Germany's Colonial-Nazi Debate: Who Owns the Hierarchy of Historical Violence?

A Berlin exhibition forces the question: does comparing colonial brutality to the Holocaust diminish the latter or expose Europe's selective memory? The politics of historical comparison are themselves a site of extraction.

The German Historical Museum's new exhibition, "Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence," curated by Edinburgh historian Stephan Malinowski, opens with a hippopotamus-hide whip from Africa placed alongside a canister of Zyklon B. The juxtaposition is deliberate and uncomfortable — not to equate, but to force the viewer to sit with both objects at once and ask what connects them.

The factual overlaps are real and documented. Racial hierarchy, forced labor, concentration camps, collective punishment, and settler expansion under the banner of "living space" appear in both systems. Hitler himself compared Eastern Europe to "Germany's India" in 1941. Between 1904 and 1908, German colonial forces killed an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama in present-day Namibia — now recognized as the first genocide of the 20th century. The Nazis mobilized 13 to 14 million forced laborers, a scale comparable to the transatlantic slave trade over more than three centuries. But the exhibition draws a hard line at the industrialized killing of the Holocaust. As Malinowski puts it: "Where the two things really diverge is the Holocaust and is the systematic mass murder of the European Jews and it's murder for the very purpose of murder." The 1944 deportation of 1,800 Jews from Rhodes and Kos to Auschwitz — after the war was effectively lost — illustrates how Nazi persecution defied any military or economic logic. Edward Kissi of the University of South Florida adds that while colonial violence was "just as extreme," Nazi violence was "annihilatory and exterminatory" in character, pursuing elimination rather than subjugation. The intellectual lineage of this debate runs deep. Hannah Arendt argued in 1951 that colonial territories served as laboratories for racial ideologies that later "boomeranged" into Europe. Aimé Césaire's "Discourse on Colonialism" (1950) charged that Europe condemned under Nazism forms of violence it had long accepted in its colonies. Trinidadian Pan-Africanist George Padmore wrote in 1938 that Hitler and Mussolini's methods had "all been used before by the British." Anti-colonial thinkers from India to the Caribbean were making the connection in real time. Malinowski pushes back on the claim that Germany's Holocaust focus has crowded out colonial reckoning, noting that Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal — none of which center the Holocaust in their national memory — have hardly been exemplary in confronting colonial history. The argument that Holocaust memory blocks colonial memory, he says, is "nonsense." The real dynamic is simpler: states resist accountability for violence that implicates their founding narratives, regardless of which atrocity dominates the discourse. The political stakes are concrete. In 2016, Nama representatives walked out of negotiations after Germany's chief negotiator called the Herero-Nama genocide "incomparable" to the Holocaust. Germany has since recognized the events as genocide "from today's perspective" but has not accepted legal liability or agreed to formal reparations. The exhibition opens amid Nicaragua's case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over its support for Israel during the war in Gaza, and visitors' comments in the epilogue reflect those tensions — even though the exhibition itself does not address Israel or Palestine. What's really being contested is not historical fact but the political economy of memory: which victims receive institutional recognition, which atrocities anchor national identity, and who gets to define the boundaries of comparison. Germany has unequivocally accepted responsibility for the Holocaust. Its colonial record remains, as Kissi observes, closer to America's unresolved relationship with slavery — acknowledged in theory, deferred in practice.