The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (70 page)

deeply offended by Césaire’s charges, for they imagined themselves

as civilized imperial rulers and not benighted natives. Yet just as decisive military victories turned earlier generations of defeated peoples

into primitives and barbarians, their stunning military collapse in the

summer of 1940 rendered twentieth-century Frenchmen inherently

inferior in the eyes of the Nazis.

The French were not alone in their shock at becoming imperial

subjects. After Napoleon’s failed imperial project and the bloody stalemate of World War I, no one in western Europe believed that it was

possible to create a formal continental empire in the era of the modern

nation-state. France and Germany traded victories and defeats in the

Franco-German War of 1870 and the First World War, but in neither

case did the triumphant power consider occupying its vanquished foe

on a permanent imperial basis. Instead, they imposed penalties and

indemnities and swapped the disputed territories of Alsace-Lorraine

back and forth. This restraint was not the result of European brotherhood. Rather, the continental powers assumed that it was not wise or

possible to turn national peoples into imperial subjects.

Nationalism was a powerful counterweight to empire, but nations

were not as coherent and immutable as the Europeans imagined.

The idea that nation-states were composed of people who shared

a common language, culture, and history was a useful fi ction, but

neither the Germans nor the French lived up to this ideal. Roughly

one-third of the population of late nineteenth-century France did not

actually speak French, and to the east, nineteenth-century Germans

had even greater diffi culty determining the scope and boundaries of

the modern German nation. While French nationalism rested on the

foundations of the centralized state system of Louis XVI and Napoleon, German-speakers were spread throughout central and eastern

Europe. Most lived in the principalities, city-states, and religious

360 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

fi efs that made up the German Confederation and the sprawling

multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire, but there were also small

enclaves of German-speakers in the Baltic states and tsarist Russia.

For a long time, the creation of a single German nation seemed an

impossibility.

Lacking formal state institutions to bridge these differences, aspiring nationalists and intellectuals debated whether the German nationstate should be based on the
klein Deutsch
(small German) model

that would be restricted to northern Protestants or the
gross Deutsch

(large German) ideal that would theoretically include all Germanspeakers regardless of their religion or residence. On the all important question of what made a German, both camps generally agreed

that the German
Volk
(people) shared a common bond based on blood

and inheritance. This was in contrast to French and British nationalism, both of which were based primarily on citizenship in a particular

state. Thus, while the French state could manufacture Frenchmen by

forcing its minority Breton, Corsican, Flemish, Basque, and Alsatian

populations to adopt French language and culture, German nation

builders came to imagine a Germanness that was not tied to national

boundaries.

It was no easy matter to build a coherent nation-state from this

romantic but imprecise identity. Once moderate Germans failed

to create a liberal constitutional monarchy out of the chaos of the

revolutions of 1848, it fell to the Prussian prime minister Otto von

Bismarck to bring about German unifi cation on authoritarian terms.

After defeating Austria in 1866, he forced the member states of

the German Confederation to unite under the Prussian king (later

emperor) Wilhelm I by goading Napoleon III of France into war four

years later. The resulting German Empire, or Reich, hardly fi t the

model of a homogenous nation-state. Never forgetting that they had

come late to the community of nations, the Reich’s ruling elites were

jealous of their national prestige and aggressive in defi ning the physical and cultural boundaries of the new state.

Imbued with a belligerent sense of nationalism, the Reich’s leaders

dreamed of a German-dominated
Mitteleuropa
(middle Europe) as

a continental equivalent of the informal British Empire of the midnineteenth century. This sphere of commercial and political infl uence

would provide the markets and raw materials that Germany needed

to compete with the western industrial powers. Most Germans were

France under the Nazis 361

not particularly interested in an overseas empire, and Bismarck took

part in the new imperial scramble only to distract the French and

acquire bargaining chips for future diplomatic negotiations.

While Hitler shared these dubious views of the new imperialism,

the Nazi imperial project had much in common with its liberal democratic counterparts. What was truly distinctive about Hitler’s empire

was that he sought to create it in Europe rather than Africa or Asia.

Although he disavowed overseas expansion in
Mein Kampf
, he had

a clear imperial agenda that blended extractive rule in the industrial

west with settler colonialism in the agricultural regions of the east.

Kenya was a similar imperial/colonial hybrid, but the metropolitan

British government and public never would have allowed the settlers

to try to exterminate the African majority to claim the white highlands all for themselves.

The Nazis, on the other hand, never answered to a humanitarian lobby. Hitler disdained the liberal justifi cation for empire, and

in his view it was moral and right to defend the German people by

any and all means. Citing the western destruction of Amerindians as

a precedent, Hitler planned to carve out living space (
Lebensraum
)

for German settlers in eastern Europe by enslaving and eventually exterminating “racially inferior” Slavs. Although he called the

Ukraine Germany’s “new Indian Empire,” the Nazi leader emphatically disavowed the civilizing rhetoric that legitimized western styles

of imperial rule. Declaring that “it is not our mission to lead the local

inhabitants to a higher standard of life,” Hitler proclaimed that the

Reich’s eastern subjects would not get any hospitals, schools, or even

the simplest forms of social welfare. “No vaccinations for the Russians, and no soap to get the dirt off them. But let them have all the

spirits and tobacco they want.”11 He defended these genocidal colonial

plans as the justifi able prerogative of a master race faced with invasion by more fecund Slavic and Asiatic peoples, which made eastward

military expansion just as moral and valid as the colonization of the

Americas. While Hitler fantasized about reclaiming former Germanic

lands in Flanders and Burgundy, he never envisioned replacing their

populations with German settlers. Western Europeans may have been

culturally inferior, but their shared racial heritage with Germany

spared them from the worst abuses of Nazi rule in the east.

This Nazi blueprint for empire was both inherently brutal and

foolishly unrealistic. Even so, conventional historical narratives are

362 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

not correct in portraying Hitler’s imperial project as exceptional or

anomalous. The actual ambitions and methods of Nazi empire building were simply more extreme versions of the standard imperial template. In formulating their expansionist program, Hitler’s men drew

on both the continentalism of Germany’s long-standing
Mitteleuropa

aspirations and lessons learned from limited overseas conquests during the new imperialism. The result was a powerful but unsustainable

hybrid empire with a totalitarian metropole that combined genocidal

settler colonialism with the extractive exploitation of subject communities.

In this sense, the Nazi empire was markedly different from the

German Empire of Bismarck and Wilhelm I. The fi rst unifi ed German nation-state called itself a
Reich
(empire), but in Wilhelmian

Germany this term referred as much to a national realm as it did a

conventional empire. The Germans were not the clear-cut aggressors

in the First World War, and apart from some boundary disputes, they

did not have grand designs on their neighbors’ territory in the west.

They did have ambitious plans for the Ukraine, but had the Central

Powers been victorious, Wilhelm’s middle Europe most likely would

have looked more like the informal British Empire than Napoleon’s

imperial continental state.

The Wilhelmian Reich’s conduct in its African and Asian territories also did not explicitly presage the atrocities of the Nazi empire.

While the early stages of German rule in Africa were marred by the

same sorts of abuses that tarnished the reputations of Britain, France,

and Belgium, in the years leading up to World War I, Bernhard Dernburg’s Colonial Offi ce won international respect for its plans to make

imperial governance more rational, scientifi c, and humane. The settler

colony of German Southwest Africa was the exception, but its brutal,

if not genocidal, tactics in dealing with a revolt by the Herero people

were quite similar to those employed by settlers in the neighboring

British territories. Most of the German Reichstag was appalled by

this incident and demanded that their representatives in Southwest

Africa observe the rules of war set out in the Hague Conventions.

The victorious powers at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference therefore

acted hypocritically when they passed judgment on the Wilhelmian

Reich’s record as an imperial power. In addition to forcing Germany to

assume responsibility for starting the war, pay reparations, and surrender 13 percent of its European territory (including the contested

France under the Nazis 363

Alsace-Lorraine), they also convicted the Germans of being unfi t to

rule “primitive peoples.” This was a poorly disguised excuse for the

winners to take Germany’s African and Asian territories as League of

Nations mandates. Germany was thus the only participant in the new

imperial scramble to answer for its record.

Even Germans who had little interest in overseas empires viewed

the loss of their nonwestern territories under these circumstances as

an affront to Germany’s honor as a civilized nation. Heinrich Schnee, the last governor of German East Africa, made a telling point:

“The colonial history of
no
nation is free from excesses, and indeed it

would be easy to provide cases elsewhere exceeding in gravity anything to be found in the short history of German colonization.”12

In their defense, German apologists compiled a long list of imperial

crimes committed by their accusers. These included forced labor in

the French and Belgian Congo, Portuguese plantation slavery, British

retaliation for the Indian Mutiny and the Amritsar massacre, the Rhodesians’ demolition of caves sheltering Ndebele women and children,

the deaths of more than twenty-six thousand Afrikaner women and

children in Boer War concentration camps, and the Royal Air Force’s

bombardment of rebels in Southwest Africa, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

From the standpoint of the general German public, the loss of the

overseas empire was one of the lesser indignities of the inequitable

1919 peace settlement. Like their counterparts in the other imperial

metropoles, they paid little attention to imperial affairs because they

derived few actual benefi ts from the new imperialism. Rampant postwar infl ation, the war guilt clause, crushing reparations payments,

restrictions on the German military, and the French occupation of the

Ruhr industrial belt were far more onerous and pressing concerns.

Nevertheless, Germany’s imperial stigma contributed to the overall

sense of anger and humiliation that undermined the Weimar Republic and helped bring the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi)

Party to power.

In the immediate interwar years, the Nazis were just one of many

right-wing postwar factions that blamed Germany’s defeat on Marxists, capitalists, and Jews. Incredibly and irrationally, these groups

charged that Jews were the conspiratorial force behind both western

imperialism and Russian Bolshevism. The German voting public paid

the extremists relatively little attention once the country recovered a

measure of stability in the 1920s. The Nazis became a national political

364 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

force only when the Weimar regime’s failure to manage the depression gave their conspiratorial theories credence with lower middleclass voters. Even this increased support brought Hitler’s party only

a third of the vote in the 1932 elections, leaving it the second-largest

party in Germany. As the
Führer
of the Nazi Party, Hitler needed the

backing of powerful industrialists and more mainstream conservatives to become the German Chancellor one year later.

The Nazis’ capitalist sponsors and right-wing allies expected to

use Hitler as a weapon against their enemies on the left. They never

imagined that he would seize total control of the government through

grassroots organizing, political terror, parliamentary maneuvering,