This is an excerpt from a chapter in Losurdo’s - War and Revolution - Rethinking the 20th century.

The Third Reich and the Natives

With the unleashing of the war in the East, Hitler set about constructing the ‘German Indies’, as they were sometimes called, or conquering a Lebensraum similar to the Far West. The First World War and the British naval blockade had demonstrated the geopolitical vulnerability of Germany’s previous colonial expansion. Assessing this negative experience, Mein Kampf stressed that ‘the New Reich must again set itself on the march along the road of the Teutonic Knights of old’, in order to build a robust continental empire.¹⁰⁴ This involved exploiting the disintegration of Czarist Russia, avoiding a ‘fratricidal’ conflict with the Anglo-Saxon powers, and preserving Germanic or Aryan solidarity intact. In this optic, the war with the ‘natives’ of Eastern Europe was equated with the ‘war against the Indians’, with ‘the struggle in North America against the Red Indians’. In both cases, ‘victory will go to the strong’,¹⁰⁵ and be secured by the methods appropriate to colonial war: ‘in the history of the expansion of the power of great peoples, the most radical methods have always been applied with success’.¹⁰⁶

It might be said that Hitler sought his Far West in the East and identified the Untermenschen of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as ‘Indians’ to be chased ever further beyond the Urals in the name of the march of civilization. This was not a fleeting suggestion, but a long-premeditated programme spelt out in detail. Furet aptly draws attention to the fact that Hitler compared []the great spaces he readied himself to conquer to a ‘desert’.¹⁰⁷ But he does not breathe a word about the history behind this metaphor, which pertained to the history of colonialism and, above all, the expansion of the continental empires. In the mid-nineteenth century, Mexico seemed like a set of ‘desert wastes … untrodden save by the savage and the beast’ to chauvinistic circles in the USA, who aspired to conquer it, at least in part.¹⁰⁸ Going further back, here is how Tocqueville described the immense territories of North America on the eve of the Europeans’ arrival:

Although the vast country that I have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied it without possessing it. It is by agricultural labour that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps, their savage virtues consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these tribes began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing its completion.

In a way, the genocide that was in the process of being completed formed part of a divine plan – what, around a decade later, would be called the Manifest Destiny with which the white colonizers were invested:

They [the indigenous tribes] seem to have been placed by Providence amid the riches of the New World only to enjoy them for a season; they were there merely to wait till others came. Those coasts, so admirably adapted for commerce and industry; those wide and deep rivers; that inexhaustible valley of the Mississippi; the whole continent, in short, seemed prepared to be the abode of a great nation yet unborn.¹⁰⁹

The advance of the American white, engaged in his lone ‘struggle against the obstacles that nature opposes to him’, against ‘the wilderness and savage life’, was unstoppable and beneficial.¹¹⁰ Indeed, the native ‘has nothing to []oppose to our perfection in the arts but the resources of the wilderness’.¹¹¹ There is an especially significant expression: ‘the Indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds whence they have since been expelled’.¹¹² The desert becomes genuinely inhabited only with the entry of the Europeans and the flight or deportation of the natives.

This was the colonial tradition that lies behind Hitler, who was likewise concerned to populate the ‘desert’ of Eastern Europe: ‘In a hundred years’ time there will be millions of German peasants living here.’ The settlement of civilians went together with measures to contain and deport the barbarians:

Given the proliferation of the natives, we must regard it as a blessing that women and girls practise abortion on a vast scale … we must take all the measures necessary to ensure that the non-German population does not increase at an excessive rate. In these circumstances, it would be sheer folly to place at their disposal a health service such as we know it in Germany; and so – no inoculations and other preventative measures for the natives! We must even try to stifle any desire for such things, by persuading them that vaccination and the like are really most dangerous!

Even traffic accidents or similar kinds of incident could prove useful: ‘Jodl is quite right when he says that notices in the Ukrainian language “Beware of the Trains” are superfluous; what on earth does it matter if one or two more locals get run over by the trains?’ For the processes of racial de-specification to proceed unhindered, ‘to avoid all danger of our own people becoming too soft-hearted and too humane towards them, we must keep the German colonies strictly separated from the local inhabitants’.¹¹³

As the conquest proceeded, it was necessary to push the Untermenschen or ‘Indians’ of Eastern Europe back ever further, possibly beyond the Urals, so as to create space for Germanic elements and civilization. On the other hand, the objective situation dictated rapid colonization of the conquered territories and their endowment with a new ethnic identity. This entailed massive ‘tasks of population policy’ (volkspolitische Aufhaben). The process that had taken centuries in the Far West or other colonies had to be completed []or configured in its essentials in the space of a few years and in conditions of total war. The ‘mass catastrophe’ (_Volkskatastrophe*) of the subjugated peoples and the death of ‘tens of millions of men’ was inevitable.¹¹⁴ The decimation of the indigenous populations could not be entrusted to the long-term effects of rum, or infectious diseases, or the destruction of bison. Where starvation and the brutality of deportation proved insufficient, bombers could be called upon to raze Leningrad and Moscow to the ground (according to Hitler’s plan in July 1941), as could execution squads charged with thinning out populations ‘of primarily Asiatic composition’ and ‘Asiatics of poor quality’.¹¹⁵

The natives had hitherto been assimilated to the Native Americans, who could be unceremoniously depleted. In another respect, they ended up being represented as work tools, ‘slaves in the service of our civilization’,¹¹⁶ and hence as blacks. The new continental empire had to seize land from the ‘Indians’ (therewith condemned to deportation and decimation), and procure work tools – the slaves who could not be imported from Africa, and who were all the more imperative because of the war’s economic and military requirements.

From the outset, the Third Reich’s colonial policy suffered from this contradiction or tension: in the new territories, it was necessary both to conquer the Far West and Africa, deporting and decimating savages, and to utilize sufficient servile or semi-servile manpower. Resolving this problem – reducing the residual ‘native’ population to a simple pool of slaves for the master race – was not easy. As with the slaves in the southern USA referred to by Tocqueville, they were certainly to be deprived of education in the interim. Hitler explained: 'I am in favour of teaching a little German in the schools simply because this will facilitate our administration. Otherwise every time some German instruction is disobeyed, the local inhabitant will come along with the excuse that he “didn’t understand”.'¹¹⁷ But Eastern Europe was not the America conquered by whites; nor was it the Africa of the golden age of the slave trade. Here the ‘Indian savage’ and black slave did not exist in a natural state: they had to be created by erasing centuries of history and artifice (from the standpoint of Nazi Social Darwinism), []restoring the laws and aristocracy of nature. The attempt to revive the colonial tradition in twentieth-century Eastern Europe entailed a gigantic programme of dis-emancipation and a horrendous train of atrocities and barbarism. The death penalty with which, according to Tocqueville, the South threatened those who offered education to slaves, now had to target an entire social stratum. The Führer clearly explained the inexorable logic governing the construction of the new empire: ‘For the Pole there must be _a single* master, and that is the German; … therefore all the representatives of the Polish intelligentsia must be killed. This sounds cruel, but it is the law of life.’ Hitler’s order, formulated as early as the start of the campaign in Poland, was obsessively repeated by the Nazi ruling group. It was necessary ‘to prevent the Polish intelligentsia structuring itself as a leading group’; it was necessary to systematically liquidate the clergy,¹¹⁸ the nobility, and social strata capable of preserving the national consciousness and historical continuity of the nation, so that the new colonies could supply the requisite slaves. As the blacks were destroyed by the slave (or semi-slave) labour they were forced to perform, they were transformed into ‘redskins’, dross that must somehow or other be disposed of, in accordance with the schemas of the colonial tradition, which now assumed its most sanguinary and repugnant aspect. The pressure of time and war dispelled any residual scruples.