History

Colonialism and the Holocaust: continuities, causations, and complexities

Document Type

Article

Abstract

This review article scrutinizes recent research into, and disputes about, continuities from European colonialism and imperialism in the nineteenth century to the Holocaust and to the Nazi conquest in Eastern Europe. Five different versions of this colonial paradigm of Holocaust and Nazi history are considered: Jürgen Zimmerer's argument about a particular German continuity from the pre-WWI genocide in Africa to the Nazi genocide; the notion of a European archive of colonial knowledge used by the Nazis to legitimize or obfuscate their own programmes of subjugation and annihilation; the focusing on settler colonialism as a crucial model of Nazi expansion; the idea of specific East European colonial continuities from the Middle Ages to the Third Reich; and Dirk Moses's suggestion to analyze the Holocaust as ‘subaltern genocide’. Eventually, the review leads to an ambivalent assessment of the explanatory potential of the colonial paradigm.

Publication Title

Journal of Genocide Research

Publication Date

9-1-2013

Volume

15

Issue

3

First Page

339

Last Page

362

ISSN

1462-3528

DOI

10.1080/14623528.2013.821229

Keywords

Holocaust, colonialism, Nazism, imperialism, Nazi expansion

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