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  • Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler by Shelley Baranowski
  • Eric D. Weitz
Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler, Shelley Baranowski (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 380 pp., hardcover, $90.00, paperback, $25.99.

Shelley Baranowski has written an important book that tracks German imperial practices from the founding of the Second Reich to the demise of the Third. While often [End Page 156] nuanced in its evaluation, the emphasis is on continuities, as the subtitle suggests. According to the author, the Nazi empire drew on ideas and policies that had already been executed in the German imperial realm before 1914 and during World War I. For all the bluster of the two empires—the Weimar Republic seems an exception here—they also were marked by deep insecurities, notably fear of dismemberment by imperial rivals. The "volatile combination of ambition and dread" (p. 4) fed the drive to secure territorial and population gains.

In making the continuity argument—widely discussed over the past ten years—Baranowski assembles a great deal of empirical information and engages the relevant historiography. She provides an effective reprise of German history from 1871 to 1945. The author reviews Bismarck's foreign policy and the motivations for his turn on the colonial question, and tracks the radicalization of foreign policy under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Readers encounter syntheses of Germany in World War I, the Weimar Republic, and, of course, racial politics under the Third Reich.

But Baranowski's interpretive framework raises a host of questions. Too often, the emphasis on continuity in imperial and racial policies leads her to neglect countervailing tendencies. Around the turn of the twentieth century a large part of society regarded colonial acquisitions skeptically. Business owners had to be cajoled into investing in the German imperial realm; as much as ordinary Germans might have enjoyed the zoo-like displays of Africans or voyeuristic tales of German women ravaged by the Herero, precious few shipped out to the colonies. Colonial governors worried endlessly about those who actually chose to emigrate. Rarely did they display the God-fearing, self-disciplined, hard working, paterfamilias characteristics idealized by colonial societies. By 1914, race thinking may have become hegemonic in Germany, as throughout the West. But that hardly meant that all Germans were avid imperialists or that Germany's military culture went unquestioned.

No doubt, the racial policies and brutal practices of the German military and administration in Southwest Africa (SWA), culminating in the genocide of the Herero and Nama, bear similarities to Nazi policies in Eastern Europe. But how precisely do we know whether events in SWA constituted "a bed of experiences that would shape the Third Reich" (p. 49)? The fact that a few veterans of the African wars entered the Nazi Party does not tell us very much. Most Germans who joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s, and the vast majority later on, had no such experiences. Moreover, it is much too simple to compare Nazi hatred of the Jews with the German "loathing" of the Herero (p. 49). After all, until Lothar von Trotha was granted full military and civilian powers in the colony, the German governors had negotiated with the Herero. Missionaries had converted the Herero elite. Samuel Maharero, the Herero leader of the rebellion in 1904, spoke and wrote German. And Herero military prowess was both feared and admired. In its first stages, the Namibian War went badly for Germans, much to the surprise and fury of the General Staff and the Kaiser. All one has to do is read the official military history of the war to detect the combined [End Page 157] admiration and dread of the Herero, an unstable mix that one can also find in Nazi antisemitism. If Jews were not so seemingly powerful, why bother with them? The point here is that "loathing" does not capture the complexity of racial politics and, in and of itself, has little explanatory power in regard to the genocide.

Baranowski's treatment of German strategy in World War I similarly emphasizes continuities. "The occupation of Belgium and France," she writes, "enabled the application of methods drawn from the...

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