One of my history professors brought up a little-known series of events in colonial history: the Herero Wars.
She then promptly connected it to the Holocaust, saying that the military culture of Imperial Germany that was developed and exhibited in SWA led directly into the ideology of complete extermination of the Jews and other groups during NSDAP rule in Germany.
I'm not so sure about all this, and by that I mean I doubt the connections almost completely.
The military of Imperial Germany was essentially a broadened version of the Prussian military. Relevant individuals such as Lothar von Trotha were dyed-in-the-wool Prussian aristocrats - the most intransigent individuals in the resistance against NSDAP domination of the post-WWI German military and political establishment. Von Stauffenberg and his circle of anti-Hitler conservatives and reactionaries were cut from the same cloth (though von Stauffenberg was, of course, Bavarian in extraction).
While I'm not doubting that some of the techniques and methods used in SWA emerged in NSDAP actions against Jews and Gypsies and such, the culture was one almost wholly drawn from Nazi ideology, not imperial Prussian tradition. To equate the two serves only to condemn European imperium and draw nonexistent connections between them as Cesaire did. It was the culture of imperial Prussian aristocracy that most effectively opposed Hitler and his ilk within Germany, as opposed to lending it support and legitimacy.
Very suggestive. I'm inclined to agree, another approach is comparative - to note that all of the great advanced progressive states began to use policies of mass militarized incarceration and have bloody track records with those populations they herded - US with Indians and Japanese, the Germans, the Dutch. The Brits invented concentration camps when they herded 20,000 Boer civilians into them during the Boer War and then let them die of disease because of squalid, cramped conditions. It's intellectually lazy to selectively connected atrocities committed by co-nationals across a 35-year period while ignoring negative correlations and other contexts. Simply put, it wasn't because the Nazis were Germans that they systematically rounded up and killed people with scientific precision. It was because they were progressives.
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