Abstract
This chapter looks at earlier imperial-colonial projects which served as inspirational examples and models for the top Nazi leadership, especially German Führer Adolf Hitler and SS Chief Heinrich Himmler. In this chapter, I sketch the history and memory of four expansionist episodes which preceded and influenced Nazi-driven eastern German expansion during World War II: the Teutonic Knights (and the related Frederician project); American continental expansion in ‘the West’; German Colonial Africa (that is, German South-West Africa and German East Africa), and the World War I-era ‘German East’ (that is, the wartime Ober Ost military state and the post-war Freikorps Baltic adventure). Like Nazi racial imperialism, each of these episodes was based on conquest of new ‘living space’, ‘depopulation’ of the indigenous inhabitants, and ‘repopulation’ by settler colonists.
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Notes
Quoted in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), pp. 434–5.
David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 6–7.
Dominik J. Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer, ‘Settlers, Imperialism, Genocide: Seeing the Global Without Ignoring the Local — Introduction’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2008), pp. 191–9.
Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 325.
Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 2.
Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, ‘Introduction: Settler Colonialism: A Concept and Its Uses’, in Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 1–20.
R. Douglas Hurt, The Indian Frontier, 1783–1846 (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), p. xiv.
Russell Thornton, ‘Population History of Native North Americans’, in Michael R. Haines and Richard H. Steckel, A Population History of North America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 9–50.
Quoted in Richard H. Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Ben Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 142.
For the particulars, see Jens-Uwe Guettel, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–1944, trans. Norman Cameron; R.H. Stevens and H.R. Trevor-Roper (eds), (New York: Enigma Books, 2008), 17 October 1941 and 8 August 1942, pp. 55.
Benjamin Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German Southwest Africa Incubated Ideas and Methods Adopted and Developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2005), pp. 429–64.
Quoted in Phillip T. Rutherford, Prelude to the Final Solution: The Nazi Program for Deporting Ethnic Poles, 1939–1941 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), p. 30.
The Freikorps Baltic adventure has been studied in some detail. For the details, see Robert G.L. Waite, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Postwar Germany 1918–1923 (New York: WW. Norton, 1969 [1952]), pp. 94–139.
Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), p. 207.
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© 2013 Carroll P. Kakel, III
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Kakel, C.P. (2013). Pre-Nazi Praxis: Imperial-Colonial Models. In: The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide: Hitler’s ‘Indian Wars’ in the ‘Wild East’. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-39169-8_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-39169-8_3
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