pushed into the ranks of slavery.”31 One week into the invasion, Reinhard
Heydrich, chief of the German Reich Security Main Office, ordered his police and SS forces to
wipe out the Polish elite and expel Jews; the “nobility, clergy, and Jews must be killed”, he
instructed.32 Roughly two million Polish Christians—in addition to Poland’s three million Jewish
victims—were ultimately murdered (through starvation, executions and massacres, ill treatment,
disease, and other means) while under German occupation. Poland lost one-fifth to one-sixth of
its pre-war population, a higher proportion than any other country, with the exception of the
Belarusian republic. An additional 1.7 million Poles were enslaved as “forced labourers” in
factories and camps and, most often, as farm workers throughout the Reich.

Inverting a practice seen in most wars—to portray civilian victims, after the fact, as
combatants—following at least one battle, German soldiers forced their captured Polish troops to
shed their uniforms in order to look like partisans, who could therefore be treated without regard
for any laws of war, which were quickly jettisoned anyway.33 (The doomed Poles were forced to
disrobe and then shot.) Germans unleashed other forms of unrestrained modern warfare: for forty
years, Europeans had rained bombs from the air upon colonial peoples, but in September 1939
the Luftwaffe conducted the first mass bombing of a major European city, killing roughly twenty-
five thousand civilians in Warsaw in that month alone. In the first days of the invasion, special
German units, the Einsatzgruppen, were unleashed upon Poland’s defenceless civilians, both
Jews and non-Jews. Several of these SS death squads, composed of roughly 4,200 men,
murdered fifty thousand Poles, mostly non-Jews, by the end of 1939.34 Their role in Poland was
primarily to kill Poles; twenty-two months later in Lithuania and elsewhere, they would play a
prominent and indispensable role in the murder of Soviet Jews.

The Germans annexed much of western Poland into the “Greater German Reich”, establishing
the huge territory labelled the “General Government”. The General Government was a dumping
ground for displaced persons as well as a colony. Several hundred thousand German civilians
migrated there, either coerced or lured, like other colonial settlers through history, by the
prospect of material gain and a social status they could not acquire at home. German forces
squeezed Jews into sealed-off quarters of numerous cities in late 1939 and early 1940. They later

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extended this policy into other corners of occupied Europe, but the largest ghettos remained in
Poland, until their occupants were deported en masse to death camps later in the war. Appalling,
degrading conditions prevailed. In Lodz, the second-largest ghetto, an average of more than
seven people resided in the average apartment, only one in forty of which had running water.
Typhus and tuberculosis competed with starvation, and “potato peels became a prized item”.35

The Nazi leadership could foresee the future integration of “Aryans”, including Danes and the
Dutch, into the racially recast order they envisioned; therefore, “occupation reverted to civilian
control that ensured better conditions”—although not without repression, occasional reprisals,
and so on—“for the indigenous population” in certain countries.36 Yet there was at least one
group that suffered much more severely in the Western military campaign. As Raffael Scheck
argues in one of the few books devoted to the topic, Hitler conducted a “race war against black
Africans in the Western campaign of 1940”.37 This “race war” was not a mere “hiatus between
the race wars in the east”, but through the involvement of the regular army and the impetus
provided by racist propaganda was connected to “Wehrmacht atrocities in Poland and the full-
fledged race war [the Wehrmacht] later conducted in the Balkans and the Soviet Union”.38 The
army’s lingering obsession with the “terrorism” of the franc-tireurs—the irregular or guerrilla
units that had hounded German forces during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71—helped to
inspire the atrocities against France’s African troops (and later against Slavic combatants and
potential combatants). Again displaying their delusional creativity, the Nazis were able to depict
certain Africans as real or potential colonisers. At the end of May 1940, shortly after the defeat
of France, the Nazi daily Völkischer Beobachter ran a photo from 1918 of French colonial troops
with the caption: “The black representatives of French civilisation march into the Rhineland.
Several hours later they throw themselves like wild beasts on German women and girls. They
rape, plunder, murder, and commit arson wherever they can.”39

Barbarossa and the Genocidal Frenzy

Though Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941—caught
Stalin by surprise, there should have been little doubt that Hitler would eventually put an end to
their marriage of convenience. By the summer of 1940, Hitler routinely bellowed to his
colleagues that the Soviet Union must be “utterly destroyed” and its occupants, like the Poles,
reduced to “a people of leaderless slave labourers”.40 On 30 March 1941, Hitler instructed his
generals that the war would be one of “extermination” (a Vernichtungskrieg).41 One 6 June, the
infamous “Commissar Order” had been issued, calling for the execution “as partisans” of Soviet
political officers, Communist Party members, and supposed saboteurs. “In the battle against
Bolshevism, the adherence of the enemy to the principles of humanity [Grundsätzen der
Menschlichkeit] or international law is not to be counted on.”42

In May 1941, German leaders devised the unsubtly dubbed “Hunger Plan”, an avowedly
genocidal strategy that called for the “extinction of industry as well as a great part of the
population” in “deficit regions” (that is, entire nations, including Russia and Belarus).43 In those
regions and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, the Hunger Plan envisioned the destruction of the
cities and the starvation of roughly thirty million people during the first winter of the invasion.

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The plan’s chief author, SS Obergruppenführer and long-time party radical Herbert Backe,
presented with utter clarity the plan’s envisioned consequences to a 2 May 1941 conference of
state secretaries of ministries that would be involved in the occupation. Point Two casually
announced, “Tens of millions of people will undoubtedly starve to death.” “With no evidence of
protest or disagreement,” reports Stephen G. Fritz is his recent Ostkrieg, “key representatives of
the German state agreed.”44 “The chilling wartime scheme for the ‘reduction’ of the Slav
population in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe ‘by one-third,’ ” observes Aristotle Kallis, “serves
as an eloquent reminder of the eliminationist focus of the regime’s plans” for the Slavic peoples
it ruled or hoped to conquer.45

Soviet POWs
The Soviet Union lost more than twenty-five million citizens in the war. About one-third of
this total died in combat, serving either in the Red Army or in partisan groups, but the majority
died as a direct and desired consequence of Nazi policy. Many millions of non-Jewish
Ukrainians, Belarusians, and other Soviet civilians were shot by German forces or starved or
froze to death; as many as one million Russians perished during the thirty-month-long siege of
Leningrad alone, and an additional three million Soviet citizens starved to death elsewhere in the
western Soviet Union. They were all victims of Nazism’s racial warfare. Soviet POWs were
targeted for distinctly genocidal killing.

As genocide scholar Adam Jones recently lamented, the extermination of 3.3 million Soviet
POWs remains “one of the least-known of modern genocides; there is still no full-length book on
the subject in English”.46 Roughly one million of the hapless captives were systematically shot or
gassed, while the others succumbed to starvation, disease, beatings, arbitrary executions, or
simply froze to death after capture. During the first four months of Barbarossa, most of the
captured soldiers were transported in open freight cars. Even after closed cars were deployed in
late November, a German document the following month reported that “between 25 to 70
percent of prisoners” died en route, “not least because no one troubled to give them any food”,
Richard Evans pointedly notes.47 Those who survived the transport were herded into “camps”,
for lack of a better word. Even such a monstrous creation as Auschwitz-Birkenau, though,
provided greater opportunities for survival. Antony Beevor describes the “camps” as “barbed-
wire encirclements under open skies”.48

While “camp” is misleading, “prisoners of war” is also imprecise. Captured Soviets

immediately lost any status or protections afforded POWs under international law by even the
most inhumane regimes; in the worst camps, they were viewed and treated in a manner closer to
that of the despised, dehumanised Jews, and subjected to appalling torments. “The German
guards used the inmates as target practice and set their dogs on them, placing bets on which dog
would inflict the worst injuries.”49 A Hungarian officer who visited one camp—or enclosure—
reported seeing “tens of thousands of Russian prisoners. Many were on the point of expiring.
Few could stand on their feet. Their faces were dried up and their eyes sunk deep into their
sockets. Hundreds were dying every day”.50 German guards amused themselves by “throwing a
dead dog into the prisoners’ compound”. Russians scrabbled to “fall on the animal and tear it to

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pieces with their bare hands”.51 Many hundreds of thousands were sent to camps including
Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they—along with Polish POWs—were subjected in September 1941
to the first experiments upon humans in the use of Zyklon B.

In contrast to a mortality rate of 4 per cent for British and American POWs held by the
Germans, nearly 60 per cent of Soviet POWs died in Nazi captivity.52 Approximately two
million had perished before the Wannsee Conference to determine the “final solution” of the
“Jewish question” convened in January 1942, and most of the remaining victims perished before
that year’s summer. Another two million POWs survived the war. Most of them were then
arrested upon return to their homeland on suspicion of collaboration with their captors and were
sentenced to long terms in the Gulag, where many tens of thousands perished before Stalin’s
death.53 Cold War politics conspired to keep this sad tale hidden. It was not in the Soviet Union’s
interest to draw attention to such a deplorable example of its own lack of preparedness and
weakness in 1941, nor was it a Western priority to remember or honour the terrible suffering and
sacrifice of the Soviet peoples. It is worth noting that for each American victim of Pearl Harbor,
roughly fourteen hundred Soviet POWs were starved or murdered. Had Nazi Germany somehow
been defeated in early 1942 this would have been known to posterity as Hitler’s gravest crime.

The Peak of Nazi Genocide of the Jews

After its initial military successes, in the summer and autumn of 1941, the Nazi empire found
itself in possession of several million more Jews, in addition to those in the General
Government.54 At this point, the Nazi leadership moved quickly towards the decision for a
genocidal “final solution” (its term) to the so-called Jewish question. Decisions were now being
shaped by a climate of euphoria over the initial successes in the Soviet campaign, tinged by
anxiety, and multiple conflicting proposals and initiatives, over what to do with the millions of
Jews now within the Reich. Ironically, in the quest for a Judenfrei German empire, the Nazis had
vastly expanded its Jewish population. This anxiety was heightened as the German advance into
Russia stalled outside Moscow by mid-October 1941.55 Two years after the attack on Poland,
localised mass murder, driven by racial and demographic schemes and the brutality intrinsic to
them, had evolved into systematic genocide. Once the decision for a genocidal “final solution to
the Jewish question” was made and conveyed, by late October, administrators like Hans Frank
adapted with alacrity. “Gentleman, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity,” Frank
announced to subordinates in Krakow on 16 December. “We must annihilate [vernichten] the
Jews, wherever we find them.”56

Long before we encountered the evocative title of Patrick Desbois’s 2008 Holocaust by
Bullets, the great Russian-Jewish writer Vasily Grossman had referred to “the Shoah by bullets
and the Shoah by gas”.57 Auschwitz-Birkenau, which is so closely associated with common
understanding of the Nazi killing processes, did not expand its gassing operations until the
summer of 1943.58 The monstrous camp complex is rightly regarded as the epitome of Nazi evil,
and was the graveyard of one million Jews. Yet hundreds of thousands of the Nazis’ other Jewish
victims had already been killed through less impersonal, less industrialised means—and the
death camps, where half the six million were murdered, were not as antiseptic or depersonalised

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as implied by the adjective “industrial”. Millions of Jews and other victims of Nazism were shot
at close range and dumped into mass graves; starved to death; or succumbed to disease.

An Einsatzgruppe unit commanded by Friedrich Jeckeln, who was executed by the Soviets
soon after the war, shot 23,600 Jews at Kamenetsk-Podolsk (south-western Ukraine) in late
August 1941, the first massacre by German troops of Jews in such numbers.59 The open-air
massacres quickly accelerated; the Babi Yar shootings of 33,000 took place five weeks later, and
by the end of January 1942 Einsatzgruppe A reported that it had shot 229,000 people, one-third
of them in Lithuania in mid-October alone; the other three Einsatzgruppen each shot close to
100,000 people, the very large majority of whom were Jewish, in the autumn of 1941 and early
1942.60 Tens of thousands of German Jews were deported to the east to be shot in October and
November 1941, by which time Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and others were speaking
unambiguously of the “extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe” (Alfred Rosenberg) and
triumphantly recalling Hitler’s January 1939 “prophecy” that the “Jewish race” would be
destroyed in the war. Awaiting his execution four years later, Jeckeln stated that Himmler
ordered him in November 1941 to kill “all Jews in the Ostland down to the last man”.61

In the autumn of 1941, the Nazis began operating extermination centres in German-occupied
Poland. Chelmno was the first such centre, and also the first to use gas. One hundred and fifty
thousand victims were killed in this fashion—Russians, Poles, and Romanies as well as Jews,
who as elsewhere were the large majority. The Germans had opened the Auschwitz camp in
1940, and in October 1941 they began a large-scale expansion, adding a second camp,
Auschwitz-Birkenau, which included gas chambers and crematoria. As they began to expand and
transform Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941, the Nazis initiated “Operation Reinhard”. The
programme’s task was to murder the Jews who were trapped in the General Government.
Operation Reinhard entailed the construction of four additional death camps—Belzec, Majdanek,
Sobibor, and Treblinka. Two million Jews perished in “Operation Reinhard”, most of them
during the most intensive period of the Holocaust: between early 1942 and early 1943, roughly
half the Nazis’ Jewish victims were murdered.

Much has been written on the role of the Wehrmacht in the Nazi genocide, and on the
motivations of German and non-German killers. An issue that merits further exploration is the
connection between Jews and Slavs in the Nazi–German imagination. Letters from German
soldiers in the East reflect the influence of Nazi teachings about “Jewish–Bolshevist” aggression
and barbarity. In a bizarre variant of the “blood libel”, one soldier wrote that he had witnessed
the “bestial murder” by “Bolshevists and Jews” of “12,000 Germans and Ukrainians. I saw
pregnant women hanging by their feet” in an alleged Soviet secret-police prison. “Some even
had their hearts cut out. 300 orphans between the ages of 2 and 17 had been nailed to the wall
and butchered [zerfleischt]”. Other letters from the summer and autumn of 1941 repeated these
fantastical and lurid accusations, replete with the crucifixion motif. “I was in Lemberg yesterday
and saw a bloodbath … Many had their skin stripped off, the men were castrated [entmannt],
their eyes poked out, arms or legs chopped off. Some were nailed to the wall, 30–40 were sealed
into a small room and suffocated. About 650 people in this area,” added the soldier, “must have

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died in such ways.” Most of the crimes were committed by “the Jews”, he wrote. “Now they
have to dig the graves.”62

The Exterminatory Impulse

After experimenting with other methods to settle the “Jewish Question” of their imagining,
the Nazis by the autumn of 1941 were dedicated to killing every Jew they could get their hands
on—and even those beyond their grasp. The genocides of Slavs, Roma and Sinti, and the mass
murder of Africans and political and social enemies lacked the urgent priority and determination
that, by late 1941, drove the Jewish Holocaust. But these crimes originated in closely related
goals and congruent ideological roots in racism and imperialism.

ENDNOTES

1. Generaloberst Hoepner, “Befehl des Befehlshabers des Panzergruppe 4”, 2 May 1941,
reprinted in Der deutsche Überfall auf die Sowjetunion: “Unternehmen Barbarossa” 1941, ed.
Gerd R. Ueberschär and Wolfram Wette (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,
1991), p. 251.

2. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin,
2008), p. xxxvii.

3. Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007), p. 373.

4. Shelley Baranowski, “Against ‘Human Diversity as Such’: Lebensraum and Genocide in

the Third Reich”, in German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany, ed.
Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 59.

5. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 306.

6. A more complete summary of Nazism’s crimes would of course include the many hundreds
of thousands of Romani victims of the Porrajmos (“Devouring”; see the article by Ian Hancock
in this issue of Global Dialogue); the roughly two hundred thousand victims of Operation T-4,
which targeted for extermination the mentally and physically disabled and which was extended
into Poland and the Soviet Union; the tens of thousands of German communists and socialists
who were killed under the Third Reich; the five or six thousand homosexual men who died in
German concentration camps, where they could not expect sympathy or solidarity from their
fellow prisoners; and approximately fifteen hundred Jehovah’s Witnesses (mostly but not all
German) who died in camps or were executed.

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 7. While we have made great progress in transcending a dead-end debate about Holocaust
“uniqueness”, it is still worth stating explicitly that “victimhood competition” is indecent and
misguided. I endorse the approach indicated by Michael Rothberg’s question, “Does collective
memory really work like real-estate development?”, in his Multidirectional Memory:
Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2009), p. 2. Rothberg argues persuasively that we should view “race and violence … in a
comparative framework that allows those interested in the Holocaust to benefit from a relaxation
of the border patrol that too often surrounds and isolates discussion of the Shoah” (p. 132).
Recognition of humanitarian disasters should not be a “zero-sum game”, as if we possess a finite,
limited quantity of compassion, sympathy, sorrow, which if we expend it in one direction must
be subtracted elsewhere.

8. See Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). Thomas Jefferson was given to the most
astonishingly passive, obtuse ruminations: “It is to be lamented then, very much to be lamented,
that we have suffered so many of the Indian tribes already to extinguish”; the whites had
“suffered”, he continued, because they had neglected to collect a scientific record of the
languages of the vanishing peoples (Brantlinger, p. 52). Andrew Jackson spoke in more blunt
and pitiless terms, but was capable of expressing a sense of “melancholy” as we “tread on the
graves of extinct [Indian] nations” (ibid., pp. 57–8).

9. Frederic William Farrar, quoted in Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One
Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (New York:
New Press, 1997), p. 135.

10. Ibid., p. 140.

11. See Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 1.

12. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), p. 317.

13. 24 June 1890 newspaper ad sponsored by the Pan-German League, available in translation
at Fordham’s Modern History Sourcebook
[http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1890pangerman.asp].

14. Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 182.

15. See Benjamin Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South-West Africa
Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe”,
European History Quarterly 35, no. 3 (2005), p. 432. Ratzel first used the term in 1897, and in
1901 published his essay “Der Lebensraum” in Festgaben für Albert Schäffle, ed. Karl Bücher et
al. (Tübingen: Laupp, 1901).

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 16. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten
Genocide (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 210.

17. Ibid., p. 140.

18. Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz”, pp. 457, 458.

19. Ibid., p. 445.

20. Aristotle A. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life: Ideological and
Structural Determinants of National Socialist Policy-Making”, Journal of Genocide Research 7,
no. 1 (2005), pp. 7, 10.

21. Madley, “From Africa to Auschwitz”, p. 445.

22. Ibid., p. 430.

23. Hitler, Mein Kampf, pp. 641, 654, 661.

24. See David Furber and Wendy Lower, “Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-Occupied
Poland and Ukraine”, in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern
Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), p. 375.

25. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History”, in
Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Moses, p. 37.

26. Ibid., p. 39.

27. Fortunately, few of Feder’s early writings are available today. See Feder, “Manifesto for
Breaking the Bondage of Interest”, in Nazi Ideology Before 1933: A Reader, ed. Barbara Miller
Land and Leila J. Rupp (Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, 1978). Hitler repeated many of
Feder’s ideas at the time, and the “economist” was one of the few individuals—and the only
Nazi—whose influence Hitler acknowledged in Mein Kampf. Like most important figures during
the Nazi Party’s very early years, though, Feder lost influence by the time the Nazis took power.

28. Allison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York:
Human Rights Watch, 1999), pp. 65–6. The Tutsi-led rebels were intent on reimposing Tutsi
“feudal” rule, preached Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (the infamous radio station,
RTML) from 1991 to 1994.

29. Lithuania, still an independent nation in 1939, also declined German offers to join an anti-
Soviet war; it would be annexed by Moscow, with Hitler’s tacit support, in June 1940.

30. David Crowe, The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (New York: Westview,
2008), p. 159. The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on 1 September and occupied

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slightly more than half the country. Of the one and a quarter million Jews in the Soviet zone,
about two hundred and fifty thousand were deported to Siberia or Kazakhstan, while the
remaining population saw its synagogues, schools, and aid organisations shut down on Stalin’s
orders.

31. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books,
2010), pp. 121, 126.

32. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), p. 105.

33. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 121. The German army massacred three hundred POWs in this
incident near the village of Ciepeilów in Mazovia Province on 8 September.

34. Crowe, Holocaust, p. 160.

35. Bloxham, Final Solution, pp. 112–13.

36. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life”, p. 10.

37. Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French
Soldiers in 1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 9.

38. Ibid., pp. 151, 11.

39. Ibid., p. 106.

40. Robert Gellately, “The Third Reich, the Holocaust, and Visions of Serial Genocide”, in
The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Gellately and Ben
Kiernan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 259.

41. Antony Beevor, The Second World War (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2012), p.
189.

42. “Der Kommissarbefehl”, 6 June 1941 [http://www.ns-

archiv.de/krieg/1941/kommissarbefehl.php]

43. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 163.

44. Stephen G. Fritz, Ostkrieg: Hitler’s War of Extermination in the East (Lexington, Ky.:
University Press of Kentucky, 2011), pp. 61–2.

45. Kallis, “Race, ‘Value’ and the Hierarchy of Human Life”, p. 16.

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 46. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.
271. The genocide of the POWs is discussed at length in Alexander Werth’s and Alexander
Dallin’s major works on the war and occupation in Russia.

47. Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 183.

48. Beevor, Second World War, p. 209.

49. Evans, Third Reich at War, pp. 183–4.

50. Quoted in Jones, Genocide, p. 177.

51. Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New
York: Picador, 2007), p. 290.

52. Mann, Dark Side of Democracy, p. 186.

53. Jones, Genocide, p. 273. Soon after Stalin’s death in March 1953, there were widespread
amnesties and releases from the camps.

54. Roughly one million Soviet Jews fled eastward, out of the regions occupied by the
Germans, sparing themselves the fate of those in the German zone.

55. For the most persuasive, detailed account of Nazi decision-making as it evolved into the
“final solution”, see Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of
Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press,
2004).

56. Stanisław Piotrowski, ed., Hans Franks Tagebuch (Warsaw: PWN-Polnischer Verlag der
Wissenschaften, 1963), p. 112. Piotrowski quotes from Frank’s 16 December 1941 address to a
cabinet session in Krakow.

57. See Beevor, Second World War, p. 210.

58. See Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 68–70.

59. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 224. Many of these victims had been deported earlier by
Hungary.

60. Ibid., p. 254.

61. Ibid., pp. 289, 298–9. “Ostland” was the German occupation zone in the Baltics, which
included a section of northern Poland as well as Minsk and other parts of western Belarus.

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 62. Wolfgang Diewerge, ed., Deutsche Soldaten sehen die Sowjet-Union: Feldpostbriefe aus
dem Osten (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert-Verlag, 1941), pp. 44–5 for first quotations, from non-
commissioned officer K. Suffner; p. 44 for second set of quotations, from 6 July 1941 letter from
corporal Paul Rubelt. Some of the letters collected in this short book are available in imperfect
English translations at [http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/feldpost.htm].

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