Controversial Kinship: Berlin Exhibition Probes Links Between Colonial Rule and Nazi Violence

The first thing a visitor meets at the German Historical Museum in Berlin is a pairing meant to unsettle: a whip made from hippopotamus hide, of the kind used in Africa's colonies, set beside a canister of Zyklon B, the poison used in Nazi gas chambers. The exhibition, titled "Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence," was curated by Stephan Malinowski, a professor of modern European history at the University of Edinburgh. It runs until April 11, 2027, and by his account it is meant to tell the story of a debate, not to settle it.

The pairing marks a contrast, since a whip is not an industrialized killing process. It also marks connections. Whips were used in Nazi concentration camps, and Fascist Italy used chemical weapons against civilians and soldiers when it invaded Ethiopia, then called Abyssinia, in 1935 and 1936. In 1941, Hitler compared Eastern Europe to "Germany's India," saying that, like the English, the Germans would rule the empire with a handful of men.

The idea of kinship is not new. In 1938 the Trinidadian journalist and Pan-Africanist George Padmore wrote that there was nothing original in the exploits of Hitler and Mussolini, because the British had used the same methods to subjugate less heavily armed peoples. In 1950 Aimé Césaire, from Martinique, argued that Europe condemned under Nazism forms of violence it had long accepted in its colonies. A year later Hannah Arendt, in "The Origins of Totalitarianism," described colonies as laboratories for racial ideology and domination, practices that then "boomeranged" back into Europe.

The exhibition sets out parallels. In the Congo Free State, King Leopold II's private colony from 1885 to 1908, executions, amputations and sexual violence enforced rubber quotas. Under the Nazis, the regime mobilized some 13 to 14 million forced laborers within a few years, a scale comparable to the transatlantic slave trade over more than three centuries. Victims came from Poland, Ukraine, Russia and elsewhere in the Soviet Union, and included Jews, who faced "extermination through work." The regime also confiscated property and harvested gold teeth and hair from the dead.

The historians interviewed stress the differences too. Malinowski notes that colonial powers often offered assimilation, with a few educated colonial subjects gaining access to places like Oxford or Cambridge, and says the Nazis offered nothing of the sort to Poles, Russians or Jews. Edward Kissi, a historian at the University of South Florida, says colonial violence was as extreme as Nazi violence, but that Nazi violence aimed at annihilation. He cites the forced sterilization of Black Germans. The exhibition draws no direct parallel to the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Malinowski calls the Holocaust murder for the very purpose of murder. As an illustration, about 1,800 Jews from the Greek islands of Rhodes and Kos were deported in July 1944, after the war was effectively lost, and most were killed on arrival at Auschwitz.

Germany's own colonial record is central. On October 2, 1904, General Lothar von Trotha issued an extermination order after the Herero uprising in German South West Africa, today's Namibia. Between 1904 and 1908, an estimated 60,000 to 80,000 Herero, about 80 percent of the population, and 10,000 Nama, about half of theirs, died. It is now regarded as the first genocide of the 20th century. In 2016, Nama representatives walked out of talks after Germany's chief negotiator called the events "incomparable" to the Holocaust. Germany has since recognized the genocide "from today's perspective," but has not accepted legal liability or agreed to formal reparations.

The argument has a German history of its own. In the 1980s Historikerstreit, Ernst Nolte framed Nazism within wider twentieth-century violence and as a response to Bolshevik terror, and critics accused him of downplaying German responsibility. Since 2020, a "Historikerstreit 2.0" has asked whether the Holocaust is a unique reference point in memory culture or should be seen alongside colonialism, racism and empire. The dispute is now less about whether comparison is legitimate than about what follows from it. Malinowski rejects the idea that focus on the Holocaust has crowded out colonial memory, noting that Britain, France, Spain and Portugal do not discuss the Holocaust yet are hardly attentive to colonial crimes.

The exhibition opens amid sharpened tensions, including Nicaragua's case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over German support for Israel in the Gaza war. Visitors' comments in the epilogue reflect this, though the exhibition does not address Israel or Palestine beyond a reference to Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, made Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921. Kissi compares German reluctance over colonial history to debates over slavery in the US, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Armenian genocide in Turkey. What to watch is whether the debate moves Germany toward legal liability and reparations for the Herero and Nama.