Re-Imagined Communities: Racial, National, and Colonial Visions in National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy, 1933-1943

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY

Eric S. Roubinek

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Eric D. Weitz, advisor Mary Jo Maynes, co-advisor

December 2014

© Eric S. Roubinek 2014

Acknowledgements

This project could not have been completed without the ongoing support and encouragement of numerous friends and colleagues. Foremost among them, I am deeply indebted to my two wonderful advisors Eric Weitz and MJ Maynes. Whether from across town, the mountain-tops of the Alps, or the south of France, Eric and MJ always found time to answer my questions and challenge my ideas while providing moral support throughout my graduate career. The strengths of this work are the result of their mentorship and guidance. I am also indebted to my committee members Rick McCormick, Patricia Lorcin, and Helga Leitner who not only provided useful comments throughout the writing process, but whose courses were influential in the defining of this project. I would be remiss not to thank Gary Cohen whose encouragement and humor were a constant throughout my graduate studies. I have received financial support from the University of Minnesota History Department, Graduate School (Graduate Research Partnership Program, Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship), European Studies Consortium (Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship Program), Center for German and European Studies, and from the German Academic Exchange Service. I am grateful for their support without which this project could not have been completed. Throughout the research process I spent several years in the archives of Germany and Italy. I wish to thank the staff of the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Bundesarchiv Koblenz, and the Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv for their kind support. In Rome I am grateful for the patience and direction offered to me by the staff of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. And finally I wish to thank the staff of the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, whose assistance and friendliness over the years have made the archive an inviting, and at times, entertaining place to work. I also wish to thank many of my graduate colleagues at the University of Minnesota who offered me their guidance and friendship and who kept me sane throughout my graduate career. Emily Bruce and Melissa Kelley were a constant source of encouragement and Eric Otremba and Tim Smit always provided a healthy dose of realism and experience. I am also grateful to Chris Marshall and Ed Snyder, who helped me find my own voice in my early years as a graduate student, offered friendly competition and commentary in the final stretch of writing, and provided innumerable hours of entertainment throughout my years in the history department. I am also indebted to Marnie Christensen who is responsible for getting me back into my running shoes and providing me with a healthy outlet for my stress and a sounding board for my work in the final years of dissertating. Whether accompanying me to the archives in Berlin and Rome, or submitting forms to the Graduate School in my absence Adam Blackler has been a terrific friend and indispensable colleague. Jessica Namakkal and Matt Konieczny formed my “shadow writing group.” Thank you both for your professional and personal support and encouragement throughout the writing process. Additional thanks go to my “nemesis” Willeke Sandler and to Kobi Kabalek who provided a strong intellectual network while researching in Germany and beyond.

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I also owe a debt of gratitude to my new colleagues at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, without whose patience and support I could not have finished the final push of writing. A special thanks goes to Jake Butera, Regine Criser, Oliver Gloag, and Darin Waters. Outside of the university I wish to thank my extended network of family and friends for their ongoing support. My “adopted” big sister and big brother Marynel Ryan van Zee and Will Cremer have been unbelievable mentors throughout the writing process and the transition into the post-dissertation world. In Germany Britta, Tobias, Tessa, and Frank provided so much more than just a roof over my head during my many research trips. I value our great conversations and lasting friendship. To my family in Germany I extend my deepest thanks for all that you have done to support me over the years. Whether offering a respite from the archives on the North Sea or not so subtly critiquing my German, I could not have completed this project without your support and friendship. Thank you Kristin, Christa, Henning, Helge, Katja, and Ingmar! Finally I wish to thank my mom and dad and sister without whose love and support this project could never have been completed. “Next year” has finally come, dad, and I am now finished writing.

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Abstract

The rise of National Socialism in 1933 offered a new opportunity to the German colonial movement whose demands for a restored overseas empire had remained at the margins of nationalist politics throughout the Weimar Republic. Profiting from the broader political revisionism of National Socialism, colonial revisionists sought to meld their ambitions overseas with the racial, national, and expansionist politics of Nazism, while the regime sought to benefit from the popular support for colonialism. Using a biographical approach, I move beyond a strictly diplomatic history of National Socialist overseas empire to explore the experiences of members of the German colonial movement – from mid-level, Party functionaries, to women journalists, and even opponents of the regime – to demonstrate the contentiousness of ideas of race, space, and nation under the Third

Reich. Viewing race and nation through the lens of overseas empire, I argue that not only were these ideas highly variable and mobile within a national context, but also that contestations over these terms allowed for the creation of new racial and national communities that transcended the borders of the nation-state. When it became apparent to the German colonial movement that the National Socialist leadership was more interested in expansion on the continent than overseas, the movement looked increasingly to Fascist Italian colonialism for inspiration and collaboration. This transnational cooperation provided an alternative to the formal political and military alliances between the two states and posited a German and Italian fascism as the defender of a “new

Europe.” My research draws on a broad variety of secondary sources and the primary and archival source collections of the Bundesarchiv Berlin, Bundesarchiv Koblenz,

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Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz,

Politsches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, and the Archivio

Centrale dello Stato.

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Table of Contents

Introduction and Literature Review 1

Chapter 1: “To be Colonial is to be National”: Overseas Empire under the Third Reich 29

Chapter 2: Fascist Colonialism: Transnational Nationalisms and the Creation of a “New Europe” 76

Chapter 3: “Mit kolonialem Gruß” to “Heil Hitler”: Colonial Education in the Third Reich 126

Chapter 4: Creating “Carriers of the Nation”: The Fascist Colonial Police 174

Conclusion 221

Bibliography 227

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Introduction and Literature Review

As a consequence of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles Germany ceded all of its overseas possessions to the newly created Mandate Powers. Yet, despite the loss of colonies, German colonialism did not end. Instead it lived on in the memories of former

German colonists, and colonial officials and soldiers. United in spirit if not in name, a multitude of German colonial revisionist organizations such as the Deutsche

Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) kept the dream of overseas empire alive throughout Germany’s Weimar Republic. Colonial revisionists – these diehard supporters of the return of a German overseas empire – made little headway in the midst of Weimar’s political, social, and economic crises. Therefore, many colonialists welcomed the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933.

The Nazis had promised to take up the colonial banner in domestic politics and reinstate a strong, national colonial will. Since 1920 point three of their party platform declared, “We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and settlement of our surplus population.”1 In many ways the Nazis kept their promise, and under the Third Reich colonialism took on a new dimension of symbolic national and international importance. The colonial press, colonial literature, membership in colonial organizations, and participation in colonial events all increased after 1933. Beyond the propaganda, the National Socialist regime actively planned for a return to overseas territories. By the end of its 10-year-long quest for overseas colonies in 1943 the Nazi colonial administration had moved from a process of synchronization and ‘nazification’

1 “Programm der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, München 24.2.1920,” in Wolfgang Treue, Deutsche Parteiprogramme 1861-1954 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1956), 143. 2 of the various colonial revisionist groups of the Weimar era to establishing its own departments of overseas colonial preparation and education. It had even developed detailed plans to create a Colonial Ministry in 1941. Yes, all of this despite the fact that the Third Reich never possessed a single overseas colony. As historian Wolfe Schmokel argues, we have to ask “whether at any time in history a non-existent empire had been so well administered.”2

The bureaucracy of Nazi colonialism, however, tells only one story. By contrast, my argument here begins from the premise, that whether speaking of ‘colonial fantasies’ or of a ‘colonialism without colonies’, the politics and experiences of overseas colonialism had a profound influence on the German nation in the twentieth century and during the National Socialist period in particular. Therefore the story of the German colonial movement and its determined efforts to return Germany to the ranks of overseas colonial powers needs to be told alongside and in dynamic relationship with the story of more official government efforts. Moreover, overseas colonial revisionism is not just the tale of a few stubborn individuals – although many of them surely were stubborn. This is rather a much more expansive story of German and European history that joined together diverse actors in a common cause.

What I identify as the German colonial movement in the following analysis was not a formal organization as such. It consisted both of members of German colonial

2 Wolfe Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 160. This quote from Schmokel also forms the title of Dirk van Laak’s chapter, “‘Ist je ein Reich, das es nicht gab, so gut verwaltet worden?’ Der imaginäre Ausbau der imperialien Infrastruktur in Deutschland nach 1918,” in Birth Kundrus, ed., Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 2003), 71-90. Werner Schubert also begins his article with this quote from Schmokel. “Das Imaginäre Kolonialreich: Die Vorbereitung der Kolonialgesetzgebung durch den Kolonialrechstausschuß der Akademie fur Deutsches Recht, das Reichskolonialamt und die Reichsministerien (1937-1942),” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 115 (1998): 86-149. 3 organizations – such as the German Colonial Society until 1936 or the

Reichskolonialbund thereafter – and those who remained unaffiliated. The diverse group of former colonial officers, administrators, colonists, and German nationalists that I define as members of a German colonial movement had only one thing in common, a shared goal of colonial revisionism that would restore Germany’s overseas empire. My analysis focuses on those who had already gained experience overseas, although there were some within the movement who were still awaiting their first chance. Most members of the German colonial movement were politically conservative – a reflection of their strong sense of nationalism – but German colonialists of the interwar period allied with various political parties throughout the Weimar Republic and even after 1933.

Some colonialists joined the National Socialist Party, while others remained neutral or even antagonistic to the regime as they pursued their colonial goals.

Despite the diversity of their politics and experiences, members of the German colonial movement were serious and united in their aim to restore Germany as an overseas imperial power. This, they believed, could only be accomplished by anchoring a strong colonial consciousness within the nation. As such, many German colonialists responded positively to the early National Socialist rhetoric on the importance of overseas colonies and established a tentative alliance with the new regime. In the early years of the Third Reich they successfully used the apparatuses of the Nazi Party and state to further a sense of colonialism within the German nation. As chapter one demonstrates, under the Third Reich ‘to be colonial was to be national’. When it became clear, however, that Hitler and other leading Nazi officials were more interested in

4 expansion into Eastern Europe than they were in returning overseas, the German colonial movement did not give up its revisionist goals, but rather strengthened its resolve to return to Africa. As part of their response to the Nazi leadership’s disinterest in overseas colonies, its members increasingly shifted their focus away from National Socialist

Germany and toward another ‘new comer’ in empire building, Fascist Italy. Like

Germany, Italy was late to overseas expansion and its empire never rivaled those of its

European neighbors. But in contrast to Germany, Italy actually did possess overseas colonies and was further expanding this empire under fascism. Mussolini’s blending of nationalism and colonialism and Italy’s victories in Ethiopia in 1935/36 proved inspirational and instructive to a German colonial movement disenchanted with the Nazi leadership’s continental priorities.

This dissertation argues that we must recognize these global connections that

European colonialisms created and upon which they were defined, and not be confined to a national narrative. It demonstrates that whether as travelers, translators, or just die-hard overseas colonialists, when the Nazi regime began to fail the German colonial movement and its overseas ambitions, the movement looked increasingly toward its Fascist neighbor for inspiration. Forced into a position in which they had to negotiate loyalty to the party and loyalty to their goals of (re)establishing an overseas empire, members of the German colonial movement formed a new transnational network of fascist colonialists with their

Italian allies. Together they created an ideological union and shared sense of belonging that provided a supplement to the political and military alliances of the Axis powers.

This community of fascist colonialists incorporated and co-opted National Socialist and

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Fascist ideas of race and space into an alternative vision of a fascist overseas empire and new Europe.3

Germany’s Colonial Pasts and the Forgotten Empire

Within the historiography of Germany the story of overseas colonialism under the

Third Reich is little known. The defeat of the Nazis in the Second World War brought the German colonial movement’s dream of restored overseas possessions to an end.

Forever remaining a non-existent empire, Nazi-era colonial revisionism could not compare to the official German overseas empire that had lasted from 1884-1919.

Moreover, even this actually-existing empire of the Kaiserreich never rivaled those of

France, Britain, and other European powers. Because of this double marginalization the overseas colonialism of the Third Reich had been all but lost to popular memory as well as disregarded in the grand narratives of German history throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.4

Even with Germany’s actual overseas empire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century a colonial and postcolonial scholarship had been slow to develop there in comparison to other former imperial powers.5 To some extent this should come as no surprise. The German overseas empire could not compete with those of its European neighbors in geographic expanse of its territories, the number of colonists it sent abroad,

3 Throughout this analysis I use capital “F” Fascism to refer to the Partito Nationale Fascista in Italy, while lower case “f” fascism is used to describe both the Nationalsozialistische Deutscher Arbeiterpartei and the Partito Nazionale Fascista. 4 See e.g. Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1866-1918, vol. 2. (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1990), and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1987). 5 See “Introduction: German Colonialism and National Identity,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, edited by Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1-6. 6 nor in economic profitability. It lasted a mere 35 years before the Versailles Peace Treaty stripped Germany of its overseas possessions.

More than the comparative statistics of empire, however, it is perhaps the final means by which Germany ceased to be an overseas power that has had the greatest effect on the development of a colonial and postcolonial history there. Germany lost its colonial possessions at the hands of international agreements and treaties, meaning that it did not have to administer the processes of decolonization following the postwar period that were and remain politically and culturally traumatic events in Britain, France,

Belgium, Portugal, the Netherlands and the United States. This lack of a firsthand process of decolonization in which the colonized forced the withdrawal of imperial powers allowed for myths of a ‘good’ German colonialism to be perpetuated from the time of the Weimar Republic throughout much of the post-World War II historiography.6

Moreover, Germany also lacked a continued interaction with former colonial subjects during the interwar period. As a consequence there were too few former colonial subjects who spoke and wrote German well enough to create their own critical narratives

– those of the ‘other’ – that could be incorporated into a national history. Put simply,

Germany did not have a Frantz Fanon or Aimé Cesaire.

6 See Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-1960,” in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, et al., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 205-232; and Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” and Pascal Grosse, “What does German Colonialism have to do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Eric Ames et al., Germany’s Colonial Pasts, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 135-147 and 115-134 respectively, or the numerous accounts throughout the colonial press of the 1920s and 1930s of General Lettow-Vorbeck’s “loyal Askari.” Only in 2004 did Germany officially recognize its responsibility for the genocide of the Herero and Nama when the German Minister of Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, publicly ‘apologized for Germany’s actions. 7

In the postwar period the growing historiographic focus on Germany’s recent history under the Third Reich and its role in the Holocaust further compounded the historical amnesia regarding Germany’s colonial pasts. These colonial histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were not completely forgotten, but became overshadowed by efforts to find lines of continuity from the Kaiserreich to the Third

Reich, particularly after the introduction of Ralf Dahrendorf’s argument for a German

Sonderweg in social and political development.7 Only once Germany’s national

‘peculiarities’ had been addressed and worked through, did scholars start to show an interest in Germany’s overseas colonialism.8

Processes of colonialism may have been neglected in postwar national narratives, but colonial politics were not. In the 1960s Hans-Ulrich Wehler moved beyond narratives of Bismarck’s gamesmanship and the high politics of colonial diplomacy and argued for the “primacy of domestic politics.”9 Wehler viewed Bismarck’s rapid turn towards overseas empire as a continuation of internal political affairs. It was a way to deflect the German public’s attention away from domestic crises while at the same time bring the working classes closer to the state. Wehler may have been less interested in the actual processes of colonialism, but his clear argument that colonial politics and the idea of colonialism were not just something to be exported, but had a profound effect on the

7 See Ralph Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in Germany (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967); Geoff Eley and David Blackbourn, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), and Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht; die Kriegspolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914/18 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1961). 8 See Jürgen Zimmerer in “Forum: The German Colonial Imagination,” German History 26 (2008): 253. 9 Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Berlin: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1969). 8 metropole influences my analysis on domestic struggles between the German colonial movement and the Nazi leadership.

If Wehler argued for the importance of domestic politics, then Klaus Hildebrand’s study of pro-colonial thought from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich is best defined as the ‘primacy of foreign politics’.10 To be sure Hildebrand does echo some of the domestic policy analysis of Wehler. He demonstrates how colonialism became a tenet of Nazi ideology, but only superficially so, as it attracted support from the various colonial societies during the Weimar Republic. Hildebrand argues that the Nazi leadership’s claim for the return of Germany’s colonies however, was more than just an ambivalent catchall aspect of Nazi ideology or propaganda. It was part of a strategic foreign policy intended to entice the British into staying clear of Germany’s plans on the continent. In gambling Germany’s claims to its former colonies, Hitler hoped to establish continental hegemony, only later to attack Britain’s overseas empire. Only when Britain felt threatened by Germany’s maritime rearmament in 1938 did Hitler give up this tactic and begin to consider a real pursuit of colonial acquisitions. But even this, Hildebrand argues, was superficial. From 1936 to 1943 the Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP may have been charged with organizing the future colonial empire of Nazi Germany, but

Hitler and other Nazi leaders had no real intent in pursuing an overseas empire.

10 Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969); Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators? Die NS- Kolonialplanungen für Afrika (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2008); Kum’a N’Dumbe III, Was wollte Hitler in Afrika? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestlatung Afrikas, translated by Sven Dörper and Petra Liesenborg (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1993). See also Wolfe Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919-1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1964) for an earlier and less satisfactory analysis of this period. 9

I agree with Hildebrand’s argument that Hitler and the Nazi leadership primarily viewed overseas colonialism as a means to create domestic unity and as a strategy in foreign policy. In analyzing a colonial empire that did not exist, it is certainly justified to focus on the ways in which colonial revisionist rhetoric was wielded by the Nazi regime.11 The focus on Nazi diplomacy in Hildebrand and other later studies, however, does have its limitations. First these works are too focused on high politics even if they acknowledge other colonialist interests. Officially Hitler did indeed have the final say in

Nazi diplomacy, but domestically the Nazi leadership maintained far less control over politics and society. In dismissing these domestic pro-colonial voices at the regional, local, and individual level, scholars have told only half of the story of colonialism under the Third Reich and not recognized the tremendous impact these colonial voices played in constructing visions of the nation and national identity. Second these studies limit their focus to the idea of colonialism and colonial politics. Very little attention is directed toward the actual colonies when Germany had them during the Second Empire, nor to the former German colonies and those of other European powers during the Weimar and

Nazi eras. As a result, these important studies cannot recognize the ongoing significance that overseas experience played for Germans returning to the metropole and the way in which it shaped the politics of the German colonial movement.

11 See eg. Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), and The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Gerhard L. Weinberg, “German Colonial Plans and Policies 1938-1942,” in Waldemar Besson and Friedrich Frhr. Hiller v. Gaertringen, eds., Geschichte and Gegenwartsbewusstsein: Historische Betrachtungen und Untersuchungen, Festschrift für Hans Rothfels zum 70. Geburtstag dargebracht von Kollegen, Freunden und Schülern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), 462-491. 10

In part the growth of cultural studies has come to rectify these shortcomings when historians ‘rediscovered’ Germany’s colonial pasts in the 1990s. By building off works that focused on the French and British empires, German cultural studies has not only recognized the important political, social, and cultural entanglements of the overseas periphery to the metropole,12 but through its focus on representation and the importance of discourse has led some to identify German colonialism before it existed in practice.

Such is the case of in Susanne Zantop’s Colonial Fantasies in which her discursive analysis reveals the importance of media and literature as precolonial Germany lived vicariously through the colonial expansion of others.13 While Zantop’s analysis tends to reify a homogenous nation-state and undo decades of social history, more recent work from sociologist George Steinmetz has shown concretely the ways in which members of the German bourgeoisie were active in Germany’s pre-colonial global expansion as diplomats and as business entrepreneurs.14 Despite their differences, both approaches draw from postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said when they argue for the importance of the construction of the ‘other’ in German writing as a constitutive aspect of

German identity and nation building.15

If the focus on identity construction coming out of postcolonial studies could be used to demonstrate the existence of a Phantasiereich even before official colonialism

12 See e.g Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 13 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 14 George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 15 See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). The influence of cultural and postcolonial studies also informs the analysis in Nina Berman, Orientalismus, Kolonialismus und Moderne: Zum Bild des Orients in der deutschen Kultur um 1900 (Stuttgart: M & P, 1997). 11 began in 1884,16 it was by no means limited to this era of precoloniality. Germany’s short-lived colonial expansion continued to play an important role in social, cultural, and political developments of the Weimar Republic and into the Third Reich as scholars have recently noted.17 Their works have informed my own analysis as it focuses on the members of the German colonial movement whose past overseas experience strongly influenced the creation of German nationalism under National Socialism and demonstrate that a ‘Nazi colonialism’ was not only a diplomatic strategy of the Party leadership.

Despite the recognition of colonialism’s importance both before and after Germany’s formal overseas empire, it is recently upon colonial continuities that some scholars have placed perhaps too much emphasis.

Nazi Imperialism and Nazi Colonialism

In the 1950s Hannah Arendt theorized a continuity of racist violence from

Europe’s overseas colonies to the European continent during the Second World War.18

Historians are now returning to Arendt’s work, searching to provide empirical evidence to her largely conceptual claim as they meld Germany’s ‘rediscovered’ colonial history with the tradition of looking for continuities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A search to explain the origins of Nazism and its brutal actions in the

16 Birthe Kundrus, ed, Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 2003). 17 See Sabine Hake, “Mapping the Native Body: On Africa and the Colonial Film in the Third Reich,” and Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-1960,” in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, et al., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998); and Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” and Pascal Grosse, “What does German Colonialism have to do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Eric Ames et al., Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 18 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). 12

Holocaust is still very much at the center of German historiography even as the spatial imaginary of Germany has widened.19

One of the most important contributions to come out of this new research agenda is the recognition that Nazism was a form of imperialism.20 There are significant similarities between the administrative practices in the multinational, multiethnic, multiconfessional, and polyglot empires of nineteenth-century Europe and the empire established by National Socialism’s conquest of Eastern Europe.21 As other recent works have argued, it is not only logical to think of Nazism as a form of imperialism, but also as a form of colonialism.22 Indeed, the Nazis did not just rule over Eastern Europe during the Second World War, but also actively colonized those newly won territories with

‘racially pure’ Germans. Hitler even once quipped:

What India was for England, the territories of Russia will be for us. If

19 Geoff Eley made an important summation of the growing body of scholarship that has expanded the geographic boundaries of ‘where’ is Germany and German history, “Empire, Ideology, and the East: Thoughts on Nazism’s Spatial Imaginary” (paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Milwaukee, WI, October 2012). 20 To an extent Woodruff Smith was already referring to a Nazi empire in the 1980s, but unlike these more recent studies, Smith was largely concerned with diplomacy and high politics of the Nazi state than the actual practices of empire and their similarities to other forms of empire, past and present, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism. 21 For the most recent contribution to these similarities, see Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 543-566. 22 See Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008); Shelley Baranowski “Against ‘Human Diversity as Such’: Lebensraum and Genocide in the Third Reich, ” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 51-71, and Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Kristin Kopp, “Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland,” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 146-163, and “Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland,” in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany's Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 76-96, and “Gray Zones: On the inclusion of ‘Poland’ in the Study of German Colonialism,” in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33-42. 13

only I could make the German people understand what this space means for our future! Colonies are a precarious possession, but this ground is safely ours.23

As provocative as such quotes are, recognizing the similarities between Nazi practices in Eastern Europe and other imperialisms is one thing, identifying continuity between German colonialism and the Holocaust is another.24 Correlation is not proof of causation. Isabel Hull, for example is skeptical of such linkages even as her analysis of colonial military culture demonstrates clear continuities between the Kaiserreich and the

Third Reich.25 For Hull there is no comparison between the Herero War and the

Holocaust because she does not view the former as a genocide. In part then, the rise in comparative genocide studies may have contributed to the difficulty of distinguishing continuities from similarities.26 For example, George Steinmetz, has called the Herero and Nama War of 1904-1907 the first genocide of the twentieth century.27 Others have more forcefully declared race as the linking factor between the Herero genocide and the

Holocaust.28 The studies that mistake both similarity and continuity of ideas for causality have been less convincing. Historian Jürgen Zimmerer is the most prolific of these scholars and has used personal biographies of colonial officials and similarities in racial

23 Adolf Hitler, in H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed., Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944 (New York: Enigma, 2000), 24. 24 For an example of this analytic slippage see Baranowski, Nazi Empire. 25 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005). 26 Devin Pendas made a similar critique of the tensions between Holocaust and Genocide Studies in his paper “Ideology and the Challenges of Comparison in Holocaust and Genocide Studies,” (paper presented at the 38th Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, Kansas City, MO, September 2014). 27 George Steinmetz, “The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century and Its Postcolonial Afterlives: Germany and the Namibian Ovaherero,” Journal of the International Institute (2005), www.umich.edu/news/MT/NewsE/10_05/steinmetz.html 28 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 14 discourses to claim a straight line of causality from Windhuk to Auschwitz.29 While provocative, these studies on the continuities of institutional memory and personal biographies of those who were in the German colonies and later members of the National

Socialist Party still only suggest a causal link, rather than prove its existence.30 For every perpetrator of the Holocaust that had previously been in the German colonies, there were thousands who had not been.

This in no way means that personal biographies are unimportant. On the contrary, the lives of former German colonial officers, civil servants, and those with overseas experience tell the story of how German colonialism was continued and by whom after the end of the German overseas empire. Identifying such continuity however, need not anticipate the Holocaust, nor be mired in the new debate about a colonial Sonderweg. A debate that Sebastian Conrad argues, “has concentrated too much on comparing

(German) nineteenth-century colonialism with Nazi expansionism and looking for links between the two.”31 Maintaining this framework of German history and German historiography has come at the cost of recognizing the larger context of interaction and cooperation between European empires.32

My investigation of the German colonial movement under Nazism moves beyond recent studies that have been rightly criticized as too caught in this paradigm of the nation

29 Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhoek nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2011). 30 For an overview of this scholarship see, Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and the Historkierstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History 41 (2008): 477-503; and Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 31 Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 549. 32 Ibid., and Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Reflections On Our Discourse Concerning ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 147. 15

(Germany) and its continuities. In doing so my analysis decentralizes the leading figures of the Third Reich by focusing on a group of Germans who could not understand, or rather intentionally chose to deemphasize the ‘importance’ of the East.33 Hitler and the

Nazi leadership may have preferred continental expansion, but they brought neither personal overseas experience to these plans, nor were they the ones responsible for creating colonial identity and colonial policy under Nazism. That was the purview of the

German colonial movement and this is their story. It is one about a group that sought to influence official Nazi policy in its efforts to return overseas above all else. This manipulation was as much a product of national interests and peculiarities as it was of global connections; the movement drew both from former German colonial experiences and the more recent ones of Italian Fascism.

Fascism and Empire

Nearly 25 year ago Timothy Mason asked, “Whatever Happened to Fascism?”34

His question was not a critique of the many state-based studies of German National

Socialism and Italian Fascism that had been produced in the past decades, but the lost focus on comparative fascism and its treatment as an international phenomenon. For example, the early work of Ernst Nolte that compared National Socialism, Italian

Fascism, and the Action Francaise had been overshadowed by Cold War politics and an increasing emphasis on totalitarianism and a comparison of Nazism and Soviet

33 Recall that neither National Socialist policy, ideology, nor society was monolithic. Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 34 Timothy W. Mason, “Whatever Happened to Fascism?” in Thomas Childers and Jane Caplan, eds., Reevaluating the Third Reich (New York: Homes and Meier, 1993). 16

Communism.35 When historians finally overcame this focus, they were faced with a new problem of defining exactly what was ‘fascism’.

Whether writing of a “fascist minimum,” delineating all of the things Nazism and

Fascism were against, or enumerating all of the things they were for, there finally has been some consensus on the ‘nature of fascism’.36 The most well-regarded definition comes from Roger Griffin who argues generic fascism is “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra- nationalism.”37 This definition captures well the shared nationalism, populism, and romanticization of the past that fascism practiced even as it created something new.

Scholars are in agreement that there was a shared cult of leadership in both regimes, and that National Socialism and Fascism created cults of youth. They were both militaristic in terms of party and state organization as well as in style.38 Scholars also argue that both fascist Germany and Italy were similar in their efforts to take complete control of society by further invading the private life of their citizens through pro- and anti-natal policies, and through worker’s leisure and welfare benefits, to name but just a few examples.39

Geoff Eley builds upon this recognition that National Socialism and Fascism attempted to

“colonize the everyday” to argue that fascism in its generic form was a type of

35 Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1963). 36 See Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche, Payne, A History of Fascism, and Fascism: Comparison and Definition (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), respectively. 37 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 26. 38 George Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999). 39 See for example Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organizations of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 17 imperialism.40 His language might have much more to do with the recent developments in understanding the Holocaust as a continuation of German colonialism discussed above than with any overseas ambitions of these regimes, but as I argue below, comparisons of fascism and empire need not be that limited.

Like Germany, Italy too, was another latecomer to overseas expansion and never rivaled the overseas possessions of its European neighbors. Italy did however still maintain an overseas empire under Fascism. Its victories in Ethiopia in 1935/36 were highly publicized as were Italy’s settlement programs there and in its earlier colonial possessions: Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia. Despite losing these colonies only a few years later, postwar migrations from Africa have kept this history very much alive in Italian popular memory even as the historiography experienced relative amnesia.41

For reasons similar to the German case, colonial and postcolonial scholarship was also slow to develop in Italy. Italy, too, had lost its colonial empire at the hands of international agreements and treaties and was relieved from having to administer its own processes of decolonization. The lack of voices of the formerly colonized to offer a counter-narrative of the past resulted in the creation of the myth of the “good” Italian in the postwar years, despite the clear violence perpetrated by Italians in the Abyssinian

War.42

40 Geoff Eley, “Where are we now with theories of Fascism?” (paper presented at the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities – Department of History, Classics and Archeology & Institute of Historical Research’s Rethinking Modern Europe Seminar, London, May 2010), http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/events/Pastactivities/activities2010, accessed 2 April 2014. 41 This is a theme throughout the edited volume, Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 42 See Angelo del Boca, “The Myths, Suppressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism,” in Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 18

Recently, however, scholars have begun to break these silences and focus on the ways in which Italian colonialism, especially under Fascism had a great affect not only on the populations of the colonies but also on the Italian population at home.43 Similar to the continuity arguments of Sebastian Conrad and Isabel Hull that link the practices of

Germans in Africa to political developments in the metropole,44 Victoria de Grazia argues that Italian racial policies began in the colonies as Mussolini tried to create an overseas empire only later to be used against its own population.45 Indeed, the emphasis on race in the Italian colonies has taken on new precedence in the recent historiography of Italy, moving from an earlier preoccupation with Italian antisemitism to a broader understanding of racial policies that includes those practiced in its overseas empire.46

While scholars of both Germany and Italy have developed a new focus on these states’ colonial pasts, moving from narratives of unidirectional exchange from the metropole to the colony to recognizing the interconnectedness of politics, society, and culture within the imperial realm, these studies remain framed in a national narrative.

43 See the special issues on Italian colonialism in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8(3) 2003; Modern Italy, 8(1) 2003; and the edited volumes: Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, eds., Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave, 2005), and Palumbo, A Place in the Sun. 44 See Sebastian Conrad, “‘Eingeborenenpolitik’ in Kolonie und Metropol: ‘Erziehung zur Arbeit’ in Ostafrika und Ostwestfalen,’” in Jürgen Osterhammel and Sebastian Conrad, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871-1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004) and Hull, Absolute Destruction. 45 See Victoria de Grazia, “Die Radikalisierung der Bevölkerungspolitik im faschistischen Italien: Mussolinis ‘Rassenstaat,’” Geschichet und Gesellschaft: Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissensschaft, 26 (2000): 219-254. 46 See Esmonde Robertson, “Race as a Factor in Mussolini’s Policy in Africa and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988); Barbara Sorgoni, “‘Defending the Race’: The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism,” and Giulia Barrera, “Mussolini’s Colonial Race Laws and State-Settler Relations in Africa Orientale Italiana (1935-41),” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 8 (2003); Nicola Labanca, “Il razzismo coloniale italiano,” Alessandro Triulzi, “La costruzione dell’immagine dell’Africa e degli africani nell’Italia coloniale,” and Gianluca Gabrielli, “Africani in Italia negli anni del razzismo de Stato,” in Alberto Burgio, ed., Nel nome della razza: Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870-1945 (Bologna: Societa Editrice il Mulino, 1999). See also Guilia Brogini Künzi, “Der Wunsch nach einem blitzschnellen und sauberen Krieg: Die italienische Armee in Ostafrika.” in Thoralf Klein and Frank Schumacher, eds., Kolonialkriege: Militärische Gewalt im Zeichen des Imperialismus (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). 19

Scholarship on Italy maintains the distinctiveness of Italian colonialism in its comparisons with the British and French Empire, while scholarship on Germany maintains its focus on ‘colonialism without colonies’ during the Third Reich.47 Despite the similarities of their politics, expansionist ambitions, and radical racial policies and actions, scholarship has thus far ignored a direct comparison and exploration of the importance of overseas empire under German National Socialism and Italian Fascism.48

It was decades ago that George Mosse pointedly argued little was new about

Nazism and Fascism, that they merely radicalized existing ideas of racism, imperialism, and nationalism. In fact, it was fascism’s ability to scavenge the ideas of others that was its greatest strength.49 Yet, while scholars have accepted that National Socialism and

Italian Fascism borrowed from their own and each other’s national pasts regarding ideology, militarism, politics, and aesthetics, studies of generic fascism have disregarded overseas empire as a topic over which knowledge passed in both directions. Instead notions of ‘race and space’ have divided German National Socialism from Italian

Fascism throughout the historiography. Studies argue that Germany was focused on continental expansion in the East, while Italy looked overseas and that the radical antisemitism of Nazism is beyond comparison.

Zeev Sternhell was one of the first to argue that the radical racial antisemitism of the Third Reich makes any comparison between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy

47 See eg. Grosse, “What does German Colonialism have to do with National Socialism.” 48 The works that come closest to such a study are Ken Ishida, “Racisms compared: Fascist Italy and ultra- nationalist Japan,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 7 (2002), 380-391; Marina Tesoro, ed., Monarchia, tradizione, identita nazionale: Germania, Giappone, e Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento (Milan: Mondadori, 2004); and Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922- 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2000). Although Kallis maintains that Germany was only interested in the East, while Italy looked overseas. 49 Mosse, The Fascist Revolution. 20 impossible.50 While most scholars find little problem with a comparison of fascism in general, they still differentiate between the racism of Nazism and that of generic fascism.

Griffin argues that generic fascism was no more racist than traditional liberal democracies, whereas Stanley Payne notes, “fascist ideology was not necessarily racist in the Nazi sense of a mystical, intra-european Nordic racism, nor even necessarily anti-

Semitic.”51

Recent studies have shown, however, that race was perhaps more important to

Italian fascism than previous works had thought. Mussolini adopted the antisemitic leggi razziali in 1938, despite the fact that many Jews had been prominent members of the

Italian fascist party. While popular belief and older scholarship maintained that this act was undertaken to satisfy Hitler,52 more recent works from Meir Michaelis recognize

Mussolini’s own antisemitism that preceded the racial laws of 1938.53 Moreover, looking at the competing racial theories within the scientific community in Italy, Aaron Gillette shows that it was Mussolini who ultimately dictated Italy’s official racial politics through personal cabinet appointments.54

50 Zeev Sternhell, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). 51 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 48; Payne, A History of Fascism, 11. 52 See the myth of the ‘good Italian’ (Italiani brava gente) in Filippo Focardi, “‘Bravo Italiano’ e ‘cativo tedesco’: riflessioni sulla genesi di due immagini incrociate,” Storia e Memoria 5 (1996): 55-83; David Bidussa, Il mito del bravo italiano (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1994); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “A Lesser Evil? Italian Fascism in/and the Totalitarian Equation,” in Helmut Dubiel and Gabriel Motzkin, eds., The Lesser Evil. Moral Approaches to Genocide Practices in a Comparative Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004). 53 Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews, German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), and “Mussolini’s Unofficial Mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi – Il Tevere and the Evolution of Mussolini’s Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3(3) 1998, 217-240; and Frank Adler, “Jew as Bourgeois, Jew as Enemy, Jew as Victim of Fascism,” Modern Judaism 28 (2008): 306-326. 54 Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (New York: Routledge, 2002). 21

What these debates fail to recognize, however, is that antisemitism was not the only form of racism practiced by fascists, and Jews were not alone in being defined as biological ‘others’. Expanding our understanding of race and racial politics in no way diminishes the importance of antisemitism to Nazi ideology and its atrocious practices.

But as studies on the pro- and anti-natal policies of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy have already made clear, a broader understanding of the nation as a people in a biological sense, one that was both inclusive and exclusive, was key to both regimes.55 Recognizing the importance of overseas empire to both regimes not only challenges the spatial divide between these two states, but also allows us to reframe further this debate on race. It forces us to reconsider both how racial knowledge was created and by whom and to recognize that it was transmitted across state borders in a broader, global context.

The recent rediscovery of German and Italian colonial history has become quite a historiographic event, what one may call the ‘colonial turn’. But while postcolonial and cultural studies as well as the theoretical developments in transnationalism have redirected scholarly attention to oft-neglected aspects of German and Italian history, this latest focus has not gone without criticism. As Geoff Eley has pointed out, colonial history is not in itself new, and we need to recognize the earlier works on European imperialism that have already grappled with these problems, albeit through a different

55 For example, see Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), and Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany,” in Renate Bridenthal et al., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Reflections On Our Discourse Concerning ‘Modernity.’” 22 analytic approach.56 Jürgen Zimmerer is equally critical of the cultural approach to these ignored colonialisms, arguing that the “colonial imagination must not be reduced to published texts alone. One must also look at the practitioners of colonialism, who had dreams and imaginations as well and even acted upon them!”57 Konrad Jaurausch makes yet another critique concerning the trend towards transnationalism as he makes clear there is an internal autonomy to the nation-state that cannot be understood purely through transnational networks.58

My analysis takes seriously all of these criticisms. It also maintains that fascism has always been a transnational phenomenon, even as it took on national peculiarities.

What follows then is not a comparative history of colonialism under National Socialism and Italian Fascism in a traditional sense. It is rather an effort to demonstrate through the lens of overseas empire, especially Africa, that two of the most ultra-nationalist nation- states did not only share political, ideological, and aesthetic similarities, but also collaborated in the creation of a shared racial identity and understanding of the nation that extended beyond state borders. Put simply, even in that most racial of regimes and societies, the Third Reich, race thinking was highly mobile and variable, and different forms of racism and racial thinking were in play.

To help elucidate the tensions between these modes of racial thinking in their national and transnational contexts, my analysis focuses on individual members of the

German colonial movement who not only maintained the dream of restoring Germany’s

56 Bradley Naranch, “ConfRPT: The Intellectual Origins of German Colonial Studies: American Historical Association, 122nd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, 3-6 January 2008,” H-net, 7 February 2008. 57 Zimmerer, “Forum: The German Colonial Imagination,” 58 Konrad Jarausch, "Reflections on Transnational History," H-Net, 20 January 2006. 23 overseas empire, but also acted upon it. In doing so, I take a largely biographical approach to National Socialist overseas empire and its relationship to Italian Fascist empire. Rather than focus on the leading figures of the Third Reich that included Hitler and his deputies I investigate mid-level functionaries of the Party and public officials under the Third Reich.

The advantages to this approach are threefold. First, and of a practical nature, it allows for us to make use of the remnants of the archive – nearly 90% of the holdings of the Colonial Policy Office were destroyed during the war. What remains are often disparate memos, notes, and agenda. Yet, approaching the archive from a biographical perspective is more than just a practical means to understand these traces of the past.

This approach also allows for an investigation of the role of race thinking and empire that moves beyond the politics of formal, state diplomacy and propaganda that has dominated much of the historiography. As other scholars have demonstrated, the Third Reich was not a monolith, neither in terms of ideology, nor in practice. Looking beyond the discourse of high-ranking Nazi leaders demonstrates more clearly how race thinking surrounding the colonies was created, transformed, and transmitted by individuals.

Neither the colonial journalist Louise Diel, nor the Schutzpolizist Fritz Kummetz held the same influence as that of the Nazi leadership. But they were in the unique positions to help form public perceptions and official policies of Nazism’s colonial revisionism.

Their personal biographies make clear the complicated ways in which racial thinking in the Third Reich was under constant negotiation within the Party and across the German public. Third, the biographies of these mid-level functionaries and public figures make

24 clear that these negotiations were not just taking place within the confines of the German state. Whereas Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy collaborated politically and militarily through formal channels, members of the German colonial movement relied on personal and professional connections from their past and present to negotiate an informal alliance of imperial ideas, one that called for a joint return to Africa and the creation of a ‘new

Europe’.

The organization of my argument is inspired by the work of Robert Paxton and his analysis of fascism which reminds us that what fascists said is as important as what they did.59 The first two chapters focus on the media of the German colonial movement as it attempted first to create a German national identity based on overseas colonialism under National Socialism and second to create a transnational colonial identity in conversation with Italian allies. The following two chapters look more closely at what members of the German colonial movement did by following the story of Nazi officials who transgressed the priorities of continental expansion as they kept their focus overseas.

Chapter one, “To be National is to be Colonial”: Overseas Empire Under the

Third Reich” is an introduction to the German colonial movement as it emerged from the

Weimar Republic. It follows the German colonial movement and its diverse members as they negotiated the political landscape of this new regime. Drawing heavily from records of the German colonial press and German archives, this chapter traces the initial opportunism seen by both the National Socialist regime and the German colonial movement in an alliance between the two groups. Both parties tried to ingratiate

59 Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004).

25 themselves to one another; the National Socialists sought the popular support of colonial revisionism and the German colonial movement viewed Hitler’s regime as their ‘last hope’ to return overseas. Yet tension soon ensued as it became apparent that Nazism’s emphasis on expansion in Eastern Europe was at odds with the goals of the German colonial movement. Despite the increased efforts of the National Socialist regime to coordinate colonial revisionism, the German colonial press maintained its independent goals and successfully melded a sense of colonialism into the nationalism of Nazi

Germany.

Chapter two, “Fascist Colonialism: Transnational Nationalisms and the Creation of a ‘New Europe’” continues an analysis of the German colonial media as it moved from the national context of Nazi Germany to become part of a broader discourse on fascist colonialism. Departing from diplomatic histories of the alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, it draws from published sources of the German and Italian colonial presses as well as the personal records of individual members of the German colonial movement to trace the creation of a transnational network of fascist colonialists.

Beginning with a discussion of the German author Louise Diel this chapter demonstrates that advocates of overseas colonies, even including many who were relatively powerless and not members of the Nazi Party, were able to use colonialist arguments to influence both domestic and foreign politics. Through the writings of traveling colonial journalists, the colonial press, and through the act of translation, this network often transgressed official German and Italian domestic and foreign policies as they created a new,

26 transnational community of fascist colonialists and an alternative racial view of overseas empire and a new Europe.

Transitioning from what fascists said to what they actually did, the third chapter,

“‘Mit kolonialem Gruß’ to ‘Heil Hitler’: Colonial Education in the Third Reich” highlights the tensions between the colonial movement and National Socialist regime that manifested themselves in the actual institutions of colonialism during the Third Reich. In returning to the national context of Germany, this chapter begins with the debates regarding the incorporation of colonial themes within youth education and who would control this colonial message. The chapter then turns to the ‘nazification’ of the existing colonial schools within the Third Reich and the local and national debates that it sparked.

It demonstrates that many former colonialists were clearly at odds with Nazism and its goals of empire. Further questioning analyses of continuity, the final section of the chapter focuses on the former Schutztruppler Paul Schnoeckel and his role in the creation of a ‘Nazi’ colonial education. Through a comparison of his propaganda on colonial education policy and the pedagogy he actually approved, it argues that even within the halls of National Socialist colonial schools, loyalty to the vision of overseas empire trumped loyalty to the Party.

Chapter four, “Creating ‘Carriers of the Nation’: The Fascist Colonial Police” returns to the transnational context as it outlines the tensions between the national and international in the creation of colonial policy under Nazism. Beginning with the international debates surrounding Nazi racial policy and its negative influence on

Germany’s bid to regain its overseas colonies, this chapter demonstrates the disconnect

27 between the Party leadership’s use of colonialism as a diplomatic strategy and the actual preparation for a return to the colonies by the German colonial movement. Drawing on a diverse collection of previously disregarded Reichskolonialamt sources, this chapter then focuses on the little-known former colonial officer Fritz Kummetz and his attempts to outline a new policy for the envisioned (overseas) colonial police of the Third Reich. It follows Kummetz as Germany’s lack of colonies forced his planning to negotiate the past experiences of German colonialism against the current colonial policies of other

European empires and the racial ideology of the Third Reich. The chapter demonstrates that in doing so, Kummetz regarded practical experience as superior to baseless ideology.

It continues by following Kummetz’s turn to Italian Fascism and the subsequent construction of a German colonial police school that was modeled on Italian rather than

German colonial experiences and expertise. The resulting National Socialist colonial police, who were heralded by the regime as carriers of the National Socialist ideal, were less the embodiment of national peculiarities than they were of a transnational, cross- border collaboration.

In their analyses of generic fascism scholars have often dismissed common ideas of race and space in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. My analysis of the German colonial movement under the Third Reich is as much a response to this as it is a response to Timothy Mason’s question ‘whatever happened to fascism?’ Using overseas colonialism as a lens it demonstrates the importance of both race and space to each fascist regime as it reaffirms the pan-European nature of fascism.

28

Chapter 1: “To be National is to be Colonial”: Overseas Empire Under the Third Reich

In your new plan, you want to give new responsibilities to the Reichskolonialbund and reorient it toward Ostpolitik. Such a reorientation would appear to me to be a betrayal of our mission and ideas. -Erich Duems, 19431

Writing for the Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, editor Erich

Duems of the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitschrift looked forward to the change in government ushered in by the National Socialist seizure of power. For Duems postwar German politics and the resurrection of a German overseas empire had been constrained by the overly harsh Treaty of Versailles. While he and other colonial revisionists had struggled to keep alive the colonial traditions and dreams of a restored German empire in Africa, the political parties of the Weimar Republic had often only used colonial revisionist rhetoric as propaganda, with no clear plans or ambitions of changing or reversing the loss of Germany’s overseas colonies, and thereby its opportunities for the resettlement of

Germans and the economic prosperity that he assumed a colonial empire would bring.

With the introduction of the Nazi government on 30 January 1933 however, Duems predicted that all of this would change. If words and points of the party platform represented reality, he contended, then the German colonial movement could expect a decisive push from the new regime. By his estimation, under a National Socialist

1 Erich Duems as quoted in Tiessler, “Vorlage für Reichsleiter Bormann,” 12 February 1943, BAB NS 18/152, 2. 29

Germany, “To be national is to be colonial!”2 In just ten short years Duems had drastically changed his tune. Rather than forward the German colonial movement’s efforts to return overseas, the National Socialist regime had betrayed the movement by pursuing continental rather than overseas expansion.

This chapter follows this ten-year history of the German colonial movement and its efforts to create a strong colonial will within the nation as it emerged from the Weimar

Republic and into the Third Reich. Initially, both the German colonial movement and the

Nazi leadership recognized colonial revisionism’s power to create national cohesion. The colonial movement, however, viewed the creation of a strong colonial will as a stepping stone toward returning overseas, whereas Nazi leaders treated it as an endpoint. As these separate goals became more apparent the German colonial movement’s tactics remained the same, even as its strategy changed. The rhetoric of National Socialist propaganda – with its vague and non-committal references to colonialism – that was once appropriated by the German colonial movement to secure its place within the regime would later be co-opted and used as a strategy for the colonial press to maintain its own overseas gains.

The result was a strong German colonial consciousness that was rooted in the propaganda of National Socialism even as it became increasingly at odds with goals of the Nazi regime.

2 Erich Duems, “National und Kolonial,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (1933) 2, 9-10. 30

Colonial Revisionism During the Weimar Republic

One of the German colonial movement’s major goals following the First World

War was to raise the level of colonial consciousness by blending a sense of German nationalism, even a German national identity, with overseas empire. The German governments however, had far less serious an interest in regaining Germany’s colonies during the Weimar Republic. The Social Democrats who dominated the initial Weimar

Coalition had never been keen on Germany’s actually existing colonies and had very little interest in getting them back. Even the more moderate Catholic Center did little to pursue an actual policy of colonial revisionism. And as the more conservative, nationalist parties took up the colonial banner later in the 1920s, the Reichstag of the

Weimar Republic was still much more concerned with the Republic’s own security, the very real economic and political crises of the 1920s, and restoring Germany’s role in international politics than with returning Germany’s overseas empire.

While there was an absence of policies intended to actually reverse the loss of

Germany’s colonies during the Weimar Republic, this is not to say that the German colonial movement lay dormant and inactive. Following the war, Germany had lost its international prestige as an imperial power and moreover been left aside from international politics through its exclusion from the League of Nations. The use of black

French colonial troops in Europe during the First World War and their continued deployment in occupying the Rhine region of Germany provided a further pretense for many German political and cultural conservatives that Germany was now itself being colonized. The once great Kulturnation that colonialist Friedrich Fabri argued had both a

31 right and a responsibility to participate in the mission of civilizing the globe, was now being occupied by the very forces it had deemed in need of civilizing.3 To many

Germans, it appeared as if the world no longer counted Germany as a civilized nation.4

Germany may have been a “postcolonial” state in more than just a temporal sense as Marcia Klotz has argued,5 but even as many German politicians (including Hitler) would frame Germany’s postwar political predicament in terms of the ‘colonized’, significant voices within the Weimar politics and economics maintained an active discourse of colonialism, that is from the perspective of the colonizer.6 The propaganda campaign against the Schwarze Schmach – against the occupation by black French forces, and the fear mongering it promoted concerning the well-being of white German women and racial purity of the nation at large – was more than just a postcolonial discourse.7

In the colonial media of postwar Germany, the ‘postcolonial’ fears of racial mixing were met with the affirmative narrative of Germany’s very recent colonial past and came in the form of the ‘loyal Askari’ led by General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.

Commander of the German forces in East Africa during the First World War, von

Lettow-Vorbeck had become a military hero in the early postwar years. Against

3 Friedrich Fabri, Bedarf Deutschland der Colonien? Eine politisch-ökonomische Betrachtung (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1884). 4 Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, eds. Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 141. 5 Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A Postcolonial State in a Still-Colonial World,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, 135-147. 6 Ibid. 7 On the racial propaganda war against French colonial troops in Germany see Iris Wigger, “‘Black Shame’–the campaign against ‘racial degeneration’ and female degradation in interwar Europe,” Race and Class, 51 (2010) no. 2, 33-46; Susann Lewerenz, “‘Loyal Askari’ and ‘Black Rapist’: Two Images in the German Discourse on National Identity and Their Impact on the Lives of Black People in Germany, 1918- 45,” in eds. Jürgen Zimmerer et al, German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 173-183; Wigger, Die “Schwarze Schmach am Rhein,” (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2006), among others. 32 significant odds (he commanded some 3,000 German soldiers and 11,000 African Askari) von Lettow-Vorbeck repelled the advances of a much larger British, Belgian, and

Portuguese force of nearly 300,000 soldiers, never losing German ground and in many cases making inroads into British territory. Having not yet received word of the ceasefire, his victories even continued three days past the armistice in Europe. While his victories alone seemed to make him into a hero in the eyes of many Germans, especially those disenchanted with the democracy of Weimar and who believed in the Dolchstoss-

Legende, to colonial revisionists it was his treatment of his ‘native’ African troops, his

‘loyal Askari’ that was the most important. For them the fact that so many African troops remained loyal to Germany and fought so valiantly for the imperial regime proved beyond a doubt the fallaciousness of the British parliament’s infamous “Bluebook” report that claimed Germany had mistreated its colonial subjects and was “unfit” to remain a colonial power.8 The juxtaposition of the French “black rapist” on the Rhine propagated through the Schwarze Schmach campaign with the ‘loyal Askari’ presented as Susann

Lewerenz argues “a narrative of white powerlessness in the present” opposed to the myth of “white male power in the past.”9

This postwar German colonialism was “a politics of waiting,”10 but in spite of or perhaps even because of the dire chances for a swift return of Germany’s overseas possessions, a growing colonial discourse began to dominate German politics and unite

8 See the British parliament’s “Bluebook” report: Administrator’s Office of Southwest Africa, Report on the Natives of South-west Africa and their Treatment by Germany (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1918). 9 Lewerenz, “‘Loyal Askari’ and ‘Black Rapist’: Two Images in the German Discourse on National Identity and Their Impact on the Lives of Black People in Germany, 1918-45,” 175. 10 Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of Imperial Imagination, 1920-1960,” in The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy, eds. Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 216. 33

Germans across party lines like never before. Surely images of white male powerlessness resonated strongly among broader cultural discussions of the Great War’s emasculation of soldiers,11 but there were other protests against Germany’s political, social, and economic standing following the war, too, and the German colonial movement argued that nearly all of them could be resolved by restoring Germany as a colonial power.

These outbursts of German political dissatisfaction during the 1920s coalesced around three general issues: one concerning the loss and general lack of territory, one concerning economics, and the final concerning national honor, especially Germany’s prestige on the international scale.

The peace treaties that followed the conclusion of the First World War spelled the end of many continental European empires. Wilhelmine Germany counted among these failed empires; in addition to the end of the Hohenzollern monarchy, Germany lost the region of Alsace-Lorraine and much of Eastern Prussia to France and the new Polish state respectively. A full 13% of Imperial Germany’s continental land holdings were ceded as part of the Treaty of Versailles as well as 10% of its population.12 As significant a territorial loss as this was, it paled in comparison to the loss of Germany’ overseas colonies to the mandate powers, which consisted of 1,027,000 square miles of territory in

Africa, the South Seas, and parts of China.13 It mattered little to colonial revisionists that

11 On Germany see Eric Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (Princeton: Princetion University Press, 2007), among others. A broader overview can be found in Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and in Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 12 The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “German Territorial Losses, Treaty of Versailles, 1919,” http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/media_nm.php?MediaId=1620 13 Mary E. Townsend, “The Contemporary Colonial Movement in Germany,” Political Science Quarterly, (1928) 1, 64. 34 relatively few Germans had actually resettled in Togo, Cameroon, German East- or

Southwest Africa. If Germany had suffered from a lack of Lebensraum before it had gained an overseas empire, as the geographer Friedrich Ratzel had claimed in the nineteenth century, it now suffered further from an over-population and a lack of ‘living space’. As nationalist author Hans Grimm argued, Germany was now a “Volk ohne

Raum.”14 For the German colonial movement, a restoration of Germany’s overseas territories would surely rectify this problem.

A lack of living space was also a close discursive relative to economic hardship.

The Weimar Republic was beset with a series of financial crises that shook Germans’ faith in the post-imperial regime. Beyond the stagnated economy that was a result of the war, the republic was soon faced with crippling hyperinflation in the early 1920s.

Although the creation of a new currency, the Rentenmark, succeeded in stabilizing the

German economy, it had done so on the backs of the white-collar workers and the

Beamtentum and further tied Germany’s economy to foreign interests. The reparations payments that the Treaty of Versailles demanded from Germany were, in the eyes of many Germans, simply too high. Despite the fact that Germany’s overseas colonies had not been economically profitable, even Hjalmar Schacht, co-creator of the Rentenmark, later President of the Reichsbank and colonial revisionist, argued that Germany’s financial burdens would be significantly lightened were its former colonies to be returned.15

14 See Hans Grimm, Volk ohne Raum (Munich: Albert Langen, 1926). 15 Hjalmar Schacht, “Die Sicherung der Daseinserhaltung des deutschen Volkes durch Kolonien,” Das deutsche koloniale Jahrbuch (Berlin: Wilhelm Süßerott Verlag, 1938), 8-9. 35

While many Germans on the far left and right of the political spectrum were quick to blame the economic, territorial, and geopolitical woes of Germany on the new democratic republic and the Treaty of Versailles which it had signed, the revisionist arguments of the German colonial movement largely focused on the latter as the source of Germany’s problems. Unlike many nationalists, it mattered little that German forces continued to have small victories on the Western Front right at the moment the German provisional government negotiated an armistice. Yes, in Africa, too, General von

Lettow-Vorbeck had continued to fight courageously and victoriously with his Africa troops until the very end, but it was not the negotiation of an armistice that had deprived

Germany of its colonies. Rather it was the later Versailles Treaty that was dictated by the

Allies.

Moreover, the British Blue Book – which had propagandized Germany’s abuses in its colonies and created what Heinrich Schnee decried as the “Colonial Guilt Lie” – not only established the grounds on which continually to deny Germany a return of its colonies, but challenged Germany’s status as a Great Power and civilized nation.16 If the colonial revisionists maintained a nostalgia for the Kaiserreich, then it had little to do with a monarchical form of government and everything to do with the status provided by maintaining an overseas empire. They were nationalists, but ones with a particular bent on overseas empire. For the most part, these members of the German colonial movement only supported the Weimar democracy in so much as it could help Germany restore its

16 Administrator’s Office of Southwest Africa, Report on the Natives of South-west Africa and their Treatment by Germany. For a discussion of the importance of this “Bluebook” on German colonialism, see Jan-Bart Gewald, Herero-Heroes: A Socio-Political History of the Herero of Namibia 1890-1923 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999). On the “Colonial Guilt Lie,” see Heinrich Schnee, “Die koloniale Schuldlüge,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 21 (1924): 91-152. 36 colonial possessions. When the pro-democratic parties of the Weimar Republic failed to return Germany’s overseas territories, the movement was quick to support anti- democratic parties and eventually the National Socialists, who promised to “Break the shackles of Versailles!”

The National Socialists and the Hope of a Renewed Colonial Revisionism

The realignment of the colonial movement toward the National Socialist Party began in 1928.17 A microcosm of the ineffectiveness of a parliamentary democracy to unite behind a revitalization of overseas colonialism was, according to some colonial revisionists, also represented in the divisions among existing colonial organizations of the

Weimar Republic. Most vociferous in these accusations against the poor leadership of the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society or DKG) and the subsequent divisions within the German colonial movement was author and editor of

Afrika-Nachrichten Hans Reepen. According to him, the infighting over trivial colonial claims had reduced the number of participants in colonial meetings and exhibits – even as the number of these meetings increased – to just a few men and women formerly involved in Germany’s overseas colonies. Together they could agree on little more than the fact that Germany needed to reacquire colonies. “The colonial idea has not been grounded in the masses,” he wrote, and “we have missed the opportunity to bring supporters and opponents together [into the discussion].”18 Just as Germany’s political

17 See Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 89-122. 18 Hans Reepen, “Schwabenfahrt,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1928), 12, 270. 37 parties were divided over the issues of colonial revisionism, so too, was Germany’s colonial press.

What Reepen wanted was an end to the tensions within the German colonial movement and a deeper anchoring of colonial ideas within the broader consciousness of the nation. In the decade since Germany had been a colonial power the politics of empire had changed. If Germany were to regain its overseas possessions, it could not rely on its old traditions alone, it would have to move forward. Reepen maintained that it could only do this under the leadership of a new, strong, colonial-conscious leader. In the pages of Afrika-Nachrichten he proclaimed:

We demand a stronger transmission of our ideas and are looking for a man in the Foreign Office who can really bring together the German colonial movement in unity. But Mussolini is an Italian, and we do not yet know who in the Foreign Office has just a little bit of his strength and a bit of his courage. We are searching for a man within the movement… A post is vacant!! Who will apply?19

The allusions to Hitler as a German Mussolini capable of uniting the nation and integrating its imperialist goals seem quite obvious. Yet in 1928 the Nazi rise to power was anything but a forgone conclusion. Nor could Reepen have known that in that same year Hitler had expressed his decision, in an unpublished manuscript, to stay away from

“colonial adventures.”20 Moreover, the rest of the Nazi Party leaders failed to convince the leadership of the colonial movement of their interest in colonial revisionism. Despite the hopes of future DKG President Heinrich Schnee that Hermann Göring – whose brother he had known from service in German East Africa – could play a leadership role

19 Ibid., 271. 20 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 98. 38 in the colonial movement, their meeting failed to impress the colonial leader.21 However, the entrance of the old colonial fighter from German Southwest Africa and trusted member of the NSDAP, General Xaver Ritter von Epp to the colonial cause helped to bridge the divide between the members of the colonial movement who had actually been in Germany’s formers overseas colonies and the members of the Nazi Party.

The Nazi leaders knew well that the German colonial movement comprised a substantial voting bloc that was up for grabs. And they courted this particular group from the early years of the Republic. Beyond the 25-point Party Platform that listed as point three: “We demand land and soil (colonies) to feed our people and settle our excess population”22 the Nazis shared the same general goals of resurrecting a strong German economy and restoring national prestige to the nation.23 According to colonial revisionists, a restoration of Germany’s overseas colonial empire could solve the same problems as the Nazis promised to remedy. From this perspective it is not surprising that under the Nazi regime Duems claimed “To be national is to be colonial!”

The similarities in discourse between the abstract goals of the Nazi regime and those of colonial revisionists did not mean, however, that the two parties shared a mutual plan for restoring Germany as a colonial power. Despite the coming together of the Nazi

Party and colonial movement in 1928, the differences between Hitler’s plans for the world and those of the former colonial officials were quite vast. Indeed, as many

21 See Heinrich Schnee’s unpublished memoirs, GStaPK, HAS II 14, 332. 22 “Programm der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, München 24 February 1920,” in Wolfgang Treue, Deutsche Parteiprogramme 1861-1954, (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1956), 143. 23 My argument here does not refute Hildebrand’s contention that most parties of the right and center of the Weimar Republic supported some sort of colonial revisionism, and that the Nazis were less directly involved in these colonial revisionist policies until 1928. My point here is to demonstrate the similarities of the broader claims and goals of both groups. See Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 62-70. 39 previous studies have argued, the top leaders of the Third Reich were much more concerned with continental territorial gains in Europe’s east than with regaining an overseas empire.24 If we look to Hitler himself, we find that his only appreciation for overseas colonialism was its value as a tool of foreign policy, especially against the

British. In fact, Hitler largely ignored the colonial organizations and its members of former colonial officials. When offered the African colonies in exchange for

Czechoslovakia in 1938, he opted for continental expansion. For Hitler the intrinsic value of colonialism lay in its power to create national consensus on the homefront.25

Not until 1941, when the Nazi war machine was at its peak, did Hitler order the creation of a Colonial Ministry. Yet others within the Nazi party, including Hjalmar Schacht and the head of the Colonial Policy Office Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp were less dismissive of regaining overseas colonies.

Despite these differences in opinion, both the Nazi leadership and the German colonial movement recognized the integrative power that overseas colonialism had on the nation. The former saw it as a means to maintain power while the latter viewed it as the first step in returning overseas. The Party then, did its best to maintain the strong support of the German colonial movement and the nation-building propaganda it provided while the colonial movement sought to fit its goals into the Nazis’ race and space ideology of

Blut and Boden.

24 See Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, and to a lesser extent Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators: Die NS-Kolonialplanungen für Afrika (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2008); Shelley Baronowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Rules Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008); and Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 25 Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 233. 40

This cooperation – or more aptly negotiation – between these two parties would not take place on equal terms. Like so many existing organizations across the state the primary institutions of the German colonial movement, the Koloniale

Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft (KORAG) and its largest organization the Deutsche

Kolonialgesellschaft, would have to be brought under the control of the Party. This process of Gleichschaltung which intended to control the colonial message and at the same time allow enough leeway for colonial revisionists to operate ended up creating a liminal space in which the press of the German colonial movement was free to appropriate National Socialist rhetoric for its own overseas goals.

The First Gleichschaltung: 1933

At the time of the Nazi assumption of power in 1933 the revisionism of the

German colonial movement had come a long way, at least in planning. While politically

Germany had not come any closer to regaining its overseas colonies, the German colonial movement successfully kept alive the hope and anticipation of returning overseas.

Through traveling colonial exhibits, lecture series, and books from previous colonial administrators and colonists alike, the DKG kept colonialists hopeful for the return of

Germany’s colonies, but also managed to attract new members to the movement and promote overseas colonialism as a national cause. Membership in the women’s branch of the DKG alone rose nearly 40% from 1920 to 1932.26 Despite no longer having colonial possessions, the Deutsche Kolonialschule Witzenhausen continued to operate as it had

26 The actual number of members increased from 16,500 in 1920 to 26,500 in 1932. “Arbeitsbericht des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft für die Monate June bis November 1935,” Die Frau und die Kolonien, (1936) 1, 3. 41 since its creation in 1898. As one contemporary remarked, “Its young colonial farmers are to a certain extent the assault group (Stoßtrupp) that are waiting for the right moment

[to return].”27 So sure was the DKG of the coming return of Germany’s overseas possessions that it was even responsible for creating a women’s colonial school at

Rendsburg in 1926.

Without a doubt, the greatest success of the DKG and other colonial organizations was the maintenance and growth of the popular discourse of colonial revisionism propagated by the colonial press. As the contemporary historian Mary E. Townsend observed:

…the complete loss of the oversea empire has stimulated the German colonialists to an effort which has never, perhaps, been quite so intensive in that nation… literature and propaganda in the shape of colonial histories, treatises, novels depicting life in Africa and in the South Seas, pamphlets replete with statistics, magazine and newspaper articles have literally poured from the press since 1918…28

By 1933 there were six major journals dedicated to German overseas colonialism: Afrika-

Nachrichten, Kolonialpost, Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, Mitteilung der Deutschen

Kolonialgesellschaft (later Der Koloniale Kampf), Die Frau und die Kolonien, and the children’s monthly Jambo, the latter four all organs of the DKG. The discourse constructed in this colonial media at the time of the National Socialist rise to power clearly demonstrates the efforts at national cohesion that colonial revisionism could provide. At the same time it also depicts how the colonial movement was largely left to its own devices as it anticipated a ‘new’ colonialism under Nazism. These leaps in faith

27 Carl W. Koch, “Die Deutsche Kolonialschule,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1936) 1, 11. 28 Mary E. Townsend, “The German Colonial Movement in Germany,” Political Science Quarterly, (1928), 1, 65. 42 and logic of the colonial press would contribute to a growing rift between the colonial movement and the Nazi regime.

Colonial revisionists were ready for the Nazi regime to make good on its rhetoric and put forth a real plan to regain Germany’s lost colonies in Africa. Indeed, after a meeting with Hitler in March of 1933, President of the DKG Heinrich Schnee was hopeful that the Nazis would “finally realize colonial goals.”29 National Socialist Party backing of the colonial cause came early with support for the 1933 Colonial Exhibit in

Berlin, but it soon became clear that Party support was not unconditional. As the Party did to so many existing state and local institutions across Germany, so too, did it seek to bring colonial revisionism and its leading organizations, the KORAG and DKG, under its control. Without resistance and in a seeming display of full compliance the colonial organizations of Germany underwent a ‘Selbstgleichschaltung’ or self-assimilation into the Party apparatus. The DKG voted to reorganize itself, requiring from May 1933 forward that at least half of its membership be constituted of National Socialists with previous colonial experience.30 In June 1933 the KORAG proposed and approved the creation of a new colonial umbrella organization, the Reichskolonialbund (RKB) into which the KORAG was dissolved. The newly reorganized DKG and all other colonial organizations fell in line under the new RKB, over which the Nazis secured their leadership by requiring party membership for RKB leaders and subordinating RKB members to the colonial consultants of the NSDAP.31

29 “Unser Kampf,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, (1933) 4, 1. 30 “Bericht, über die Sitzung des Hauptausschusses der DKG” 5 May 1933, BAB R8023/710, 2. 31 Linne, Deutschland Jenseits des Äquators, 26. 43

The introduction of the Reichskolonialbund and restructuring of the colonial organizations proved the Nazi Gleichschaltung at least a nominal success. Although the

DKG had contained strong nationalist and conservative elements since its creation in the nineteenth century, before 1933 it was far from being a puppet of the Nazi Party. Such staunch anti-Nazis as future Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer had served as Vice President of the DKG until the rise of the Hitler regime in 1933. The Jewish SPD

Representative Max Cohen-Reuß has also served as a member of the steering committee of the DKG until his “voluntary” resignation in the summer of 1933.32

Moving from the reorganization of the colonial societies to the discourse they produced, however, depicts a less stark rupture from the Weimar Period to the Third

Reich. The Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung was among the first journals to report on the restructuring. In the article “Neu Aufbau der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft” the DKZ reassured its readers that the “rebuilding” of the DKG did little to change the organization’s long-standing goals:

…since the founding of the German Colonial Society and over the last half century the guiding light (Leitstern) of our political will has held true, “Kolonial sein heisst national sein!” This means that all men and women that come from the most diverse political, socio-economic, and occupational backgrounds, united in the fighting community (Kampfgemeinschaft) of the German Colonial Society, on which a basic demand of national colonial policy has been consolidated. The goal of German Colonial Society’s politics since 1882 has been the same: expansion of German Lebensraum through acquisition (Erwerb), development (Erschließung), and recovery (Wiedergewinnung) our own settlement-, resource-, and landing area (Absatzgebiet).33

32 Ibid. 33 “Neu Aufbau der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung (1933) 6, 119. 44

The DKZ made clear that the personnel behind the scenes had changed, noting that although President Schnee remained, he would now be working with a new task force of former colonial officials, all of whom the article pointed out were members of the

NSDAP. It was not difficult to read between the lines and see that the Nazi Party was now in charge of administering the consolidated colonial organizations, even as the article reassured its readers that this was not a restructuring of the DKG but an

“affirmation and protection of the national colonial course of the German Colonial

Society within the politics of the new Germany.34

Unsurprisingly the newly gleichgeschschaltete organ of the DKG, Der Koloniale

Kampf, shortly followed suit in its praise of the new reorganization of German colonial revisionism. It noted that the new Reichskolonialbund had a “sharper focus” in creating a

“consensus over colonial goals.”35 This was a positive development for the journals’ editors, as they noted no longer would colonial revisionism be guided by a loose collaboration of colonial societies, but now by a stricter centralization of only those

“carriers of the German colonial movement and those organizations that participate in the practical work in the colonies.”36 This revived and refocused German colonial revisionism would follow the Führerprinzip and represent the colonial ambitions of the new Reich.37

Yet despite the changes in personnel behind the scenes of the colonial movement, if we are to judge the colonial press as a reflection of the depth of this restructuring, then

34 Ibid. 35 “Der Aufbau des Reichskolonialbundes,” Der Koloniale Kampf, (1933) 7, 2. 36 Ibid. 37 “Neue Satzung der DKG”, Der Koloniale Kampf, (1933), 7, 1-2. 45 the editors of the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung had been correct in anticipating little change. With the exception of the addition of a swastika to the title banners on the covers of colonial journals in the summer of 1934, it would be difficult to identify a broader political shift based on the contents of the articles alone. There was much more coverage of what the National Socialist regime was doing to restore Germany’s overseas possessions, but not any more so than the coverage of parliament’s pro-colonial developments during the Weimar period. Fundamentally, the colonial press still remained concerned with informing its readership about local and national colonial events and meetings, keeping alive the memory of past colonial heroes and German successes in ‘civilizing’ the world beyond Europe, and reporting on the state of other

European colonial enterprises overseas.

Calling for a strong Mussolini-like leader to head the colonial movement in the government some years earlier, by May of 1933, author and editor Hans Reepen was still unsatisfied with the consolidation and the lack of a strong and central message from the colonial movement. As editor of Afrika-Nachrichten, one of the only colonial journals to remain independent of the RKB during the Third Reich, Reepen pleaded for Josef

Goebbels and the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment to take up the colonial cause. Only with the strict Nazi vision on national unity could German colonial revisionist aims be resurrected and refocused on winning over a national and international public.38

The response from the regime upon which Reepen had been waiting finally came from Reichsstatthalter for Bavaria and President of the German Kolonialkriegerbundes

38 “Propaganda und Volksaufklärung,” Afrika-Nachrichten (1933) 5, 112-3. 46

General Ritter von Epp. Before an audience in Frankfurt von Epp announced that “The foreign powers must recognize that the German people will not be swayed on their way to international equality and they will not give up their legal claims to their colonies.”39

According to von Epp, Germans were prepared to endure the criticism against the new regime from abroad. He also seemingly assured those abroad that Germany would not be focusing on its colonies in the very near future as it had other political priorities at home.

Von Epp concluded, “It will fall to the German people to prepare political problems – such as the future possession of overseas colonies – into a living movement which the practical politics of the government can later address.”40

The timid response from the Party was much less than that for which Reepen had hoped, but there was still promise in von Epp’s speech. Reepen, too, had long recognized the importance of building a strong, unified colonial movement at home under a new government. Surely any hopes of regaining Germany’s lost colonies overseas would be the work of international politics and diplomats, but when that time should come,

Germany would be ready. As Reepen exclaimed, “There is one thing we can and must do: build the foundation for a colonial future!”41 He called for the extension of propaganda beyond the reach of the more traditional colonial organizations and into the broader masses of Germans. The new colonial movement must explain to the public the benefits of the former German colonies and much more what German colonial possessions now would mean under the completely different conditions of Germans’

39 Ritter von Epp as quoted in Hans Reepen, “Die Kolonialfrage als innerpolitisches Problem,” Afrika- Nachrichten, (1933), 7, 166. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 47 lives today and Germany’s place in the world. The goal was to incorporate the German colonial movement’s revisionism and zeal into the national identity of the new Hitler government. As Reepen argued, “for Germany we must create an absolute unity of colonial will in the sense of a nationally-conscious (volksbewussten) movement under the leadership of the government, one that reflects our whole ambition.”42

While an integration of overseas colonialism into the Nazi Weltanschauung and propaganda machine was according to Reepen necessary for its very survival, it remained unclear exactly how this was to take shape. The loose affiliation between the colonial movement and the Nazi government may have been consolidated, but the message it was sending was far from the unified voice that Reepen claimed was necessary to reach a broader public without overseas experience. Reepen’s colleague at Afrika-Nachrichten,

Josef Viera, observed these same tensions between the older segment of the colonial movement that had formed its traditions in the Kaisserreich and a younger generation of

Germans living in the Third Reich. Viera denounced the press organs of the DKG that assured its readers little would change under the new regime, that colonial revisionism would continue only with greater focus than before. For Viera the new colonial movement was not a matter of:

Give us back our colonies and then we will continue where we gloriously left off in 1914/18. …we will have to learn from the developments of the last years. As soon as National Socialism actively addresses the Colonial Question, it will bear the fruits of the developments of the last years and fill the task of overseas settlements with its own spirit and follow a modern path. Above all, the new colonial movement must create a strong relationship to National Socialism and our Volkskanzler Adolf Hitler.43

42 Ibid. 43 Josef Viera, “Nationalsozialismus und kolonialer Gedanke,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933) 6, 143. 48

Obviously Viera viewed the political developments of Germany and the rise of the Nazi

Party within the government as having a much more significant impact on the colonial movement than just an intensification of colonial revisionist propaganda. But he, too, seemed oblivious to the priorities of the new chancellor in his call for a closer relationship to Hitler and National Socialism. How was there supposed to be a new colonial movement indicative of the times and in the spirit of Nazi Germany when the top of the Nazi leadership cared so little about actually regaining Germany’s overseas colonies?

The ‘hands-off’ approach of the Nazi leadership left a certain leeway for Viera to take it upon himself to outline his idea of a new, Nazi colonialism, one that would satisfy his own goals as a member of the German colonial movement and hopefully that of the

Party and Hitler himself. His ideas sought to meld the real hope and efforts of the past colonial movement to actually regain Germany’s lost colonies with the Blut und Boden politics of the Nazi government. Building off of the Nazis’ ideas of world expansion for example, Viera noted how the British had established colonies around the globe for centuries. Even as these British colonies now tried to throw off the yoke of imperial rule,

“the English language and the English soul will remain. The Englishman in the world always runs into closely related types (Wesen), the German is a foreigner as soon as he crosses the border.”44 If Hitler’s idea of a ‘thousand-year Reich’ were to come true, then spreading Germanness across the globe must be a part of his plan.

44 Ibid. 49

For Viera it was not just the spreading of ‘Germanness’ across the globe that was important, but specifically its expansion into colonies overseas. The world is moving towards ever-greater conflict between different peoples and races he warned, and they must be able to demonstrate their fitness to survive. Overseas expansion was a way for

Germany to express its strength in this new world and also a way to protect the

“Wildling” native people of Africa, who would need Germany’s “support” if they were to develop into their own, strong cultural expression (Kulturpflanze).45

Without a clear directive from von Epp or any other Nazi government leader,

Afrika-Nachrichten, the only non-consolidated colonial journal in 1933, continued to press the hardest for a close alignment with the Nazi government in forming what it believed to be a new, strong colonial movement. In addition to the broad strokes on racial policies in the colonies made by Viera, the editorial board of Afrika-Nachrichten continued to try and link a hypothetical future colonial racial policy with the burgeoning racial politics of the Third Reich. The publication of Regierungspräsident Dr. H.

Nicolai’s Die Grundlagen der kommenden Verfassung (1931) gave them one such opportunity. Nicolai’s work was less a political document outlining a legally binding new constitution for Germany than it was a “scientific” proposal of what a legal restructuring of the government could look like.46 While the book itself was primarily focused on continental Germany, the editorial board of the Afrika-Nachrichten was quick to find the point nominally addressing future overseas colonies. Here under the subtitle

“Reichsgebiet” Nicolai stated “…we come from the standpoint that the possession of a

45 Ibid. 46 “Der koloniale Gedanke im Neuen Reich,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933), 10, 251. 50 sufficient settlement area for our people is a fair claim. To regain and keep them

[colonies] is our duty and our right, because the life of our people demands it.”47

Venturing into a discussion of the racial makeup of a new Germany, Nicolai posited that,

“members of the Reich with non-German heritage, may not identify (bezeichnen) themselves as German.”48 Nicolai clarified this idea further, “A German is one of

German ancestry… to dispel any doubts, it can be added that the blood (the race) is decisive.”49 Well before the Nazi regime had solidified its policies on race, colonial revisionists were already attempting to adapt their goals for future colonies to the racial rhetoric of Nazism.

In a form of ideological gymnastics, writers in Afrika-Nachrichten – still untethered by an affiliation to a traditional colonial organization – continued to guess at how colonial revisionism would function under the new regime, melding traditional colonial propaganda with that of the Nazis. Dr. Ernst Gerhard Jacob for example, played upon point three of the Nazi Party Platform of 1920 to prove the importance and compliance of overseas colonialism to the new regime.50 “The ideology of the National

Socialist State born out of the synthesis of Blut und Boden must also include the state territory overseas that was created through German blood and German work: the German colonies.”51 Beyond Blood and Soil, Jacob was careful to situate colonial revisionism under the Third Reich broadly, noting that “Renewal rather than conquest, will be the

47 Nicolai as quoted in “Der koloniale Gedanke im Neuen Reich,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933), 10, 251. 48 “Der koloniale Gedanke im neuen Reich,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933), 10, 251. 49 Nicolai as quoted in “Der koloniale Gedanke im Neuen Reich,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933), 10, 251. 50 An argumentative strategy that had been used throughout the Weimar period and was also taken up by Reepen as late as 1934 in the DKZ. See Hans Reepen, “Punkt 3 des nationalsozialistischen Parteiprogramms,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934) 4, 65-66. 51 Ernst Gerhard Jacob, “Die nationalsozialistische Staatsidee und die Kolonialpolitik,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933), 11, 281. 51 focus of National Socialism towards colonial lands, be it in the east of middle Europe or in distant lands.”52 His understanding of Nazi racism, too, took on broad notions as Jacob noted:

The colonial Germans out in the world were the first to combine the strong national sentiment with the social awareness and the racial pride of the white man. To be colonial has always meant for us Germans to be national and social. A strong colonial Germanness is the best defense for the racial strengthening and purification as well as the ideological (weltpolitisch) education of our people.53

Hans Bauer echoed similar vagaries as he attempted to draw out the compatibility of the colonial movement’s revisionism with Nazism. His five points included:

1. More space for our people! 2. Conservation of the German Blood 3. We want to once again be a growing nation (Volk)! 4. Our own colonial economy is an essential part of a sensible national economic policy 5. Colonial and Eastern settlement policies, both are necessary.54

By the end of Hitler’s first year in power, there remained disparate visions of a future

German colonial empire. Without a clear directive from the National Socialist leadership, the German colonial movement was stuck in a liminal world where it could only anticipate how the regime would further its colonial revisionist goals. Viewing in

National Socialist rhetoric what it wanted to see allowed for an increasing division between the goals of the German colonial movement and those of the Nazi leadership.

52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 282. 54 H.W. Bauer, “Nationalsozialismus und Kolonialfrage,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1933) 11, 284-285. 52

The Second Gleichschaltung: 1936

In 1934 Hans Reepen wrote “The solution to the German colonial problem is a matter of time.”55 He noted that Germans have other problems, too. But the colonial question is one of them. Recalling the 45-year history of the colonial journal for which he was writing, Reepen declared, “Together, within the community of the entire people, we will hoist our flags over German colonial land!”56 Reepen’s claims for the solidarity of a popular colonial movement had not faded, even if the journal for which he was writing had changed. Convinced of the potential of the Nazi regime for colonial revisionism, Reepen moved in 1934 from Afrika-Nachrichten to the more popular

Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung. One of the most vociferous critics of the more traditional members of the German colonial movement, Reepen’s move to the Deutsche Kolonial

Gesellschaft’s main publication signaled the slow shift of power away from the traditional colonial organizations toward the Third Reich.

In May of that same year the Nazi regime reorganized its Kolonialreferat, moving it from the Military Policy Office and creating its own organization, the

Kolonialpolitisches Amt (Colonial Policy Office or KPA). The new institution was responsible for giving direction to all colonial policy and colonial economic questions within the Nazi Party and to the colonial press. Unlike the RKB, the Nazi invention that had become the umbrella organization for Germany’s traditional colonial movement and maintained much of the colonial propaganda, the KPA became the National Socialist office responsible for political, economic, and scientific colonial questions. The KPA

55 Hans Reepen, “Im Geiste des neuen Reiches,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934), 6, 2. 56 Ibid. 53 oversaw four departments: Colonial Education; Economics and Currency; Traffic; and

Rights, Schools, Science, Health and Geography. While the goals of these institutions differed in name and their members in colonial experience, the RKB and KPA cooperated closely with one another. In part this cooperation was made possible by the immediate appointment of Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp to head of the KPA in 1934. Hitler’s choice of von Epp was not a coincidence. He had been a loyal supporter of the Nazi Party, allocating his own Freikorps to the Nazi SA in the 1920s and later serving as an NSDAP delegate in the Reichstag since 1928. Moreover, von Epp was a decorated veteran of the colonies, where in German Southwest Africa he was a company commander. As such, von Epp not only contributed experience in colonial service to his new post, but also excellent contact to the traditional members of the German colonial movement.57

The creation of the KPA and von Epp’s appointment as its leader was intended to bring further the traditional colonial movements into order under the Nazi banner. But beyond the addition of a swastika to the covers of colonial journals in May of 1934, indeed very little had changed. Von Epp’s first publication as leader of the KPA in the

Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, merely parroted the common motifs of the last decade of colonial revisionist propaganda: Versailles and the “Kolonial-Schuldlüge.” Linking these scapegoats to the ‘real’ problems of living space and economics, von Epp portrayed colonial revisionism under the Third Reich as the “most urgent matter for all men, women, boys and girls...” without giving them any direction at all.58

57 Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators, 31. 58 Franz von Epp, “Zum Geleit,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934) 6, 107. 54

It was not until the end of 1935 that the KPA laid out its first plans for a clear change in policy toward the colonies. Developed by the head of the economics department, Kurt Weigelt, the project called for the return of the former Germany colonies as a way to access their natural resources. This increased production would become part of a seven-year economic plan that would provide an escape from the shortage of natural German resources and contribute to the strengthening of the German economy as a whole.59 When Weigelt presented his plan to a small circle of colonial revisionists in Hamburg, it received wide praise. In Weigelt’s eyes, the return of German colonies overseas would be an economic advantage with little cost. This was, at least in part, because the return of German colonies that he foresaw would not create settler colonies abroad for Germans, but rather remain merely a capitalist venture.60

Authors within the German colonial press, over which the KPA was supposed to preside, maintained a different attitude. In his five points discussed above, we have seen that for Bauer and many other colonial revisionists, settler policy was indeed a real issue.

His placing of Kolonialpolitik alongside Ostpolitik was a strategy used to accommodate the colonial revisionist rhetoric of the National Socialist leadership, just as the Nazi leadership discussed overseas expansion as part of their plan to expand eastward on the continent – to maintain the support of the German colonial movement. But the German colonial movement was not interested in just any Lebensraum, it needed to be overseas.

To highlight this point, Bauer appropriated further the nationalist, anti-Versailles rhetoric of National Socialism to claim that the reestablishment of settler colonies not only

59 Kurt Weigelt, “Der Rohstofferzeugung der deutschen Kolonialgebeite,” December 1935, BA-MA, RW 19. 60 Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators, 31. 55 affected the future migration of Germans abroad, but also the status of those Germans still living in the former colonies. If the National Socialists cared about Germans and

Germanness worldwide, then they could not marginalize the importance of overseas empire and those Germans still living abroad. Not only did the independent Afrika-

Nachrichten – now under the direction of Bauer – push this issue further in a three-part series entitled “Die Stellung der Auslandsdeutschen in der Volksgemeinschaft” in 1934,61 but so, too, did the DKG. The latter’s book series, Koloniale Fragen im Dritten Reich, made its explicit focus on the health and political well-being of Germans still living in

Africa. According to president of the DKG Heinrich Schnee, the new series was meant to “enlighten German Volksgenossen to the state of the German territories under foreign rule.”62 The ‘former’ colonies were still German as well as the people living in them.

Returning them and creating open access to this ‘living space’ overseas was a sticking point in the minds of many former colonists, colonial officers, and colonial revisionists.

To address this growing strain between the members of the German colonial movement and the Nazi regime, further measures toward synchronization would have to be made.

For his part, Heinrich Schnee had resisted a further incorporation of colonial organizations into one group. In a letter to von Epp, he declared his fears over the creation of a singular colonial organization and the deleterious effects it would have in ostracizing the “old fighters” of the colonial movement.63 Considering the Party’s stance on overseas colonialism, Schnee thought the merger to be too soon. Only after Hitler had

61 “Die Stellung der Auslandsdeutschen in der Volksgemeinschaft,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1934), 6, 155- 156; 11, 294; 12, 321. 62 Heinrich Schnee as quoted in “Aus der Kolonialbewegung: Kolonial Fragen im Dritten Reich,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934), 6, 126. 63 “Heinrich Schnee, “Sehr Verehrter Excellenz!” 23.11.1935, GStaPK VI. HA Nl Schnee, H. Nr. 38. 56 declared his direct support for overseas expansion should such a merger take place. From the perspective of Hitler and the Party the independence of the DKG did more to undermine National Socialist domestic and foreign policy than it did to help the colonial cause. Acting on behalf of Hitler, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took the final steps in ‘synchronizing’ the German colonial movement. Fighting on behalf of the DKG,

Schnee had finally lost the ‘duel’ with von Ribbentrop in trying to keep the independence of the German colonial movement.64 Hitler’s time for Weltpolitik had finally arrived and the Nazi leadership could no longer tolerate the conservative, at times reactionary nature of the more traditional members of the German colonial movement. As Schnee was allowed to step down gracefully from his post as president of the DKG, the KPA made compulsory the closure of the German Colonial Society and remaining colonial organizations. Their members were invited to join the newly consolidated RKB under the direction of von Epp by 15 November 1936.65 The consolidation of the colonial organizations led a to massive groundswell in Reichskolonialbund membership, growing from 50,000 to over one million in the first year alone.66 Moreover, by 1941 the ratio of old members with colonial experience to that of young members without experience, but with colonial interest stood at 1:10.67 By now the Nazi regime had already integrated the colonial youth organizations into the Hitler Youth, established a series of National

Socialist colonial schools for civil servants and political speakers, and with the final

64 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 363-373. 65 “An die Staatspolizeikammer, Kreisämter und Polizeiämter; Betr: Reichskolonialbund,” 19 September 1936, BAB NS 22/1259. 66 “Das Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP Reichsleitung: Tätigkeitsberich abgeschlossen am 1. Juli 1941,” BAB NS 52/62, 98. 67 “Ibid., 101; the text reads 1:4 with a hand-written correction of 1:10. 57

Gleichschaltung of the DKG and remaining colonial organizations, seemingly taken the reins of the German colonial movement.

Despite these efforts of von Ribbentrop and Hitler to control the colonial message domestically and limit its influence on foreign policy, creating a unified colonial voice was easier said than done.68 Echoing Schnee’s speech at the closing of the German

Colonial Society, the title page of the DKG’s main publication proclaimed “The colonial idea will never die!”69 Indicative of the formal synchronization of this and other colonial publications, the very next issue of Der Koloniale Kampf no longer bore the subtitle

“Notes of the German Colonial Society,” but rather “Bulletin of the Reichskolonialbund.”

While the National Socialist leadership would boast that its reorganized RKB and KPA now controlled the major popular discourse of the German colonial movement – it oversaw the production of Kolonie und Heimat with a bi-weekly print of over half a million, the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, Afrika-Nachrichten, Deutsche Kolonial-Dienst, the women’s monthly Die Frau und die Kolonien, the youth magazine Jambo, and the

Kolonial-Post70 – the message it presented was never quite clear. Schnee was right that the colonial idea would never die. But rather than pursuing a strong revisionist policy, the

Nazi leadership was satisfied with anchoring a vague colonial consciousness in the population at large. Now under the direction of the KPA, whose driving motto was

68 Even after dismissing Schnee and closing the old colonial organizations the Foreign Office and von Ribbentrop himself continued to be at odds with the German colonial movement, which was now led my von Epp. See for example the heated exchange between von Ribbentrop and von Epp in 1936, BAB R 55/20043, 2-10. 69 “Die koloniale Idee stirbt nie! Die Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft geht über in den Reichskolonialbund,” Der Koloniale Kampf, (1936), 6, 1. 70 “Das Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP Reichsleitung: Tätigkeitsberich abgeschlossen am 1. Juli 1941,” BAB NS 52/62, 136. 58

“there is no colonial policy itself,” there was a void for the German colonial movement to continue its agitation.71

While Viera, Jacob, Bauer, and other colonial journalists sought to establish the importance of an overseas empire to Hitler’s Germany, their attempts at melding National

Socialist ideas of Blood and Soil with their own colonial causes inadvertently stumbled upon three issues that would come to divide the German colonial movement and the greater impulses of the Third Reich for the next decade: disagreements over continental colonies in Europe’s East or overseas colonies, settler colonies or economic colonies, and the contentious topic of race in the colonies. Synchronizing the colonial organizations in name was one thing, preparing a unified domestic front behind the colonial movement would prove a much more difficult task. So long as the National Socialist leadership remained unclear in its colonial goals, the German colonial press continued to appropriate the language of the regime, but for its own benefit.

Kolonialpolitik or Ostpolitik and the Questions of Settlement

“If I am walking along the street with a friend and run into a man wearing clothes stolen from me, I will not walk over to the man and remark to my friend, those are my

‘former’ clothes. No, those are my clothes, my property, whose ownership I have every right to reclaim!”72 The author’s point in this vignette is obvious. If Germans were to maintain a healthy colonial movement under Nazism, they needed to demand what was

71 Richtlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Schulungsamt des kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung), (1938 and 1939) in BAB NS 22/538, 2. 72 Hans Gerd Essner, “Gegen die Verwässering kolonialer Begriffe: ‘Ehemalige’ Kolonien?” Afrika- Nachrichten, (1937), 2, 38. 59 theirs. Less playful was the response of a Deutsch-Ostafrikaner who grimaced at the ongoing usage of ‘former’ or ‘previous’ in the press to describe the overseas possessions of the Wilhemine era and demanded its immediate correction.73 Language was indeed important. Even the main publication of the KPA, the Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, weighed in on the topic of the use of ‘former’ to describe the German overseas empire.

Hanswerner Nachrodt decried the continued use of the term not only by foreigners skeptical of a rebirth of German overseas imperialism, but by Germans, whose language he thought espoused defeatism. “[Germany] does not demand its ‘former’ colonies, no!

[Germany] demands the German colonies, for which it has earned an irreproachable right to ownership through German accomplishments and sacrificed German blood.”74

Language was not only significant to describe the types of colonies that Germany once possessed, but also to describe the process of colonialism and the act of colonization in the broadest senses. Harking back to the etymology of colonization, Ernst Gerhard

Jacob reminded his readers that ‘colonization’ stems from the latin colere- to build or work, while ‘colonial politics’ is a form of politics from the greek polis- city or state.75

While Germans had long been good colonizers, Germany’s time as a colonial power was cut short. Drawing on the ‘historic’ strength of German colonization, Jacob saw it as inevitable that a strong German colonial politics would follow: “One cannot forever close off the best colonizer blood in the world to colonial politics, when it finally awakens, fully-formed, in state unity.”76 The general rhetoric of creating a unified, national

73 “Was ist zu machen?” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1937), 1, 13. 74 Hanswerner Nachrodt, “‘Ehemalige’ deutsche Kolonien?” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1939), 4, 70-71. 75 Ernst Gerhard Jacob, “Kolonisation und Kolonialpolitik,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1937), 8, 194. 76 Ibid., 195. 60 colonial movement was quite common for colonial propaganda under the Third Reich.

Yet, in recalling the history of the Teutonic colonization of parts of Eastern Europe centuries ago, Jacob confused colonization of the East with overseas colonialism.

Ostpolitik and Kolonialpolitik may have been two sides of the same coin as so many colonial revisionists claimed, but for Hitler and the Nazi leadership emphasis was always on Eastern Europe. For the most part the confusion stemmed from the National

Socialist Party Platform of 1920, which had claimed as it third point “We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and settlement of our surplus population.”77 Whether the Party had anticipated a return to its overseas colonies in the

1920s is debatable,78 but the vagaries of the point did have the effect of attracting many colonial revisionists to the Nazi banner in the Weimar period and continued to be a rallying point into the Third Reich.79

Even before the diplomatic and geopolitical strategy of the Third Reich began to focus on continental expansion in Eastern Europe, colonial propagandists began to link the question of Ostpolitik to Kolonialpolitik. Already in 1933 author Rudolf Böhmer noted how the German youth of today think little about the importance of overseas colonies, and when they do, only as something to be pursued in the distant future. For them the greater life and settlement options lay in the East.80 Böhmer recognized the strong case for German expansion (back) into Eastern Europe as a revision of the

Versailles Treaty that stripped Germany of much of its eastern territories, but also into

77 “Programm der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, 143. 78 See Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. 79 Hans Reepen, “Punkt 3 des nationalsozialistischen Parteiprogramms,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934) 4, 65-66. 80 Rudolf Böhmer, “Kolonial und Ostpolitik,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1933), 3, 54. 61 new lands rich in agricultural potential. The drawback as he saw it, was that eastern expansion could only be accomplished through war, whereas a return to Germany’s overseas colonies in Africa would be accepted by the world. The key for Böhmer, however, was to instill the necessity of overseas colonies by equating the importance of both a Kolonial- and Ostpolitik. “Never” noted Böhmer, “have I known a supporter of colonial policy who has not also supported Ostpolitik.”81 To place German ambitions in an international light, he noted further that the same has been true of the French and

Italians, the former ruling over a world empire even as it looked across the Rhein, and the latter an empire in Africa, while its revisionist eyes looked across the Adriatic.

So long as the colonial movement and its propaganda did not interfere with the diplomatic strategies of the Third Reich’s leadership, Hitler and other top Nazi officials were content to let the movement anticipate the importance of Point Three and the role of overseas colonies versus Eastern colonies. For example, even by 1937 Hitler proclaimed in a speech at the Rally of Labor, “Without colonial expansion, the German Lebensraum is too small to guarantee a secure, uninterrupted, and lasting nourishment of our Volk.”82

Precisely where this “colonial expansion” would take place, on the European continent or in Africa, was left unclear. Only in 1942 would a clear statement be issued by the KPA that the terms “colonies, colonial land, colonial space, and colonial” did not refer to

Eastern Europe, but solely to the “colonization of tropical and subtropical overseas territories.”83 But by then it was too late. German ‘colonial’ settlements had already

81 Ibid., 56. 82 Adolf Hitler as quoted in “Richlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Referat IV Schulung des Kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung) 29 October 1938), BAB NS 22/538. 83 Wenig, “Verfügung 15/42,” 22 June 1942, BAB NS 52/64, 42. 62 been established in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and the return of an overseas empire would soon diminish with the events at Stalingrad.84 Yet, in the late 1930s, this lack of clarity extended beyond the perhaps intentional vagaries of Hitler’s language and was reflected in the colonial movement through the press.

Writing for Afrika-Nachrichten, Max Gerd Weser directed readers’ attention to this ambiguity of colonial terms. Building off of the initial 1935 strategy of the KPA,

Weser confirmed that Germany was not demanding a return to its colonies for the resettlement of peoples, but for the acquisition of raw materials. The two goals did not impede, but rather complemented each other, “because the colonies provide abundant raw materials, and the Eastern settlements foodstuffs.”85 The Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, the

KPA’s internal journal, echoed these sentiments that same year in a series of article’s that claimed the necessity of both an Ostpolitik and Kolonialpolitik.86 By 1938 the official

National Socialist guide to Colonial Policy Education claimed, “Overseas and continental endeavors (Bestrebungen) are not inseparable terms, but essentially complement one another. The colonial economy strengthens and broadens German industry by supplying resources, and strengthens German agriculture by delivering fertilizer as well as tropical animal feed for cattle farming and thereby creates a stronger population policy

(Bevölkerungspolitik) in the East”87

84 See Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine; Baranowski, Nazi Empire; and Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. 85 Max Gerd Weser, “Ostkolonisation contra Kolonien?” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1937) 12, 306. 86 See George Schulze, “Ostpolitik und Kolonialpolitik: eine wirtschaftliche Betrachtung,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1937), 2, 7-12; and Hermann Behrens, “Ost- und Kolonialpolitk: ihre ergänzende Notwendigkeit,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1937), 10, 1-8. 87 “Richlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Referat IV Schulung des Kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung) 29 October 1938), BAB NS 22/538. 63

On the surface it would appear that the colonial question had been answered in the pages of the colonial press by 1937. Colonial Policy and Eastern Policy were to be two sides of the same coin, even if settlement was clearly to take place on the continent, rather than overseas. But if this point was so clear, why did the colonial press and the

KPA need to undergo such efforts to convince its reading public of this point? Recall that the very title of Weser’s article posed “Ostkolonisation contra Kolonien?” as a question, rather than a statement of fact. Even Paul Schnoekel, the head of colonial education within the KPA, had written about the great possibilities for overseas settlement as late as 1932.88 What happened to the long-held goals of many colonial revisionists that Germans should return en-masse to territories in Africa after 1937? Did they just comply with foreign policy concerns of the Nazi leadership? Or was it possible that the colonial movement was simply saying one thing, while at the same time continuing its plan for overseas settlement?

Racial Fitness for Life in the Colonies

One of the main concerns regarding an overseas settlement policy was the issue of race, or so the German colonial movement often claimed. Appropriating the National

Socialists’ infatuation with racial ideology and politics, the German colonial movement paid lip service to this interest in race to further its pursuit of returning overseas. This discourse of race was not set in terms of the biological antisemitism that the Nazis would develop on the continent, nor even the strict separation of white and black interaction in

88 Paul Schnoeckel and Artur Stegner, Kampf um deutschen Lebensraum: Eine kolonial-politische Betrachtung, (Berlin: Georg Stilke, 1932) 25-27. 64

Africa that stemmed back to the turn of the century in German colonies. The German colonial movement framed its main concern as one of physical fitness for life and work in tropical and subtropical regions, that is in Africa. The concern of ‘racial hygiene’ as it was defined, was not necessarily one of racist, exclusionary policy, even if it does point to the ways in which a biological binary of difference was created.

Before Paul Schnoeckel rose through the ranks of the Nazi Party and entered service of the KPA, not only had he been pushing for a return to Germany’s former colonies with the establishment of civilian settlements, he also declared their physical capability to do so.89 Until 1914 most Germans assumed that the German colonies, which were with the exception of German Southwest Africa in tropical zones, were unsuited to mass settlement and reserved for large plantations. This had the effect, so claimed Schnoeckel, that most Germans migrated to foreign colonies overseas rather than to German-held lands. Schnoeckel quickly drew readers’ attention to the fact that the

German colonies maintained many areas of higher elevation where Germans could plant all of their domestic crops as well as coffee, pineapples, and peaches, and generally enjoy a climate similar to summers in Germany. Significantly, Schnoeckel claimed, “The fact that a German can work just as easily in these areas as he can in the homeland, that without risk to his health he can plow, harrow, and work in his garden without fear of racial degeneration, opens up the colonies to the tremendous task of a definite

Deutschtumpolitik.”90

89 Ibid., 25-26. 90 Ibid., 26. 65

Throughout the 1930s the issues of ‘racial hygiene’ and the fitness of white

Europeans to live in the tropics and subtropics had largely become a moot point in

National Socialist colonial propaganda. Under direction of the Foreign Office, and at times Hitler himself, the colonial movement exerted most of its energy in creating national unity that was based on a colonial ‘will’, rather than fine tune the details of how a return might be organized and function. But by 1940, as the German war effort witnessed success after success, public opinion once again returned to the practicalities of returning to Africa. Along with this change in attitude the colonial press began again to ask the question of racial fitness for colonial settlement.91

In the pages of the Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, a Dr. P.R. Skawran responded with a resounding “no” to the question of whether the white settler suffers from degeneration in the subtropical colonies.92 Despite the recent studies that had shown a clear degeneration of white Europeans by the third generation within those groups that continued to live in the subtropics, Skawran claimed that they were simply opinions devoid of statistical fact. By comparison his study pointed to an actual regeneration of whites living in South Africa who both increased in general health as well as in stature.93

That the white races can acclimate themselves, live, and produce healthy children in the subtropics is “no surprise. That’s why so few people still ask the question.”94 Perhaps the professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa was right. Europeans from

91 Perhaps unsurprisingly the colonial press did not even mention the Nazi massacre of French African troops that coincided with this shift in discourse. For a discussion of this Nazi racial violence, see Raffael Scheck, Hitler’s African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 92 P.R. Skawran, “Entartet der weiße Siedler im subtropischen Sieldungsraum?” Deutsche Kolonial- Zeitung, (1940), 10, 196-197. 93 Ibid., 196-197. 94 Ibid., 196. 66 other nations and more than a few Germans had been living and continued to live all across the African continent.

At least some German scientists were less convinced. In the following issue of

Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, P. Mühlens of the Tropical Institute in Hamburg dissented.

According to him, only those with “perfect physical and mental health, a balanced nervous system, who are capable of work, and maintain an irreproachable character are fit for life in the colonies.”95 Now Skawran had not claimed life in the colonies was easy, but for Mühlens the notion of acclimatization was very much still a question worth asking. In his estimation many members of the “white races” were not fit for prolonged life in the colonies without risk of severe degradation to their health. He recommended that Europeans of all nations take a 4-6 month vacation back to Europe for every one and a half to two years spent in the colonies. For at least the tropical regions of Africa,

Mühlens agreed with “most tropical physicians” that a “permanent acclimatization and accordingly a permanent settlement of the white race – including Germans – in the hot and humid climates of the west and east African coastal regions was under current conditions impossible.”96

The perspective of yet another German doctor was that, indeed, parts of Africa were known as “the grave of the white man” or more broadly described as “hell on earth.”97 But for the physician at the Staatliche Tropenmedizinische Beratungsstelle

Bremen the worst a European had to fear from the climate was a “light exhaustion of the

95 P. Mühlens, “Tropenmedizinische- und hygienische Kolonialfragen,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1940), 11, 212. 96 Ibid., 213. 97 F. von Bormann, “Kann ein Europäer in den Tropen leben?” Der Koloniale Kampf, (1941), 11, 6. 67 nervous system.”98 Furthermore he declared that life in the tropical regions was quite safe for a family and that more than just a possibility, the foundation of a family in the colonies was essential to happiness in the colonies, a point we will return to later.

According to German scientists at the time, the ability of Europeans to acclimate to the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa was only half of the equation. Along with the different climate came a host of new health concerns about disease, bacterial infections, and access to healthcare. It was here that the Germans had excelled as colonial pioneers, helping to create vaccinations for colonial diseases before, during, and after Germany maintained any formal overseas possessions.99 Even as Germany was denied a colonial empire after 1919 based on its poor treatment of its colonial subjects, the presses of other European nations continued to praise advances in German colonial medicine.100

One of the key developments out of German colonial medicine was a treatment for “sleeping sickness” caused by the Tsetse fly. Forgotten in the press’ praise of the

1920s and 1930s were the methods by which German colonial doctors were able to develop such vaccination, which depended on experiments – often brutal and inhumane – on involuntary African subjects. The terrors of these medical advances were likewise forgotten by the Nazis in the film Germanin.101 Directed by Max W. Kimmich (the brother-in-law of Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels) the film unsurprisingly portrayed the sacrifice of German medical doctors in their efforts to assist the ‘native’

98 Ibid., 7. 99 H. Lippelt, “Deutschland führt in er Tropenmedizin,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1937), 2, 12-13. 100 See Wolfgang Uwe Eckart, Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus: Deutschland 1884-1945, (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1997). 101 Germanin, directed by Max W. Kimmich (Berlin: Ufa,1943). 68 population. While unable to recreate the critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm of

Detlev Sierck’s La Habanera, Germanin returned to a similar narrative of the perils of exotic, tropical locals and the ability of the Aryan races to overcome them with science.102 Moreover, along with films such as Ohm Krüger, Kimmich’s film allowed for a popular audience to reconnect with – or in many cases perhaps first learn of –

Germany’s colonial ‘successes.’103

Despite the absence of colonial settlement in areas other than the East, the

German colonial movement under the National Socialist regime never lost its interest in returning to Africa. Framing their discourse around race, the press of the German colonial movement under the Nazi regime was able to continue the idea of German settlement in Africa. Unlike the bold optimism of Schnoeckel, Oberregierungsrat Szogs noted in a memo that:

The European Kleinsiedler remains rare in our colonies. Relying on his own physical labor, he cannot compete with the native who is accustomed to the climate. Moreover, it contradicts the German colonial idea to put the superiority of our race on the line, by allowing Europeans to perform physical labor alongside the natives.104

Germans were suited for overseas settlement in Africa, the real question concerned the ability of the European races to perform as efficiently as the indigenous population under such environmental conditions and the ideological appropriateness of such work. Or as

Karl Dietzel put it following the international conference in Brussels on the “Possibility

102 See Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife, (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1996) 125-145. 103 See “Germanin,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1942) 19, 264. 104 Szogs, “Landwirtschaftsrecht in den deutschen Kolonien Afrikas,” undated, BAB NS 20/120, 12. 69 of Colonization in the Tropics by White Races” in 1938,105 the question is not “is

European colonization (Siedlung) possible, but rather how are we to accomplish

European settlement?”106 Drawing from the experience of German farmers still living in

Africa, Kolonie und Heimat implied that the only way to overcome this disparity in fitness, was the large farm in which white farmers oversaw black workers. The journal warned that the Neger are and remain “big children,” and that it is necessary that they have the utmost trust in their master. Although he “stands on a lower cultural level” and is more fit for physical labor is the tropics, the “Neger is a human being and not a machine.”107 Although obviously racist, the overt and explicit mention of race placated the Nazi regime and allowed for the German colonial movement to continue planning for its return overseas.

Organization of Germany’s future colonies overseas had yet to be fully determined in 1938. There remained disparate opinions about the possibility of mass- settlement overseas versus a very minimal number of colonist farmers overseen by a colonial administration and police. As we will discuss later, there existed further debates about the organization of the colonies in terms of interaction between the white, German, and European races, and the indigenous, black population as the racial doctrine of the

Nazis had to be reconciled with that of efficient colonial management. It is, however, clear that the German colonial movement never waned in its expectation that a real, colonial revisionism and settlement would take place in Africa and not solely in Eastern

105 Karl Dietzel, “An das Auswärtige Amt,” 5 April 1938, BAB R 1001/6280. 106 Karl Dietzel, “Kolonisationsmöglicheiten der weissen Rasse in der Tropenzone,” 1938, BAB R 1001/6820, 4. 107 “Farmer berichtet aus ihrem Leben: Deutsche sorgen für unsern Morgen-Kaffee,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938), 2, 8. 70

Europe as the National Socialist regime so often claimed. Even as it became more silent about the issue of overseas settlement in the latter 1930s in deference to Hitler’s foreign policy,108 the colonial press continued to focus its interest on topics related to Africa.

While the KPA sought to imbed a colonial consciousness within the German population through visual propaganda, exhibitions, and remembrance days, the traditional colonial schools at Witzenhausen and Rendsburg continued their practical pedagogy of the 1920s that was meant to train young German men and women in the skills necessary for life overseas in the tropics and subtropics.109 So sure was the KPA of a return to Africa, that internal memos questioning the number of tropical uniforms and boots needed, and in what sizes, were common.110

Conclusion

The Australian historian Stephen Henry Roberts, a contemporary observer of

National Socialism’s colonial movement, noted, “I am not yet convinced, however, despite the popularity of the colonial campaign in Germany (it extends even to cigarette cards), that Hitler looks upon colonies other than as a bargaining weapon in diplomacy.”111 Roberts’ observation was astute and even when the diplomatic context was convenient and Hitler ordered the KPA to create a Colonial Ministry in 1941, the

108 I agree here with the larger argument of Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich; Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators; Wolf Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); and Kuma N’Dumbe III, Was wollte Hitler in Afrika? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestlatung Afrikas (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1993). 109 Karl Körner, “Die Vorbereitung f. d. deutsche Frauenarbeit über See,” undated, BAB R 8023/407, 230- 238. 110 “Tätigkeitsbericht der Unterabteilung Beschaffungswesen,” 22.4.1941, BAB NS 52/60. 111 Stephen Henry Roberts, The House that Hitler Built (London: Methuen Publishers, 4th Edition, 1937), 355. 71 return of Germany’s colonies were never his priority.112 Yet even though Roberts was correct in his portrayal of the importance of overseas expansion for Hitler, he underestimated the importance of colonial revisionism to many Germans living under

National Socialism. The RKB and KPA had built upon the successes of the DKG and other colonial organizations of the Weimar Republic and helped to turn colonial revisionism from a fringe movement into something much more at the heart of Germans’ consciousness during the Third Reich. Cigarette cards, exhibitions, memorial days and parades, films, the Deutsche Afrika-Schau, and the colonial press all contributed to a growing German colonial consciousness.113 Not only had membership in the RKB increased drastically, but even children wanted to join in the Nazis’ colonial revisionism.114 Duems’ prediction at the dawn of the Third Reich, that to be national was to be colonial, did seemingly come true.

Despite the successes in bringing the colonial idea to the German masses, colonial revisionism under the Third Reich was never the closely synchronized idea that the Nazi leadership had claimed, nor for which it hoped. The colonial press as well as the KPA behind it, never relinquished in toto their long-standing goals for the restoration of

German territory overseas and the opportunity for Germans to return there. As late as

May 1942 members of the German colonial movement were still arguing with newly-

112 See Hans Heinrich Lammers, “An das Kolonialpolitisches Amt,” 28 March 1941, BAB NS 52/60, 29. 113 On the Deutsch Afrika-Schau, see Susann Lewerenz, Die Deutsche Afrika-Schau (1935-1940): Rassismus, Kolonialrevisionismus und postkoloniale Auseinandersetzung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2005); on colonialism in National Socialist public culture, see Willeke Sandler, “‘Colonizers Are Born, Not Made’: Creating a Colonialist Identity in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945,” (Dissertation, Duke University, 2012. 114 See the case of the ballet student, Johanna Peters, whose membership application was declined by the RKB because at fifteen years old, she did not meet the age requirement of 18; Langerbein, “Ihre Beitrittserklärung zum RKB vom 19.11.1939,” 24 November 1939, BAB NS 22/1259. 72 appointed Nazi officials about the importance of having a Colonial Policy that was not informed by Germany’s Eastern Policy within the Colonial Ministry.115 At the same time, the RKB and KPA never presented propaganda that was focused and unified enough in its plans for colonial revisionism to please the most ardent members of the traditional, German colonial movement. With Hitler’s deference to foreign policy and

Europe’s East, the onus to become the strong, colonial leader that Reepen had so desperately wanted fell to von Epp. The head of the German colonial movement’s failure to take a strong, leadership position was not his own. Even as head of the RKB and

KPA, von Epp’s hands were tethered in the early years by the Foreign Office under von

Ribbentrop and by Hitler himself. Von Epp attempted to assert his authority over colonial planning against von Ribbentrop, but ultimately fell into line.116 While he maintained control over the colonial message at home and in the press, as we have seen the presentation of colonial revisionist plans to the public, he was always curtailed by

Nazi Germany’s international and diplomatic goals.

The secondary importance of colonial policy to the Third Reich’s Weltpolitik is the main point furthered by historian Klaus Hildebrand in his massive, 1960s study of

Hitler’s colonial policy. But contrary to Hildebrand’s analysis, acknowledging the diplomatic importance of colonial policy to Hitler and the Nazi regime does not only mean a focus on the international relations between Germany, France, and Britain. Nor

115 See the decenting opinions of Ministerialrat Klas and Gesandter Bielfeld in the “Auffassung über die Sitzung des Ausschusses für die Aufstellung eines Geschäftsverteilungsplanes des künftigen Kolonialministeriums im Kolonialpolitischen Amt,” 21 May 1942, BAB NS 52/84, 185-189. 116 Months after the second Gleichschaltung, Ministerialrat Berndt wrote to his boss in the Propaganda Ministry, Joseph Goebbels, asking for direction after a massive “feud” had broken out between von Ribbentrop and von Epp as both had claimed their direction over the colonial question in the press, Alfred- Ingemar Berndt, “”Herrn Reichsminister,” 25 August 1936, BAB R 55/20043, 1. 73 does it mean we should overlook the extensive and expansive efforts put forth by the

KPA and RKB in establishing a colonial consciousness within the German population, regardless of how obtuse its direct plans for colonial revisionism.117 In fact, the domestic and diplomatic spheres of colonial revisionism under the Third Reich were very closely linked, but not in a traditional sense of either or as we will see in the next chapter.118

The goal of establishing a colonial consciousness was one of domestic importance for the Nazi regime, but it was also one of broader interests that linked Nazi Germany to another foreign power, Fascist Italy. And this relationship, cultivated through mutual interests in colonial revisionism existed well before formal diplomatic and military alliances between the two fascist powers had been created. As editor of Afrika-

Nachrichten it is telling that Reepen, who had since 1928 looked to Italy as a role model in colonial issues, followed his 1933 article “Im Geiste des neuen Reiches” with a

German translation of Sergio de Cesare’s “Die koloniale Frage im Lichte des neuen

Italien.”119 For the journalist of La Rivista d’Oriente, “We [Italians] are leading by the example set forth by the Germans in their attempts to regain their lost colonial territories.”120 Even if Hitler and von Epp had failed to fill Mussolini’s shoes in

117 One needs only remember the importance of overseas colonialism to the domestic policy of the Second Empire as argued by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Notizen zur deutschen Geschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck Verlag, 2007). 118 We need not recreate the debate over the primacy of domestic and foreign policies that has dominated much of the historiography of the Kaiserreich. See eg. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne/Berlin: Kiepenheuer u. Witsch, 1969); and Eckart Kehr, Der Primat der Innenpolitik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965). 119 See Hans Reepen, “Im Geiste des neuen Reiches,” and Sergio de Cesare, “Die koloniale Frage im Lichte des neuen Italien,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934) 1, 1-3. 120 Sergio de Cesare, “Die koloniale Frage im Lichte des neuen Italien,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1934) 1, 1-3. 74 leadership, the German colonial movement was already associating itself with Fascist colonialism. Perhaps now Germany could follow the lead of Fascist Italy.

75

Chapter 2: Fascist Colonialism: Transnational Nationalisms and the Creation of a “New Europe”

Fascists are not National Socialists. The NSDAP has nothing at all to do with the Fascist Party in Italy. So little from the fascist system in Italy can be transferred to Germany as National Socialism to Italy. We have only one thing in common with fascism, namely a dictator… -Johann Engel1

The powerful rise of the new Italian empire is the work of one man, who has created a great present and future for his people through fascism. The struggle, victory, and transmission of the fascist movement is similar to our National Socialism. We congratulate Italy on its tremendous revival and are united with the anti-Bolshevik fascist movement and its Duce in the work that both of our nations are doing for the benefit of Europe. -Hermann Göring2

As late as 1932 Mussolini was advising Hitler on politics and had prepared to deepen this close interaction between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, claiming, “in a decade, Europe will be Fascist or fascistizzata!”3 Indeed, Hitler had long been fascinated by Mussolini and his Italian Fascism, even modeling his own “Beer Hall Putsch” in 1923 after Mussolini’s successful March on Rome in 1922. Despite the failure of Hitler’s coup, the admiration he shared for Mussolini had become mutual and continued throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Once Hitler came to power in 1933 however, a diplomatic gap began to grow between National Socialists and Fascists. When one year

1 Johann Engel, “Redner Material Nr. 1 der Reichspropaganda-Leitung der NSDAP,” undated, BAK N 1101/55, Nachlass von Epp, 35. 2 Hermann Göring’s dedication in Louise Diel’s book, Kampf, Sieg und Sendung des Faschismus (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1937). 3 MacGregor Knox, Common Destiny: Dictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Cambridge, UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 136. 76 later in 1934 Hans Reepen and other German colonial revisionists were looking to Fascist

Italy, they were doing so alone.

For the National Socialist leadership this fascist collaboration was secondary to the regime’s own nationalist desires. Early in the regime the Nazi government continued its anti-Versailles rhetoric that it had developed in the years of the Weimar Republic. Of their complaints, the government decried the redrawing of borders that divided ethnic

Germans across central Europe and called for the creation of national borders that would reunite “Germans” in a single territory. In addition to the well-known calls to rejoin their

German brothers in the lost territories now ceded to Poland and the new Czechoslovak state, the Nazi regime also looked to its brothers and sisters in Austria and in South Tirol, of which the latter had come under Italian control in 1919. This created a tension between the two regimes that came to a head in 1934 when the coup attempt of Nazi agents in Austria failed and resulted in the death of the ‘Austrofascist’ dictator Engelbert

Dollfuss. In response to this Nazi transgression, a clear violation to the Treaty of

Locarno, Mussolini sought to isolate the Germans through a diplomatic alliance with

Britain and France known as the Stresa Front. When the ink dried in 1935, the Final

Declaration of the Stresa Conference reaffirmed the Treaty of Locarno and promised to protect the independence of the Austria state. Poised to start a fascist Europe just two years prior, now Germany and Italy were diplomatic enemies. How did this German position that claimed “we have nothing in common with fascism except for a dictator” change so drastically in the following two years that Hermann Göring would suddenly redeclare the many similarities between the two regimes? The answer lies not only in the

77 regimes’ mutual hatred for Bolshevism, but also in their mutual overseas desires that had united colonialists and other non-diplomatic actors from both regimes years before.

While Hitler’s decision to back Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia may have been rooted in the politics of international diplomacy, it gave support to a growing colonial, fascist community that operated outside the realm of formal politics and beyond state borders.4 Beginning with the National Socialist rise to power, many within the German colonial movement looked increasingly to Fascist Italy for inspiration and cooperation.

By the time of the Abyssinian War German colonialists saw in Italy a colonial revisionism that was both active on foreign ground, but also in its propaganda. The latter had contributed to a colonial movement that was now integrated into Italian Fascist nationalism and national identity. This work of Italian colonialists resonated deeply with the goals of the German colonial movement.

The following chapter moves beyond the context of colonialism under the Third

Reich and discusses how a movement tied to the nation developed into a transnational phenomenon. It demonstrates how German colonial journalists and authors joined their

Italian counterparts in print and throughout the 1930s and into the early 1940s created a colonial media that continued to define colonialism as integral to each national context even as both movements increasingly looked for guidance from their fascist neighbor.

Whether through firsthand experience gained by travel or through the act of translation, this collaboration surrounding a shared interest in overseas empire created a common language of fascist colonialism that overcame the differences in distinct Italian and

4 Now modern-day Ethiopia, I use the term “Abyssinia” and “Ethiopia” interchangeably throughout this dissertation to accurately reflect the ambiguity of nomenclature used by both German and Italian fascists. 78

German nationalisms as it formed the basis of a new transnational fascist identity.

Placing their emphasis on overseas expansion, these transnational fascists often transgressed the will of their respective state’s domestic and international politics as they forged ahead in constructing their own racial understanding of a ‘new Europe’.

Louise Diel: Forming a Colonial Bridge Across the Alps

A great admirer and acquaintance of Mussolini, German author Louise Diel dedicated many of her 1930s works to the Italian Fascists. First writing on the role of

Italian women within the new fascist state,5 Diel subsequently focused her works more on the Duce himself and the successes of Italian Fascism. By the later 1930s Diel had upon invitation traveled to the Italian colonies twice before (to Libya and later Tunis). But it was her third trip, during which she was the first civilian to enter Ethiopia after the war, that allowed Diel to attest to the ways in which Fascist Italy had made ‘positive’ progress in the colonization of East Africa. There she observed the possibilities for national regeneration and stability created by Fascist colonialism on the African continent. The overwhelmingly positive assessment of Italian Fascist colonialism in her works was a reflection of Diel’s strong relationship to the Italian Fascist regime. It was a relationship that had existed before Hitler’s rise to power and helped to solidify her public presence in

Nazi Germany; her works on the Italian empire built a colonial bridge across the Alps.

Yet Diel was an unlikely supporter of Fascism. Her focus on Fascist Italy,

Mussolini, and Italy’s expanding empire represented a departure from her previous

5 Diel was invited by the Ente Nazionale per Industrie Turistische in the summer of 1933 to write her book, Frau im Faschistischen Italien (Berlin: Reimar Hobbing, 1934). 79 works. A prolific author during the Weimar period, the German journalist had primarily associated herself with the political left. She was a close friend of artist and pacifist

Käthe Kollwitz and had been active in the women’s movement of 1920s Germany.

Contributing often to the Allgemeine Automobil-Zeitung as well as other magazines and national dailies, Diel proclaimed the independence and freedom that automobility had ushered in for the “New Woman.”6 In her book Ich werde Mutter she made light of the bourgeois glorification of motherhood – a point that the Nazis would later wage against her – even though she was herself a middle-class mother. Perhaps, like the Italian futurists, it was her love of the automobile and technology that melded well with the imagery of Italian Fascism. Whatever the reason, Diel maintained her independence as a woman as she traveled between the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany and to Africa.

Louise Diel’s experiences crossing borders, however, represented a challenge to

National Socialist doctrine that went far beyond her views on the role of women. Her focus on building a transnational connection between the two fascist regimes often challenged the national, state-based ideologies of race and space under the Third Reich.

To be sure, Diel was a supporter of Italian Fascism, but she was not a National Socialist.

That her transgressions were tolerated by the Nazi regime is indicative of the power that non-state political actors could have in shaping both domestic and foreign policy. Much like the German colonial movement itself, Diel may have been at the mercy of popular

6 In some ways Diel was very similar to the women Schilling discusses, even if Diel began her travels after Schilling’s study ends. See Britta Schilling, “Crossing Boundaries: German Women in Africa, 1919- 1933,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, edited by Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 140-159. 80 reactions to the rapidly changing national and international politics of the 1930s, but she was also an agent of this change.

Diel’s many challenges to the National Socialist worldview did not go unnoticed.

The Office of Alfred Rosenberg, which since 1934 oversaw the spiritual and ideological upbringing and education of the Party and its organizations, began in 1938 to pay close attention to Diel, her works, and public talks.7 And they did so with good reason.

Despite Diel’s growing popularity among Germans during the Third Reich, especially after the political and cultural alliance with Fascist Italy, she never accepted National

Socialism within Germany. Her views on the independence of women and their role as mothers – which eventually resulted in her book on motherhood being banned in 19438 – was only the first of her many discrepancies with National Socialist doctrine.

Diel’s troubles with the party began in 1940 when she was suspected of harboring her half-Jewish secretary from the secret police,9 a charge that was apparently later dropped.10 Later that same year, the Auslands-Organisation der NSDAP demanded that

Diel’s passport be revoked (gesperrt) after she had “behaved extremely strangely in

Rome, expressing views that fell short of any kind of political understanding and even

7 Formally known as the “Beaugtragte des Führers für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP (DFBU), Rosenberg’s office primarily oversaw the political doctrine of the NSDAP. 8 In 1943 the Gauschulungsamt in Vienna protested against Diel’s Ich werde Mutter for not following the wishes of National Socialism. See Blume, “An die Reichsschrifttumekammer,” 25 May 1943, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Lousie Diel, 984. Already in 1938 the National Socialist regime had questioned Diel’s former association with womens’ groups and her ability to speak about other political topics. See “An die Deutsche Arbeitsfront,” 14 July 1938 BAB NS 15/27, 142 9 Metzner, “An das Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda,” 1 August 1940, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 10 Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda to President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer, “Betrifft: Luise Diel” (sic), 19 November 1940, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 81 bordered on desertion (Desertismus).”11 Her trials with the Party worsened in 1941 when it was discovered by the local Nazi official Kreisleiter Kuner that Diel and her husband maintained a close relationship to a dissident Catholic priest in Lenzkirch (Southwest

Germany) – where they had a second home – and planned to give a lecture not for, but against the regime to a group of dissident parishioners.12 The problems with Kuner and the party worsened further in 1943 when Diel’s husband and by association, she herself, were found to be harboring and redistributing foodstuffs for profit during a time of war.13

According to local Kreisleiter Kuner, the Diels “want nothing to do with National

Socialism, and their actions in the ‘hamstering’ of foodstuffs and farmed goods demonstrates that they are in their tenor, everything but National Socialists.”14 Kuner was dumbfounded that Diel, an obvious opponent to the regime had not been convicted of her crime, and even after taking the case to the Parteikanzlei, was allowed to continue writing as a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer until the end of the war. His final plea to the President of this organization:

[I am of the opinion] that [Ms. Diel] is unworthy to be a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer. Since Fascist Italy gave her the opportunity to write the book “Faschismus,” Ms. Diel used this as an opportunity to push through her own egotistical wishes with every agency of the party and of the state. Thus she allowed herself to go before the Party Chancellery of the Führer and lodge complaints against me and my office, which had exposed her hoarding and harmful behavior.15

11 Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda to President of the Reichsschrifttumskammer, 29 May 1940, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 12 Kuner an Präsidenten der Reichsschrifttumskammer, 16 April 1941, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 13 Kuner an Präsidenten der Reichsschrifttumskammer, 13 January 1943, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 82

Kuner could not comprehend that after all of his loyal work for the Regime in uncovering these enemies of the Volk that the Party Chancellery of the Führer was unable to provide for prosecution of the Diel’s.16 So why was Louise Diel allowed to continue writing when it was evident even to low level, local Nazi officials that she was not toeing the party line?

Diel’s relationship to the Nazi Party extended back to the very beginning of the regime in 1933, when she was a member of the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur. The

Kampfbund was established by Alfred Rosenberg in 1927 as part of a broader conservative movement within the Weimar Republic that built upon völkisch nationalism and antisemitism even if ostensibly the organization was created to preserve true

‘German’ culture within the arts. Only in 1934 was the Kampfbund dissolved and its members reintegrated into new Nazi organizations, now under the umbrella of the Office of Rosenberg. Not a supporter of the new Nazi regime, Diel nonetheless used her membership within the Kampfbund early on for her own professional gains, seeking out sympathetic publishers interested in her new book Die Frau im faschistischen Italien.17

Diel made no early effort to hide completely her political bent. By June 1933 the new regime continued its process of political and cultural Gleichschaltung or synchronization of German life. The result of which was the creation of a Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller for ‘German’ – that is politically sympathetic Aryan – authors within Nazi Germany. Through various party apparatuses that included the Office of

Rosenberg, the Office of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, and the Gestapo the

16 Ibid. 17 See the correspondence between Hans Hinkel and Louise Diel, 23-28 November 1933, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 83

National Socialist leadership sought to ensure that only the right message was being sent out to the public through literature. Diel’s early participation in these organizations demonstrates more her tenacity to continue her writing and a manipulation of the system than it does her adoption of the political ideals of Nazism. As Hans-Dieter Schäfer has demonstrated, the process of Geichschaltung by no means meant that all authors became

Nazis or were forced into inner emigration.18 After listing the requisite two-personal character references on her application to the Reichsverband deutscher Schriftsteller in

1933, Diel even admitted in the notes that she was herself politically active.19 The political activity to which Diel was referring was her growing allegiance with Mussolini and Italian Fascism: a relationship that predated and superseded any relationship to the

Nazi regime. It was this relationship of Diel’s to Italian Fascism that caused both her ongoing trouble with the regime and allowed her to maintain a certain degree of independence from Nazi censors and even the secret police.

Despite the leeway given to Diel by Nazi authorities, she was not immune to popular reactions to a rapidly changing international politics. The assassination of

Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934 for example had a tremendous effect on Diel’s work. During this time the Italian press had taken an increasingly hostile stance toward National

Socialist Germany, prompting a similar resentment of Italy in the German press. While in 1933 her works on Mussolini and Italian Fascism received much commercial success as well as the support of the Party, by 1937 her publisher was threatening to pulp her

18 Hans-Dieter Schäfer, Das gespaltene Bewußtsein: Über deutscher Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933- 1945 (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1981). 19 “Reichsverband Deutscher Schriftsteller. Fragebogen für Mitglieder,” 7 December 1933, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 84 most recent work, Mussolini’s neues Geschlecht. In its first two-and-one-half years on the market the book sold only 61 copies!20

Yet by the time Diel’s publishers were ready to destroy her book, the political tide in Europe was beginning to change. Despite his hopes, Mussolini’s alliance with Britain and France had not warmed these nations to his overseas plans in Ethiopia. The internal politics of Britain and France had not only undermined their efforts to prevent

Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia, but had also demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the League of Nations. Britain and France had failed twice, not only to prevent Italy’s imperialist war of expansion in Africa, but also to keep Italy away from Nazi Germany’s sphere of influence. The resulting alliance of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany would only come as a formal political declaration in the Berlin-Rome Axis a year later in 1936, but for all intents and purposes the Italian war in Abyssinia and Germany’s support of it had already solidified the fascist union.

An opportunist, Diel used her long-standing relationship to Italian Fascism amid the changing political alliances to her benefit, arguing with her publisher that Mussolini himself would be quite disappointed if a book that he commissioned and for which he himself hand-wrote a two-page inscription would be destroyed, especially during this moment in which the German-Italian friendship had become so strong.21 It was not

Diel’s ploy, nor her personal connections that ended up saving her works on Italian

Fascism, but rather the simple fact that since the Abyssinian War, relations between

20 Harry Schumann an Louise Diel, 14 May 1937, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 21 Diel an Ministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, 7 June 1937, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 85

Germany and Italy had indeed improved. Even her publisher had to admit that since

Mussolini’s visit to Germany in 1937, sales of Diel’s book had increased tremendously as a German audience became more interested in Italian Fascism.22

Opportunism worked both ways, however, and Diel’s personal connections to and interest in Fascist Italy did certainly save her career. At a time when Nazi Germany was looking for political as well as ideological allies, Diel’s established relationship to Italian

Fascism and its leader provided a useful opportunity for the Nazi leadership. It is for this reason that such high-ranking Nazi officials as Hermann Göring wrote inscriptions to her works, praising their greatness and relevance. Diel’s works on Italian Fascism even became the vehicle through which the leaders of the two fascist regimes could publicly recognize one another: Kampf, Sieg und Sendung des Faschismus contained a hand- written inscription to Hitler from Mussolini for which the Nazi leader later telegrammed his personal thanks to the Duce.23

The symbolic union of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy that Diel’s works furthered was not just pure propaganda. To be sure, a public association of the two nations was useful for each regime, especially after their military cooperation in the

Spanish Civil War and later alliance during the Second World War and diplomatic alliances established by the Rome-Berlin Axis and the Pact of Steel. But it was not just the ideological rhetoric of anti-Bolshevism, nor the diplomatic relations established in the anti-Comintern Pact from which Diel profited. Diel wrote about neither, even as her

22 Carl Reissner Verlag an den Herrn Präsidenten der Reichsschrifttumskammer, 5 October 1937, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 23 Carl Reisner an die Auslandsorganisation der NSDAP, Rückwanderer-Amt, 4 March 1939, BAB RK B31, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Louise Diel. 86 popularity grew. Moreover, her work preceded the formal collaboration and sharing of knowledge and culture between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy established in the

German-Italian Cultural Accord of November 1938.24 Under this treaty, which was designed to encourage as much as dictate and control cultural and political exchange, it is significant that Diel’s work, which stressed the incorporation of Italian Fascist into

National Socialist culture, continued against the grain of German cultural hegemony.25

During a broader phase of “semi-Nazification” of the Italian regime that began in 1938,

Diel’s work on Italian colonialism highlighted, if not inaugurated a process by which

German National Socialism began to adopt traits of Italian Fascism.26

Louise Diel’s career benefitted the most from the opportunism the Nazi regime saw in her later turn to the theme of Italian Fascist colonialism. Not only had National

Socialist Germany been a supporter of Italy’s war of aggression in Abyssinia for strategic diplomatic reasons, but for practical, domestic ones as well. Diel’s works made clear the utility of colonialism as a tool to unify the nation. Italy’s victory over Abyssinia had not only emboldened the young Italian regime with pride in its military superiority, but it had the effect of rectifying Italy’s past defeats in Africa and restoring its national glory. With this restored pride in the nation, Mussolini hoped a new sense of national cohesion would

24 See Jens Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz: Das Deutsch-Italienische Kulturabkommen vom 23. November 1938,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36, no. 1 (1988): 41-77. 25 On the hegemony of Germany in the German-Italian Alliance see Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz, 72-73. 26 Stanley Payne identifies four phases of Italian Fascism, the fourth of which is identifiable by the Fascists’ activist foreign policy and military campaigns abroad “climaxed” by its turn to semi-Nazification, Payne, A History of Fascism 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 212. Aristotle Kallis, too, points specifically to 1938 and the Fascist adoption of racial Antisemitism as the turning point where National Socialist Germany began increasingly to dominate Italian politics’ Aristotle Kallis, Fascist Ideology: Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 148. 87 follow. At the very least, the creation of an overseas empire gave Mussolini the political capital to implement the “revolutionary foreign policy” that he had envisioned since the

1920s and its domestic counterpart.27

Domestically Italy’s war in Ethiopia allowed for a rebirth and the fulfillment of

Mussolini’s goal to create a new Fascist Man and Fascist Woman, nothing less than a

Fascist social revolution. Nonetheless, there were two sides to this coin. As historian

Ruth Ben-Ghiat argues, for intellectuals such as the Italian cinematographer Mario

Soldati, the Ethiopian war offered the opportunity for a generation of Italians to translate their faith in the regime into action. Africa would become a site of great social experimentation, where ideas of corporativist collaboration could be applied, “so that

Africans would be enriched rather than exploited.”28 This was intended to convince the world not only of Fascist Italy’s return as a military power, but also of its progressive and modern nature. And convince it did! Writing on Fascist Italy’s colonial progress, Louise

Diel opened her book Behold our New Empire! by claiming:

Fascist imperialism rejects arbitrary methods and ruthless exploitation. It is making good on the basis of the recognition, amply confirmed by experience, that the greatest victories are not won, nor rewarded, by money or the equivalent of money – if that were not so, the March on Rome, and the March from Rome, would become milestones without historic importance. Its purpose was, is, and will be, to supply a capable and diligent people with the best and quickest means of development. A nation which lacks space and essential endowments cannot progress.29

27 MacGregor Knox, Hitler’s Italian Allies: Royal Armed Forces, Fascist Regime, and the War of 1940- 1943 (Cambridge UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12. 28 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 127. 29 Louise Diel, “Behold our New Empire” –Mussolini (London: Hurst & Blackett 1939), 11. 88

But for Mussolini and the party leadership the war in Ethiopia and its subsequent colonization also had the purpose of steeling the nerves of a generation of Italian men who had come of age during the First World War. For this generation of Italians and

Europeans more broadly, combat had come to be the mode of social change. Only through a return to a military society, a society in combat, could Italian Fascists recover from their postwar malaise. As colonial Minister Allesandro Lessona noted in an article to the media:

The colonial idea springs from a desire for prosperity and the will to power of a people: when the movement for colonization is only a mirage aimed at conquest for the sake of prestige or superiority, it expresses itself in unfavorable conditions. The colonial idea, then, is the result of a complex of qualities – certainty in the future, faith in oneself, audacity, training for the struggle, certainty of victory – these ennoble colonization and allow it to achieve the peak of heroism. Italian colonization belongs to this category, since it cannot help but exercise a particular fascination for the youth, who, disdaining a life free of passion and courage, value the joy of action and the beauty of projects rooted in danger but surrounded by glory. These young men, educated and growing up in the climate of the fascist revolution, first took part in the reconquering of the Italian occupied territories in Africa and abandoned during the great war, and then they participated in the total conquest of our African colonies; finally, the colonies realized their full economic and political potential. This is a patrimony that we must conserve and improve, even if it is not materially equally as valuable.30

The combat experience of a new colonial war in Ethiopia offered the Fascist regime the opportunity to create a new hard-edged breed of Italians, loyal to the nation and invigorated for the growing ambitions of Mussolini’s foreign policy.

To be sure, there were limitations to the hardening of Italian soldiers through military conflict, or at least it was to take some time. At the time of their deployment the

30 Allesandro Lessona, Scritti e discorsi coloniali (Milan: Editoriale “Arte E Storia,” 1935), 1, first published in Azione coloniale, 1933. Thanks to Jennifer Illuzzi for assitance with this translation. 89

Fascist regime forbid the press from depicting any shows of emotion from the troops as they left the docks and even after they had arrived in Africa.31 Moreover, while the national cohesion and unifying nature of the war was felt by many and propagandized heavily by the regime and through the press, it, too, was from the beginning, limited in nature. As Renzo De Felice has documented, police sources demonstrate that at least until 1935 the public was not at all convinced of this war, and there were many cases in which soldiers failed to report for duty and even cases of “clandestine expatriation” to avoid the war in Ethiopia.32 At the same time, the communist press was also striving to counter Mussolini’s imperialism with its own anti-colonial propaganda. Despite these early setbacks and the fact that the Fascists never definitively conquered Ethiopia,33 the military action could be considered a success. “After the victory, almost everyone became a fascist,” Soldati remarked in a postwar interview.34 “Celebrated as a triumph of collective action that would free Italy from the ‘prison’ of the Versailles treaty, the colonial enterprise provided putative proof that Mussolini had transformed Italians from spectators into agents of historical change.”35

Diel’s work on Italian Fascism and especially the regime’s colonial conquests were a part of this propaganda that helped create a common national cause and

31 On press directives, see the order of 11 July 1935 in ACS, MCP, b. 185, f. 34 and that of 26 May 1936, cited in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 127. 32 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il duce, vol. 1, Gli annali del consenso 1929-1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974) as cited in Nicola Labanca, “Studies and Research on Fascist Colonialism, 1922-1935: Reflections on the State of the Art,” in Patrizia Palumbo, ed. A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post- Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 54. 33 See Angelo del Boca, “The Myths, Supressions, Denials, and Defaults of Italian Colonialism,” in Patrizia Palumbo, ed., A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 17-36. 34 Interview with Mario Soldati in Jean Gili, Le Cinéma italien à l’ombre des faisceax (Perpginan: Institut Jean Vigo, 1990), 86, as cited in Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 127. 35 Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities,123. 90 reinvigorate a sense of nationalism and national belonging. The effect of Diel’s writing as well as the framing of Italian arguments quickly caught the eye of officials within the

Nazi regime back in Germany. For diplomatic reasons, Diel had already become somewhat of a success. Following the war in Ethiopia, it became apparent that not only could her body of work serve as a symbolic cultural bridge between the two regimes, but also be figuratively translated to serve the National Socialist cause. Like Fascist Italy,

National Socialist Germany could also benefit from tapping into a theme strongly attached to national prestige and around which Germans could rally. A revisionist colonialism promised to break the ‘shackles of Versailles’, bolster the economy, and provide ‘much needed’ living space; three common motifs of colonial revisionism employed since 1919 and continued by the German colonial movement under National

Socialism. It should come as no surprise that Diel’s first work on German colonialism begins with a quote about the Italian colonial empire:

The resurrected empire, Rome’s new greatness as a world power carries before us the waving banner in east Africa. As he has proclaimed over and over again, the Duce demands a place for Germany in Africa’s sun.36

Indeed, as Diel argued, the National Socialists could learn much from the colonial endeavors of Fascist Italy.37

36 Louise Diel, “Äthiopien von heute,” (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, undated), cited in Diel Die Kolonien Warten! Afrika im Umbruch (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1939), 7. 37 Louise Diel, Sieh unser neues Land mit offenen Augen: Italienisch-Ostafrika (Leipzig: Paul List Verlag, 1938), 9. 91

The Bridge Widens: The Ethiopian War in National and International Contexts

Germans had not set foot in Africa in any official capacity since the Paris Peace

Treaties that followed the First World War. Without this firsthand experience the

German colonial movement had focused much of its propaganda campaign on the memories of former German colonists and colonial officials, the reports of individual travelers such as Diel, and primarily on the reports of the other European powers’ colonial endeavors abroad. Of course reporting on the colonial practices of Germany’s

European neighbors allowed for a certain revisionism on the behalf of German colonial movement and the opportunity to make self-aggrandizing, nationalist claims about

Germany’s own imperial prowess. Perhaps more importantly, if Germany were ever to regain its colonial space, its prospective colonizers would have to be well-informed on the colonial practices of its neighbors, their successes and their failures. Above all,

German colonial propaganda was the key source of colonial news for those vested in a return to Africa. It is unsurprising then, that the colonial empires of Britain and France, sometimes even Belgium, dominated reports from the colonies in the German press during the 1920s and early 1930s. In Hitler’s first year in power, the colonial press only had one article of notice on the colonial developments of the Fascists in Italy.38

Discussion of Italy in the German colonial press remained somewhat obscure until 1935 when the Italian dictator made ready for war against the last remaining independent state in Africa, Ethiopia. With the increasing hostilities developing in

Europe as Mussolini’s belligerent diplomacy threatened the postwar treaties and potency

38 Mario Pigli, “Das koloniale Flugwesen Italiens,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1933) 2, 36-38. 92 of the League of Nations, Italy and its colonial ambitions suddenly littered the pages of the German colonial press as it did many news media across the globe.

The discussion of Italy and Italian colonial policies initially took on the form of news reporting. Director of Colonial Education in the KPA Paul Schnoeckel’s first reaction was one of feigned neutrality in which he positioned Italy’s machinations solely in the realm of international relations. Should the British and French empires suffer from

Italy’s plans, so be it.39 Relying on his past experience as the leader of the German

Ethiopian-Expedition, Max Grühl, focused on putting the crisis at the Horn of Africa into a broader perspective. He wrote of the long history of German interactions with the

Negus that stemmed back over 300 years. He praised their culture and civilization.40 For all of its recognition of Ethiopia’s cultural heritage however, the Deutsche Kolonial-

Zeitung maintained a strong cultural chauvinism. Photo montages within the DKZ produced a racial and cultural superiority of Europeans through its portrayal of the

Ethiopian others as poor and unhygienic, not just exotic.41 Even Grühl, who seemed to maintain an affinity for the people of Ethiopia noted, “even if I add that the so-called

‘modern’ troops of the emperor – who number no more than 120,000, plus another

70,000 irregular troops, in part fighters armed with spears – they cannot in the least be compared to the disciplined, well-armed, European army… the hour of fate will strike if the free African Empire finds itself in a war with Italy.”42

39 Paul Schnoeckel, “Abessinien in der Weltpolitik,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 3, 51-53. 40 Max Grühl, “Deutsche Forschung in Abessinien,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 5, 102-103. 41 See the photo montages: “Abessinien, das letzte Kaiserreich Afrikas,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 4, 73; and “Abessinien: Land und Leute,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 5, 104-105. 42 Max Grühl, “Abessiniens Schicksalstunde,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 4, 72. 93

The former colonial officer come colonial journalist Walther Wülfing made his focus more on Italy itself. Whereas Grühl’s articles stressed the continuation of Italy’s monarchical imperialism in its renewed aggression toward Ethiopia, Wülfing saw

Mussolini’s coming conquest as particularly Fascist. To be fair, Wülfing acknowledged that the colonial goals of Italy in the 1930s took up from where they had been quashed in the London Treaty of 1915. Indeed, the conquest of Ethiopia would serve many of the

19th century goals of Italian imperialism by opening up new economic markets and connecting the territories in African that Italy already controlled. But it was the strong leader of Mussolini who was positioning Italy against Britain and France for territorial gains overseas in Africa and not some latent, populist colonialism. By 1935 it was

Mussolini, who himself had taken over the Colonial Ministry, along with Air Marshall

Italo Balbo and Emilio de Bono, who would not only administer Italy’s colonialism, as

Wülfing noted, but would place it under their own military leadership of the three

Quadrumviri.43 The coming conflict would be the expression of popular Italian will. Yet this will was not organic and had to be created and fostered by the state. Even if many of

Fascist Italy’s goals remained the same as its 19th century predecessor, this centralized, top-down colonialism represented for Wülfing a particularly Fascist and ‘modern’ tactic.

More interested in reporting on the tactics and goals of Italy at the horn of Africa,

Wülfing urged his readers that despite the limited effect on Germany’s own colonial interests, the coming events in Ethiopia would be decisive for Africa and European politics. His short-sightedness here could not have been more misplaced. While the

43 Walther Wülfing, “Italiens koloniale Ziele,” Afrika-Nachrichten (1935) 3, 63; and the same in Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 3, 60. 94 events of the war would have little effect on the former German colonies of Togo,

Cameroon, East- and Southwest Africa, the particularly “Fascist” bent that he observed in

Mussolini’s imperial politics – the revision of Versailles, the strong, centralized top-down colonialism that founded popular support, and the search for spazio vitale or ‘living space’ – were all a part of what the Nazi regime had been trying to accomplish with its own colonial revisionism. The publishing of his report in two German colonial journals reflects this point.

If Hans Reepen was initially interested in Fascist Italian colonialism for its ability to serve as a role model to German colonialism, much in the way Walther Wülfing was unknowingly placing it, by the time Italy was about to go to war with Ethiopia Reepen was much more concerned with the geopolitical opportunity that the Italian’s diplomacy created. Mussolini’s machinations for the horn of Africa wrought chaos in the foreign ministries of European imperial powers as well as within the League of Nations. On the surface, the belligerence of Fascist Italy threatened the existence of Ethiopia, a member state in the League of Nations whose sovereignty other members were obliged to defend, claimed Reepen.44 Beyond this however, Reepen cut to what he saw as the real issue at hand, namely the inequitable distribution of the world among European powers and the reluctance of the ‘haves’ to share with the ‘have-nots’, ie. Britain and France with Italy and Germany. With an almost prescient view to the coming of colonial wars of independence, Reepen acknowledged the altruistic claims of the British, that its dominions were “independent nations” and as such had the right to self-representation.

Of greater significance than his spinning of the Ethiopian crisis is the fact that he saw

44 Hans Reepen, “Abessinien, eine Kolonialfrage,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 9, 194. 95

Italy’s situation vis-à-vis the League of Nations as one, which could benefit not only the

Italians’ colonial claims, but also those of Germany. While not of geographic importance as Wülfing noted, perhaps the conflict over Ethiopia would be of significance to the

German colonies after all.

Indeed Der Koloniale Kampf began to see it this way by the fall of 1935.45

Reporting on the public lecture entitled “How White – How Colored?” by Paul

Schnoeckel, Der Koloniale Kampf argued that the political context that led to the current war had had a perplexing effect upon the League of Nations. They argued that

Schnoeckel’s talk drew attention to the duplicity of European claims over the colonies in defending Ethiopia against Mussolini’s advances. The riches of Ethiopia, with its land and natural resources, were like a magnet to the Italian Fascist regime. The journal questioned why France should be allowed to maintain an expansive overseas empire while reducing Mussolini to “a collector of deserts?”46 The only conclusion that Der

Koloniale Kampf could draw from Schnoeckel’s lecture was that the decisions of the allies in 1918 that promised the just and neutral consideration of all colonial claims had failed. Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia would no longer be of tangential interest to the

German colonial movement, but could create the conditions under which German claims to regain its former territory in Africa could not be ignored.

As the Ethiopian War came to a formal end the National Socialist colonial press continued its reporting of the Italian ‘advances’ on the Horn of Africa. Surprisingly, modern tactics and strategies of war employed by the Fascists had little resonance within

45 “Abessinien im Lichte der deutschen Kolonialpolitik,” Der Kolonial Kampf, (1935) 8, unpaginated. 46 Ibid. 96 the colonial press. At least initially the focus remained on the political and diplomatic successes of the war. As Herbert Müller-Jena reported on the successful conclusion of the conflict, “Thus coalesce the colonial policy and foreign policy of Fascism into a closed political system in the service of Italian imperialism whereby the colonies stand as the more important contributor to Italian trade around the world.”47

The coming together of colonial ideals in the support of diplomacy and economic gains was not entirely new. And of course German colonial revisionists had also very much been interested in the utility of using colonial claims to unite the nation domestically as well, just as Mussolini had done. Italy’s conflict in Africa may have secured itself a new place in world trade and established a new diplomatic order, but it was not one in which Italy was now an equal of the other European great imperial powers. Instead the justification of Italy’s war in Ethiopia, which the National Socialist government and the German colonial revisionists had watched with such anticipation, had initiated what would become a strong relationship between the two fascist powers of

Europe. A relationship that would affect foreign as well as domestic policy within each state, but one that was firmly built around overseas imperialism.

Creating a Transnational Fascist Identity of Colonialism

By the beginning of 1936 the German colonial organizations had moved from a mere reporting on the colonial actions and ambitions of its neighbor to the south to an active exchange of colonial knowledge with Fascist Italy. The discursive if not strictly political collaboration between National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy was

47 Herbert Müller-Jena, “Der Aufbau des faschistischen Kolonialreichs,” Afrika-Nachtichten, (1935) 7, 181. 97 affirmed when the Italian colonial journal L’Azione Coloniale honored German colonization in its pages. It was a point not overlooked by the German colonial movement. The Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst reprinted the praise in 1936.48 Fascist Italy’s praise for German colonialism was not limited, however, to the past successes of the

Kaiserreich, which L’Azione Coloniale had cited, rather the ‘new’ colonialist strivings of the Third Reich were to be recognized as well. In the pages of Italy’s Revista delle

Colonie Gaetano Gigli praised the work of German colonial journalist Paul Rohrbach and especially his book Deutschlands koloniale Forderung. As the German colonial press reported, for Gigli, Rohrbach’s work deserved to be read by everyone with an interest in colonial politics.49 German colonial journalists were reading and exchanging ideas with their Italian counterparts and vice versa, well before the establishment of a formal, diplomatic and economic ‘friendship treaty’ between to the two fascist states. It is unsurprising then, that even after the establishment of a formal diplomatic alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, overseas empire would continue to be a major influence on the relationship.

The “Rome-Berlin Axis” that was initiated by the Italian Foreign Minister and son-in-law of Mussolini, Galeazzo Ciano, and signed into effect on 25 October 1936 signaled the formation of a strong, unified central Europe. Speaking of an axis between

Berlin and Rome in a speech on 1 November 1936, Mussolini’s objections to the Third

Reich’s ambitions vis-à-vis Austria suddenly faded away. In light of Germany’s support for Italy’s war of aggression in Abyssinia, the two states now combined to form a fascist

48 “Italienische Würdigung der deutschen Kolonisation,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1936) 2, 19-20. 49 “Italienische Würdigung deutschen kolonialien Schifttums,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1936) 6, 158. 98 backbone of Europe. As these two fascist regimes were allying themselves with Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Italy had found a partner willing to support its overseas ambitions while at the same time Germany had found a way out of its isolation on the

European continent.

For members of the German and Italian colonial movements the agreement was an acknowledgment and extension of the already existing collaboration that had been established by a transnational network of German and Italian colonialists. As such, they believed the agreement should extend beyond a diplomatic and economic extension between the two metropoles or as Professor D’Agostino Orsini of the University of Rome put it, form an “Iron Axis” from Berlin to Rome to Tripolis.50 Framing his argument primarily in terms of economic independence, Orsini claimed the importance of colonies and the impact of Italy’s war in Ethiopia as supporting Germany’s own claims for expansion overseas. Italy itself had enjoyed an axis between the Italian metropole and

Libya since 1911. Yet it was only one that had come to fruition under the leadership of the Duce and Italian Fascism’s reorganization and strengthening of the colony. With the addition of Ethiopia and Germany to the line, Orsini saw the opportunity for a new era of fascist, economic cooperation. Italy, poor in raw resources both in the metropole and its overseas empire, would allow the skilled work of German technicians to help extract the economically valuable resources from its new colony in east Africa. Against the critiques of French and British observers, Orsini promoted the economic potential over the military threat of such an alliance that extended the Rome-Berlin Axis into Africa.51

50 D’Agostino Orsini, “Die ‘Eiserne Achse’ Berlin-Rom-Tripolis,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1936) 12, 299. 51 Ibid., 301. 99

Orsini, as well as the colonial movements of both regimes were right in that the

Rome-Berlin Axis improved upon the already existing cooperation between colonial movements of each state. But beyond the diplomatic and economic coming together that this agreement signaled – even as is expanded to include overseas possessions – the

Italian colonies offered Germany physical access to overseas territory.52 In broader terms of cooperation, the alliance strengthened the ongoing exchange of colonial ideas and colonial experiences as German reports on Fascist Italy’s overseas empire and its colonial press developed into a stronger representation of Italian colonial journalists being published in translation in the German colonial press. The peak of such mutually constituted colonial knowledge production came in spring 1938.

In May of that year Kolonie und Heimat published a special issue that recognized the collaborative efforts of National Socialist and Italian Fascist colonialism. Gracing its cover was an image of Mussolini poised on horseback and triumphantly raising a sword to the sky and a hand-written salutation from the Fascist leader to the journal. “In its fight for colonial rights and national honor, National Socialist Germany has received on more than one occasion the camradely and sympathetic support of Fascist Italy – echoed from the mouth of Mussolini,” wrote journalist Wilhelm Lothar Diehl in the issue’s leading article.53 He added that as editor of the journal, General von Epp had wanted to give at least a small amount of recognition to the Fascist Italian leader who had helped

52 For example, head of the SS Heinrich Himmler sent colonial doctors to be trained in the fields of the Italian colonies in “Tripolis” and “Abyssinia” in 1939. See “[unknown] an Ullmann,” 2 June 1939, BAB NS 19/638, 2. As we will see in subsequent chapters, even the German colonial police would be trained in Italy and Italian Africa. 53 Wilhelm Lothar Diehl, “Das Kolonialreich des italienischen Imperiums/L’Impero Coloniale Italiano,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 4. 100 support Germany’s colonial cause.54 The special issue was published just weeks after von Epp had had the chance to visit Rome in March of 1938 and speak about his previous visit to the Italian colony in Libya.

Lecturing to the Fascist Institute for Italian-Africa at the Palazzo Brancaccio in

Rome, von Epp explained the benefits of visiting Fascist Italy’s colonies firsthand and the effect it would have on Germany’s own colonial ambitions.

My visit to the Italian colony Libya made it possible for me to collect a wealth of information that I have come to recognize as a grounds for a versatile (vielseitige) and common conception of colonial policy. Already here I have to point out that from the German perspective our experience – with few exceptions – is limited to the time before the War and our current conceptions are unfortunately only a theoretical study. Because even now the lies and war psychoses persist in building restrictions, exemplified by the League of Nations Mandates holding the colonial possessions of the German Volk. Therefore it was all the more valuable to take a look at the colonial work of Italy in Libya myself – and I may say that I will return with the best impressions of those accomplishments and the new projects underway…55

Von Epp championed the work of Fascist Italian colonialism, focusing on the farmer, the reclamation of land, and the processes by which the Italian settlers had made it arable.

He praised the ability of the Italians to create an infrastructure: of roads – “that could not be better” – cities that consisted of hospitals, and schools for both Italians and the indigenous populations.56 All of these accomplishments reminded von Epp of the

54 Ibid. 55 Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp to the Fascist Institute for Italian Libya, as quoted in “General von Epp über Italiens Kolonialarbeit in Libyen/Il capo del movimento coloniale tedesco, Generale von Epp, Sull’opera colonizzatrice dell’Italia in Libia,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 4. 56 “General von Epp über Italiens Kolonialarbeit in Libyen/Il capo del movimento coloniale tedesco, Generale von Epp, Sull’opera colonizzatrice dell’Italia in Libia,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 5. 101 possibilities that lay in store for Germany should it reclaim its overseas possessions in

Africa and of the support Mussolini had given to Nazi Germany.

Von Epp recalled that it was less than a year ago that Mussolini had proclaimed,

“It is necessary that a great people such as the Germans again receive the space in the

African sun that they are due.”57 For the first time it was the head of the Nazi colonial movement that found useful inspiration in the Fascist Italian model of colonialism and not only the traditional German colonialists. Like the Italians whose “will reconquered the land,” so too, could Germany regain its colonial empire and prestige through a concerted national desire.58 As von Epp affirmed, “Italy and Germany are companions

(Weggenosse) in Raumpolitik. Italy has conquered the territory in its empire that it needs to live. [Italy], through its act in the creation of its empire and in the words of the Duce before the world, has demonstrated the vital issue of Germany’s colonies.”59

The words of colonial cooperation that von Epp expressed were certainly not novel, even if it was the first time that a leading official of the Nazi colonial regime had echoed them. More significant to his speech and the journal’s special issue at large were the ways in which it shared ideas of fascist colonialism across state borders and specifically across languages. We have already seen that Louise Diel was able to capitalize on her journalism as a bridging agent across the Alps. She brought a wealth of information on Italy’s new colonial policies and practices to an eager German audience.

She also served as a symbol of the coming together of the two regimes. Her works were, as were those of many other German authors, translated into numerous European

57 Ibid., 4. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 5. 102 languages, including English and Italian. That scholarship and works of literature were translated into multiple languages should come as no surprise. But translation was even more significant to the colonial movement under Nazism for precisely the reasons that von Epp outlined above. Germany had not “experienced” its overseas colonies since the

First World War. As we will see in the coming chapters, it had instead been developing

“in theory” a new form of colonialism that was heavily based on the books, journals, and diplomatic reports and correspondence with other colonial powers. Recall from the previous chapter, that members of the German colonial movement such as Reepen had already looked to Italy and its colonial journalists since 1934.

What is distinct about the special edition of Kolonie und Heimat is that almost the entire issue – from the date on the cover to the individual image captions – was bilingual, written in German and Italian. Moreover, the issue was not just a translation of German authors into Italian, but, in a sign of colonial solidarity, included articles from authors on both sides of the Berlin-Rome Axis. Included were contributions from Dr. Angelo

Piccioli of the Research Department in the Ministry for Italian-Africa on the development of roads in the empire, Dr. Adolf Dresler on the Italian General Graziani, and from the journalist Maner Lualdi, whose novella As a Fighter Pilot in Ethiopia: Experiences from the Airwar in East Africa was serialized in this and subsequent issues.60

This discursive coming together of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany was only intensified as Nazi revisionism of the Versailles Treaty continued and the failed

60 Angelo Piccioli, “Die Straßen des Imperiums/Le strade per l’impero,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 5- 7; Adolf Dresler, “Marschall Graziani, der ‘Afrikaner’,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 7-8; Maner Lualdi, “Als Kampflieger in Äthiopien: Erlebnisse aus dem Luftskrieg in Ostafrika,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 5, 18-19. 103 policy of British appeasement led to war in Europe. By 1940 the sharing of colonial information between the two fascist states was not limited to German reports on Italian colonization or translations of Italian colonial journalists and scientists into German, but the Italians now too, were taking an interest in the colonial machinations of their ally.

Book reviews of many German authors including Hans Grimm, who had popularized the notion of Germany’s lack of ‘living space’ in the 1920s, could be read alongside those of the works of Hans Reepen, Josef Viera, and Louise Diel.61

To capitalize on this ongoing colonial collaboration, Kolonie und Heimat published a second bilingual issue in June 1940, some 9 months after the war’s beginning. On the occasion of von Epp’s visit to Rome at the invitation of Minister for

Italian-Africa, General Atillo Teruzzi in that year, Kolonie und Heimat proclaimed within its pages the successes of German and Italian colonial cooperation. The special issue was littered with pictures of the two colonial leaders von Epp and Teruzzi shaking hands and walking stride in stride. Von Epp’s visit, which focused on the Italian Colonial Exhibition in Naples allowed for the leaders to exchange ideas and appreciate the historical and contemporary accomplishments of each nation overseas. Teruzzi admired the first and oldest globe, created by the German Martin Behaim, while von Epp was introduced to new weapons and materiel that the Italians had successfully integrated into their colonial army.62 Remarking on this trip, editor of Kolonie und Heimat, Dr. Josef Krumbach noted:

61 See for example, the review of “Hans Grimm: Volk Ohne Raum,” Revista delle Colonie Italiane (1940) 7, 1023; the review “Luisa (sic) Diel: Duce des Faschismus” Revista delle Colonie Italiane, (1940) 9, 1371- 1372; and “Louise Diel: Frau im faschistischen Italien,” Revista delle Colonie Italiane, (1940) 11, 1681. 62 See the image captions in Kolonie und Heimat, (1940) 12, 228. 104

For a number of years there has been a very active German-Italian colonial team (Arbeitsgemeinschaft), which has now established itself as a permanent cooperation between the respective colonial offices of Germany and Italy... the existing relationship between the two offices has entered into a new phase in which there is an intensified exchange of ideas and experiences.63

Indeed the cross-border exchange of colonial ideas between National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy had changed drastically over the last decade. Not only were Italian texts being translated into German for a German audience, but German texts now into Italian, and all of this now in a series of special issues. Krumbach was undoubtedly a significant factor in this development, as he himself had been educated in the Italian language (as well as French, English, and Dutch)64 and had spent significant time in Italy and the

Italian colony Libya before being appointed by von Epp as the editor of Kolonie und

Heimat in 1937.65

The increased cooperation of National Socialism and Fascism in the realm of colonial politics cannot be divorced from the broader context of European diplomacy in which these two states were operating. Indeed, the collaboration as reflected in the translation of the colonial press and these bilingual issues of Kolonie und Heimat coincided with key moments of diplomatic convergence between the two regimes.

Specifically they were marked by the visits of Mussolini to Germany in 1937, von Epp and an SS delegation’s visit to Rome in 1938, and von Epp’s following trip to Italy in

1940. More broadly they occurred alongside the diplomatic rapprochement between Italy

63 Josef Krumbach, “Koloniale Zusammenarbeit Deutschland-Italien/Collaborazione Coloniale fra la Germania e l’Italia,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1940) 12, 224-225. 64 Reichsfachschaft für das Dolmetscherwesen in der Deutschen Rechtsfront,” 6 June 1942, BAB PK G 139, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Josef Krumbach, 2256. 65 “Lebenslauf, Dr. J.H. Krumbach,” BAB RK B 101, Personenbezogene Unterlagen Josef Krumbach, 1922. 105 and Germany in the latter 1930s. Once divided over the issue of Austria, since the

Ethiopian War in 1935 the diplomatic relations between the two regimes had changed.66

Their rhetoric of anti-Bolshevism and support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War developed into a nominal alliance in the 1936 Rome-Berlin Axis and given further credence in the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1937. The revisionist and expansionist policies that the two regimes shared took on a more aggressive nature in the military alliance of

1939, the Pact of Steel.

Focusing on these diplomatic alliances historian Aristotle Kallis calls this period following 1935 the “internationalization” of fascist expansion.67 But more than just an internationalization, Kallis argues, since the Spanish Civil War the increasing alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany had challenged the indisputable Italianness of fascism and established Germany as the heir apparent.68 Other historians agree, noting that up to this point, Fascist Italy had been the exporter of ideas and techniques and

National Socialist Germany the beneficiary.69 For many historians then, the growing political and military might of National Socialist Germany correlated with – if not caused

– the growing dominance of Nazi ideology within the fascist alliance. When looking at high politics this analysis certainly holds true. Identifying this reversal of hegemony in international fascism and the alliance between Germany and Italy is also useful in trying to account for the introduction of the antisemitic legislation in 1938 to what had been a largely philosemitic Fascist Italy. While some Italian Fascists embraced German racial

66 Pace Kallis who views the latter Spanish Civil War as the true turning point in National Socialist and Fascist Italian diplomacy, Fascist Ideology, 145. 67 Ibid., 139. 68 Ibid., 148. See also Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz, 72-73. 69 William Carr, Hitler: A Study in Personality and Politics (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 23. 106 ideologies,70 others, including Mussolini himself, were often put off by such ideas.71

Others such as Italo Balbo never supported the alliance of the Axis powers at all, never mind the racial ideologies of Nazism.72

But if fascist colonial cooperation coincided with a diplomatic coming together between Germany and Italy, it was not dictated by it. By focusing on the reactions of leading officials to the issue of state-hegemony in the alliance between National Socialist

Germany and Fascist Italy we miss the larger point; colonialism allowed for a cross- border exchange of ideas, ideologies, and practices that moved in both directions during this diplomatic and military alliance and significantly, before it. Recall that Diel was urging the incorporation of Italian colonial ideals and methods into German National

Socialist colonialism at the same time the Nazi state was influencing Italy’s antisemitic policies. In referencing how each state informed, changed or exercised power over the other we fail to recognize that what the Italian and German colonial media were trying to create was a new form of alliance that preceded and extended beyond the formal realm of national and international politics. As each fascist state was incorporating overseas empire into their own form of nationalism, a transnational network of German and Italian colonialists were co-constructing a new form of “imagined community,” one based on a colonial, fascist identity.

70 See Meir Michaelis, “Mussolini's Unofficial Mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi – Il Tevere and the Evolution of Mussolini's Anti-Semitism,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 3, no. 3 (1998): 217-40; and Frank Adler, “Jew as Bourgeois, Jew as Enemy, Jew as Victim of Fascism,” Modern Judaism 28 (2008): 306- 326,. 71 Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy 1922-1945 (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press; Oxford University Press, 1978), 138. 72 See in the entry from 3 June 1937 in Malcolm Muggeridge, ed., The Ciano Diaries (New York: Double Day, 1946). 107

Benedict Anderson argues that print-capitalism was one of the main contributors to the development of nationalism and national identity formation in the modern age. The printed word created the basis for a national consciousness first and foremost through the creation of “unified fields of exchange and communication.”73 Print language had the ability to erase cultural and social hierarchies that existed between dialects and spoken vernacular. Through this process Anderson argues that readers:

…gradually came aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged. These fellow- readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community.74

Certainly Anderson was thinking about a singular, common language and not two distinct ones. Yet through the translation of German and Italian colonial texts into the other language the same process of community creation took place. Colonial media was initially a method used to meld the overseas idea into each state’s particular nationalism.

Ironically, this media was now creating a new community that extended beyond state borders and their national divisions.

This attempt to create a common, albeit imagined community of fascist colonialism was intentional on behalf of the German and Italian colonial offices and colonial journalists. On both the Italian and German side there were enough polyglots in the administration that translation was hardly a necessity for each regime to understand what the other fascist state was developing in the realm of colonial politics. Dr.

Krumbach had spent extended periods of time in Italy and its colonies and proven himself

73 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London; New York: Verso, 2006), 44. 74 Ibid. 108 an apt translator. On the Italian side, General Ambrogio Bollati chief editor of Revista delle Colonie Italiane, too, had already focused his studies on German and military history. Publishing translations of Carl von Clausewitz’s famous On War, Bollati’s translations of German colonial works enjoyed the personal support of Mussolini even as they placed him into a distinctly pan-fascist camp.75 The act of translation then, was not only a means of official and diplomatic communication, but a purposeful attempt to reach a much broader, general reading public. Through these translations readers of both

Italian and German colonial journals were made aware not only of the colonial activities of the ‘other’ state, but as they read them in translation and especially in the bilingual issues, they were brought into a larger, yet defined community of fascist colonialism.

The language used by colonialists in the creation of this German-Italian community of fascist colonialists extended beyond contemporary issues of overseas empire. It incorporated the mutual rejection and dissatisfaction with the Treaty of

Versailles as well as the shared anti-Liberalism, anti-democracy, and of course anti-

Bolshevism that led National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy down a shared path.

From the lens of German and Italian colonialism that was reflected in, but not solely driven by diplomatic events, the French, British, and to an extent American empires became the stagnant, waning bourgeois ‘other’ and created in turn an affirmation of a fascist, ‘new Europe’.

Beyond the present, common goals of the two regimes, the fascist colonial press also tried to create a common past, a history of unity. In the pages of the German journal

75 Guido Bonsaver, Censorship and Literature in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 139. 109

Afrika-Nachrichten the Italian colonial journalist B.V. Vecchi recounted the story of two

Italian colonists who had made their way from Eritrea to Kenya and eventually settled in

German East Africa to start a farm just before the outbreak of the First World War. Cut off from reliable contact to Europe in the chaos of late summer 1914, the two Italians heard (incorrectly) from the local German authorities that Italy had sided with Germany in the conflict. Quickly fulfilling their patriotic duty, the two Italians reported for service at the German military command. As Vecchi reported, “The hot Roman blood of these two friends Mongardi and Marri let them obey this call enthusiastically, with the inner conviction that they were fulfilling their duty and at the same time with the proud feeling of being able to show the Germans that the Italians knew, too, how to fight.”76

During the war, Renato Marri fell in German uniform in 1914 at the Battle of

Tanga against British and Indian forces. Though he survived the battle, Alfredo

Mongardi was presented with bad news. After the battle he was informed that the Italians had in fact sided with the Entente forces and that he, like the rest of his Italian compatriots, would be taken as a prisoner of war and interned. Yet as Vecchi described it, because he had fought so valiantly, General von Lettow-Vorbeck honored Mongardi’s request that he be returned to his farm. There he became a successful farmer throughout the war until the British forces seized and plundered it.77

Since the outbreak of armed conflict in 1939, German and Italian forces had fought alongside one another in numerous military campaigns and in various geographic locations. Most recent to Vecchi’s text in 1942 was the campaign in North Africa where

76 B.V. Vecchi, “Ein merkwürdiger Tatsachenbericht aus Deutschost: Ein Italiener fällt für Deutschland,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1942) 5, 80. 77 Ibid., 81. 110

General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps had been dispatched to support the Italian forces.

Yet Vecchi’s account of Marri and Mongardi was different. Whereas Germans and

Italians had been fighting alongside one another in the Second World War, they were still fighting within separate units, for separate states. Vecchi’s recounting of the events of

World War I presented the Italians as sacrificing their life and livelihood for the German nation, a clear attempt to create a common history of sacrifice for a greater, common cause. Indeed Vecchi paints a picture in which the “hot-blooded Italian” with something to prove finds common ground with the German general. Mutual colonial desires and shared sacrifice were more important than political and diplomatic ties. It was, as Vecchi wrote, not Mongardi’s political enemy, but his ally, the British, who removed him from his land.

Similar attempts at breaking down national differences and creating a shared past were presented by General Melchiori in the pages of Milizia Fascista which were translated and republished in Akrika-Nachrichten. Melchiori was an experienced and well-known colonialist both in Italy and Germany at the time. He had fought in the

1935/36 Ethiopian War, was working with the Afrika Korps in North Africa, and had played host to von Epp during the latter’s visit to Libya in 1938. In his essay to the weekly Milizia Fascista, he noted the heroism of the German Schutztruppe in fending off the British, French, and Belgian forces during the First World War in Africa. Showing his respect to the German colonial troops and giving a nod to the unjust removal of

Germany as a colonial power in 1919, Melchiori felt moved by the similar fates of

German and Italian colonialism. He wrote, “Just like Italy, Germany only recently

111 became a colonial power. With the creation of its inner unity, towards which Bismarck dedicated his entire life, Germany thought it unnecessary to address the Colonial

Question, just as we had first to think of the unification of Italy before we could attend to the colonies.”78 Melchiori continued to enumerate the many nineteenth and early twentieth century parallels between the German and Italian colonial pasts. But it was not only the similar pasts that Melchiori found noteworthy, but also the present circumstances:

And so is the presence of German troops on Libyan ground – that which has drunk from our best blood and which has been cultivated by our fingers and painstaking work – a remarkable sign. From here begins the reclamation of the German colonies and the return of Germans to them.79

For Melchiori the similar pasts were now merging into a singular, shared struggle in the present, one that predestined German and Italian fascists for a shared colonial future. The common history and shared sacrifices here, as presented in 1941 and 1942, resonate closely with nineteenth-century notions of nation and nationalism,80 but this new, colonial, fascist identity created a community that was bounded by more than just a common past and goals for the future.

The shared vision of German and Italian colonialists of a fascist colonialism and a new Europe represented a new form of transnational nationalism and national identity, and this new imagined fascist community was based on race. To be sure race and racism, especially in its antisemitic form created more division than unity between the two fascist

78 Allessandro Melchiori, as quoted in Adolf Dresler, “General Melchiori über die deutschen Kolonien,” Afrika-Nachrichten (1941) 7, 110. 79 Ibid., 111. 80 Cf. Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” lecture at the Sorbonne, 11 March 1882, as reprinted in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, ed., Becoming National: A Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996) 41-55. 112 regimes to come to power. Aaron Gillette has argued convincingly that there were internal divisions in Italy between the “Nordic” and “Mediterranean” camps, the former favoring German ideas of race and the latter a notion of Greco-Roman prestige,

Latinness, and the importance of spirit over biology. Ultimately, as Gillette demonstrates, external exigencies and mostly Mussolini’s own decisions determined the trajectory of Fascist Italian racism.81 Despite the machinations of some Italian Fascists, until 1938 the regime had been largely philosemitic.82 The biological determinism of the

Nazis was however, hardly monolithic and was also challenged internally by the German colonialists, as we will see in chapter four. The network of transnational fascists promised to bridge these national and international disparities by introducing their own colonial experience.

With the internal divisions over racial ideology in both Italy and Germany it is not surprising that differences would exist between the two states as well. These struggles continued even after the Italian debates between the Nordicists and Mediterraneanists had largely been settled by Mussolini’s adoption of le leggi razziali in 1938. The failures of the German-Italian Cultural Accord stand as but one example. By establishing a body of governance over the exchange of German academics to Italy and Italian academics to

Germany, the Cultural Accord was meant not only to bring the two fascist regimes closer together beyond the realm of politics and diplomacy, but also to alleviate some National

Socialists’ concerns over the ideological leanings of some Italian professors at German institutions and the content of their lectures. Until the creation of this agreement the

81 Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002). 82 See Adler, “Jew as Bourgeois, Jew as Enemy, Jew as Victim of Fascism,” among his many others. 113 political, racial, and cultural dependability of these lecturers remained outside of state control.83 Yet creating an international institution of cultural governance did little to create acceptance of radically different notions of culture and race, let alone unanimity.

The Nazi racial scientist Dr. Eugen Fischer for example, was supposed to lecture in Italy for a period of three months on the topic of “Heredity, Race, and Racism.” Despite the plan, Fischer refused his appointment in Italy, citing Italy’s position on racial policy as grounds for the request.84 In the previous year the Ministero della Cultura populare had published an essay by Italian racial scientist Giacomo Acerbo that not only contradicted the racial concepts of Germany, but was also generally anti-German in sentiment.85

Attempts by the German colonial press to overcome these differences were unsuccessful. But instead of trying to convince a new fascist community of the importance of racial antisemitism authors such as Eberhard Diehl portrayed the Italian

Fascists as subscribing to a different form of racism. Referencing the legal status of Jews in pre- and post-1938 Italy, Diehl called the reader’s attention to the rise in racial antisemitism there and the previous criticisms Italian Fascists had levied against the

National Socialists. But for Diehl it was not so much the Jewish ‘problem’ that awakened Italians’ sensitivity to issues of race, but the war in Ethiopia. The Italians

“have been able to minimize the racial problem so long as [they] did not have the need to

83 Petersen, “Vorspiel zu ‘Stahlpakt’ und Kriegsallianz, 44. 84 Gräfe, “An Herrn Oberreg. Rat Dr. Scurla: Zum Schreiben vom 26. Jan. 1942 – WU 95 – betr. Art. XI des Deutsch-Italienischen Kulturabkommens, 26 February 1942, BAB R 4901/15106, 201. 85 Dahnke, “Der Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erzeihung und Volksbildung, Betrifft: Artikel XI des Deutsch-Italienischen Kulturabkommens, hier: Gastvorlesungen deutscher Gelehrten in Italien,” 1 May 1942, BAB R 4901/15106, 288. 114 deal with it in daily life. This need finally represented itself in the colonial construction in Abyssinia and the evil of miscegenation demanded a remedy.”86

While Diehl continued to try and express the ease and excitement with which

Fascist Italy would adopt the German conceptions of race, he was most successful in his argumentation about the colonial anti-miscegenation laws:

We are witnessing a completely unexpected shift in Italy. Today Italy marches toward an active racial policy. In remarkable decisiveness the Italian government has created a law that protects the blood of the white race and forbids a mixing of blood with coloreds (Farbigen)… Italy averted the problem of racial mixing. It is the first colonial power to recognize the differences between the whites and blacks, taught by racial studies and rejects any compromise solution.87

Reframing as Diehl did the racial consciousness of Italy to focus on the differences of black and white, rather than on the more particular racial antisemitism of the Nazis, suddenly the two regimes had much more in common. Even Fischer, who refused his guest lectureship in Italy on the grounds of a disagreement over antisemitism, had similar ideas about the difference between the white and black races of the world:

No person denies that a Neger can be differentiated from a European, and one can hardly deny that these differences are racial differences… If on the other hand one thinks of intellectual (geistige) characteristics, then this is unscientific racial theory! It is certainly a purely scientific question as to whether intellectual racial differences exist, but they have nothing to do with racial policy. It is just as certain that policy can learn from the results of scientific research… With the help of “tests” many authors have shown that between groups of individual europids, negroids, and mongoloids there exist clear differences, for example in grades of intelligence, ability, shape memory (Gestaltsgedächtnis), fatigue, etc…88

86 Eberhard Diehl, “Italien auf dem Weg zum aktiven Rassenpolitik,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1938) 5, 112. 87 Ibid. 88 Eugen Fischer, “Geistige Rassenunterschiede,” RAK (1934) 4, 3. 115

That Fischer’s ideas were congruent with those of Fascist Italy were confirmed in the pages of Der Biologe. As Ed. Haber put it, “The most important commandment is that the members of the colonizing powers respect the colored masses in their providential peculiarities and keep them pure. In the long run, only the pure, colored race recognizes the natural superiority of the white race and their leadership qualities.”89 It would be on this basis of the dichotomy of white versus black, European versus African that Italian and German colonial journalists would begin their creation of a new, racially-defined

Europe.

Creating a new colonialism, creating a new Europe

Writing on the rise of nationalism in late-nineteenth century Germany Helmut

Walser Smith argues, “Nationalists did not invent nations; they made sense of them in radically new terms. This new understanding involved a shift from an exterior sense of nation to an interior sense, from the nation as emblem to the nation as identity.”90 For all of the hypernationalism spouted by the leaders of National Socialist Germany and Fascist

Italy,91 it was the German and Italian colonialists of the interwar years and not the fascist leaders who made sense of nations in radically different terms. Like so many political leaders following the post World War I treaties, Hitler and Mussolini gave primacy to the nation-state model: one homogenous nation (however defined) within one state.

Colonialists on the contrary fought against the nation-state model in their attempt to

89 Ed. Haber, “Rasse und Kolonisation,” Der Biologe, (1937) 4, 108; see also Kum’a Ndumbe III, Was wollte Hitler in Afrika? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestaltung Afrikas (Frankfurt: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1993) 93-98. 90 Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race Across the Long 19th Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 7. 91 See Roger Griffin’s definition of generic fascism, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991). 116 create a new nation, a community of fascist colonialists that spanned state borders. What began as a broader racial differentiation between white Europeans and black Africans developed into an understanding of a ‘new Europe’ dominated by the fascist colonialists of Germany and Italy.

Before the colonial cooperation between National Socialist Germany and Fascist

Italy was solidified in the mid 1930s, both colonial movements thought of themselves as part of a greater conception of Europe. This mental distinction meant that the Ethiopian

War of 1935/1936 was not an Italian war of aggression, but a broader conflict of white versus black. As Hans Gerd Esser explained in the pages of Afrika-Nachrichten, “For those familiar with colonial politics and the initiated it was clear from the beginning that the Italian-Abyssinian Conflict was about more than just economic importance and power politics and was of clear racial-political and pan-European importance.”92 Esser became more provocative when he asked his readers if they had heard the story of the black

American aviation officer who had offered his military support to his “racial compatriots” in Abyssinia.93 The Abyssinian War, he warned, would not just pit Italy against Ethiopia, but white against black across the globe.

Before the start of and even during the Ethiopian War some Germans held contempt for Italy and their cause.94 The SS for example, were threatened with treason

92 Hans Gerd Esser, “Weiß gegen Schwarz,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1935) 8, 200. 93 Ibid., 202. 94 Kallis, Fascist Ideology, 145. 117

“against their own people” should they join the Italian forces in their efforts.95 As Esser noted:

There were a few Germans here and there who thought, marvelously, that the Italians would be bloodily embarrassed in Abyssinia, or should they lose the war, that would be their just desserts for their unfriendliness to us [vis-à-vis south Tyrol and Austria].96

These prejudices that were based on politics and diplomacy were superficial as Esser warned. “Does not the best family sometimes have problems? In a healthy family internal problems do not justify the betrayal of its members to a “wild’ outsider.”97

Despite some of their political differences at the outbreak of the Ethiopian War, for many fascist colonialists both Germany and Italy had more in common than they did to differentiate themselves. They were part of a larger “family” of white Europeans, and within this community their racial bond needed to outweigh any other differences. Or as

Esser put it, “If Italy loses, the white race loses a member (Glied), if Abyssinia wins, the black race wins a member.”98

The Italians made their own contributions to this argument that placed white

Europe against black Africa and the rest of the world. For the journalist Alberto Spaini of Azione Coloniale, racial solidarity of the white Europeans was of the utmost importance. He feared the growing empires of Asia, especially Japan and China, who had already experienced the ‘benevolence’ of ‘western’ European imperialism through violence and war and begun to claim the unfitness of Europeans to govern. The

95 Heißmeyer an den Chef des SS-Hauptamtes, “Betr.: Werbung italienischer Konsulate für den Eintritt als Freiwilliger in die italienische Ostafrika-Armee,” 30 October 1935, BAB NS 2/38, 41. 96 Hans Gerd Esser, “Weiß gegen Schwarz,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1935) 8, 202. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid. 118

“decadence” and failures of whites – that is of the British – in China cannot be generalized to European imperialism as a whole, he claimed.99 Adding:

Italy has started down a third way that is based neither on simple settlement nor on pure exploitation. Its empire will be determined by a demographic colonization. It will settle the whites, while at the same time it will find a reasonable accommodation for the coloreds (Farbigen). A population policy such as the Anglo-Saxons follow, can only lead to a demographic deficit and an extinction of the population in the motherland as well as in the colonies. England is obviously going this way and in so demonstrates the declining vitality of their nation.100

White Europeans may have shared a common racial bond as both Esser and Spaini here viewed it. Nonetheless, national differences still divided them at some level. If Britain was willing to go down a path of national degeneration, then Italy was prepared to step in as protector of Europe’s imperial status in the world.

Initially the Germans made similar distinctions between their role, first and foremost as national Germans and secondly as Europeans. They too, criticized the

British empire for its duplicity in handling the ‘racial problem’, a point that broke down between theory and practice. A half-caste in England as Leo Keller noted, is more than an empty expression. “It is a destructive, value judgment that the self-assured Englander uses to describe a Mischling, the product of half white and half native blood.”101 Because of this the mixed-raced individual is forever an outsider in Britain, so why, asked Keller, do the British anthropologists and politicians waste so much effort in trying to prove the

99 Alberto Spaini, “Ein Imperium sinkt hinab, ein andere steigt auf,” Azione Coloniale, 20 January 1938 as reprinted in “Die Kolonialarbeit der weissen Rasse,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1938), 2, 24. 100 Ibid. 101 Leo Keller, “Europäische Kulture und Zivilisation und das Rassenproblem in den Kolonien,” Afrika- Nachrichten, (1936) 4, 96. 119 opposite?102 This confusion about the position of whites versus blacks in politics and society, the quotidian discrimination and British science’s rejection of such a racial hierarchy, represented for Keller a great danger to the rule of white Europeans. Why cannot the British recognize this danger, he questioned, when even the minister of South

Rhodesia can note, “In England it has not yet been clearly recognized that the white man will reject social and political equality so long as human nature has not fundamentally changed. Any policy that is ignorant of this fact cannot be successful.”103 Demonstrating a seeming prescience for the coming national liberation movements following the Second

World War, both Italians and Germans were warning of the cost to Europe’s political hegemony in the world should ‘western’ European empires continue their dangerous colonial policies that refused to recognize racial difference and implement colonial policies of racial segregation.

Blaming the Treaty of Versailles and particularly the French, I. Appel noted in the pages of Kolonie und Heimat it was ironic that “Western Europe” speaks of dictators when these are just the embodiment of the proud, great nations preparing to defend themselves against the “real dictatorship of democracy” that has ruled since 1918.104

Internal problems aside, Appel viewed the time since the end of World War I as one in which Europe was confronting significant external problems, the greatest of which was the relationship to Africa. He wrote:

Thus emerges a picture of the significant issues and political debates to be resolved in the future. They must be solved in Europe, if they are to work for Europe beyond its borders. Our century is in more than one way a

102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 I. Appel, “Die Kolonialfrage Europas,” Kolonie und Heimat, (1938) 11, 5. 120

decisive one. The current political problems are just tests for the awareness of a common destiny among those peoples whose racial force has carried cultural progress into our days. Will Europe remain the power over the colonies that it was, or will national fatigue lead to a point, where the colonial question is solved by the racial and political failures of Europe itself?105

The ‘new Europe’ led by National Socialist Germany was ready, proclaimed Appel. But it would take the cooperation of all of Europe to be successful.

Even the editor of the staunchly nationalist National Socialist Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, agreed that European cooperation was necessary for the maintenance of Europe’s global hegemony. Dr. Wilhelm Koppen recognized that

Europeans had shared a sense of racial superiority and chauvinism in the creation of similar native policies in the early years of overseas expansion. Despite national rivalries, the greatest common difference was between white Europeans and black

Africans. Since the First World War, this had changed he argued. By excluding

Germany as a colonial power, Western Europe had challenged the overall nature of

European hegemony. In his estimation, to restore the balance of power, Europeans must all work together. He continued, “The cooperation of the great white people in Africa can only be successful when everyone is committed to the idea that the same responsibility and performance also means the same rights.”106 Of course Koppen was not referring to the equal rights of Europeans and Africans, but that all European nations should have the same right to rule over their colonial possessions as they see fit.

Although he was skeptical of the liberal practices of the French and British empires

105 Ibid. 106 Wilhelm Koppen, “Europäischer Gemeinschaftsgeist in Afrika,” in Das deutsche koloniale Jahrbuch (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Wilhelm Süßerott Verlag, 1939), 44. 121 toward their subjects, Koppen further supported his main concern that, “the cooperation of the white people in Africa strengthened the regard (Ansehen) of white leaders and advisors.”107 Unsurprisingly Koppen held the Italian Fascists in high regard, for they, like the Germans, had realized the importance of the natural values of different races and

“would strengthen the white race in Africa.”108

Dr. Ernst Janisch shared a similar assessment of the relationship between whites and blacks, between Europe and Africa. He, too, used the fear of liberal colonial policies and racial mixing to strike fear into the minds of readers that Europeans’ supremacy in the world was at the brink. In his estimation, the policies of the French for example, who tried to turn Africans into black Frenchmen went against the laws of nature.109 “Only

Italy,” he noted, “after an initial hesitation is now racially conscious in full effect.”110

What Janisch called for was a new colonialism, and a new order between Europe and

Africa. In his words:

A new master (Herrentum) must arise, not from the strivings of individual peoples, not from selfishness or greed, but from the great moral (sittlich) mentality of Nordic Europeans – who recognize and respect the differently developed beings of foreign races as separate – and from those who share these moral and mental feelings.111

This was a sentiment repeated throughout the colonial press of both Germany and Italy.

Recognizing the shared needs and visions of racial segregation and ‘living space’, colonial journalists called for a new colonialism based on the ‘Axis’ of Europe.112

107 Ibid., 47. 108 Ibid. 109 Ernst Janisch, “Selbstbehauptung und Verpflichtung der weißen Rasse in Afrika,” in Das deutsche koloniale Jahrbuch (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Wilhelm Süßerott Verlag, 1940), 62-63. 110 Ibid., 61. 111 Ibid., 63. 112 Karl Weidner, “Europa and Afrika,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1941) 1, 1-2. 122

What began as separate political arguments about the return of Germany as a colonial power and Italy’s expansion of its overseas empire aimed against the victors of the First World War soon developed into something more. Even as each state pursued its own national interests, the objections that were waged against ‘Western Europe’ began to solidify Germany and Italy into a unified bloc. To expand upon the arguments of Helmut

Walser Smith, the focus on the external had shifted to the internal commonalities.113 As

Hans Reepen argued in the pages of L’Italia D’Oltremare, “The German colonial movement looks with friendship and gratitude to the Italian peoples in view of the aid which Italy lent it in a situation that no one knows better than the new Mediterranean

Empire. Common concerns, common needs; there is a common spirit in National

Socialism and Fascism that will attain a better peace than that of Versailles.”114 This transition, while always political, was also framed in racial terms. The dichotomy of white Europeans against black Africans developed into Germans and Italians as defenders of the race of a new Europe.

The “entirely new form of colonial policy” ushered in by Fascist Italy,115 was as we have seen, an inspiration to the German colonial movement since the late 1920s. It was with this new colonialism that rejected the exploitation of western, liberal imperialism, and that like Germany, was invested in the racial purity of its own as well as that of the peoples to be colonized, that was leading the way to a new Europe.116 As

113 Smith, The Continuities of German History, 7. 114 Hans Reepen, “Il movimento coloniale il Terzo Reich,” L’Italia D’Oltremare, (1937) 24, 9. 115 Josef Krumbach, “Die Kolonialpolitik des faschistischen Italien–eine neue Kolonialpolitik,” Afrika- Nachrichten, (1939) 8, 207. 116 Adolf Dresler, “Kolonialpolitik des Faschismus–eine Wegbereiterin des neuen Europa in Afrika,” in Das deutsche kolonial Jahrbuch (Berlin-Wilmersdorf: Wilhelm Süßerott Verlag, 1941), 69-75. 123

Krumbach noted, “While Germany is still fighting for the return of its colonies, we see today our Axis partner building its African living space upon these new directions and new perspectives.”117 The ongoing exchange of ideas and knowledge across the borders of the German and Italian fascist states convinced German colonialists, that they would not have to wait much longer for their turn as part of the new Europe to start a similar, new process of overseas colonialism. For the Italian author G. Taralletto, the two revolutionary regimes were already on their way to creating a new European order.118

Conclusion

Historian Karsten Linne has argued that the dream of a new German colonial empire was created and propagated by a small group of German bureaucrats more content to sit at their desks daydreaming of empire than fighting a miserable war on the Eastern

Front.119 While certainly there were such men, this interpretation greatly oversimplifies the German colonial movement and its relationship to the National Socialist regime. The

“dream of empire” was not limited to a homogenous group of bureaucrats. The movement consisted neither of Nazi Party members alone, nor was it limited to just to men. Remember Louise Diel? Furthermore, the ‘desk jockeying’ of the German colonial movement and its press was much more than an effort to avoid war. It was not just a

“dream,” but a serious desire to return overseas and a desire upon which the movement acted. Lacking formal political power, journalists and authors within the German

117 Krumbach, “Die Kolonialpolitik des faschistischen Italien–eine neue Kolonialpolitik,” 210. 118 G. Taralletto, “L’espansione coloniale nel nuovo ordine Europe,” Revista delle Colonie, (1941) 4, 467. 119 Karsten Linne, “Aufstieg und Fall der Kolonialwissenschaften im Nationalsozialismus,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 26 (2003): 281. 124 colonial movement used the only tool they had, print media. With this they worked for the restoration of a German overseas empire by creating a strong sense of colonial will and identity that began within the confines of the nation, but increasingly extended beyond the borders of the state. This creation of a transnational, fascist colonial community that challenged the domestic and foreign policies of National Socialist

Germany and Fascist Italy was anything but an idle hobby.

The formation of a transnational fascist community based on overseas colonialism was more than just a diplomatic strategy and result of foreign relations.120 It was created by border-crossing journalists such as Louise Diel and by the development of transnational networks of knowledge production that spanned the political borders of these two fascist states. Nonetheless, these “ultra-nationalist” nation-states were still states, with their own histories, own cultures, and unique domestic problems at home.121

As Konrad Jarausch has rightly pointed out, transnational phenomena still have their own national expressions.122 Despite their similarities, the colonial contexts of each regime varied markedly. Postwar Italy was still a colonial power, whereas Germany could no longer make such a claim. While the media of fascist colonialism could bridge the national divisions of Germany and Italy in its creation of a common colonial history and shared vision for the future, the creation of colonial policies remained tethered to the state.

120 Pace Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969). 121 See Griffin’s definition of generic fascism in, Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 26. 122 See Konrad Jarausch’s contribution, “Reflections on Transnational History” to the h-german forum on transnationalism, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h- german&month=0601&week=c&msg=LPkNHirCm1xgSZQKHOGRXQ&user=&pw=. 125

Chapter 3: “Mit kolonialem Gruß” to “Heil Hitler”: Colonial Education in the Third Reich

Along with the new construction of the German colonial movement, comes new responsibilities for colonial propaganda. In the 15 years of the interim empire (Zwischenreich) the colonial fight turned inward given the prevalence of anti-colonial currents and the complete fragmentation of the people both in political parties and trade unions, which continually weakened the will of the people and of the government. Today, with the unity of the nation, the unity of the will is also created, and the colonial propaganda no longer needs to struggle (ringen) for its colonial ambitions to be recognized. No longer do two sides face off in the colonial arena, but rather the propaganda can appear today in close cooperation with the formation of the Volksgemeinschaft. -Erich Duems1

Since the National Socialist rise to power in January 1933, the German colonial movement had undergone a revival and found a new place in German national identity.

Yet as Erich Duems continued his presentation he cautioned, that “To spread the colonial idea within the new Volksgemeinschaft colonial propaganda must go in two directions, towards the development of the will, and toward the development of knowledge. The former by means of publicity, the latter by means of education.”2

The first two chapters of this dissertation have focused on this ‘colonial will’ through the creation of a colonial nationalism in National Socialist Germany. This occurred first within the nation-state context of Germany and second as a constituent part of a broader, transnational, colonial, fascist identity. In this third chapter we will move from the various media and discourses of colonial propaganda to focus more closely on

1 Erich Duems, “Koloniale Propaganda und Schulung,” Lecture delivered on 15 June 1934, BAB R 8023/43, 300. 2 Ibid. 126 what Duems called colonial education. While an ‘informal’ colonial education had existed since the 18th century in the German literary imaginary, the formal colonial education to which Duems was referring did not begin in earnest until Germany became a

‘real’ colonial power at the end of the 19th century.3 Despite losing its overseas empire in

1919, practical colonial education continued throughout the Weimar Republic, even though Germany was no longer a colonial power. In 1933 these Wilhelmine institutions of colonial education came face to face with the new worldview of National Socialism and the Nazi leadership’s efforts to redefine the role of empire. While Duems thought that colonial propaganda no longer had to fight to be recognized under the Third Reich, we will see that in regards to colonial education – whether of men, women, or children – there were indeed continued rifts among Germans caught between the old and new empire. From 1936 on the National Socialist regime increasingly sought to bring the

German colonial movement under its control. Where colonial leaders defied the National

Socialist worldview, the regime installed its own loyal followers. Despite these efforts, even the newly installed colonial officials maintained a stronger loyalty to their colonial ambitions overseas than they did to Hitler’s government. A return to the colonies overseas was, as one Nazi official put it, “stuck in their blood.”4

3 See George Steinmetz, The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; and Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770-1870 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 4 “Notiz für Parteigenossen Krämer!: Betr: Beurteilung des kolonialpol. Votrages (sic) ‘Das Reich im Raum er Welt’ v. Pg. Viera, München,” 16 June 1942, BAB NS 18/154, 101 (backside). 127

Educating a Colonial Youth

In its broadest conception the education for which Duems was calling needed to begin where all education begins, with children. Children had been at the heart of

German and European imperialism since its inception and took on even stronger roles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this age, the education of children, whether formally or through stories and toys, reinforced the nationalist, racist, and militaristic tendencies promoted and performed by their parents and prepared them to become future imperialists.5 By 1919 however, this process of imperial indoctrination of

Germany’s youth had gone the same way as its colonies. That Germany had not been a colonial power for nearly fifteen years, coupled with the divisive role that colonial revisionism had played in the Weimar Republic, meant that very little colonial education was taking place in German schools by the time the National Socialists had taken power.

G. Winkelmann for example recalled having to give an oral presentation while at the high school (Gymnasium) he attended from 1919-1928. Finding what disparate sources he could, he informed his teacher that he planned to give a presentation on “The value of

Germany’s former colonies and why Germany needed colonies again.” His teacher chastised him that any fourth grader could present on such a topic, to which he quipped, that they would certainly see once he had given his presentation.6 As Winkelmann admitted, his teacher may have been right, and his presentation went poorly. But this was not the fault of the student.

5 Jeff Bowersox, “Boy’s and Girl’s Own Empires: Gender and the Uses of the Colonial World in Kaiserreich Youth Magazines,” in German Colonialism and National Identity, edited by Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (New York: Routledge, 2011), 57-68; see also Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871-1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 6 G. Winkelmann, “Die koloniale Aufgabe der Schule,” Afrika-Nachrichten (1933) 10, 258. 128

The problem, as Winkelmann argued, was a dearth of information available to schoolchildren. While the German Colonial Society continued through the political, social, and economic instability of the Weimar Republic, German students learned little of Germany’s former overseas empire. Winkelmann remembered that all of his school comrades could recite the history of British imperialism from Queen Elizabeth to the present, but other than he himself, who had grown up in the colonies, no one knew a thing about the thirty-five years of German empire. To address this deficit of colonial knowledge among German youth, Winkelmann argued, “In the schools, whose first priority is to teach children, that is where suitable teachers can present the colonial idea for what it is, a need for our people, something serious, a German duty, that has nothing to do with the adventures of the disappearing Fatherland of before.”7

Editorials like this from Winkelmann and from the broader cries of Duems and the German Colonial Society had not fallen upon deaf ears. In September 1933 the

Prussian Minister of Culture, Dr. Bernhard Rust, declared, “The fight for German living space is one of the most important tasks of the German people. It is one with which we must familiarize the German youth as young and closely as is possible.”8 With that statement he welcomed the incorporation of colonial education into the schools of

Prussia. This change in pedagogy was to be led by the DKG and the appropriate lecturers with personal colonial knowledge that it selected. Until this development, as Rust noted, the colonial education of Germany’s youth had been reduced to the DKG’s children’s

7 Ibid. 8 Bernhard Rust in “Koloniale Wissens- und Willensbildung an den Schulen,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft (1933) 9, unpaginated. 129 journal Jambo, which of course would now be integrated into the new curriculum.9 The states of Anhalt and Saxony soon followed the lead of Prussia and by 1934 a colonial curriculum had been universally adopted by the German states.10

The National Socialist Party was also quick to make itself a part of this new colonial education. Besides the support Bernhard Rust – a Nazi, the Prussian Minister of

Culture, and by 1934 the Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erziehung, und Volksbildung – the colonial education of Germany’s children gained additional support from the Hitler

Youth (HJ). Its leader, Baldur von Schirach, claimed in 1934 that it was a necessity that the HJ be won over by the colonial idea and taught to fight the ‘colonial guilt lie.’11 To help prepare German children for this cause, all colonial youth groups would be mandatorily brought into the local organizations of the Hitler Youth. Additionally, and to help accommodate the full integration of colonial curriculum into the Hitler Youth, colonial lecturers would be brought in to help children move beyond “basic theory.”12

Throughout the first years of the Third Reich, the German Colonial Society

(DKG) as the leading organization of the German colonial movement sought to increase its control over German colonial propaganda and education and present itself as indispensable to the new regime. Local offices of the DKG in Cologne had already begun a process of teacher education to prepare additional lecturers for the reintroduction of colonial education into the schools. Led by such staunch supporters of German

9 “Koloniale Wissens- und Willensbildung an den Schulen,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft (1933) 9, unpaginated. 10 “Koloniale Aufklärung in den Schulen,” Afrika-Nachrichten (1933) 12, 326. 11 “Koloniale Schulung der deutschen Jugend,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft (1934) 1, unpaginated. 12 Ibid. 130 overseas empire as Duems, head of the DKG Heinrich Schnee recommended that such programs be introduced nation-wide.13 It was the German colonial movement that took the initiative in colonial education under Nazism and not the Party.

But just as with the DKG’s effort to realign the adult colonial movement under

National Socialism, the children’s colonial movement also met resistance from the Nazi political leadership. While the recreation of a colonial-conscious German youth melded with the broader development of Nazi ideas in creating a new form of colonial nationalism, the Party also wanted to maintain its control of this movement and limit the influences of the former German colonialists, especially the DKG led by Heinrich

Schnee. Even as the DKG initially took over the colonial curriculum of German schools and succeeded in making the colonial idea a part of the indoctrination in the Hitler Youth, von Schirach attempted to make sure that the National Socialists would have the final word. Colonial lecturers of the Hitler Youth were to acquaint themselves with the propaganda of the HJ publications and from February of 1935 take part in National

Socialist-approved continuing education courses for colonial themes. While the DKG valued the ‘genuine’ overseas colonial experiences of its lecturers, von Schirach had different ideas. For him the importance of educating children about German colonialism was not just to create colonial politicians of the future, but “…it must build upon our worldview and lead to action. Therefore the German youth must be sent out to the East, where they will learn from German farmers the meaning and goals of colonization.”14

13 “Koloniale Schulung der Jugend: Bericht der Schulabteilung der DKG,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft (1934) 4, unpaginated. 14 “Koloniale Schulung der deutschen Jugend,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft (1934) 1, unpaginated. 131

The National Socialist process of Gleichschaltung that sought to place the German colonial press under the direction of the Party would also represent a threat to the expression of colonial ideas in children’s education. Winkelmann would finally receive his request that a colonial education return to the German school curriculum, along with a new set of ‘informed’ colonial lecturers. From 1933 on German students would learn of

Germany’s past overseas empire, and its ‘great’ national heroes in Otto von Bismarck,

Carl Peters, and General Lettow-Vorbeck.15 But as to what they would be taught about the possible future of a colonial Germany – that was mired in the same debates of their parents. For the DKG a colonial future meant a return overseas and the likelihood of settlement, while the Party expressed its emphasis on Eastern Europe through such obligatory organizations as the Hitler Youth.

Colonial Schools Past and Present

To address the lack of preparedness of German colonists at the beginning of

Germany’s formal overseas empire, a new German Colonial School (Deutsche

Kolonialschule, DKS) was established at Witzenhausen in northern Hesse in 1898. With the loss of Germany’s colonies in 1919, the need for such a school undoubtedly waned, yet the school carried on, defending itself as preparing students for the colonial future.16

The initial six-semester program offered a wide spectrum of topical studies from

15 For the creation of Lettow-Vorbeck into a colonial hero see, Michael Pesek, “German Colonial Identities in Wartime, 1914-1918,” in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 126-139. 16 Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators? Die NS-Kolonialplanungen für Afrika (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2008), 33. 132 agriculture and home economics, to technical training for German men.17 The school was intended to provide a broader curriculum than the normal agricultural school and above all focus on building a strong character among its students.18 Because the education at Witzenhausen maintained its original focus on colonial agricultural practice, and focused little on theory, it was seemingly ripe for reorientation towards the National

Socialist worldview. Similar to the divisions in the colonial education of Germany’s youth, differences in views between the German colonial movement and the National

Socialist regime would plague the traditional institutions of colonial education in

Germany after 1933.

The greatest opponent to the continuation of the DKS into the Third Reich was, ironically, one of its own graduates, Richard Walther Darré. Born the son of a German immigrant outside of Buenos Aries, Darré had come to Germany to seek a better economic future. He first enrolled in the DKS in 1914 and after four years of military service during the war, returned to Witzenhausen to complete his studies. Yet, as Klaus

Hildebrand argues, he was never a strong adherent to the idea of overseas colonies, but rather more interested in economics and agriculture. It is unknown whether it was these issues that were more pressing to Darré or his chance, personal meeting with Hitler in the

17 Ibid.; “Die Deutsche Kolonialschule in Witzenhausen,” Der Deutsche im Ausland, (1936) 21, 528; Carl Koch, “Die Deutsche Kolonialschule in Witzenhausen (Werra),” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1937), 2, 48. 18 Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators?, 33; “Prüfungsbericht des Rechnunghofes des Deutschen Reiches über die Deutsche Kolonialschule GmbH Witzenhausen von 1.4.1935”, BAB R 2301/6840, 2-20; cf. Jens Böhlke, Zur Geschichte der Deutschen Kolonialschule in Witzenhausen: Aspekte ihres Entstehens und Wirkens, (Witzenhausen: Schriften des Werratalvereins in Witzenhausen, 1995); Eckhard Baum, Daheim und überm Meer: Von der Deutschen Kolonialschule zum Deutschen Institut für Tropische und Subtropische Landwirtschaft in Witzenhausen, (Witzenhausen: 1997). 133 spring of 1930 that challenged his colonial education,19 but from 1930 the future Reich

Minister for Food and Agriculture led a personal vendetta against Witzenhausen and the colonial movement’s dream of a restored overseas empire.

Darré was opposed to the ideas of the German colonial movement and the school at Witzenhausen for a colonial future overseas. He was, by contrast, much more interested in developing his own agricultural policy, one that championed rural Germany over its urban centers. It was an interest that eventually led to his racial politics of Blut und Boden. First outlined in his book Neuadel aus Blut und Boden, Darré’s ‘blood and soil’ rhetoric disparaged colonial revisionism as misplaced. The real living space that

Germany required, he argued, was not to be found overseas, but in Europe’s East.

Darré’s position that privileged Eastern Europe, placed him as an opponent to the

German colonial movement throughout his career.20 With Darré’s notion of Lebensraum the DKS, his alma mater, became a place of antiquated ideas. With his newfound power within the Third Reich, Darré almost immediately set about trying to rectify what he saw as the flaws of the school’s worldview and sought to bring about a change in the school’s focus, preferably under his own direction. For the German colonial movement, Darré’s attempted takeover of the DKS represented a warning signal. Those vested in returning overseas feared a domino effect, in which if the DKS fell, their other institutions of colonial revisionism would soon follow.

19 Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich: Hitler, NSDAP und die koloniale Frage, 1919-1945 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1969), 326-329. 20Richard Walther Darré, Neuadel aus Blut und Boden (Munich: Lehmann, 1930); “Der Bauernstand im Dritten Reich,” Freiheit der Scholle, 11 April 1931; “Ostraumgedanke oder Rückforderung der Kolonien?” Völkischer Beobachter, 9 May 1931; “Stellung und Aufgaben des Landstandes in einem nach lebensgesetzlichen Gesichtspunkten aufgebauten deutschen Staate,” in Um Blut und Boden (Munich: 1940). 134

The fronts in this battle for Witzenhausen – the “stronghold of overseas education in Germany” – were clear.21 On the one side stood Darré, former graduate of the DKS, yet firmly enmeshed in the political ideology of National Socialism. Not only was he backed by the power of the Nazi regime and the new offices over which he presided, but he also found a surprisingly high number of National Socialist followers within the student body.22 So strong was this National Socialist presence among DKS students in

1932, that the school’s director confided to a friend, “…I am bothered, because the Nazis, to which a large part of my students belong, would, with the help of representative

Freisler, like to take over the direction of the school.”23 Against the new ideas of Darré and his ‘fifth column’ of followers within the DKS stood much of the school’s faculty and most importantly its director, Dr. Wilhelm Arning. Unlike the upstart Darré and his followers, Arning had not joined the Nazi cause. He remained, like many postwar colonial revisionists, a member of the German National People’s Party. While this political distinction meant much to Darré and his followers, it meant little to other members of the German colonial movement, even members of the Nazi Party. Upon hearing news of Darré’s machinations for the DKS, former governor of German

Southwest Africa Heinrich Schnee as well as the National Socialist and soon to be director of the National Socialist Colonial Policy Office, General Ritter Xaver Ritter von

Epp and his adjutant Dr. Karl Jung, came to Arning’s support. Arning and the colonial cause received additional support in the form of Kurt Weigelt, member of the NSDAP,

21 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 331. 22 Ibid., 332. 23 “Arning an Bang,” 22 February 1932, Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen, Nachlaß: Arning as cited in Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 332. 135 director and ‘foreign minister’ of the Deutsche Bank, and strong advocate of German colonial revisionism.24 It would seem as if the bond between former colonial fighters and their hope for a restored overseas empire was greater than the political affiliations that divided them.

Space, however, was not the only dividing line between the Arning and Darré camps. The Blut und Boden policies of Darré also promoted a strong racial component, one with which the DKS director could not come to terms. In a long editorial to the

Deusche Kolonial-Zeitung he explained how the racial laws of the Third Reich were actually preventing Germany’s recovery of its former colonies from the mandate powers.25 As we have seen previously, like most members of the German colonialist movement, he couched his language in the words of National Socialism, but made clear that Nazism’s racial legislation “had not the least to do with native policy in the colonies.”26

Resolution between Arning and Darré did not ever materialize, but neither did

Darré assume the power he wanted over the DKS. Personally and financially invested in the colonial efforts of National Socialist Germany, Weigelt played the role of arbiter

24 Weigelt played many important roles in German colonial revisionism in the Weimar era and through the Third Reich. He was cochairman of the German-East Africa Society, Advisory Committee Member of the Kolonialinstitut, Supervisory Member of the German Colonial School at Witzenhausen, Member of the Business-Leaders Committee of the Africa Organization, Member of the Colonial Rights Committee for the Academy of German Rights, and member of the Colonial Council of the Reich Colonial Organization. Much of Weigelt’s interest in the restoration of Germany’s overseas possessions no doubt came from his own financial interests: he maintained ownership over a banana plantation in German East Africa throughout the interwar period. See Karsten Linne, “Afrika als ‘wirtschaftlicher Ergänzungsraum’: Kurt Weigelt und die kolonialwirtschaftlichen Planungen im ‘Dritten Reich,’” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftgeschichte (2006) 2, 141-162; and Alexandre Kum’a N’dumbe III, Was wollte Hitler in Africa? NS-Planungen für eine faschistische Neugestaltung Afrikas (Frankfurt: Verlag für Interkulturelle Kommunikation, 1993), 74-77. 25 Wilhelm Arning, “Die deutsche Rassengesetzgebung als Hemmnis der Übernahme von Mandaten,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 8, 176. 26 Ibid. 136 between the two parties. With the help of Reich Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick,

Weigelt declared that the DKS would not take on the role of an “Eastern-Settlement

School” while at the same time making concessions to Darré and the growing National

Socialist contingent within the school.27 Weigelt’s negotiations were a success for the continued existence of the German Colonial School at Witzenhausen and more broadly for the German colonial movement and its emphasis on overseas expansion as a whole.

These successes, however, came at a personal cost to Dr. Arning who was replaced by

Carl Wilhelm Heinrich Koch in his role as director.

Koch was an obvious choice for Weigelt and the colonial movement. In

Weigelt’s words, he had “the practical experience as a farmer and had also served his country as an officer during the war in Africa. His position as Sturmführer in an important district in Berlin rounded out his qualifications.”28 Placing a National Socialist as head of the DKS surely appeased many within the regime and their calls for the

Gleichschaltung of the German colonial movement. But Koch was no puppet of the regime, and in many ways stood as a more vehement opponent to Darré in maintaining

Germany’s colonial traditions and preparing the next generation of German men ready to go out overseas.29 While Darré would continue his battle against the German colonial movement through the press for the coming years, further fueling the debates over

Kolonialpolitik and Ostpolitik, the colonial press celebrated the accomplishments of

27 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 333. 28 “Weigelt an Meissner,” 16 December 1933, Deutsches Wirtschaftsinstitut Berlin 6414/1 as cited in Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 336. 29 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 336. 137

Arning and welcomed the former Kamerunkämpfer and Angoladeutscher Koch as head of the DKS.30

The German Colonial School at Witzenhausen was not however, the only existing colonial school in Germany when the National Socialists assumed power in 1933. Since its founding in 1926, the Colonial Women’s School in Rendsburg had been educating young women for their eventual placement alongside German men (presumably husbands) in the colonies. Developed on the behest of the Ministry of the Interior and the

Colonial Women’s League of the German Colonial Society, the founding of a colonial school during a time in which Germany no longer possessed colonies was a testament to the will and optimism of German colonial women.

Unlike the technical training received by their male counterparts at Witzenhausen, the education of women at Rendsburg maintained a theoretical component even as the courses focused on domestic duties in the colonies. The curriculum included courses on cooking, butchering, carpentry, sewing, animal husbandry, gardening, dairy production, health, and nursing.31 As the colonialist Agnes von Boemcken noted, these courses should also “train these women and girls to be fighters, carriers of the German idea, which they should defend through a close assertion and adherence to German character in morals and customs, in thought and feeling.”32 Here in Rendsburg as in Witzenhausen, colonialism would be tied to a German national identity even into the Third Reich.

30 “Der neue Leiter der Kolonialschule zu Witzenhausen,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung (1934) 4, 81. 31 “Bericht über die Prüfung der Kolonialen Frauenschule Rendsburg durch den Rechnungshof des Deutschen Reiches,” August 1934, BAB R 2301/6857, 13. 32 Agnes von Boemcken, “Koloniale Frauenschule Rendsburg,” in Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, Koloniale Frauenarbeit, (Berlin: Zentrale des Frauenbundes der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, 1930), BAB R1001/6693, 17. 138

Despite the similarities between the men’s colonial school in Witzenhausen and its counterpart for women in Rendsburg, historians have noted a major difference in the longevity of the two schools. Witzenhausen had a longer history, but Rendsburg continued on after 1943 when the losses on the Eastern Front and in Africa had largely brought an end to the German dream of a restored empire overseas. Both Karsten Linne and Lora Wildenthal attribute this longevity of Rendsburg to its ability to adapt to the growing National Socialist preoccupation with Eastern Europe. Citing the director of

Rendsburg Dr. Karl Körner’s decision to work with Himmler and the SS in transitioning the Rendsburg curriculum to focus on Eastern settlement – similar to the transition Darré had attempted at Witzenhausen – they claim that Rendsburg had been easily ‘nazified’ and done so early in the life of the regime.33 Indeed, by 1930 the Colonial Women’s

School underwent a significant change. From that moment on it was no longer a private institution, but financed by the state (90 percent of the budget came from the Ministry of the Interior, and 5 percent was contributed both by the Women’s League of the German

Colonial Society and the city of Rendsburg respectively).34 At this point there was an increasing incorporation of racial and eugenically-based courses to its curriculum and by

1933 Rendsburg had added such National Socialist-approved courses as “national policy,” “genetics,” and “racial theory.”35 But, it was also at this time that the school

33 See Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators?, 35-36, and Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 197-200. 34 Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 197. 35 Linne, Deuschland jenseits des Äquators?, 34. 139 transitioned from a finishing school focused on domesticity to a “professional school for

German women overseas.”36

Despite the seeming ease with which the Rendsburg curriculum had been gleichgeschaltet, a look at the debates between the local Party functionaries, the KPA, and the Ministry of the Interior demonstrate an internal struggle between the traditional

German colonial movement and the new political regime. Similar to the confrontation that developed between colonialists and National Socialists as Witzenhausen, the main critiques were levied against the school’s director, Dr. Karl Körner and his relationship and loyalty to the Party. This issue came to a head in 1936, when, despite the praises of the regional National Socialist Women’s League leader, the colonial education at

Rendsburg and particularly Körner, came under attack.37 Noting that it was “true that the

Colonial Women’s School did not enjoy the best reputation for its politics,” Kreisleiter

Carl reported to his Nazi superiors that in Rendsburg “the National Socialist spirit has not yet been accepted, and that [they] still live there according to older traditions.”38 Carl’s accusation that Körner was more interested in the colonial cause of the past empire than in the worldview of National Socialism posited colonialism and Nazism as incompatible.

He claimed that Körner was responsible for the school’s lack of interest in the work of the NS-Frauenschaft and the Bund Deutscher Mädel and Rendsburg’s refusal to incorporate a maternity education course. As such, the Colonial Women’s School was

36 Karl Körner, “Die Vorbereitungen für die deutsche Frauenarbeit über See,” undated, in BAB R 8023/407, 230. 37 Schmalmack an Sieh, “Betr.: Frauenbund der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft,” 3 March 1936, BAB R 1501/127216, 8. 38 Carl an Gauleiter, Kiel, “Betr.: Auskunft über die Kolonial-Frauenschule – Rendsburg,” 9 April 1936, BAB R 1501/127216, 10. 140 far removed from the Volk and the Party. Moreover, Carl described Körner as politically withdrawn, communicating with neither the local state nor Party authorities.39

While the critiques of Körner died down over the next few years, members of the local National Socialist regime resumed their attack on his school and against his person in 1940. At their core, objections to Körner and his role as director were based on his loyalty to the Party. Not only had he not attended the local meetings of National Socialist leaders, but could not be bothered to even prove he was an official member of the Party.40

Another local Nazi official declared that Körner, “was stuck in former ideals and incapable of coming to terms with the movement,”41 leaving him no alternative than to call for the director’s resignation.42

Only after months of complaints in early 1940 was there finally an attempt at the

Gau level to get to the bottom of the ‘Körner problem’. Writing to Gauleiter Lohse in

Kiel, Kreisleiter Peters acknowledged the ongoing allegations against the Rendsburg school director. He too, had observed Körner’s lack of engagement with the Party on both a personal and institutional level, but gave Körner the benefit of the doubt, that perhaps Körner was simply more interested in focused colonial education, isolated from the national politics that would restore such an overseas opportunity. Peters suggested

39 Ibid., 10-11. 40 An den Stabsleiter des Stellvertreters des Führers, Hernn Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, “Betr.: Koloniale Frauenschule in Rendsburg, Direktor Körner,” 14 January 1941, BAB R 1501/127216, 6. 41 (Illegible) an Herrn Ministerialdirektor Dr. Vollert, Reichsministerium des Innern, 22 November 1940, BAB R 1501/127216, 2-3. 42 Ibid., 5. 141 that the dispute would have to be settled at the Reich level between the

Reichskolonialbund and the Ministry of the Interior.43

As the ‘Körner debate’ made it to the national level, the tides began to change as the school director found greater support among his fellow colonial revisionists than he did in Schleswig. Writing on behalf of Körner, von Epp’s adjutant Dr. Karl Jung explained to both the Ministry of the Interior and to Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess the strong character Körner possessed. Recalling his long relationship to Körner that extended back to Africa, Jung explained how Körner had been the head of the German school in Southwest Africa where he labored to maintain the strong German traditions of the school against the government of the mandate. After leaving Windhoek to return to

Germany he began his tenure as director of the Colonial Women’s School. This, as Jung noted, was not only the first of its kind in the world, but had become so successful that the Italian Fascists had asked Körner to advise them in the development of a similar school.44 Beyond trying to convince the Reich and Party authorities of Körner’s strength of character regarding the nation, he also tried to convince them of his loyalty to the

Party. “As the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Colonial Women’s School at

Rendsburg for the last eight years I have come to know Körner as a man with an excellent mindset (Geistesbildung) and of the best character traits. During my almost 19 years in the Party I have met few men who understood National Socialist thought as

43 Peters an Gauleiter Lohse, “Betr.: Direktor Körner, Rendsburg,” 26 April 1940, BAB R 1501/127216, 12-13. 44 Jung an Hess, “Beurteilung des Leiters der Kolonialen Frauenschule Rendsburg Oberstudiendirektor Dr. Körner,” 18 January 1941, BAB R 1501/127216, 34. 142 naturally as Körner.”45 As Jung concluded, “ I cannot think of another who can responsibly replace Körner as director of the Colonial Women’s School.”46 Captain Carl

Peucer of the KPA seconded Jung’s recommendation.47 Because of his past experiences overseas and despite his flawed relationship to the Party, at the end of January it was decided that Körner was indispensable as director of the Rendsburg school.

While members of the German colonial movement who happened to be influential

National Socialists were able to save Körner’s position, Körner himself was not convinced that the criticism he received was based on his political affiliations alone. In two letters to Captain Peucer of the KPA, Körner outlined the situation from his perspective. Regarding his political loyalties, Körner admitted that he had not been a formal member of the any political party before the Nazi seizure of power, nor had he followed any political or worldview.48 Regarding his late joining of the Party Körner noted that he did not want to compete against his national companions for membership, who perhaps had more to gain through joining the Nazi Party. Once the ban in additional membership ended in 1937, he did indeed join the NSDAP.49 Despite this hesitation, the great irony for Körner was not that Parteigenossen critiqued his high membership number, but the grounds of their attacks: he was being denounced by the National

Socialist regional leaders in the same way that he had been denounced in 1928 by their political opponents, the Center and Social Democratic Party.50 For all three parties,

45 Ibid., 35. 46 Ibid., 36. 47 Jung an Ministerialdirektor Dr. Vollert, Reichsministerium des Innern, 18 January 1941, BAB R 1501/127216, 33. 48 Körner an Peucer, “Meine politische Stellung,” 28 January 1941, BAB R 1501/127216, 51. 49 Ibid., 53. 50 Ibid. 143

Körner’s adherence to a German nationalism founded on overseas empire was a threat.

As Körner noted, “The [colonial] difficulties grew especially in Rendsburg, even after the

Nazi seizure of power.51 He recalled, that the present Regierungspräsident, then

Kreisleiter Hamkens had told him, “So Mr. Director, now you will soon close your

‘shop’. In the Third Reich there are no colonies!”52

Much of the debate over Körner seems to have been a regional issue based on the personal differences of local National Socialist officials and the isolation-loving personality of Körner himself. Yet it is significant that Körner’s supposed withdrawal from Party life was framed in such a way that made overseas colonies anathema to the views of the Third Reich. To the extent that Körner received support both for his character and endeavors, it came from other former colonialists who happened to preside over positions of power within the National Socialist Party or who were members of the

Ministry of the Interior, a state- and not party-affiliated institution. When support for

Körner finally come from top officials within the Nazi government, they came as praise for Körner’s willingness to adopt his colonial curriculum to focus on training women for relocation in the territories of Eastern Europe occupied by Nazi Germany. This however, was a stop-gap measure by Körner to keep the school alive and relevant more than a change in ideology. Körner noted that his school produced about 120 graduates a year and that they would have to wait for the return of Germany’s colonies before being sent overseas. Körner recognized that however long that may take, in that time most of his students would have moved on, become mothers, or changed their life goals. They

51 Körner an Peucer, 26 January 1941, BAB R 1501/127216, 44. 52 Ibid. 144 needed to put their education into practice and they needed to do so now, when not overseas, then where the regime had territories.53

Even at this point of transformation, the overseas aspect of Rendsburg was only pushed to the background. With the addition of Russian to the possible languages women at Rendsburg could study, French, Spanish, English and Swahili remained options.54 As late as 1943 the Rendsburg curriculum was focused on agricultural training in topical zones.55 There was an obvious disconnect between the traditional German colonial movement and the regime at large regarding the knowledge of and will to restore

Germany’s overseas possessions.

While in the cases of Witzenhausen and Rendsburg, two domestic, colonial institutions that had continued from the previous German political regimes seemed to cause conflict within the Third Reich, not all former colonists and colonial officers were seen as inconsistent with the direction of the National Socialist regime.56 Despite losing political sovereignty over its overseas possessions in 1919, a number of German nationals continued to live abroad in the mandate territories of Africa. Many of these Germans became supporters of the National Socialist cause and especially its claims to want to restore the greatness of the German colonial empire, officially joining the Foreign

Organization of the NSDAP (Auslands-Organisation or AO).

53 Körner an den Herrn Reichsminister des Innern, “Betrifft: Erlass vom 24.1.1944 No. I 8006/44 – 7803 A, Grundbestimmungen der Kolonialen Frauenschule,” 16 February 1944, BAB R 1501/127215, 118. 54 Körner an Herrn Oberregierungs- und Landwirtschaftsschulrat Dr. König im Reichsministerium, 2 May 1943, BAB R 1501/127215, 85. 55 Ibid., 87; Döring an den Reichsminister für Wissenschaft, Erzeihung und Volksbildung, “Betrifft: EV 7042/25, Pläne für die Ausgestaltung der Kolonialen Frauenschule,” undated, BAB R 1501/127215, 4-8. 56 In addition to the obvious exceptions of von Epp and his cohort in the RKB and KPA. 145

As the National Socialists were reining in their hold on the colonial movement in

Germany, Germans abroad were offering their own vision of colonialism under Nazism.

In an undated report, the AO outlined in great detail what it saw as the future of “National

Socialist Native Control in the Reich Colonies.”57 For these Germans living abroad the

National Socialists offered the greatest promise of returning Germany’s status as colonial power and restoring their own prominence among the mandate powers and the indigenous populations.

Despite the similarities between the Ausland Germans and their colonial counterparts in Germany proper, the former embraced almost entirely the wishes of the new political regime. Employing National Socialist racial ideas, the Ausland Germans justified a proto-Apartheid form of colonial social and racial segregation that would promote National Socialist economic interests as well as their own.58 Of course for these men, Nazi racial policy was the major question with which they were confronted. There was no question of Lebensraum in the East or Africa. They were already in the colonies overseas and invested in staying there. To ensure that colonial revisionism within Nazi

Germany remained a force of national unity and not division, someone would have to bridge this gap and reconcile these differences, someone with colonial experience and loyalty to the Party.

57 Auslands Organisation der NSDAP, “Nationalsozialistische Eingeborenenlenkung in den Reichskolonien: Denkschrift der Auslands-Organisation der NSDAP,” undated, BAB NS 9/280, 1-126. 58 Ibid., 26. 146

Paul Schnoeckel: Colonial Officer, National Socialist

It was already apparent in 1934 that the National Socialist regime would have to do something more drastic to keep the colonial message in line. Just as the regime was synchronizing the German colonial movement in terms of organization by replacing the

DKG with the RKB and KPA and trying to censor the German colonial press, so too, would it attempt to dictate the colonial education of its German citizens as well as those within the party and state apparatuses. As Der Koloniale Kampf cautioned, the German colonial movement needed to differentiate between the “old” and “young” colonial speakers of the new regime to keep the colonial message clear.59 The man in charge of overseeing this realignment was former army major Paul Schnoeckel, whom Alfred

Rosenberg appointed to leader of the Education Department of the Colonial Policy Office in 1935.60 The appointment of Schnoeckel, who was both an experienced colonial officer and loyal National Socialist, was a strategy by the head of Reichsleiter Rosenberg to bring together the “old” and “young” colonial fighters. It was an attempt to bridge the gap between the ‘traditional’ German colonial movement that saw its future overseas, with the worldview of the Third Reich that envisioned a racial struggle of expansion eastward on the continent. In making this appointment it is obvious that Rosenberg had not anticipated Schnoeckel’s loyalties to the German colonial movement might trump his loyalties to the Party.

59 “Der alte und der junge Kolonialredner,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonialgesellschaft, (1935) 5, unpaginated. 60 Paul Schnoeckel, “Lebenslauf,” undated, BAB SSO 94 B, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel; and Paul Schnoeckel, “Fragebogen und Lebenslauf,” 1938, BAB SSO 94 B, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 147

In many ways, Schnoeckel was the perfect candidate for such an important position. He had a long and decorated record of service to the German nation. Before serving in the First World War, he had spent significant time overseas: right before the war in the German colony in Samoa and prior to that as a lieutenant in the Schutztruppe in German Southwest Africa from mid 1904 to mid 1906. There, he noted, he was involved in the “skirmishes against the Herero and Hottentots.”61 Following his service in the war on the Western Front, Schnoeckel served briefly as an advisor (Referent) for the Ministry of War before retiring in 1919. With the end of the war and Germany’s new position as a former colonial power, Schnoeckel nonetheless maintained his activity overseas, using his translation skills (English and French) to work for a Berlin sales company and spending significant time in the United States.62 It was only upon his return from the United States, however, that his interest in Africa was once again restored.

Shortly after the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Schnoeckel expressed his renewed interest in Germany’s colonies. In a letter to a Herrn Hall he outlined his past experiences in the colonies overseas and inquired about Rosenberg’s search for new staff to look into the colonial question within the Foreign Office.63 It was not only

Schnoeckel’s experience as a colonial officer in German Southwest Africa and adjutant to the Governor in Samoa that surely made him a qualified applicant, but also his loyalty to the Party. Schnoeckel had become a member of the NSDAP in March 1932, nearly a

61 Ibid. 62 “Kartei,” 7 August 1939, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel; and Paul Schnoeckel, “Lebenslauf,” undated, BAB SSO 94 B, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 63 Schnoeckel an Hall, 10 April 1933, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 148 year before the party had taken control of Germany.64 Even before officially joining the

Party he had sought out the National Socialist media (Der Angriff and Der Völkische

Beobachter) to publish his early writings on the colonies.65 Unlike Körner at Rendsburg or Arning at Witzenhausen, Schnoeckel’s allegiance to National Socialism appeared much more sound. Viewed by the Nazi leadership as a potential bridging agent, he was admitted to the KPA in 1934 and was quickly promoted to Hauptstellenleiter in 1935 and placed in charge of the Education Department of the KPA. One year later he advanced further to director of Colonial Education and Science of the RKB.66 By the beginning of the Second World War was also director of the newly-established Reichskolonialinstitut in Berlin.67 While future colonial farmers and their wives would pass through the halls of

Witzenhausen and Rendsburg, almost all other National Socialist civil servants, soldiers, and officers would go to the school of Schnoeckel – whether they intended to go overseas or simply to spread the colonial message at home.

Yet unlike some of the early adopters of National Socialism, Schnoeckel was not just an opportunist, but remained a staunch supporter of overseas colonialism. His desires discussed above – to reestablish limited German settlements in Africa – did not disappear even as he began to lead colonial policy education for the entire Third Reich.

But what Schnoeckel lacked in shared opinions with Darré and others, he made up for in adherence (and deference) to National Socialist racial ideas and its general

64 “Kartei,” 7 August 1939, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 65 Schnoeckel an die Ortsgruppe der NSDAP Braunes Haus, “Einschreiben,” 1 November 1938, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 66 Paul Schnoeckel, “Fragebogen und Lebenslauf,” BAB SSO 94 B, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 67 Untitled report on Paul Schnoeckel, undated, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 149

Weltanschauung. Schnoeckel was indeed a veritable parrot of Hitler and the Nazi leadership. His contributions to the colonial press even before the final Gleichschaltung in 1936 viewed German colonial revisionism as primarily an effort in Weltpolitik. Italy’s war with Abyssinia became a global, diplomatic problem that challenged the unjust treatment of Italy and its colonial ambitions following World War I and laid the basis of

Germany’s own claims for colonial revisionism post Versailles. The war also ‘revealed’ the racial tension growing in Europe, as Schnoeckel argued, by pointing out the

‘irreverent’ use of black colonial troops in the First World War by the French and the strict segregation of the races by Italy and Germany.68 The allies, he argued, had forgotten the “prestige of the white race.”69

Despite the shared goals and cooperation with Italy, colonialism was always a national project for Schnoeckel, even as it placed the Third Reich on an international stage. For example, while other colonial journalists were writing of the “New Europe” based on political and racial grounds, Schnoeckel maintained his focus on the “New

Germany.” In doing so he quoted L’Azione Coloniale which claimed:

The admirable techno-scientific organization about which the Germans in the Fatherland are so proud, was extensively applied in the colonies when the Reich had its place in the sun of Africa. Our pictures give witness to the highly developed achievements of the German colonizers in the areas of health and industry. Not for nothing is it said – as we recently remarked – that the German spirit represents the greatest example of systematic colonization that was ever undertaken in Africa.70

68 Paul Schnoeckel, “Eine zeitgemäße Betrachtung,” Afrika-Nachrichten, (1935) 9, 228-229; Paul Schnoeckel, “Abyssinien in der Weltpolitik,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 3, 51-53; Paul Schnoeckel, “Die Große Schuld,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 4, 72-74; Paul Schnoeckel, “Am Scheideweg der Rassen,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, (1935) 9, 207-207. 69 Paul Schnoeckel, “Die Große Schuld,” 74. 70 L’Azione Coloniale from 22 July 1936 as quoted in Paul Schnoeckel, “Die Notwendigkeit von Kolonialbesitz für das neue Deutschland,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1936) 3, 4. 150

For Schnoeckel, this Italian praise was justification for Germany’s past and present colonial claims against the British and French, not a sign of growing collaboration between the two regimes. Even as colonial cooperation increased across the borders of the two fascist powers through the support of his own department of colonial education,

Schnoeckel refused to break the national focus in his vision of colonialism under the

Third Reich.71

Schnoeckel continued his focus on the national within the pages of the newly formed journal Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst in 1936, over which he presided. Published in cooperation between the RKB and the KPA, the DKD was intended as an educational journal, providing the official voice of the Third Reich in all colonial matters. “The DKD will deepen [our] understanding of colonial interests, serve as a resource for the champions of Germany’s colonial education, prove the necessity of colonial possessions for the Third Reich, and emphasize the importance of colonial policy.”72 Within the pages of the fully-synchronized DKD Schnoeckel attempted to lead the will of a new

German colonial movement while at the same time deferring to all National Socialist politics and diplomacy.

Education in the form of publicity was, however, not enough for the Nazi regime.

Not only did it aim to usurp, maintain, and further promote the popular will for German colonialism from the traditional German colonial movement, but it also needed to educate future German colonists, colonial civil servants, and soldiers. Moreover, it needed to

71 The Reich Colonial Conference in Vienna in 1939 for example, was created under his direction and featured German and Italian presenters on the same panel, “Reichskolonialtagung Wien 1939,” undated, BAB NS 52/106, 107-108. 72 Anmerkung zur ersten Ausgabe des DKD, Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, (1936) 1, 2. 151 create a knowledgeable base of colonial educators who could spread the popular will of colonial revisionism within the confines of National Socialist foreign and domestic policy. If the NS-Regime now shared Winkelmann’s desire for a renewed colonial education across Germany, then there would need to be a trained cohort of such educators. But colonial experience was not preparation enough. The ‘old’ colonialists such as Schnee, Arning, Körner, and members of the DKG who did not fit the mold of

National Socialist colonial idealism would have to be replaced with a new, politically reliable group of colonial experts.

National Socialist Colonial Education

Colonial education for the National Socialists was “new territory” as the Colonial

Policy Office put it.73 The schools at Witzenhausen and Rendsburg may have continued their operations during the Third Reich, but they focused on a practical education for deployment in the colonies overseas. As we have seen, largely absent from such traditional education was a focus on the politics of colonialism under National Socialism.

With the creation of a ‘synchronized’ colonial movement in 1936, the KPA sought to address this deficiency, stating in its Guidelines for Colonial Education that such pedagogy “should convey a knowledge of our colonies to the German people and awaken and strengthen in them the colonial idea.”74 Schnoeckel, the former colonial officer and

73 Introduction to the Report over the state of colonial education in the Third Reich, undated (likely 1939), BAB NS 52/106, 2. 74 Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, “Richtlinien für Vorträge, Schulungskurse und Abhandlungen über Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialwirtschaft,” March 1936, BAB NS 52/106. 152 loyal National Socialist who had been lecturing on colonial themes since 1933, personally took the lead in this transformation of colonial policy education.75

Colonial-themed lectures by former officials and colonists alike had been prevalent throughout the interwar period. Under National Socialism these individual lecture series would continue. Schnoeckel himself began a Monday morning colonial lecture series at the Hochschule für Politk in Berlin in November 1936, while his colleagues Duems and Mickausch at the RKB began a lecture series at the

Volkshochschule Groß-Berlin at the same time.76 While the colonial education of a targeted audiences continued throughout 1943,77 the goal of the Nazi regime was not just to maintain the status quo, but to ensure that its own message was being transmitted.

Toward this end the colonial education of the Third Reich developed specific courses aimed at training state lecturers on colonial issues beginning in July 1938.78 While these courses ensured that the state propagandists were competent in the role the colonies played in the Third Reich, they did little to reach the broader masses. It was here that

Schnoeckel made his greatest mark on educating the broader public on the history of

Germany’s colonies and the necessity of their reacquisition under Nazism.

Shortly after its creation in 1936 the KPA introduced its first “Guidelines for

Colonial Education,” which were to be distributed across Germany on the state level.

Despite its National Socialist roots, the program seemed in line with the general

75 Beyond his colonial themed articles published in 1932, Schnoeckel lectured about the colonies in the fifth seminar of the Reichsschule Bernau (Berlin), “Personalkartei,” 7 August 1939, BAB PK Q 110, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Paul Schnoeckel. 76 “Koloniale Vorlesungen,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungsblatt des Reichskolonialbundes, 1936 (10), 7. 77 Specific courses were offered to the Hitler Youth, the NS-Lehrerbund, the Wehrmacht and SS. 78 “1. Kolonialer Reichslehrgang für Redner,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungsblatt des Reichskolonialbundes, 1938 (9), 34. 153 trajectory of the traditional revisionism of the German colonial movement following the

First World War. According to the “guidelines” emphasis was to be placed on the wrongful means by which Germany had been stripped of its colonies following the war, the illegal use of colonial troops during the war by the allies, and on combating the

‘colonial guilt lie’ which claimed Germany had been an unfit colonizing power. Further emphasis was to be placed on educating Germans about the development of the colonies under the current mandate system and the place the colonies would maintain within the

National Socialist regime. The revised guidelines of the next few years continued the previous revisionist arguments about the colonies including issues of legality, national prestige, and economics, even as they became increasingly focused on the specificities of the colonies within the Third Reich.

The first guidelines did, however, diverge in their continuities with previous revisionist arguments in their explicit statement that overseas colonies and “eastern colonies” were inseparable goals. Here began what would become a growing deference to

National Socialist ideology. While the question of overseas or eastern expansion had been previously debated in the colonial journals, now the KPA itself, the highest office of colonial thought under the Third Reich, was keeping both options alive, even with

Schnoeckel, the former colonialist, as its leader of education.

That the Nazi leadership had taken control of Germany and its colonial movement became even more apparent when a revised edition of the Guidelines for Colonial

Education were released later in 1936. Gracing all of the points that had been stated in

154 the previous version were excerpted quotes from the speeches of Adolf Hitler.79

Certainly these quotes provided a useful context and talking points for the political lecturers who were to be trained under this program. Yet the introduction here of these quotes also demonstrates the way in which Schnoeckel and the Education Office of the

KPA kowtowed to the direction of the party leadership, but also struggled to prove their loyalty and stay relevant. German colonial revisionists had since the late 1920s tried to see in the words of the Nazi leadership what they wanted to see. Point three of the

NSDAP Program, which mentioned colonies, always meant a return to the overseas colonies for them. But whereas figures such as Körner had pushed ahead with his determination to return Germany’s overseas colonies, even in the face of a Darré and resistance from others within the regime, the educational policy of the Third Reich was now falling in line.

Perhaps as a reflection of the dynamism of the regime itself or as a reaction to the continued difficulties in ‘synchronizing’ the German colonial movement under Nazism, the “guidelines” continued to change. The greatest addendum to the official guidelines of colonial policy education came in 1937 when the KPA and RKB reaffirmed the pursuit of colonial revisionist polices were in the interest of space and resources (Raum und

Rohstoff), but here for the first time stated that in the process of regaining these interests

“there is not a colonial policy itself.”80 The guidelines continued:

National Socialism recognizes only a total policy (Gesamtpolitik) that the Führer personally directs and leads. Colonial policy therefore, is neither its

79 Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, “Richtlinien für Vorträge, Schulungskurse und Abhandlungen über Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialwirtschaft,” June 1936, BAB NS 52/106. 80 Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, “Richtlinien für Vorträge, Ausbildungskurse und Abhandlungen über Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialwirtschaft,” 4 January 1937, BAB NS 52/106. 155

own policy, nor is it ‘an orientation overseas,’ rather only a piece of the political representation of the total interest of the German Volk.”81

While weakly demonstrating the integration of colonial will within the general interest of the German nation under National Socialism, this phrasing left no doubt about the subordinated role that colonial revisionism was supposed to have within the Third Reich.

This was a clear shot at the more traditional members of the German colonial movement such as Arning, Reepen, and others who continued to stress the importance of regaining an overseas empire even when it was at odds with the regime’s diplomatic strategies. As we have seen in the previous chapters, this subordination of colonial goals continued to be challenged by former colonialists throughout the 1930s even as the phrase “there is no colonial policy itself” would become the motto of official National Socialist colonial education of the late 1930s.82 Yet it is clear through all 30 Colonial Policy Seminars of the RKB and KPA that Schnoeckel actively stressed the importance of the National

Socialist worldview above all colonial revisionist endeavors even as he continued his focus on Africa.83

Nowhere is this clearer than in the second substantial change to the 1937 edition of Guidelines for Colonial-Policy Education, which also first introduced the ‘racial question’ to colonial education:

The implementation of this [colonial] work requires political, economic, and cultural measures of the most different kind. Of the most important are those relating to racial policy. Protection of the German blood, not only at home, rather also overseas, is naturally a requirement of

81 Ibid. 82 See the latter “Richtlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung,” from 1938 and 1939, BAB NS52/106. 83 More than one-third of all lectures delivered in the during the two-week Kolonialpolitischen Reichslehrgänge were devoted to topics involving the Third Reich and its policies directly or the relation of the latter to colonial revisionism. See BAB NS 52/50, NS 52/106, and NS 18/154. 156

our folkish interests. For the simple reason of self-preservation we object to the racial mixing of Germans with foreign peoples and with other races. This objection of our worldview has become a binding fact through the Nuremberg Laws, but in no way creates a value of other peoples or races. Against the accusation from abroad we argue that Germany does not just present its own, but also European interests.84

According to the Colonial Education Office of the KPA the Nuremberg Laws were about

“racial respect” rather than “racial hatred” (Rassenachtung gegen Rassenhaß).85 At least in theory the racial policies set forth by the National Socialist metropole would be extended to whatever colonial land Germany may (re)gain in the future.

As a result of ideology rather than practice, this new racial policy represented a change and a challenge to the past policies of the German colonial movement.

Coinciding with the publication of these new Guidelines, Schnoeckel contributed a lengthy article to his Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst regarding “native policy” that tried to reconcile these differences.86 In it he outlined the longstanding racial segregation that had been implemented in the German colonies at the beginning the twentieth century.

For him, German colonialism had been about “racial respect” rather than “racial destruction” (Vernichtung). Maintaining a strong sense of national superiority, he attributed the latter to the policies of other European powers and to the Americans, whether through physical violence or the act of assimilation.87 Each race of people was unique, according to Schnoeckel, and “Led by its awareness of different races, Germany recognized that a Samoan is not a Hottentot, a Herero no Hausa, a Masai warrior no

84 Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, “Richtlinien für Vorträge, Ausbildungskurse und Abhandlungen über Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialwirtschaft,” 4 January 1937, BAB NS 52/106. 85 Ibid. 86 Paul Schnoeckel, “Eingeborenenpolitik,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, 1937 (6), 1-9. 87 Ibid., 1. 157

Papuan.”88 To treat them all the same, through the European civilizing mission for example, would be to deny their distinct characters, traditions, and cultures. Germany had done this right during its colonial empire, argued Schnoeckel. Past experience not being enough, he was compelled to find contemporary justification and drawing from a

Rosenberg speech, declared that the Third Reich would continue this correct policy: “We do not wish to Europeanize the blacks, rather want to secure for him (sic) his character amid the rule of the white races.”89

“Native policy is basically population policy” wrote Schnoeckel in his attempt to downplay the changes and draw a line of continuity from the racial policies of the former

German empire to the Nuremberg Laws and make compatible the overseas ambitions of the German colonial movement with the racial worldview of National Socialism.90 He continued:

The past is the teacher of the present, the present the constructor of the future. The Third Reich will be able to transform the best practices of the traditional German native policy into modern forms. The future of our overseas provinces is taken care of. The Third Reich can and will bring a uniform policy to the confusion of [European] native policy, despite the differences between the races.91

To take Schnoeckel and official Colonial-Policy Education at their word, the racial policies of the Third Reich were simply a new form of the same policies that had already been employed within Germany’s past overseas empire. Colonial-Policy Education

88 Ibid. 89 Alfred Rosenberg in ibid., 7. 90 Schnoeckel, “Eingeborenenpolitik,” 1. 91 Ibid., 9. 158 promised that the dream of a restored overseas empire was now secured, not forgotten by the Nazi regime.

Despite the new challenges to the German colonial movement by the new

Guidelines for Colonial-Policy Education, the Third Reich was then not always at odds with the colonial movement in name, nor in practice. Beyond the oft-cited point of the

National Socialist German Workers’ Party platform to regain colonies, an addendum to the Guidelines in 1936 called for a clarification of terms regarding the former German colonies in Africa. From June 1936 on, they were no longer to be referred to as “former” colonies, but rather “German” or “the currently-under-mandate-governance German colonies.” 92 As small as the semantic differences were, the change was in line with the wishes of the German colonial movement as reflected in the colonial press. At the very least, it assured the more traditional members of the German colonial movement that the

KPA took its own words seriously – that overseas and Eastern colonization were inseparable terms. The KPA did still have interests overseas. To perform his role as a loyal National Socialist Schnoeckel had to pay lip service to the German colonial movement and assure them that the regime had its best interests at heart. As it turns out, this lip service was not a one-way street.

Schnoeckel did not just direct Colonial-Policy Education from behind a desk, but as a former lecturer on colonial themes during the Weimar Republic he was actively involved in the education process of German citizens under Nazism. It is within these courses that we see Schnoeckel – the former colonial officer – was just as adept at

92 Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, “Richtlinien für Vorträge, Schulungskurse und Abhandlungen über Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialwirtschaft,” June 1936, BAB NS 52/106. 159 appeasing the Nazi leadership as he was at placating the German colonial movement.

Through a careful appropriation of National Socialist language, Schnoeckel kept the dream of overseas empire alive even as he moved beyond a discourse to practical colonial education and a preparation to a return overseas.

The first Reich Seminar for Colonial Policy was held in September 1936 in

Wilhelmshagen near Berlin. As a joint project of the KPA and RKB, the Seminar for

Colonial Policy set out five major goals:

1) to create a group of colonial experts that will share their expertise with others 2) to teach the participants that German Colonial Policy is tied to and decided by the National Socialist worldview 3) to foster the self criticism of one’s own colonial knowledge 4) to recognize the necessity of colonial territories to the Third Reich 5) to support a true spirit of camaraderie within the colonial movement93

Lasting a full ten days, the course introduced its participants to lectures, readings, and small group discussions on themes ranging from the foundations of the National Socialist worldview to colonial policy and colonial economy in the Third Reich. Further themes included Bolshevism as an “opponent” of Nazism and discussions of how to combat it through the Anti-Comintern. Moreover, the first seminar taught its students how to organize lectures and other opportunities for the exchange of colonial knowledge locally.94

At first the new, synchronized, colonial education introduced by Schnoeckel was understandably much more interested in the politics of colonialism and its role within the

National Socialist regime than it was with the practical experiences taught at the

93 Doehle, “1. kolonialpolitischer Lehrgang,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungsblatt des Reichskolonialbundes, 1936 (10), 7. 94 Ibid. 160 traditional colonial schools at Witzenhausen and Rendsburg. Rather than teach about the former German colonies, as its third goal highlighted, this pedagogy was much more focused on how Germans should think about the colonies. Beyond the biographies of its lecturers, past colonial experience played an apparently insignificant role in the early seminars.

Or did it? Despite the attention given to colonization of Eastern Europe in his

Guidelines for Colonial-Policy Education for example, the lecture schedules of the many seminars reflect a different story. When the question of Eastern Europe first made a mark on colonial education in October 1941,95 it did so as a 90-minute lecture entitled “Ost- und Kolonialpolitik – ihre ergänzende Notwendigkeit.”96 This was the only lecture (out of 35 total) that dealt with the East within a two-week course. Even at the height of

German military and civilian expansion into Eastern Europe at the beginning of 1942,97 the 23rd and 24th seminars for colonial policy only included an additional two lectures broadly concerned with the East: “Das Generalgouvernement, Aufbau und Aufgaben” by the president of the Generalgouvernement in Krakow and “Die Neuordnung der besetzten

Ostgebiete” by a representative from the Office of Rosenberg.98 As the war took a swing for the worse for the National Socialist regime after the battle of Stalingrad, it is

95 There exists a somewhat incomplete record of the lectures of the Kolonialerpolitischer Reichslehrgänge. The first through seventh courses are summarized in the colonial press, as well as the twelfth. The lecture schedule for colonial policy seminars 15-17, 19, 20, 23-26, and for 30 are found in BAB NS 52/50 and NS 18/154 respectively. 96 “19. Und 20. Kolonialpolitische Reichslehrgang für Beamte,” 21 October 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 10 (backside). 97 See Wendy Lower, Nazi-Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and USHMM, 2005); and Kristin Kopp “Arguing the Case for a Colonial Poland,” in Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, eds., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 146-163; and Kristin Kopp, “Gray Zones: On the inclusion of ‘Poland’ in the Study of German Colonialism,” in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer, eds., German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), 33-42. 98 “23. Und 24. Kolonialpolitische Reichslehrgänge für Beamte,” 2 January 1942, BAB NS 52/50, 6 and 8. 161 unsurprising that questions of Eastern colonization came to a halt. But as late as October

1942, when the 30th seminar was unexpectedly cancelled halfway through its duration, the preplanned seminar schedule had already reduced and limited questions of the East to a singular lecture from the Office of Rosenberg.99 With these few exceptions the remainder of the lecture series of each seminar focused almost exclusively on colonial lands in Africa, with courses on tropical hygiene, African languages, raw resources, and the history of Germany’s former colonialism and its lands. Despite Schnoeckel’s changing of the language of the Colonial-Policy Education Guidelines to more closely reflect the wishes of the National Socialist leadership and worldview, especially the

“Eastern Question,” colonial education in the Third Reich remained as the KPA put it, to

“protect the experiences gathered by this ‘overseas education’” and to “create an educated ‘colonial man’.”100

As Colonial Education under Schnoeckel critiqued the regime’s colonial machinations in Eastern Europe so, too, did it shy away from following Nazi racial policy. It is tempting to see Schnoeckel’s argument on the continuities of colonial racism with Nazi racism as part of some broader empirical evidence to Arendt’s theory in her

The Origins of Totalitarianism. Surely it resonates with much current scholarship regarding the connection between Germany’s colonies and the Second World War.101

99 On the cancelling of the 30th seminar already underway, see “Notiz für Pg. Tießler, Betrifft: Kolonialpolitische Reichslehrgänge für Beamte,” 14 October 1942, BAB NS 18/154, unpaginated. For the lecture schedule, see “30. Kolonialpolitischen Reichslehrgänge für Beamte,” BAB NS 18/154, 56. 100 “Neue Aufgaben,” undated (likely 1939), BAB NS 52/106, unpaginated. 101 See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951); Jürgen Zimmerer, “Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika: Der erste deutsche Genozid,” in Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zellner, eds., Völkermord in Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003), 45-63; Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhoek nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit-Verlag, 2011); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute 162

Schnoeckel himself even provides that sought after biographical continuity as he was one of those persons active in German Southwest Africa during the genocide of the Herero and Nama and later employed in the colonial office of the Third Reich as a loyal follower. Yet we need to place the coincidence of Schnoeckel’s biography aside for a moment and recognize the internal contradictions of his spin on colonial propaganda under the Third Reich. In his education guidelines he claimed that these racial policies were “of a different kind,” whereas within the colonial press he claimed that National

Socialist racial policy and former German colonial policy were ultimately one and the same. Based up on the content of colonial education that he outlined, it is obvious that

Schnoeckel was appropriating National Socialist rhetoric for his own gain. Even as a

National Socialist and a colonialist, it is clear that his loyalty to the latter identity was stronger. We have then to take seriously his claims within the colonial press that the racial differences among colonized people were important to the former German colonial empire and would continue to be important for any overseas revisionism. These priorities, however, did not fit under a National Socialist racial policy that treated all

‘non-Germans’ the same, that is as others.102

Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Sebastian Conrad, “Rethinking German Colonialism in a Global Age,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 543-566; and Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and the Historkierstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History 41 (2008): 477-503, to name but a few. 102 On the racism of the National Socialist regime directed toward non-Jewish populations, see primarily Cornelia Essner,“Die Nürnberger Gesetze” oder Die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002); and Tina Campt, Pascal Grosse, and Yara-Colette Lemke-Muniz de Faria, “Blacks, Germans, and the Politics of the Imperial Imagination, 1920-1960,” in Sara Friedrichsmeyer, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 205-232, among many others. 163

Certainly there was an element of truth to Schnoeckel’s continuities argument.

Both the Second Empire and the Third Reich separated, categorized, and discriminated against those they deemed as racial others. Yet perhaps Schnoeckel’s article and his assertion that ‘native policy’ was basically population policy of another form was not just assurance to the German colonial movement that things would not drastically change under Nazism, but also to the Nazi leaders, assuring them that the colonial movement understood their racial worldview. That the latter is true becomes more apparent when moving beyond Schnoeckel’s response to the new top-down ordered racial policies for inclusion in colonial education and looking at the actual lectures presented over six years of Seminars for Colonial-Policy Education. Just as with the “Eastern Question’ there was out of political necessity on average a handful of lectures on National Socialist racial policy and the regime’s worldview in every seminar. Yet, by comparison there were as many more lectures on the practical relations to the indigenous population that recalled the previous experience of former German colonists overseas.103 The colonial lessons of the past could not be subsumed by the racial policies of the Third Reich.

Despite Schnoeckel’s public claims that there was no colonial policy in and of itself, when push came to shove, he too, did not back down from directing Colonial-

Policy Education as he saw fit. His experiences overseas and those of his colonialist colleagues could not be silenced. This point is apparent not only in the thematic organization of lectures in the seminars for colonial policy education, but also came to a particular head when Schnoeckel suggested that Dr. Günther Hecht of the Racial Policy

103 See the lecture schedules for the Reichslehrgänge für kolonialpolitische Schulung from 1936-1942 in BAB NS 52/50, NS 52/106, and NS 18/154. 164

Office be given a gag order and be prevented from further lectures on race in the colonial policy seminars. Schnoeckel reminded the Racial Policy Office that its place was not to make colonial policy decisions and that all future revised lectures from Hecht would have to receive approval from his colonialist colleagues Dr. Asmis in the Foreign Office and

General von Epp before Schnoeckel himself would review them for possible inclusion in the future.104 Schnoeckel was not about to let racial policy dictate colonial goals. The official political propaganda notwithstanding, there was in this instance a colonial policy in and of itself.

More than just political infighting between political offices and personalities within the Third Reich, the above protest of Schnoeckel reflects the fact that the division between the colonial goals of the National Socialist leadership and the German colonial movement extended beyond the halls of Witzenhausen and Rendsburg to the very office that was supposed to help overcome them. Schnoeckel did obey orders from above and often revised colonial lectures or swapped out lecturers whose views did not conform to the National Socialist worldview.105 Yet, as the Hecht example demonstrates, there were clear limits. Even after the political synchronization of colonial revisionism and the introduction of the Third Reich’s worldview into a formal Colonial Policy Education program, a generation of former colonialists could not be swayed from their goals to

104 The lecture in question was delivered by Hecht on 10 October 1940. Its specific contents are unknown. Memo from Dr. Bielfeld (KPA), 3 June 1941, BAB NS 52/13, unpaginated. 105 Two lecturers from the 15th seminar, Prof. Schlunk and Theodor Wolff, for example were removed from the list of future lecturers based upon poor performance and the former, because of his unreliability regarding the National Socialist worldview. See Paul Schnoeckel, “Bericht über den 15. Kolonialpolitischen Reichslehrgang für Beamte,” 5 July 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 36. 165 return overseas and take up the ‘cultural work’ of German colonization as they had left it in 1919.

The Successes and Failures of National Socialist Colonial Education

Despite the ways in which colonialists managed to carve out their own space by co-opting the National Socialist messages from above, colonial education in the Third

Reich was not without problems. The generation of former colonialists created somewhat of a unified front that protected their colonial revisionist interests against the attempts of the National Socialist regime to transform them. Past experience overseas had created a common bond among them, one that in many cases proved stronger than their loyalty to the Nazi regime. Yet, just as this overseas experience bound them together, a lack of experience seemed to prevent the movement from growing.

Initially the age and experience gap was claimed to be a positive aspect of colonial education. The seminars would build a necessary bridge between the older and younger generations. Of the 55 participants in the first colonial policy seminar most were men who had already been active in Germany’s overseas possessions. Of the younger men who attended, all were either born in the colonies or born to men and women who had been active overseas.106 In spite of the clear generational gap Der Koloniale Kampf claimed, “the participants quickly unified around their colonial work.”107 Reporting on the third seminar in 1937, the Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst observed the same disparity in ages and experiences of the participants, noting:

106 Doehle, “1. kolonialpolitischer Lehrgang,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungsblatt des Reichskolonialbundes, 1936 (10), 7. 107 Ibid. 166

The 56 participants of the seminar were very diverse in their ages and professions. 20-year-old comrades, thrilled by the necessity of gaining colonial territory for the Third Reich, and 50 to 60-year-olds, who still fight tirelessly for colonial interests, professionals represented by students, businessmen, lawyers, craftsmen – workers of the mind and of the hand, all found themselves together in this basic work and education… The enthusiasm of the young comrades for the knowledge and long-lived practical experiences of the older generation – many of whom were active in our old colonies and other overseas lands before and after the war – created and promoted a mutual understanding.108

At first the formal colonial education under the Third Reich succeeded in bringing together the disparate members of the German colonial movement in unity. Members of different ages, professions, from various regions of the country, and with different levels of colonial knowledge and experience would form a common bond. The creation of national cohesion here can be viewed in line with other integration policies of the Third

Reich, including the creation of the Autobahn and the ‘Strength Through Joy’ program.109

A closer look at the statistics of the first 15 Seminars for Colonial-Policy

Education that ran from 1936 through June of 1941 supports this interpretation but also introduces one of colonial education’s largest challenges. Some 543 men participated in these first seminars and represented a broad variety of professions ranging from farmers and craftsmen (Handwerker) to students and pensioners. Civil servants were however the profession most represented and of those civil servants over half were teachers.110 In this regard the introduction of the colonial seminars fulfilled the goal of creating a

108 “3. kolonialpolitischer Reichslehrgang vom 28.6.1937 bis 10.7.1937,” Deutscher Kolonial-Dienst, 1937 (7), 22. 109 See Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkely, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), and Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 110 “Tafel Nr. 5: Die Aufteilung nach Stellung und Beruf,” 1941, BAB NS 52/106, unpaginated. Please note that this and the following charts are actually undated, but by looking at the number of participants it is certain that they were created after the 15th but before the 16th seminar, which took place in 1941. 167 knowledgeable cohort of colonial educators. In the attempt to indoctrinate these participants in the National Socialist worldview, the seminars were also successful. Out of all of the participants a full 302 had only become members of the National Socialist

Party after 1933.111 In other words, over 60% of those educated in these seminars had been neither early supporters, nor long-standing members of National Socialism.

Additionally, the participants did represent a mix of people with and without first-hand colonial experience. 198 men had been in the German colonies or elsewhere overseas compared to the 201 who had never been outside of the country, the remainder had only traveled within Europe.112 However, the statistics also show that not all of this diversity was a good thing, particularly as it concerned gaps between the age cohorts. Most participants were born between 1881 and 1910, meaning that 30 to 50-year-olds represented 80% of the students. By comparison only 15% of students were in their twenties while five percent were in their sixties – two septuagenarians were even present!113

By and large the colonial seminars attracted an older generation of German colonial revisionists. Between the 15th and 16th Seminars in 1941 the average age of participants had increased from 38.25 to 42.75 respectively.114 Certainly one reason that the average age of the participants had increased was due to the war itself and its demands on a younger generation of soldiers. Nonetheless, already by 1938 there were

111 “Tafel Nr. 6: Parteizugehörigkeit der Lehrgangsteilnehmner,” 1941, BAB NS 52/106, unpaginated. 112 Tafel Nr. 8: Aufenthalt der Teilnehmer in den Kolonien, in Übersee oder im europäischen Ausland,” 1941, BAB NS 52/106, unpaginated. 113 “Tafel Nr. 4: Die Altergliederung der Teilnehmer in 6 Jahresgruppen,” 1941, BAB NS 52/106, unpaginated. 114 See Paul Schnoeckel, “Bericht über den 15. Kolonialpolitischen Reichslehrgang für Beamte”, 5 July 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 34; and Paul Schnoeckel, “Bericht über den 16. Kolonialpolitischen Reichslehrgang für Beamte,” 14 July 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 29. 168 complaints within the Office of Rosenberg that the participants in colonial education and the leaders of the KPA were “too old.”115 As was reported to Rosenberg, “Members of the RKB participated in all four seminars. In part these members have been active at the

Gau level and have previous colonial experience, but they are of such an age as to not be able to gather practical experience in the colonies after the war.”116

By 1941 Schnoeckel, too, had recognized this disparity. Reporting on the 16th

Seminar for Colonial-Policy Education, Schnoeckel noted:

[This] seminar did not represent the animation (Lebhaftigkeit) and flexibility (Beweglichkeit) of the earlier courses. During the lectures and discussions the leaders of the seminars needed – more than in the previous courses – to highlight the completely changed living, housing, and economic conditions of the postwar era. It is advisable that in the future the number of old colonialists be limited from 20 to 25% (at the most), in order to make room for a younger generation interested in the colonies and overseas.117

There is a certain irony here in Schnoeckel’s disappointment in the difficulty of attracting a younger generation to the colonial cause. Nearly three years prior the German colonial movement celebrated Schnoeckel on his 60th birthday.118 The majority of the German colonial movement advocates during the Third Reich, from von Epp to Josef Viera, were in their sixties. It is true that the propaganda of the German colonial movement under

Nazism was able to increasingly attract a broader base of popular support. The 15-year- old Johanna Peters for example, had to be denied membership in the RKB because she

115 Scheidt, “An Rosenberg,” 19 February 1938, BAB NS 8/235, 9-10. 116 Ibid., 9. 117 Paul Schnoeckel, “Bericht über den 16. Kolonialpolitischen Lehrgang für Beamte,” 14 July 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 32. 118 “Der Beauftragte für Kolonialpolitische Schulung: Hauptstellenleiter Paul Schnoeckel,” Deutsche Kolonial-Zeitung, 1938 (9), 307. 169 did not yet meet the minimum age requirement, 18.119 But despite Schnoeckel’s desire to create more room for a younger generation of future colonialists, it appears (whether due to the number of young men at the fronts of war or not) that an education in colonial politics remained the reserve of those who had former experience in the colonies. Indeed, there was something about the former German colonialists that ‘stuck in their blood’.

Despite the difficulties in attracting younger students to the Seminars for

Colonial-Policy Education, Schnoeckel never waned in his efforts. The same official who critiqued the age of the seminars’ students and the age of the members of the KPA also noted that despite the setbacks in Colonial-Policy Education, Schoeckel was working hard, “He wants to intensify colonial education.”120 Indeed, Schnoeckel was not resigned to rest on his laurels as the head of Colonial-Policy Education. After the first impromptu lectures across the county and seminars at the Kolonialpolitishcen Schulungshaus in

Ladeburg he created the Reichskolonialinstitut in Berlin-Grunewald, where from 13

January 1941 all Seminars for Colonial-Policy Education were held. In 1941 Schnoeckel even began an attempt to expand the size of the Reichskolonialinstitut on Douglasstrasse in Berlin.121 The increase in pedagogical space that he demanded corresponded with the expansion of the colonial education that he envisioned. Until 1941 the Colonial-Policy

Education course lasted two weeks. Beginning in 1941 he expanded the seminars to a three week program and, based on the colonial education of other European powers,

119 Langerbein, “Ihre Beitrittserklärung zum RKB vom 19.11.1939,” 24 November 1939, BAB NS 22/1259. 120 Scheidt an Rosenberg, 19 February 1938, BAB NS 8/235, 9. 121 See the various exhanges between Schnoeckel and the Party leadership, including Albert Speer, in BAB R 2/4978. 170 planned to expand to a six-week and later 2-3 month-long course.122 Neither phased by the age gap nor by the context of the Second World War, Schnoeckel was determined to instill an educated, colonial consciousness within the German population.

By 1941 Schnoeckel lamented the pace at which future colonial experts were being trained. “With one seminar a month we can expect roughly 600 [educated] civil servants a month, which does not at all correspond to the demand. We must find a way to increase the number of participants.”123 In spite of his critique, by July 1941 the

Seminars for Colonial-Policy Education had already trained a total of 604 civil servants, teachers, etc. for first use (Einsatz) in overseas colonies.124 A further 1110 postmen, 369 leaders of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, 101 members of the Reichsbahn, and 280 police officers were educated under the KPA’s Colonial Education Office.125 Schnoeckel was responsible for another 14 Seminars on Colonial-Policy Education before the circumstances of the war cut short his ambitious colonial revisionism in 1942.

Conclusion

In January 1934 Heinrich Schnee wrote to Robert Ley, head of the German Labor

Front, asking him to join the German Colonial Society. After explaining what he viewed as the benefits to membership in his organization he closed his letter:

Mit kolonialem Gruss Heil Hitler!

122 Paul Schnoeckel, “Reichskolonialinstitut (KPA-Staat), undated, BAB NS 52/50, 43. 123 Paul Schnoeckel, “An Korvettenkapitän Wenig,” 12 July 1941, BAB NS 52/50, 24 124 Paul Schnoeckel, “Reichskolonialinstitut (KPA-Staat), undated, BAB NS 52/50, 43. 125 Paul Schnoeckel, “Schulungsamt (KPA-Partei) undated, BAB NS 52/50, 45. 171

Schnee126

The archive is unclear as to whether Ley ever responded to Schnee’s request. As the

DKG was to be dismantled and reassembled into the RKB shortly thereafter, perhaps it did not matter. What is of interest however, is that since 1933, when nearly all official correspondence was closed with a “Heil Hitler!” Schnee maintained his connection with his colonial past. Moreover, it was this reference to the colonies that came first, almost as if the praise to Germany’s new leader was an afterthought. This point, as minor as it may seem, is nonetheless indicative of the broader position of German colonialists during the Third Reich. Many seemed to believe that a resounding “Heil Hitler!” was all that was needed for the traditional German colonial movement to continue its revisionist work after 1933.

By 1936, however, ‘wagging the dog’ was less successful. Education leaders at the traditional German colonial schools in Witzenhausen and Rendsburg were criticized, attacked, and in the case of Arning, removed from office for their lack of adherence to the

National Socialist worldview and the regime’s low prioritization of overseas expansion and high priority on a unified racial policy. The regime demanded control, especially of a movement so closely tied to domestic and foreign policy.

In his role as director of Colonial-Policy Education, the former colonial officer

Paul Schnoeckel was to remedy this problem, maintaining and expanding the popular will for colonial revisionism while ensuring that it adhered to National Socialist policy. Less vociferous in his critiques of the regime than his colleagues at Witzenhausen, Rendsburg, or within the colonial press, Schnoeckel walked the National Socialist line. Restricted by

126 Schnee an Ley, 8 January 1934, BAB R 8023/749, 44. 172 the National Socialist leadership as he was, his official guidelines of Colonial-Policy

Education presented an image of a unified and nazified – albeit dynamic – colonial policy. Nonetheless, it is clear that he never gave up the dream of a restored overseas empire. In contrast to his colonial education guidelines, the actual pedagogy of Nazi colonial education took on a perverted, at times contradictory, tone as it tried to meld 19th and 20th century versions of racism and a distinct focus on overseas colonies with expansion on the continent. Moreover, Schnoeckel’s directive to ‘rein in’ the colonial movement under Nazism gave his colonial education a particularly nationalist bent.

Whether referring to the Second Empire or the Third Reich, German colonialism was a point of pride and a point of comparison. There was no room in Schnoekel’s nationalism for the importance of outside influences that may have aided in the development of

‘German colonialism’ past nor present.

Acting both as a loyal National Socialist and loyal colonialist, Schnoeckel was expected to bridge the gap between his generation of Germans with first-hand colonial experience and a younger generation without, between a generation that had grown up in the Kaiserreich and those of the Third Reich. Even as he was able successfully to expand the breadth and depth of colonial education under Nazism, he was never able to move completely from the Colonial to the Hitler Gruß.

173

Chapter 4: Creating “Carriers of the Nation”: The Fascist Colonial Police

“In contrast to many other democratic states, Germany’s foreign policy is defined and conditioned by its Weltanschauung. The Weltanschauung of this new Reich is based upon the conservation and preservation of our German people. We have no interest in the oppression of other peoples. We want to be blessed in our form, and others should be in theirs! The racially determined concepts of our Weltanschauung do lead to a limitation of our foreign policy. That is to say, our foreign policy goals are not limitless, they are not decided by coincidence, rather they are determined by the resolution only to serve the German people, to preserve them in this world and secure their existence. -Adolf Hitler, 19381

Depicting swastikas over the African continent, a National Socialist propaganda poster from the mid 1930s read: “Auch hier liegt unser Lebensraum!” The colored poster that posited Kolonial- and Ostpolitik as inseparable goals was the product of the German colonial movement’s attempt to meld its goals of overseas colonial revisionism with the

National Socialist focus on continental expansion. It had the effect of convincing the

National Socialist leadership of the movement’s loyalty and synchronization within the regime. While this apparent alliance was useful to colonial revisionists on the national level, on the stage of international relations this perceived union of overseas expansionism with Nazi ideology quickly became a liability to the dream of a restored empire overseas.

1 Adolf Hitler’s speech in the Berlin Sportpalast on 26 August 1938, reprinted in Richtlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Schulungsamt des kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung), 1939) in BAB NS 22/538, 2. 174

With an emphasis on Eastern expansion, the Nazi leadership understood that overseas expansion would be hardly necessary based on Germany’s current population and dwindling birth rates.2 Nonetheless, the Nazi-led Foreign Office found utility in this broad notion of Lebensraum and used it as a diplomatic bargaining chip in its broader attempt to revise the Treaty of Versailles. In response to this, a world already skeptical of

Nazi Germany’s domestic antisemitism, now employed this critique of race to defend against Germany’s bid to (re)administer overseas territories. Indeed as Hitler later noted, the emphasis on race within the Third Reich’s worldview was leading to foreign policy limitations.

To be sure, in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws became the hegemonic discourse of international propaganda and diplomacy and linked Nazi racial antisemitism to the overseas colonialism of the Third Reich. This critique produced by foreign states and their presses was sustained by the German Foreign Office, which continued to address it.

In keeping racial antisemitic policies its focus, the ensuing debate largely disregarded

Germany’s actual colonial past and thereby established Nazi Germany’s colonial policies as peculiar: different and more radical than those of its European neighbors. Poorly mediate by the Foreign Office, this debate also ignored what the German colonial movement under the guise of the Colonial Policy Office (KPA) was actually planning for a future colonial empire – an effort that strove to disconnect itself from the racial antisemitism of the Nazi regime.3

2 Frercks, “An Herrn Schumburg in Auswärtigen Amt,” 21 February 1936, BAB R 1001/7540. 3 In some ways the disconnect is unsurprising: Hitler viewed the Foreign Office and KPA as having different goals. See Werner Schuber, “Das Imaginäre Kolonialreich: Die Vorbereitung der Kolonialgesetzgebung durch den Koloniarechtsausschuß der Akademie für Deutsches Recht, das 175

Maintaining a focus on the power struggles between the German colonial movement and National Socialist leadership this chapter transitions from the domestic context of colonial education to the national and international contexts of creating new guidelines for a future colonial administration. It begins with a discussion of the ways in which the domestic racism of Nazism became conflated with the regime’s bid for overseas colonies. It then focuses its analysis on former colonial officer and National

Socialist, Fritz Kummetz, and his development of a colonial police policy for the Nazis’ anticipated empire overseas. As we will see, colonial policy under the Third Reich was not what the Party leadership in the form of the Racial Policy Office and Foreign Office had presented. Frustrated by the impracticality of Nazi racial ideology and practices,

Kummetz did not design something peculiarly National Socialist; rather his overseas colonial policy under the Third Reich was a project influenced more by prior German traditions, contemporary international relations, and a growing transnational cooperation with Fascist Italy.

The Disconnect between National Socialist Rhetoric and Colonial Planning

On 16 April 1935 the Manchester Guardian published a brief article on the future of the German colonies.4 The article led with a correction to what it saw as a blatant bit of British war propaganda against Germany’s fitness as a colonial power. In contrast to

Reichskolonialamt und die Reichsministerien (1937-1942),” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte 115 (1998): 92; and Klaus Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. Hitler, NSDAP u. Koloniale Frage 1919-1945 (Munich: W. Fink, 1969), 902. 4 “German Colonies,” Manchester Guardian (April 16, 1935): 10. 176 the British Bluebook published in 1918,5 the Manchester Guardian proclaimed: “the truth is that Germany was a highly efficient colonial administrator” and “that some at least of her former colonies were better off under her rule then they are now.”6 With one swift stroke it would seem that the Koloniale Schuldlüge – propagated since the 1920s by the former Governor of German East Africa Heinrich Schnee – had finally been lent credence. And indeed the German colonial movement would continue to use this admission in their colonial propaganda into the Second World War.7 Although the

Guardian’s article had redeemed Germany’s colonial history under the Kaiserreich, it was not ready to welcome a return of Germany as a colonial power under Hitler.

Employing their own bit of diplomacy, the article’s contributors noted:

…if [Germany] returned to the [League of Nations], [she] would certainly not have to bear the slur implied in the Peace Treaty. But whether she is altogether suited to the exercise of mandatory functions, as the German Empire would certainly have been, is another matter. She has adopted a racial doctrine that is incompatible with the very principle of the mandate. It is true that several mandatories in their practice fall short of this principle, but none of them so far short as Germany has fallen in her treatment of “non-Aryans.” In no mandatory area are the natives treated as the Jews are treated in Germany – and the natives of territories, that once belonged to Germany and are now reclaimed are all “non-Aryans.”8

For such a short article, the repercussions of the Manchester Guardian’s claims across Germany were immense. The Foreign Office – which had been responsible for

Germany’s overseas possessions under the Kaiserreich through the creation of

5 Administrator’s Office of Southwest Africa, Report on the Natives of South-west Africa and their Treatment by Germany (London: H.M. Stationary Office, 1918). 6 “Abschrift zu III.K.l 1792/35., Manchester Guardian 16 April 1935, ‘German Colonies,’” BAB R 1001/7540, 19. 7 See for example, J.H. Krumbach, Kolonialpolitik heute: Zeitschrift des Oberkommandos der Wehrmacht Abt Inland, (1941) 25.; also F. Zumpt, Deutsches Ringen um kolonialen Raum: Kolonialfrage und nationalsozialistischer Rassenstandpunkt (Hamburg: Paul Hartung K-G, 1938). 8 “Abschrift zu III.K.l 1792/35., Manchester Guardian 16 April 1935, BAB R 1001/7540, 19. 177

Reichskolonial Amt in 1907 and still maintained responsibility over all former colonial subjects now residing in Germany – feared for the treatment of these black Africans under Nazi racial doctrine and the effect it would have on any goals of regaining

Germany’s status as a colonial power.9 The Foreign Office was further burdened by concerned Germans living abroad. Former Schutztruppler in German Southwest Africa had long married “natives” as well as so-called Bastardmädchen and Mischlinge within

German territory. It was a practice that had been sanctioned in German Southwest Africa

(DSWA) until colonial law banned such mixed marriages in 1905.10 From that date on, even existing mixed-marriages had been invalidated in the eyes of the state.11 The language of the ban on mixed, Jewish marriages in 1935 was reminiscent of German colonial practice, yet the passing of the Nuremberg Laws represented a new racial policy different from Germany’s colonial past and more extreme.12 It caused former German colonials to express increasing concern over the citizenship status of their children and grandchildren. Were they Aryan or not? Were these Schutztruppler with non-white wives still part of the German racial community? In response to these concerns the seemingly bewildered Foreign Office could only respond that the racial laws of 1935 only applied to marriages between Jews and German citizens or those with related

(artverwandte) blood. The law speaks “explicitly of Jews and not of non-Aryans. Who

9 Brückner, “Notiz an AA” from August 1935, BAB R 1001/7540. 10 See Lora Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884-1945 (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2001), 82-85 11 Cornelia Essner, “Die Nürnberger Gesetze” oder Die Verwaltung des Rassenwahns 1933-1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 56. 12 The recent review of the Foreign Office’s complicity in the Holocaust is shockingly silent on the influence of colonial politics on the formation of the Nuremberg Laws and Nazi racial policy, see Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes, and Moshe Zimmermann, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit: Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010). 178 counts as non-Aryan are those who come from non-Aryan, specifically Jewish parents and grandparents.”13 The Foreign Office continued, “A law concerning marriage between non-Jewish non-Aryans and German citizens or persons of related blood does not yet exist.”14

While the Foreign Office was hard-pressed to provide answers concerning the fate of German colonials and colonialism under a new National Socialist racial ideology, others in Germany were not. Writing in direct response to the Manchester Guardian’s article, R. Schober of the Dozentenschaft at the University of Berlin vociferously claimed that Nazi Germany had never adopted a racial policy directed against all non-Aryans.

The racial doctrine of National Socialism never sees its aim in the devaluation of other races. Nations, it says, can fulfill their mission in the world only by becoming their own true selves. That is why the ‘Aryan paragraph’ is only directed against intermixture and predominance of other races in Germany; that, too, is why a German native policy (Eingeborenenpolitik) in [the] colonies would have for its aim the development of the native peoples on their own and congenial lines. The different races in the world are like the different instruments in an orchestra. There is no use of mixing them up. This is the racial doctrine of National Socialism, and so is the idea of the mandates.15

Here Schober presented less his own understanding of the burgeoning Nazi racial doctrine than a paraphrasing of director of the Racial Policy Office (RPA) Dr. Walther

Gross’s article in the Völkischer Beobachter from the summer of 1934.16 It would seem that racial politics was not just on the minds of critical foreign observers of Nazism, but that it had also engrained itself in the domestic populace.

13 “Gesetz zum Schutz des deutschen Blutes und der deutschen Ehre,” 13 March 1936, BAB R 1001/7540, Oelhafen. 14 Ibid. 15 Schober, “The Racial Doctrine of the Nazis: To the Editor of the Manchester Guardian,” 25 March 1935, BAB R 1001/7540. 16 Walther Gross, “Rassenstolz und Politik,” Völkischer Beobachter, 20 July 1934. 179

That the Manchester Guardian’s article should stike such discord and misunderstanding between the RPA and Foreign Office was indicative of already long- standing differences of opinion concerning race and national belonging in the regime.

Already in the summer of 1934 Dr. Gross had met with the Foreign Office to discuss the melding of Nazi racial doctrine with Nazi Germany’s foreign affairs. This meeting had less to do with the collaboration of these two offices than the Foreign Office’s acquiescence to the policies of the RPA. The meeting made clear that not only would the

Foreign Office follow the lead of the RPA concerning issues of race, but also that “the

Jewish question is to be addressed independently from general racial policies,” a result that is reflected in Dr. Gross’s article in the Völkischer Beobachter and which was so carefully parroted by Schober in his response to the Manchester Guardian.17 From this point on the Foreign Office walked a fine line seeking to make the inherently racist institution of colonialism palatable to a global audience increasingly wary of a radically racialized Nazi regime.

Forced into this position of compliance, the Foreign Office maintained an

Eingeborenenpolitik of separation and difference between what the RPA identified as

European and African races. Outwardly it propagated colonial policies that highlighted the supposed natural affinity of African races for manual labor and other unskilled work, while at the same time promising to keep intact and let flourish the cultural and social mores of these peoples. Internally the Foreign Office scrambled through its archives to find other European examples of such policies towards Africans that might avert the scrutiny of the global public.

17 Von Bülow-Schwante, “Aufzeichnung,” 7 August 1934, BAB R 1001/7540. 180

Germany’s own former colony in Southwest Africa promised to provide at least one such example. In a recent administrative proclamation from July 1934 extramarital sex between Europeans and members of African races was forbidden and punishable by five years imprisonment.18 That a law there from 1920 still allowed for sexual relations between interracial married couples was less supportive of the Nazi cause, but the Nazis at this point had also failed to devise a concrete racial law concerning mixed marriages for its future colonies. In fact, a draft of such a Kolonialblutschutzgesetz would not be proposed until 1940, 19 indicating that these racial laws were developed first in Europe and only later transferred to Africa.20

In the meantime contemporary European and even American discussions on colonialism provided useful comparisons. For example when Robert Kettels argued in the colonial journal L’Essor Colonial et Maritime that the presence of Mischlinge from a biopolitical (bevölkerungspolitsch) standpoint was “undesirable” the Foreign Office took notice.21 Ketels argued that while these mixed-race peoples needed the protection of the

Belgian state, there also needed to be a pan-European racial policy to prevent an increase in their population. His policy called for a reduction in the birth of Mischlinge through a ban on miscegenation, an improvement in their social status in the colonies, and a ban on immigration of mixed-race peoples from the colonies to Europe. Moreover, Ketels argued that Europeans needed to create job-training programs for Mischlinge in Europe

18 Deutsches Kolsulat in Südwestafrika, “Gesetz gegen die Mischung von Weiss und Schwarz in Südwestafrika (Morality Proclamation),” 7 August 1934, BAB R 1001/7540. 19 Rudolf Asmis, “Entwurf eines Kolonialblutschutzgesetzes,” 17 September 1940, BAB R 2/4965. 20 Pace Essner, Nürnberger Gesetze, who uses this semantic similarity to claim a loose continuity from the racial laws of the German colonies to those of the Third Reich. 21 Auswärtiges Amt, “Die Mischlingsfrage von Belgien gesehen,” 26 February 1936, BAB R 1001/7540. 181 with the goal of sending them back to the colonies and keeping them there.22 Not only did such a racial policy support that of the Nazi leadership, but internal correspondence of the Foreign Office demonstrates that this Belgian argument was to be used explicitly in external propaganda in support of Nazi Germany’s bid to regain its overseas empire.23

Through the mid 1930s the Foreign Office took great interest in the “native” policies of other global colonial powers and their territories, including Spain, Mexico, and Brazil. As far as the Foreign Office was concerned even the international conference sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation and Yale University in Honolulu concerning the problems of indigenous populations served as further evidence that Germany’s racial politics towards it future colonies were in line with the concerns of other colonial powers.24 Directed by the RPA and Ministry of the Interior not to abandon the fundamentals of Nazi racial policy even in the face of foreign pressure, the Foreign

Office did not look to Germany’s own colonial past – which had been exonerated by the

Manchester Guardian, but rather relied on examples of contemporary foreign racial policies to justify its own.25

Existing as a former colonial power in a still colonial world,26 the Nazis’ policies of racial segregation and racial purity did find global resonances. But these similarities

22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Schubert, “An das Auswärtigen Amt: Betr. Kongress zum Studium der Eingeborenenprobleme in Honolulu,” 3 April 1936, BAB R 1001/7540. 25 “Aufzeichnung Röhrecke für Bülow,” 19 August 1935. On the inflexibility of Ministry of the Interior and the Racial Office to allow the Foreign Office to bend to foreign pressures over Nazi racial policy, see Conze et al., Das Amt; and PAA R 100683, 99-106. 26 For one view of how Germany’s unique position following the First World War affected racial policies see Pascal Grosse, “What does German Colonialism have to do with National Socialism? A Conceptual Framework,” in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 115-134. 182 confirmed rather that countered the criticism that the Nazis’ racial policies would be extended to Africa if the regime regained overseas possession. Despite

Reichskolonialbund board of directors member H.W. Bauer’s touting of Polish and

British politicians support of Germany’s ambitions overseas,27 we know from internal communications that the efforts the Foreign Office and the colonial organizations under its authority were unsuccessful in separating the Nazis’ radical racial antisemitism from future Nazi colonial policy in the eyes of the world.28 Moreover, by continually engaging in this discussion, the Foreign Office actually reified their connection and grew the discourse surrounding it.

Writing for the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftbiologie in 1938,

Tropenmediziner Ernst Rodenwaldt built off of the British-German connection and added

Italy to a list of those he identified as modern colonial powers. They were modern, in his estimation, in that their colonial policies had moved away from the failed liberalism of the French Revolution that saw all humanity as equal and recognized the value of applying biological thinking to solve the population politics of the colonies.29 Seeking to draw the English closer to the German cause, Rodenwaldt remarked that two Germanic peoples are responsible for this new period of colonialism with a new method of handling the Mischlingsfrage, the English and the Germans. Rodenwaldt argued that “From the beginning – out of pride in belonging to the Herrenvolk – the Englishman refused to recognize the equality of a half-blood… even where the law demanded it.” Rodenwaldt

27 H.W. Bauer, “Die Rassenfrage in der Kolonialdiskussion,” Ziel und Weg 2, 15 January 1939, BAB NS 5/VI/20332. 28 Frercks, “An das Auswärtige Amt,” 28 February 1938, BAB R 1001/7540. 29 Ernst Rodenwaldt, “Die Rückwirkung der Rassenmischung in den Kolonialländern auf Europa,” Sonderdruck des Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 32:5, 1938, 385. 183 went further, claiming “An Englishman does not commune with ‘Halfcasts’. And for him it is completely incomprehensible that other members of European races do.”30

Considering these commonalities Rodenwaldt was utterly flustered that “from such a position the English people cannot understand the Nazis’ racial opposition to Jews.”31

Rodenwaldt’s reintroduction here of antisemitism into the broader racialized language and theories of colonialism went against the wishes of the RPA and the Foreign

Office. His transgression, whether intentional or not, demonstrates that it was not only foreign critics and outside observers, but also many National Socialists who had begun to connect the racial thinking that determined the antisemitic policies of the Third Reich and that of the regime’s colonial ambitions. This perceived correlation even extends beyond the contemporary debates and has become the foundation of much recent historical scholarship.32

30 Ibid., 388. 31 Ibid. 32 Hannah Arendt was the first to theorize that the Nazi crimes in the East and the Holocaust had their roots in the violence of European colonialism, Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951). Although Aimé Césare and W. E. B. Du Bois had made similar critiques of colonialism, see Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1972), and W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903). That Germany’s colonial experience had an influence on the metropole is clear, see Sebastian Conrad, “‘Eingeborenenpolitik’ in Kolonie und Metropole: ‘Erziehung zur Arbeit’ in Ostafrika und Ostwestfalen,” in Sebastian Conrad, and Jürgen Osterhammel eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2004), 107-28. But more recently scholars have sought give empirical evidence to Arendt’s thesis, drawing clear lines of continuity between German colonial violence and the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Spearheading this effort is Jürgen Zimmerer, see Jürgen Zimmerer, “Krieg, KZ und Völkermord in Südwestafrika: Der erste deutsche Genozid,” in Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller eds., Völkermord in Deutch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904-1908) in (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2003), 45-63. Historians such as Isabel Hull and others have also made important contributions. See Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005). For a critical overview of this scholarship see Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History 41, (2008): 477-503. On whether asking questions that seek to find this causality are even relevant, see Eric Weitz, “Before the Holocaust,” forthcoming. 184

Yet we must recognize that the loosely articulated racial policies for a National

Socialist colonialism, defended here on an international stage, were dictated from the

RPA down and did not reflect the wishes, nor the actual planning of the KPA and the

German colonial movement it represented. The RPA may have been able to exert its power over the Foreign Office, but as we saw in the previous chapter, many German colonialists turned Nazis, such as Schnoeckel, would not allow colonial revisionism to be dictated by Nazi racial policy. Despite the incorporation of Nazi maxims – such as

Lebensraum – by the colonial press, the actual planning of a colonial administration under the Third Reich had little to do with the regime’s policies of racial antisemitism. In fact, it was a set of policies and practices often disregarded by the KPA in colonial planning. We need not, however, understand this subversion as the German colonial movment maintaining some sort of moral high ground. They were in fact most interested in the return of Germany’s overseas colonial empire and disdained anything that hindered this goal. If the National Socialist leadership often viewed the German colonial movement as an obstacle to its foreign policy goals, then the German colonial movement viewed the racist worldview of the Nazis as a limitation to its goals of overseas revisionism.33

Major der Schutzpolizei Fritz Kummetz: Nationalist, Colonialist, National Socialist

Point three of the Nazi Party platform since 1920 was, “We demand land and territory (colonies) for the sustenance of our people, and settlement of our surplus

33 Pace Klaus Hildebrand who argues that the Nazis “tolerated” the overseas ambitions of the Foreign Office and colonial organizations, which adversely affected their foreign diplomacy, especially with Britain. See Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 394. 185 population.”34 Whether the nascent Nazi Party envisioned these “colonies” as a return to an overseas empire or the fruition of a long-prophesized, eastward expansion on the continent could not be known. Indeed, it was the ambiguity of this point of the party platform that attracted broad support for the young party: reaching those disenchanted with the Weimar Republic at whose hands Germany lost its overseas possessions and more broadly stirring nationalist sentiment for the restoration of a strong, central

European state. It was also this ambiguity over colonies, both within the Party and among advocates of the German colonial movement, that required immediate attention as

Nazi Germany played the colonial card in a poker game of foreign policy.35 The

Gleichschaltung of Weimar’s various colonial organizations in 1936 into the Nazi’s own

Reichskolonialbund and Kolonialpolitisches Amt was not, however, just a stop-gap measure for the expedience of foreign policy, even if colonial revisionism of the Third

Reich was subjugated to the Nazi worldview and the only official colonial policy was that there was no colonial policy in and of itself.36 Lacking formal diplomatic power, the

German colonial movement under Nazism did what it could domestically to further its overseas goals. As we have seen, the first step to this goal was to embed an overseas colonial consciousness within the nation through propaganda and colonial education, a process that often required the German colonial movement to appropriate the language of the Nazi worldview.

34 “Programm der Nationalsozialistischen Deutschen Arbeiterpartei, München 24.2.1920,” in Wolfgang Treue, Deutsche Parteiprogramme 1861-1954 (Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1956), 143. 35 Hildebrand, Vom Reich zum Weltreich. 36 Richtlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Schulungsamt des kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung), 1938 and 1939) in BAB NS 22/538, 2. 186

This colonial propaganda increased in breadth and depth during the Third Reich.

But drumming up nationalist support to ‘break the schackles of Versailles’ and return

Germany to a colonial power was one thing. Translating this propaganda into a concrete plan that incorparated the Nazis’ worldview proved significantly more difficult, especially since German officials had not set foot on the African continent for over fifteen years. Yet, this was the exact task facing the former colonial officer, Fritz

Kummetz, when the KPA ordered him to create a Colonial Police Administration Law in

1935. Working from an ideology that claimed the racial singularity and superiority of

Germans did not fit well with a burgeoning colonial police policy that was from the beginning predicated on this officer’s past experiences abroad. The hope of SS-

Brigadeführer Humann-Hainhofen that “in the colonies of the Third Reich, population management (Menschenführung) and the administration will be determined by principles for which there are no examples, not even in our former colonial experience” did come true.37 Not, as he had hoped, because of the implementation of a new Nazi colonialism, but rather because it would rely on the colonial experience of other European states, primarily Fascist Italy.

Like many of his fellow veterans of the First World War, Fritz Kummetz returned to Germany and found a career that suited his skills: as a police officer. Working as a civil servant in Berlin was indeed not a bad position for a man who had grown up the son of a farmer in Eastern Prussia. His experiences in the war undoubtedly broadened his horizons, seeing battle on both the Eastern and Western Fronts as well as in Anatolia.

Yet it was not the war that first brought Kummetz out of the German Reich, but rather the

37 Humann-Hainhofen an Heinrich Himmler, “Abschrift,” 8 February 1938, BAB NS 19/4161. 187 opportunities presented by Germany’s overseas empire in Africa. After a stint at the

Volkshochschule and Landwirstschaftsschule in Heiligenbeil, Fritz Kummetz followed in the footsteps of his three older brothers and found his future first in German Southwest

Africa, Cameroon, and finally Togo in colonial administration and agricultural service until the outbreak of the war. Military service surely prepared Kummetz for his career in the Berlin Schutzpolizei as his rise in rank during the Weimar Republic attests, but it was his experience in Germany’s overseas colonies in Africa that had the greatest influence on his personal politics and goals.38

Joining the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) in 1920, Kummetz was an early supporter of the German colonial movement’s revisionism. Along with his fellow revisionist, Kummetz believed that the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had unjustly stripped

Germany of its colonies and he devoted considerable time defending Germany’s colonial policies against the (mostly British) accusations that Germany was “unfit” to be a colonial power.39 Kummetz, like so many within the German colonial movement, was attracted to the National Socialists’ rejection of Versailles and saw in the Party a real means to regain Germany’s lost overseas possessions. Indeed, this is the likely reason why Kummetz joined the party in March 1933, shortly after Hitler took power.40

In some ways, Kummetz’s opportunism in joining the National Socialist Party was mutual: Kummetz and other colonialists received the opportunity for upward social

38 Fritz Kummetz, “Lebenslauf,” 7 May 1935, BAB R 1001/9690. 39 See the British parliament’s “Bluebook” report, Administrator’s Office of Southwest Africa, Report on the natives of South-west Africa and their treatment by Germany. 40 Although Kummetz had already been a member of the NS-Flieger-Korps and NS- Beamtenarbeitsgemeinschaft since 1932. See “Abschrift” and “Personalangaben,” BAB 230 A, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Fritz Kummetz. 188 mobility within the Party apparatus, while the Nazis could strengthen national unity at home and gain political capital internationally.41 Yet this simplistic and cynical interpretation greatly undermines the genuine desire held by Kummetz and the German colonial movement for Germany to regain its status as an overseas colonial power.

Indeed, as we have seen, the relationship between the colonial organizations and the Nazi party was much more diametric than symbiotic.

The strain in colonial continuity between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich is indeed what makes the personality of Fritz Kummetz so significant. He was a former colonial officer and early member of the NSDAP. Moreover, by 1936 he acted as the political liaison between the Reichskolonialbund, KPA, and the Ministry of the Interior, between the Reichskolonialbund, KPA, and the Foreign Office, and between the Foreign

Office and the Ordnungspolizei. When much of the Nazi apparatus was little more than gleichgeschaltet in name only, and colonial revisionism was lip service to some and the basis of foreign policy to others, how one man negotiated these political tides speaks volumes to the political dynamics of German overseas colonialism under the Third Reich.

Colonialism may have been used as a rallying point for nationalist sentiment under the

National Socialist regime: garnering voices against the Weimar Republic in the early years and later providing a weak justification for radical Nazi racial policy. But a policy of “there is no colonial policy in and of itself”42 meant that even after the Nazi regime attempted to shore-up the various colonial organizations of the postwar period, spaces for

41 See eg. Karsten Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators?: Die NS-Kolonialplanungen für Afrika (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2008). 42 Richtlinien für die kolonialpolitische Schulung, (Berlin: Schulungsamt des Kolonialpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP (Reichsleitung), 1938 and 1939) in BAB NS 22/538, 2. 189 individual action continued to exist. Indeed, Nazi ideology was not monolithic.43 A close analysis of Kummetz’s role between domestic and foreign institutions in the planning of

Germany’s future colonies demonstrates the continued struggle to define a National

Socialist colonial policy, a project that was influenced by past German traditions, international relations, and transnational cooperation with Fascist Italy.

Police as Carriers of Colonial Traditions

Through such personalities as Dr. Heinrich Schnee and General Lettow-Vorbeck, the colonial idea had been kept alive during the Weimar Republic, even if they were unsuccessful in convincing the allied powers to return Germany as a colonial power. As a result of their efforts the city of Bremen erected a colonial monument of von Lettow-

Vorbeck and the Deutsches Kolonial- und Übersee-Museum followed shortly thereafter in 1932. The goal of creating these sites of memory was to create a place where “with the help of a true and complete representation of our methods and actions” the true impression of the importance of Germany’s former colonies could be represented, especially to Germany’s youth.44 The efforts to defend Germany’s colonial legacy from the mostly British attacks that it was ‘unfit’ to be a colonial power are quite evident. Yet,

Germany’s ‘place in the sun’ was not to be just a memory however, but rather something to be regained as Schnee’s countless colonial-revisionist texts attest. The conditions for the creation of the place of memory for German colonialism were only made possible by an agreement in November 1931 between the Reichs und Preussischen Ministerium des

43 See Hans Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). 44 “Tradition der Schutzpolizei Bremen für Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte, (1936), 21, 833. 190

Innerns (RuPrMdI) and the Kolonialkriegerbund that the Landespolizei of Bremen should adopt and maintain the traditions of German Southwest Africa’s Schutzpolizei.45

Composed of many colonial veterans, the extent to which the Bremen police kept the colonial idea alive extended beyond the shield-form Petersflagge that now adorned their uniforms.46 Bremen was not the only city to maintain the traditions of the colonial police at home. At the same time the Landespolizei in Berlin adopted the traditions of the

Schutztruppe in German East Africa, the police in Munich those of Togo, in Kiel those of

Cameroon, Stuttgart the South Sea-Islands, and the Landespolizei in Hamburg adopted the traditions of the Schutztruppe in Kiatschow.47

It is true that carrying on the traditions of the Schutztruppe in these major metropolises was largely symbolic. These efforts – much like those of the Deutsche

Kolonialausstellung48 – served more as a bridge to the past, than as preparation for the restoration of Germany as a Kolonialmacht. Nonetheless, the role of the police in continuing a colonial tradition extends beyond a sentimentality for Germany’s past glory.

Kummetz had himself recognized the futility of simply remembering the past and upon his own accord set about rectifying this situation. If Germany would eventually regain its

45 Ibid. 46 Carl Peters was the founder of German East Africa in 1884 and considered by many contemporaries a national hero. The Nazi Party posthumously resurrected Peters as a national hero with a 1941 propaganda film based on his life. 47 “An den Auswärtigen Amt,” 20 September 1934, BAB R 1001/7171, 3. 48 See Susann Lewerenz, Die Deutsche Afrika-Schau (1935-1940): Rassismus, Kolonialrevisionismus und postkoloniale Auseinandersetzung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Frankfurt a.M./New York: P. Lang, 2006). 191 overseas colonies, it would need more than a group of old colonial veterans to administer them; it would need a young group of well-educated colonial police.49

Both before and after the war, Kummetz had presented slideshows and lectures about the colonies to public audiences with materials loaned from the Deutsche

Kolonialgesellschaft, After discussions with the Kolonialpolitisches Amt der NSDAP, the

DKG, and the commander of the Schutzpolizei in Berlin in the spring of 1935, Kummetz founded a colonial lecture series directed at the Berlin Schutzpolizei.50 By the middle of

June some 30 lectures had already taken place, with themes ranging from history and foundations of German colonial policy to the role of the German colonies during the

World War and under the mandate powers.51 Due to the early popularity and success of these lectures, Kummetz was soon contacted by a representative of the Reichs- und

Preussisches Ministerium des Innerns and head of the Schutzpolizei and informed that his lectures would be adopted for the entire political schooling of the police throughout the

Reich, including the Schutzpolizei, Kriminalpolizei, Gemeindepolizei, and Gendarmerie – some 150,000 men in all.52

At the same time as his courses began for the Police in Berlin, Kummetz also contributed a series of articles to the Deutsche Polizeibeamte as a way to keep the colonial spirit alive. In these articles Kummetz maintained the role of the colonial veteran and German nationalist, focusing on the gains in economic wealth and prestige

49 A point that Kummetz articulates much clearer in a later article “Warum gehört die Kolonialpolizei zur Kolonialverwaltung,” 6 January 1941, BAB R 1001/9764. 50 Fritz Kummetz, “Lebenslauf,” 7 May 1935, BAB R 1001/9690. 51 “Koloniale Schulungsvorträge für die Schutzpolizei,” Der Koloniale Kampf, (1935), 6. 52 See “Koloniale Schulungsvorträge vor der Polizei, RdErl. d. RuPRMdI. v. 2.8.1935 – III S Ib 6 Nr. 10/35,” Ministerialblatt für preussische innerne Verwaltung (1935), 32, 989; and the same in Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1935), 17, 66-67. 192 that an empire provided. In his “Koloniale Gleichberechtigung!” Kummetz made the familiar argument that Germany had been unjustly “robbed” of its colonies and its people deported from the colonies because of accusations by the British that Germany had

“mistreated and militarized its native population” and used the colonies as U-Boot bases to plunder the sea vessels of world trade.53 Of course for Kummetz and the German colonial movement this was a bald-faced lie; it was the so-called Koloniale Schuldlüge.

Focusing on Germany’s “best and prettiest colony,”54 Kummetz reconstructed a brief history of German goodwill and expertise in its colonies, harking back to Carl Peters who founded the colony through the brave Askaris who loyally served General Lettow-

Vorbeck until the end of the First World War. For Kummetz and many of his contemporaries, Germany had rightly earned its place as a colonial power. If Germany had differed from its European neighbors in how it maintained its colonies, it was on the basis that “[Germany’s] demand for colonies was never about imperialism, but rather about resources (Brot).”55

Indeed, not only was Germany’s interwar revisionist agitation centered around national prestige, but also around economic necessity. At the opening of the Leipziger

Messe in 1935 Reichsfinanzminister Hjalmar Schacht stated, “the possession of colonial resources are essential for an industrial-state to supplement its domestic economy.”56

53 Fritz Kummetz, “Koloniale Gleichberechtigung,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1935), 16, 604. 54 Interestingly German East Africa was always referenced as the gemstone of Germany’s empire in Africa. This, despite the violent suppression of the Maji-Maji rebellion from 1905-1907. By comparison, for all of the “living space” German Southwest Africa provided, colonial revisionists rarely discussed it in a positive light. Whether this silence is evidence that the memory of the colonial violence that occurred there continued to carry relevance into the Third Reich is worthy of a detailed study. 55 Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, quoted in Kummetz, “Koloniale Gleichberechtigung,” 605. 56 Cited in Fritz Kummetz, “Kolonialbesitz, eine wirtschaftliche Notwendigkeit für Deutschland,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1935) 18, 682. 193

Schacht was himself a major proponent of colonial revisionism during the interwar years and it was he who later encouraged Hitler to employ Germany’s lost colonies in international diplomacy. Unlike many of the other colonial agitators mentioned above,

Schacht cared less about whether Germany had a legitimate legal right to its former overseas possessions, but rather that these were a fundamental part of the German economy. In his opinion what mattered was that Germany:

have territories under German management and included in the German monetary system. All the other questions involved – sovereignty, army, police, law, the churches, international collaboration – are open to discussion. They can all be solved by means of international cooperation so long as nothing unworthy is imputed against the honor of Germany. The German colonial problem is not a problem of imperialism. It is not a mere problem of prestige. It is simply and solely a problem of economic existence. Precisely for that reason the future of European peace depends upon it.57

Schacht’s economic argument about Germany’s need for resources and especially his call for international cooperation formed the basis of Kummetz’s second article in Der

Deutsche Polizeibeamte.

Less National Socialist in tone, Kummetz’s agitation is representative of the broader discourse of colonial revisionism that had been prevalent since the Weimar

Republic. As Wolfe Schmokel argues, there were two types of colonial revisionism: economic and non-economic. Although these were largely discourses that were maintained by colonial agitators through the Weimar Republic, at their core they were no different to the arguments circulating during the Bismarck era and more broadly, they were common to the “classical nineteenth-century argument used in all European

57 Hjalmar Schacht, “Germany’s Colonial Demands,” Foreign Affairs (1937), 15, as cited in Wolf W. Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism 1919-1945 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1964), 47. 194 countries.”58 The German colonial movement was adept at wielding both types of these arguments as they saw fit and as the occasion permitted as we have seen in chapter 1. As a member of the NSDAP, Kummetz’s ‘old’ rhetoric was undermining the National

Socialist regime’s hold on colonial revisionism.

Precisely therein stood the danger so far as some Party officials were concerned.

The Nazi Party had taken up the colonial claim already in the early 1920s and maintained it, at least in name, through the Machtübernahme. That the colonial revisionism of the

Weimar Republic had continued unchanged was given further credence in November

1933 when Heinrich Schnee – then director of the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft – was invited to a private audience with Hitler to discuss the colonial problem.59 At the outset, it looked as if the postwar colonial movement would continue on into the Third Reich unchanged; the arguments remained the same as did the leaders who made them.

This however, was not to be, as the NSDAP sought to bring the various colonial organizations under its control. Already in June of 1933 the Koloniale

Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft had voted to create an umbrella organization for all of the colonial organizations, the Reichskolonialbund into which most of the organizations migrated, including the DKG. As an umbrella organization the RKB lent itself well to the influence of the NSDAP, which the latter increasingly exerted. By 1934 the regime had gone so far as to require that all Gauleiter in the RKB be party members and it made

58 Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 46. 59 “Unser Kampf,” Der Koloniale Kampf: Mitteilungen der Deutschen Kolonial Gesellschaft (1933), 4, 1. 195 clear that all colonial agitators would be subordinate to the party.60 At a time when Hitler was using the lost colonies as political capital in negotiations with the British, he needed to be certain that individual members of any of these organizations would not undermine his efforts.61 Ironically, the racial policies of the Third Reich accomplished this on their own. Yet, up until the second Gleichschaltung of the colonial organizations and the creation of the Colonial Office of the NSDAP in 1936, individual colonial agitators did enjoy a degree of freedom in the views they expressed.

In the first of Kummetz’s articles to Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte in 1935 he had employed common, contemporary arguments of the German colonial movement. The goals of his efforts were not only the restoration of Germany as a colonial power, but also to overcome the “internal division and external weakness of the German people” and “to maintain the colonial idea among our Volksgenossen and to bring together the entire people in great unity.”62 As we have seen, the KPA itself later saw this as one of its own major goals. Indeed, through his own efforts at establishing a colonial education for the police of the Third Reich and his writings to the major police journal, Kummetz was establishing overseas colonialism as a key component of German nationalism under fascism, with public servants as its carrier. Kummetz made this point more clearly in his third and final article in Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte on the history of the police in the

60 Edgar Hartwig, Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (DKG) 1887-1936 in Dieter Fricke, ed., Lexikon zur Parteiengeschichte: Die bürgerlichen und kleinbürgerlichen Parteien und Verbände in Deutschland (1989- 1945) (Köln, 1983) 724-748, as cited in Linne, Deutschland jenseits des Äquators?, 26. 61 For colonial revisionism as a foreign policy tool of the Third Reich see Hildebrandt, Vom Reich zum Weltreich, 441-672, and Schmokel, Dream of Empire, 76-136. 62 Kummetz, “Kolonialbesitz, eine wirtschaftliche Notwendigkeit für Deutschland,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1935), 18, 684. 196

German colonies. But it is also here that we glean a sense of what kind of nationalist

Kummetz was:

The police officer was a coachmen and hunter. He accompanied the divisions of the Schutztruppe as pathfinder, the geologist and government doctor as cultural guide (Landeskundiger). The police officers therefore maintained a close relationship to the white and colored populations of the protectorate and possessed their fullest trust. The native was to fear and respect the Schutztruppe, but he was to trust the police officer.63

That the police officer was trustworthy is respectable, but of greater importance is the magnanimity on his part towards the indigenous peoples of Africa. This intentional language was not meant for an international audience critical of Germany’s expansionist claims. As Kummetz stated to the Völkischer Beobachter, his goal was decisive: “not the presentation of colonial propaganda to an external, international audience, but rather to foster a clear knowledge of our colonies within the broadest circles of the police.”64 His audience was Germans at home. Germans, it should be noted, that had recently experienced a slanderous propaganda campaign against the French-African troops who occupied the Rhine-Ruhr region during the early 1920s and most recently a racial codification of Germanness in the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws of 1935. For Kummetz, it would seem that race – as it affected Germans and others – played a different kind of role than it did for others in the Nazi leadership. For example, Kummetz also noted:

We are a great Kulturnation of almost 70 million people; we have made innumerable contributions to the world in the areas of science, art, and

63 Fritz Kummetz, “Die Polizei in unseren Kolonien,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1935), 20, 765. 64 Dr. R.S., “Die kolonialpolitische Schulung der deutschen Polizei: Über 400 Schulungsvorträge–Rund 60 000 Polizeibeamte Mitglieder des Reichskolonialbundes,” Völkischer Beobachter, 3 December 1937, in BAB NS 22/538. 197

technology. We have the right to oversee (betreuen) undeveloped lands and primitive people, as we had for decades.65

Without a doubt these comments display cultural chauvinism or what other scholars consider nineteenth-century liberal racism.66 Fundamentally, neither the German Volk nor the African others are defined by characteristics inherent to any notion of biology, rather they are both defined by their actions and contributions to the world. This perspective was much more in line with previous colonial thinking of both the German variety and other European colonial powers. Even as a National Socialist, Kummetz was not able to shake his views on race and colonialism, which had been informed through his own colonial experiences during the Kaiserreich. And it was he who was responsible for the education of the police on colonial matters throughout the Reich, a program that was lauded by the Völkischer Beobachter for its ability to draw in the masses.67 Without a doubt, the German police at all levels had become a container for the colonial experience and this without the direct support of the Nazi Party.

By 1936 this situation changed as the last remnants of colonial organizations’ autonomy was usurped by the RKB and the newly created KPA under the leadership of

Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp. One of the many victims of this conglomeration was the

DKG of which Kummetz had been a member. Despite his apparent ambivalence toward

Nazi racial policy, Kummetz continued to flourish within National Socialist colonial politics with a position in the KPA planning the organization of the colonial police for the eventual return of Germany’s colonies. Additionally by 1936 Kummetz served as the

65 Kummetz, “Koloniale Gleichberechtigung,” 604-605. 66 See Mitchell Ash, “Recent Works on Nazi Research,” H-net Review, 8 December 2009. 67 Dr. R.S., “Die kolonialpolitische Schulung der deutschen Polizei: Über 400 Schulungsvorträge–Rund 60 000 Polizeibeamte Mitglieder des Reichskolonialbundes.” 198 liaison between the RKB, KPA, and the Ministry of the Interior, the RKB, KPA, and the

Foreign Office, and the Foreign Office and the Ordnungspolizei.68

The perseverance of Kummetz and his role as a liaison within the Nazi regime is indicative of two important points. First, the colonial aspect of nationalism within the

National Socialist regime was very much rooted in an older generation of men with experience in Germany’s previous colonial empire and maintained by the police. Second, as evidenced by the relationship of the Colonial Office to the offices of the Ministry of the Interior and the Foreign Office, this nationalism was informed and created both from within and outside the state borders of Nazi Germany.

Accessing the International “Colonial Archive”

In a letter to the Foreign Office from 1934 the Prussian prime minister acknowledged that the police of various German cities had adopted the traditions of

Germany’s lost colonies. Noting that this was a fruitful method to keep these traditions alive and strengthen public support for colonialism, he also lamented the lack of knowledge about the current form of policing under the mandate system and kindly requested reports on these conditions from the German consulates.69

The Foreign Office did its best to comply, contacting the consulates in Nairobi,

Windhuk, Lagos, Accra, and Paris. Although reports flowed back to their desks, it turned out that this information was much more difficult to obtain than they had expected.

Specific details on the organization and activities of the colonial police were considered

68 “Bomhard to the President of Police,” 7 December 1936; and “Letter to General of the Police Daluege,” 4 November 1937, BAB 230 A, Personenbezogene Unterlagen, Fritz Kummetz. 69 “An den Auswärtigen Amt,” 20 September 1934, BAB R 1001/7171, 3. 199 secret and were not available through government publications. In the case of Cameroon, the consular even went so far as to warn the Foreign Office not to contact private persons or businesses as it might strain the relations between colonial Germans and the mandate government.70 This tension had existed since Germany had lost its colonies and was exacerbated by the National Socialists’ rise to power and their increasingly frequent claims to regain their colonies. If official channels through which the role of police in

Germany’s former colonies under mandate powers were closed and private connections undesirable, all that remained to study was the organization of police in the mandate territories. After submitting a report on the history of the Colonial-Policy Education of the German police, the Foreign Office and KPA charged Fritz Kummetz with clarifying the role of colonial police forces in foreign colonies and with the creation of an administrative plan for the future colonial police under the Third Reich.

Lamenting a lack of knowledge about the colonial administrations under the mandate powers since 1919, the Foreign Office and KPA tasked Kummetz in 1935 to study the colonial police administrations of Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands,

Portugal, Spain, and Italy. At first working within the publications of the interwar years maintained within the collections of the RKB, Kummetz was soon receiving new information from the colonial offices of these states through diplomatic channels as well as through connections he had made in the colonies. These efforts were made somewhat less difficult with the military alliance between Germany and Spain during the Spanish

Civil War and significantly so during the Second World War once France and Belgium

70 Deutsches Konsulat an Auswärtiges Amt,” 5 November 1935, BAB R 1001/7171, 9. 200 were under German occupation and the KPA had established administrative offices in the colonial institutions of Paris and Brussels.71

But even before the outbreak of war, the codification of a political and military alliance between Germany and Italy established a close relationship of sharing colonial information. Indeed, one might argue that it was colonialism – namely Germany’s support for Italy’s imperial claims to Ethiopia – that initiated the Berlin-Rome Axis.72

Beyond diplomatic support, Nazis responded to Italy’s war at the horn of Africa with awe and found it instructive. For example, former German general Rudolf Xylander praised the Fascist campaign as the first modern Vernichtungskrieg.73 A German foreign servant in Addis Ababa hoped the current exchange of ideas between Nazi Germany and Fascist

Italy would not stop at economics and politics, noting that whenever Germany should return to Africa it would find itself at home between the Union of South Africa and

Italian East Africa as part of a future, racially pure African continent.74

Praise for Fascist Italy’s new colonial policies was not however unanimous across or even within Nazi institutions. For every Fritz Tiebel who announced to a representative of the Italian Colonial Office that Nazi colonial policy “must employ completely different methods than in the prewar years,” and implying a looking to the

71 “Das Kolonialpolitische Amt der NSDAP. Reichsleitung. Tätigkeitsbericht abgeschlossen am 1. July 1941,” 1 July 1941, BAB R 2/4965. 72 See Jens Petersen, Hitler-Mussolini. Die Entstehung der Achse Berlin-Rom 1933-1936 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1973), 484. 73 See Rudolf Xylander, Die Eroberung Abessiniens 1935/36: Militärische Erfahrungen und Lehren aus dem ersten neuzeitlichen Vernichtungskrieg auf kolonialem Boden (Berlin: E.S. Mittler & Sohn), 1937. 74 Strohm an das Deutsche Generalkonsulat, “Betr. Heranbildung kolonialen Nachwuchses,” 22 November 1938, BAB R 1001/9714. 201 policies in Italian East Africa,75 there was a Geheimrat Methner. In a letter to Kummetz he demonstrated his skepticism to following too closely the policies of the Italian

Fascists:

The main differences I see between the Italian colonies and ours lies not in the climate, nor even in the population, rather and above all else, in the fact that we are planning the reacquisition of our colonies and not the conquering or occupation of foreign lands, rather the return of German authority.76

Methner may have overestimated the positive reception with which Germans would be greeted should the Third Reich regain an overseas colonial empire, but he was not alone in his aversion to conflict. Rudolf Asmis, division head within the KPA also saw a future

National Socialist empire in Africa as one that would be based on a peaceful return – administered through treaties and not war.77

Mutterland als Muster: A German Plan for Future Nazi Colonies Overseas

Until 1939 Kummetz’s plans for a Colonial Police Law followed closely the

Kaiserreich’s organization of the Schutztruppe. Even as a member of the SS, Kummetz did not fully accept the Nazi racial doctrine, at least not where it affected what he saw as efficient colonial policy. Kummetz did agree with the sentiments of Humann-Hainhofen who not only envisioned a “new” Nazi colonialism, but also colonial education for the police, SS, Ordnungspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst that was based not on propaganda, but

75 “Bock über seine Dienstreise nach München und Berlin,” 13 January 1942, PAA geheim 119/182. Cf. Patrick Bernhard, “Die Kolonialachse,” in Lutz Klinkhammer, Amedeo Osti Guerrazzi, and Thomas Schlemmer, eds. Die “Achse” im Krieg: Politik Ideologie und Kriegführung 1939-1945 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2010), 163. 76 “Geheimrat Methner an Kummetz,” 14 July 1939, BAB R 1001/9714. 77 Rudolf Asmis, Grundlagen und Ziele der künftigen deutschen Kolonialverwaltung,” PAA Nachlass Asmis III/12, 2. 202 only the transfer of practical colonial knowledge.78 Kummetz even critiqued the colonial political education established by his colleague in the KPA, Paul Schnoeckel, for being too heavy handed and overladen with useless information, noting of course that his own years of experience as leader of colonial police education prepared him to make the necessary changes to this pedagogy.79 He disagreed however, with the broader notion that Germany’s future colonial activities could only be based upon the racial knowledge of National Socialism.80 Nowhere is this clearer than in his first draft a Colonial Police

Law in 1938.

Among Kummetz’s many orders concerning the organization and implementation of a colonial police force in Germany’s future colonies was the order to draft a Colonial

Police Law. In it Kummetz argued that a strong police presence in the colonies was a practical necessity. Adding that, “The cultural backwardness of the Schutzgebiete and that of its inhabitants creates a heightened sense of insecurity for public life that only an energetic implementation of government authority in the form of police regulation can resolve.”81 Again, his discussion of cultural backwardness was more reminiscent of nineteenth-century forms of racism and national chauvinism than the more radical forms of biological racism of the Third Reich. Kummetz himself, noted that the future German colonial police must be organized along three lines: 1) the current German Law, 2) the old regulations of the German colonies, and 3) the current colonial administrations of the

78 Humann-Hainhofen an Heinrich Himmler, “Abschrift,” 8 February 1938, BAB NS 19/4161. 79 Fritz Kummetz an Ministerialdirecktor Dr. Ruppel, 8 July 1939, BAB R 1001/9714. 80 Humann-Hainhofen an Heinrich Himmler, “Abschrift.” 81 Fritz Kummetz, “Grundlegende Vorarbeiten über Das Koloniale Polizeirecht,” 1 October 1938, BAB R 1001/9759, 1. 203 mandate powers.82 The indigenous population may have been “culturally backwards” as

Kummetz saw it, but it was not inherently so.

Racism was not new to Nazi colonial planning and had already been prevalent within the colonial empire of the German Kaiserreich that Kummetz found so instructive.

In the former German overseas empire the most significant point of contention almost always centered on miscegenation: the taking of black African women as sexual partners by white German men. The racism of the Kaiserreich was not static however, and evolved from expressions of German authority to fears of racial mixing.83 Eventually these fears would result in anti-miscegenation legislation for German Southwest Africa

(1905), German East Africa (1906), and German Samoa (1912). Lora Wildenthal argues that European government intervention into colonial sexuality was not new, although these German bans against colonial miscegenation were. But more than just a novelty, the ban on miscegenation was highly controversial because it called into question the definition of citizenship by basing it on race. Race, as Wildenthal emphasizes, could be mixed. Citizenship could not.84 This was problematic, as neither the 1870 citizenship law, nor its revision in 1913 made mention to race. In fact, no Reich-wide laws would make reference to race until the Nazis banned Jews from positions in the civil service with the infamous Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufbeamtentums in 1933.85

Both the anti-miscegenation legislation of the former Kaiserreich and the Nazi regime’s current emphasis on race undoubtedly influenced Kummetz as he increasingly

82 Ibid. 83 Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 82-85. 84 Ibid., 85. 85 Ibid. 204 made reference to race in his ongoing plans for the police in Germany’s future colonies.

Like Schnoeckel and the rest of the German colonial movement, he had to couch the language of his policies within the worldview of the National Socialist regime. Yet in his two drafts of a law for the colonial police there is not a specific reference to a legal codification of race under the Nazis, neither to the Civil Service Law, nor to the

Nuremberg Laws. In light of this lack of a direct reference we must consider other influences. Kummetz was not only a member of the Party, but also an early supporter of the National Socialist movement. Yet, long before that he was a colonial officer and maintained a strong ambition to return overseas even after Germany had lost its colonies.

So too, were many other officials of the Colonial Policy Office, with whom Kummetz worked as a liaison. Their former experiences and views on racial politics surely influenced Kummetz’s own low priority on race while outlining a Colonial Police Law for the future German colonies.

Let us take for example the case of Ernst Heinrich Sander, who was married in

Lehrbach in 1938. He and his wife had a civil union and had presented the necessary legal documents which had included their birth certificates. Sander’s birth certificate raised red flags when the officials noticed that it was missing the official stamp of the local registrar. Had Sander been born in Germany proper this may not have been a major issue, but Sander was born in Omaruru in 1909 – then German Southwest Africa. Sander and his father affirmed that Ernst’s mother – who had remained in Southwest Africa – belonged to the “white race.”86 Under the then current laws of Nazi Germany, if Sander

86 “Reichsminister des Innerns an Dr. Bielfeld,” October 1940, BAB R 1001/5425. 205 were not to be of “pure blood” his presumably Aryan fiancé would not be able to legally wed him.

The Foreign Office and the Ministry of the Interior quickly mounted an investigation into this case.87 It soon became clear that Ernst’s father had been a German colonist and farmer who had married an Elisabeth Bussel in German Southwest Africa in

1902. Their marriage certificate showed no signs of problems, no qualifications. A member of the Foreign Office and the KPA, Dr. Bielfeld was however, able to ascertain that indeed Elisabeth Bussel was a Bastardmädchen, “a mix of white and black.”88

Bielfeld further offered that there were two possible reasons for why this had not been mentioned on the marriage certificate between Sander and Bussel in 1902. Firstly, there had been no law banning mixed marriages at this point in the German colonies, and indeed, with a lack of German women in the colonies, mixed marriages had been promoted. Secondly, Bussel had come from Walfish Bay, then under British rule and under this rule, would have not been considered a native as such, but rather a British national subject.89 With this status, Bielfeld noted, she would have been able to wed

Sander even after the law German law banning mixed marriages.90 At a time when the

SS was calling for a special mark to be made on the birth certificates of those racial

“bastards” born to French occupational troops in the Rhineland,91 it is telling that Dr.

Bielfeld, a member of the Colonial Policy Office declared the marriage between Sander

87 “Pol. X an den Reichsminister des Innerns,” 17 October 1940, BAB R 1001/5425. Why exactly the Foreign Office was reviewing marriages that occurred two years prior is unclear from the archival sources. 88 “Bielfeld an den Reichsminister des Innerns,” 13 January 1941, BAB R 1001/5425. 89 Bussel is referred to in the documents as an “englische Staatsangehörige,” “Abschrift zu Pol.X. 4259/40,” 1940, BAB R 1001/5425, 5. 90 Ibid. 91 Untitled document, probably 1935, BAB NS 2/143, 36. 206 and Bussel “valid without reservations.”92 For members of the Colonial Policy Office and for Kummetz, the racial policies of the Third Reich were something with which they had to work, but their fundamental views on race rested on their experiences in the colonies and the colonial laws of the Kaiserreich.

In a later critique of the KPA’s memorandum on the schooling of indigenous peoples in Africa, Kummetz maintained the imperialist racism that Europeans had held for decades rather than succumb to a propagandized, radical racism of the Nazis. For example, he argued that beyond manual labor, more attempts were needed to educate black Africans for administrative service, whether as secretaries, typists, or bookkeepers.

As the previous German colonial administration had proven, educating the indigenous population for (subservient) integration into German rule was not only possible, but desirable to maintain peace between whites and blacks living in Africa.93

Kummetz’s implicit critique of National Socialist racial policy went even further in his development of a Colonial Police Law which was more closely based on

Germany’s colonial past and that of its European neighbors than on Nazi ideology. To be sure, Kummetz suggested that the law of the Mutterland served at least as a role model for the colonial police, if not a direct translation of it. But it was not the racial laws of

National Socialism to which he was referring, it was the Prussian legal system – based on the Polizeiverwaltungsgesetz of 1931 – which Kummetz envisioned the colonial police as following, at least until the creation of a Reichspolizeiverwaltungsgesetz.94 Indeed, in the

92 “Bielfeld an den Reichsminister des Innerns.” 93 Fritz Kummetz an Gesandter Bielfeld, “Bermerkungen zu der Denkschrift über ‘Das Eingeborenen- Schulewesen in den künftigen Kolonien’,” 2 Jully 1942, BAB NS 52/17. 94 Kummetz, “Grundlegende Vorarbeiten über Das Koloniale Polizeirecht,” BAB R 1001/9759, 4. 207 absence of that law the planned police deployment in the future colonies of the Third

Reich appeared quite similar to those employed during the Kaiserreich with few exceptions.95 For example, Kummetz still placed significant value on the integration of black Africans into the colonial police forces, a decision based both upon the “loyal

Askari” of German East Africa and reports from the mandate powers they were necessary for the maintenance of effective police authority. Kummetz maintained their necessity based on practical utility, despite the fact that Hitler explicitly expressed his wishes that blacks would not be a part of German police and military cadres.96

Apparently Kummetz was himself aware of his more traditional views towards colonialism, for in a memo from 1937 he qualified his draft of the Colonial Police Law by saying that it is incomplete. He noted that once a Reichs-Polizeiverwaltungsgesetz was in place, it would be necessary to redraft the rights of the colonial police, reworking the points that relate to the Third Reich.97 His anticipation was well placed and in 1940 he was called upon again to draft the organization of the police within Germany’s future colonies.

In Kummetz’s revised draft for the organization of the colonial police he again returned to the idea that the motherland, the home country, should form the basis of

Germany’s administration in the overseas colonies. But whose motherland it would reflect, was not quite clear. At least initially, his post-1940 revisions seemed to suggest a

95 One of the few changes that Kummetz proposed was a reduced role in the importance of the colonial governor. Instead of being subordinate to the governor as the police had been in the former German colonies, Kummetz called for their equality, thus giving the police more independence to exercise their authority. 96 See “Lammers to Epp,” 9 March 1939, BAB R 1501/127190. The Wehrmacht, too, maintained that the use if indigenous black troops was a necessity in the tropical colonies, see Emyael an von Geldern, “Weisse oder farbige Truppen in tropischen Kolonien,” undated, likely 1941, BA-MA RW 19/1566, 15. 97 Fritz Kummetz, “Vermerk,” 1 October 1937, BAB R 1001/9759. 208 movement from policies based in the Kaiserreich to those more indicative of the Nazi worldview. His outline from 1937 only mentioned National Socialist racial policies in a discussion of sexual relations between Europeans and “coloreds” (Farbigen), which on the basis of the Nuremberg Laws needed to be regulated.98 Neither the form this regulation would take, nor a justification for it, were mentioned. In his later draft of the

Richtlinien für den Entwurf der Kolonialen Polizeiordnung in 1940, the role of race, especially the relationship between white Europeans and black Africans took on a stronger role. Still based primarily off of Prussian legal code, the new draft also incorporated the “new” Danziger Polizeirecht “that was built from the foundations of

National Socialism.”99 Kummetz explained that because these laws were meant to organize the police in tropical colonies, where there was primarily a colored (farbige) population, race relations would have to be regulated. In this later version of Kummetz’s outline for the organization of the police in the expected German colonies race relations played a more central role. Indeed, as Kummetz wrote: “The mission of the police in the colonies is the same as that at home (in der Heimat).”100 Despite the more thorough address that this law made to race, these changes reflected more than just an appeal to the racial ideology of National Socialism. It is clear from archival sources that these changes were more directly influenced by the practical experiences of Italy’s new overseas empire.

98 Ibid., 27. 99 Fritz Kummetz, “Richtlinien für den Entwurf der Kolonialen Polizeiordnung (Gesetz über die Polizei in den deutschen Kolonien),” 30 April 1940, BAB R 1001/9759. 100 Ibid. 209

In May 1939 Kummetz, along with head of the colonial police General Karl

Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, visited the Italian colonial police school in Tivoli outside of Rome and met with the Italian chief of colonial police general Riccardo Maraffa. In the three- day meeting the representatives of both fascist regimes discussed the organization of the

Italian colonial police, their education, and how the two regimes might cooperate more closely on colonial goals. The result of these discussions was an incorporation of fascist

Italy’s experience in its colonies into the administrative organization of the Third Reich.

As Kummetz noted in a report to the KPA’s director Ritter von Epp, “Although largely made in the subtropical colonies, a large part of the Italians’ experiences can certainly be transferred to our tropical colonies and be utilized to the colonial relationship at home.”101

The idea of Mutterland als Muster or that the colonial administration should be modeled after the metropole encompasses Nazism’s colonial planning, both in its initial forms that incorporated the actual colonial traditions and administrative organization of the Kaiserreich and in its later, increasing deference to Nazi ideology, especially as it appealed to a biological definition of race. But it is also fitting that in his colonial planning Kummetz would adopt the term Mutterland – as opposed to the German term for homeland, Vaterland – as it was the colonial policies of the Italian metropole, the

Italian Mutterland, that Nazi colonial planning would increasingly adopt.

101 Kummetz an von Epp, “Betr. Bericht über das Ergebnis der Dienstreise zum italienischen Kolonialinisterium, 15 June 1939, BAB R 1001/9714, 11. 210

Experimentierfeld: Fascist Colonial Planning Across Borders

Writing an instruction manual about colonial propaganda and education in the

Third Reich, the contemporary Dr. J. Petersen argued, “Colonial space is as necessary for the Volk as a playground is to a school.”102 It was a place for the young nation to stretch its legs and strengthen its nerve. Even Methner, who was skeptical of following too closely the path established by Fascist Italy had warned that Germany must gain colonial experience in praxis, for the “green table” was the death of all colonial politics.103 Two years after the colonial collaboration between Germany and Italy had intensified,

Methner went further claiming that, “colonies are the training grounds for the homeland.”104 If it was the Italian colonial experience which was to serve as Germany’s colonial Experimentierfeld,105 how did this process of information exchange work and what role did the Fascist Italian empire play as proxy for Nazi colonies?

Well before it was a regime, the National Socialist Party had looked on Italian

Fascism with fascination. So too, did the German colonial movement under the Third

Reich, as we have seen. Italy’s settler polices resonated with Nazism’s own claim for

Lebensraum, but more importantly the German colonial movement and the Nazi

102 J. Petersen, “Der Koloniale Gedanke in der Schule: Sinn, Aufgabe und Wege kolonialer Schularbeit,” Deutsches Ringen um kolonialen Raum, Heft 1 (Hamburg: Paul Hartung, 1937), 7. 103 Methner an Kummetz, 14 July 1939, BAB R 1001/9714. 104 Methner, Vortrag an der Kolonialpolizei-Schule Wien, “Deutsche Kolonialpolitik,” BAB R 20/71. 105 I borrow the term Experimentierfeld from Aram Mattioli, Experimentierfeld der Gewalt. Der Abessinienkrieg und seine internationale Bedeutung 1935-1941 (Zürich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 2005), although a similar process of knowledge transfer is noted in Victoria de Grazia, “Die Radikalisierung der Bevölkerungspolitik im faschistischen Italien: Mussolinis ‘Rassenstaat’,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26 (2000): 219-54; and Sebastian Conrad, “‘Eingeborenenpolitik’ in Kolonie und Metropole: “Erziehung zur Arbeit” in Ostafrika und Ostwestfalen,” in Sebastian Conrad, Jürgen Osterhammel eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt 1871-1914, (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 107-28. For someome of the most influential arguments on the importance of the colonies to the metropole, see Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 211 leadership had recognized the motivational and integrative power that colonial rhetoric and actions had on the population.106 To be sure, the KPA and RKB modeled their mission after this Italian invention. Kummetz, too, had already looked to the colonial experiences of Fascist Italy in his own plans since 1935. Indeed, it was the Italian model of colonial police organization that directly influenced Kummetz’s model. His meeting in Rome further influenced the way that Kummetz believed the colonial police should be structured.

A biological understanding of race was one such feature that plans for a future

German colonial police adopted from the Italian Fascists’ experience in their colonies.

To an extent both regimes had already practiced biological racism domestically. The pro- and anti-natal policies directed primarily at women in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy demonstrate that the two fascist regimes understood the nation in biological terms.107 But unlike these policies, which were only similar, fascists now collaborated in the construction of a colonial racial policy based on actual overseas experience. Following the model of the Italians, German colonial police would have to prove their

Tropentauglichkeit, or physical fitness for service in the tropics. In the Italian case for example, eligible applicants to the colonial police were required to be between the ages

106 Patrick Bernhard, “Die ‘Kolonialachse’: Der NS-Staat und Italienisch-Afrika 1935-1943,” 148. 107 See Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany,” in Renate Bridenthal et al., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Edward Ross Dickinson, “Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Reflections On Our Discourse Concerning ‘Modernity,’” Central European History 37 (2004): 1-48; and Edward Ross Dickinson, “The German Empire: An Empire?” History Workshop Journal 66 (2008): 129-162. 212 of 18 and 26.108 A German officer of the same rank was also to be between the ages of

18 and 26.109 Other similarities included height, proper vaccinations, etc. Indeed, the ability of the “white races” to work in Africa which had long been discussed in the colonial circles of Germany for years were now being reevaluated with the assistance of

Italian overseas experience.110

Beyond practical justifications, the biological metrics of fitness for colonial deployment also had ideological reasons; both regimes sought to send their best men forth into the colonies. In the Italian case, men interested in joining the colonial police not only needed to be members of the National Fascist Party, but also needed to prove their belonging to the “Italian race.”111 While interested German applicants were not necessarily required to be members of the NSDAP, the Civil Service Law of 1933 insisted that they be members of the Aryan race. For the Italian colonial police, married officer were preferred, whereas marriage was a prerequisite for entrance in to the German colonial police. Fascist Italy adopted its stance on marriage after the war in Abyssinia, fearing the degenerative affects racial mixing could have on the national body.112 Despite having had anti-miscegenation legislation in Germany’s former colonies, it is clear from

Kummetz’s discussion with Maraffa that it was Italy’s contemporary anti-miscegenation laws in East Africa and the difficulty in enforcing them that heavily influenced

108 “Übersetzung aus ‘Regolamento Generale…’,” undated, likely 1937, BAB R 1001/9714, 1. 109 Kurt Daluege an Reichsführer-SS und Chef der Deutschen Polizei im Reichsministerium des Innern, 31 October1940, BAB R 19/463, 4. 110 Such discussions even made it into popular culture via the cinema. See Germanin, directed by Max W. Kimmich, (Berlin: UFA, 1943) and La Habanera, directed by Detlev Sierck, (Berlin: UFA, 1937). 111 “Übersetzung aus ‘Regolamento Generale…’,” undated, likely 1937, BAB R 1001/9714, 1. 112 See de Grazia, “Die Radikalisierung der Bevölkerungspolitik im faschistischen Italien: Mussolinis ‘Rassenstaat’,” 219-54. 213

Kummetz’s own recommendation that all German colonial officers be married.113

Kummetz’s interest in Italy’s precedent is all the more significant when we consider that most of the German men who applied for colonial service were members of the SS and as such were already under strict orders for a “racially pure” marriage. Yet it was not the racial politics of the SS that Kummetz found convincing, but rather Italy’s own practical experiences in Africa.

Indeed, the conflict over racial propaganda and racial ideology of the Third Reich on an international stage and between the two regimes belies the close cooperation and knowledge transfer that took place on the ground. The attempt in 1939 for example to merge the broader racial ideologies of the two regimes by changing the Italian guidelines for colonial service from requiring Italian blood to being a member of the Aryan race did little to overcome the radical differences in racial propaganda.114 Even as recent scholarship has pointed to the ways in which Mussolini’s regime had its own brand of racial antisemitism before the adoption of the leggi razziali in 1938, Italian antisemitism never compared to the radical ideas of racial hygiene and racial superiority of Nazism.115

In terms of propaganda there was little collaboration in terms of racial politics, as late as

1936 Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte was still critiquing what it saw a weak racial

113 “Fragebogen über die Polizei in den Italienischen Kolonien,” 1939, BAB R 1001/9714, 2, 4. 114 Il Magistrato dell’Ordine, 7 July 1939, 77, Übersetzung, undated, BAB R 1001/9714, 3. 115 On Italy see Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Esmonde Robertson, “Race as a Factor in Mussolini’s Policy in Africa and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988); de Grazia, “Die Radikalisierung der Bevölkerungspolitik im faschistischen Italien: Mussolinis ‘Rassenstaat’.” On Germany see the discussion of the “racial state” first posited by Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann in The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and the latest questioning thereof at the conference “Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany” Indiana University, Bloomington, 2009. 214 consciousness in Fascist Italy. Writing in response to Italy’s recent ban on sexual relations between races in Italian East Africa, the professional journal wrote:

In its assessment of the racial question Italy is going another way than National Socialist Germany. While our answer to the racial question is based on the necessity of the laws of life and basic facts, the Italian racial conscience is based on political-historical facts. Based on political grounds, Italy wishes not to have racial mixing in East Africa, because as the Italians understand it, half-breeds (Mischlinge) of two different races do not even produce the racial values of the lower race, degenerate much more quickly and above all – and this is the crucial political factor – these half-breeds reproduce even faster than the Neger, which could quickly become a danger to the Italian kingdom.”116

For Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte the Italians needed to make race a fundamental part of their policies, regardless of context. A cause for further concern was that by 1939 the racial laws in Italian East Africa had not yet been fully enforced and that every now and then authorities turned their head to obvious transgressions.117

Nonetheless the colonial experiences of Italy in Africa significantly influenced

National Socialist planning, even if the National Socialist regime maintained much of its own racial policy. Ironically, bringing the ideology of the metropole to the colony, in this case National Socialist ideas of race, was another borrowed tradition from Italy’s own colonial experiences. National Socialist racial policy, however, was not the primary concern of Kummetz in his planning for a future colonial police administration. As we have seen, a strict racial ideology was only a factor if it helped Germany to regain and create an efficient colonial empire and here the Italians had further methods to offer.

116 Olfenick, “Ausserdeutsche Rassengesetzgebung der Gegenwart,” Der Deutsche Polizeibeamte (1937), 9, 297. 117 Kummetz, “Notizen über das Ergebnis der Besprechungen in Rom,” 7. 215

After returning from Rome, one of the changes that Kummetz proposed to his earlier visions of a future police force in the German colonies was to give the police more sovereignty. In the colonies of the Kaiserreich, the police were subordinate to the colonial governor. Under Kummetz’s new provisions the police would be the governor’s equal, acting not as his representative, but as that of the regime in Germany.118 Realizing that the colonial police officer often found himself alone in the country, it was important he not only be trained to act independently, but that he have the authority to do so.119

This reorganization did call for both a stationary police force as well as roving bands of independent police troops acting entirely on their own: a strategy taken directly from

Fascist Italy’s experience in the Abyssinian War. It was part of a plan to reduce the independent control that individual governors once maintained, at the same time centralize police organization at the Reich level.

Despite the borrowing of tactics, Kummetz pointed out that this reorganization had already been considered in the former German colonies. In particular he noted that the redistribution of responsibilities for the governors and local leaders on one hand and that of the police on the other was already planned for German Southwest Africa, but was never realized because of the outbreak of the First World War.120 More ardent National

Socialists cared little about the justification, as Kummetz’s reorganization of the colonial police suited the broader consolidation of power that the Nazi government increasingly

118 Kummetz, “Richtlinien für den Entwurf der Kolonialen Polizeiordnung (Gesetz über die Polizei in den deutschen Kolonien).” 119 Kummetz to Chef der Ordnungspolizei Daluege,” 22 April 1940, BAB R 1001/9759. 120 Kummetz, “Richtlinien für den Entwurf der Kolonialen Polizeiordnung (Gesetz über die Polizei in den deutschen Kolonien).” On the restructing of the colonial police before the First World War see Jakob Zollmann, Koloniale Herrschaft und ihre Grenzen: Die Kolonialpolizei in Deutsch-Südwestafrika, 1894- 1915 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). 216 attempted to construct. Indeed the police forces of Germany first became unified under the leadership of Heinrich Himmler during the Nazi regime in 1936. Kummetz never denied however, that his plans were influenced by the cooperation between National

Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy in the realm of colonial politics. This Italian influence is most directly seen in the unification of a colonial police force and the militarization thereof, the validity and utility of which, Kummetz and head of the KPA von Epp noted, had been proven by the experiences of the Italians in Italian East

Africa.121

The meeting between Kummetz, Pfeffer-Wildenbruch, and the Italian colonial administrators in 1939 had proven successful in offering Germany a proxy colonial experience from which it learned and used to form its own outlines for a future colonial empire. Although this meeting marked a radical extension of Nazi Germany’s interest in

Fascist Italy’s colonial practice, it by no means ended the transnational cooperation. By

1940 German officers were being directly trained by the Italians at their colonial police school in Tivoli, offering further colonial experience to a colonial Nazi Germany that was still without colonies. Initially conceived as a temporary solution to colonial education until Germany developed its own colonial police school, the direct exchange of fascist personnel lasted over a year and included four cohorts of Nazi Schutzpolizei,

Ordnungspolizei, and SS officers. To celebrate the early successes of this collaboration and the holiday season, head of the Ordnungspolizei Kurt Daluege ordered two of his officers to bring German gifts to the school. His directions however, stated explicitly to

121 Kummetz, “Richtlinien für den Entwurf der Kolonialen Polizeiordnung (Gesetz über die Polizei in den deutschen Kolonien).” 217 send the 100 liters of Munich beer to the embassy to avoid unnecessary customs taxes, a reminder that although colonial ideas and experiences flowed freely between these two fascist regimes, beer did not.122

One year following the training of German colonial police in Italy, the first

German colonial police school opened at Oranienburg. At its opening head of the

Ordnungspolizei Kurt Daluege made a speech in which he firmly placed colonial revisionism and the colonial police at the center of the Nazism:

The German policeman is the carrier of state authority, not just any civil servant that goes through the motions of enforcing foreign, incomprehensible laws with a billy-club, rather a man from the Volk, who admonishingly, nurturingly, instructively exercises his office as representative of the Volksgemeinschaft.123

That this Nazi colonialism and its enforcers were products of a process of a transnational exchange of ideology and practice was obviously absent.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly as Klaus Hildebrandt, Woodruff Smith, and many others argued in the 1960s and 1980s, colonialism under the Third Reich was an integral part of the regime’s foreign policy. But at a time in which we are all trying to recognize the global dimensions and implications of national histories, it is important to recognize the mutual influence that international and domestic policies had on one another. We need not to just reconceptualize the nation outside the state, but to recognize the effects that nations, states, and cross-border interactions of individual actors had on one another. Indeed

122 Luther an das Deutsche Botschaft Rom, December 1940, PAA Inland II A/B, 22. 123 Kurt Daluege, “Entwurf für den Vortrag vor den Auslandspresse am 3. Februar 1941,” BAB R 19/382. 218

Hannah Arendt’s argument in her The Origins of Totalitarianism had more to do with the transnational, European phenomenon of colonialism and racism, than with a specific

German peculiarity.124 Even the hypernationalist Nazi regime was susceptible to a range of foreign influences that extended far beyond Germany’s own borders.

Viewing Nazi colonial ambitions just from the point of view of foreign relations or even domestic politics misses the wealth of international and transnational resonance that such racial arguments had across the globe and runs the risk of both reifying a rigid dichotomy of exchange and reproducing historical propaganda as fact. Even if of a less extreme nature, the fact that other European states were asking the same questions regarding race-mixing and providing similar solutions of segregation challenges the national peculiarity arguments that some historians continue to attribute to German history.125

As a further challenge to this notion of a German national peculiarity is the fact that once the war began, the German colonial movement’s international cooperation concerning colonial policy was largely limited to an interaction with fascist Italy. The same regime whose actions in the Ethiopian War an awed German population praised.126

This is not to say that we need now to draw a line from Abyssinia to Auschwitz,127 but if

124 See the chapter “Race-Thinking before Racism” in Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; see also Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Hannah Arendt’s Ghost: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz,” Central European History, 42 (2009): 279-300. 125 See Jürgen Zimmerer, Vom Windhuk nach Auschwitz?; also Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction; for a broader overview Matthew Fitzpatrick, “The pre-history of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit debates and the abject colonial past.” Central European History 41 (2008): 477-503. 126 See Rudolf Xylander, Die Eroberung Abessiniens; and Mattioli, Experimentierfeld der Gewalt. 127 See e.g. Patrick Bernhard, “Die ‘Kolonialachse’ in Schlemmer, etal.; Patrick Bernhard “Repression transnational. Die Polizeizusammenarbeit zwischen Drittem Reich und italienischem Faschismus, 1933- 1943,” in: Die Polizei im NS-Staat. Beiträge eines internationalen Symposiums an der Deutschen Hochschule der Polizei in Münster, edited by Wolfgang Schulte, (Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag für 219 we are to recognize and accept that Nazi imperialism drew from a transnational,

European “colonial archive” of experience,128 then we still need to pay close attention to which volumes it was reading.

Polizeiwissenschaft), 2009; Patrick Bernhard, “Konzertierte Gegnerbekämpfung im Achsenbündnis: Die Polizei im Dritten Reich und faschistischen Italien 1933-1943,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte (2011): 229-262; and Patrick Bernhard, “Borrowing from Mussolini: Nazi Germany’s Colonial Aspirations in the Shadow of Italian Expansionism,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41 (2013): 617- 643. 128 See Gerwarth et al., “Hannah Arendt’s Ghost: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz.” 220

Conclusion

Presiding over the meeting of the Colonial Policy Office on 10 February 1941

General von Epp outlined the important developments of the war and declared,

“Germany is holding a trump hand!”1 The order from Hitler later that year to proceed with plans to create a formal Colonial Ministry confirmed for the German colonial movement that a return overseas was imminent.

Despite his certainty that a return overseas was moments away, von Epp did note at the meeting in 1941 that Italy had lost the war in Africa. Italy could no longer be relied upon for colonial support. Yet even as the war worsened for Germany, von Epp and his German colonial movement comrades did not give up their efforts at colonial revisionism. As early as November 1942 requests from officials in the Nazi leadership began to request that von Epp shut down the KPA and RKB and end the dream of overseas empire.2 Von Epp refused. He continued this refusal even after Hitler declared on 13 January 1943 that all men and women whose work did not support the war effort be transferred to war-critical positions. Only two months later in March did von Epp finally concede and close the RKB and KPA.3 Despite the loss of its National Socialist leader and the closing of its formal colonial organizations, the German colonial movement carried on with it goals. Nearly a year later on 16 November 1943 the

German colonial movement celebrated the 35th anniversary of the Kolonial-Institut der

Hansischen Universität – this despite the fact that the library’s books lay in ashes from

1 “Bericht über die Sitzung am 10. Februar 1941 unter Leitung des Reichsleiters General Ritter von Epp,” BAB NS 20/121. 2 Bormann an von Epp, 28 November 1942, BAB NS 18/153, 5-6; Goebbels an von Epp, 1 December 1942, BAB NS 18/153, 9. 3 Von Epp an Lammers, 8 March 1943, BAB R 43/3598, 27. 221

British bombs.4 Only with Germany’s ultimate capitulation in 1945 did the colonial movement’s dreams of empire finally come to an end.

*****

Reviewing the documents of the German federal archives in the late 1950s a group of German scholars argued that in comparison to offices that contributed to the military, the Colonial Policy Office was “for lack of really urgent work, clearly condemned to insignificance,” and that “it uselessly wasted money and resources during the war for misty dreams of the future.”5 They were correct, all of the plans for a future overseas empire never came to fruition. Historically the German colonial movement may have failed, but as the object of historical analysis it successfully demonstrates the continued importance of overseas colonialism to a sense of German nationalism and national identity under the Third Reich, the fluid and variable understandings of race under fascism, and the power of colonialism to create a new shared vision of the nation that could bridge the borders of two ultra-nationalist nation-states, Germany and Italy.

Colonialism remained a strong component of German nationalism and national identity, even after the First World War when Germany ceased to be an imperial power.

Through the example of the German colonial movement and the various colonial organizations from which it drew, it is clear that for many, overseas colonialism was about more than just the possession of foreign territories, but had also become tantamount

4 “35 Jahrfeier des Kolonial-Instituts der Hansischen Universität, Reden und Ansprachen anlässlich des “Überseetages” der Hansischen Universität am 16. November 1943 im Kaisersaal des Rathhauses zu Hamburg,” BAB R 4901/13147. 5 H.J. Neufeldt, J. Huck, and G. Tessin eds., Zur Geschichte der Ordnungspolizei 1936-1945, Schriften des Bundesarchivs, 3, (Koblenz, 1957), 73-74. 222 to a sense of Germanness. Because of this, the German colonial movement was able to weather the fifteen years of ‘postcoloniality’ and liberal democratic politics of the

Weimar Republic – during which ideas of colonial revisionism received little traction – and remain faithful to its goals of returning overseas. Seeing an opportunity in the rise of

National Socialism to realize their ambitions, many within the movement supported the

Nazi regime and the chance for a restored overseas empire that it promised.

As the German colonial movement and the National Socialist regime negotiated their new alliance it became apparent just how deeply engrained this German colonial identity was. At first the Nazi regime promoted the efforts of the German colonial movement to broaden a strong colonial consciousness within the German nation, allowing the regime to enjoy the national unity and political stability that such a broadening of the colonial idea created. The German colonial movement, too, tried to ingratiate itself to the regime, adopting the rhetoric of the National Socialist worldview to demonstrate the complementarity of National Socialist ideology and colonial revisionism.

The German colonial movement, however, was not just another group that kowtowed to the whims of the Nazi leadership, nor did it allow its message to be silenced by the attempts of the regime to regulate it. When the Nazi leadership made clear that its expansionist interests were in Eastern Europe and not overseas, the German colonial movement and its press changed the strategy of their colonial revisionist propaganda campaign from one that adopted the rhetoric of the National Socialism to one that co- opted it. The result of this tactic was a colonial nationalism under the Third Reich that was increasingly at odds with the goals of the Nazi leadership.

223

The determination of the movement to return overseas did not only position colonialist against National Socialist in the public sphere of the press and colonial propaganda. It also created further rifts that extended into the Party and its policy creation and challenged the loyalty of its members at the individual level. These tensions are particularly clear in the colonial education of the Third Reich where the traditional colonial schools were attacked by leaders of the new regime for their supposedly antiquated and ill-fitting dreams of overseas empire. Yet it was not only the idea of overseas colonialism that many within the National Socialist leadership found anathema to regime’s goals of continental expansion in Europe, but also the politics of their leaders.

When these directors’ positions could not be saved, they were replaced with Party members, and when they could be saved it was only because of the efforts of relatively high-standing Nazi officials. But rather than demonstrating a triumph of Nazi political power and organization, these examples demonstrate the opposite. Both the replacement director and the savior were National Socialists, but they were also members of the

German colonial movement and staunch supporters of overseas empire. Even when the

Nazi regime created its own schools to align colonial revisionism with its racial worldview, Nazi members of the colonial movement were there to reinterpret the directives of the Party leadership and keep the visions of a restored overseas empire alive.

Studies that follow the continuities of German colonialism merely to find links to the

Holocaust, miss the important ways in which overseas colonialism still remained relevant under National Socialism and how the German colonial movement challenged the direction of the Nazi leaderships’ expansionist goals and racial ideology.

224

As divisive as the German colonial movement could be to the National Socialist

Party, it also created a unity that extended beyond a domestic colonial nationalism to include an alliance with Fascist Italy. Indeed, it was colonialism in the form of the

Abyssinian War that first initiated the Rome-Berlin axis. Within the German colonial movement both members of the Party and non-members alike, supported this alliance and the promise Italy offered to help Germany restore its overseas empire. Authors and journalists on both sides of the Alps collaborated in the creation of a unified fascist colonial identity, while Nazi colonial planners actively exchanged ideas and men with their Italian allies in the creation of new colonial policies.

The growing cooperation of the German colonial movement with Italian Fascism may have coincided with the diplomatic coming together of Germany and Italy, but it was not dictated by it. Indeed, it was overseas colonialism that motivated the German colonial movement to seek cooperation with Fascist Italy, not an adherence to politics.

This is especially clear in the collaborative efforts of the German and Italian colonial presses and in the lessons colonial planners drew from Italy’s contemporary colonial experiences as each related to race. A rabid antisemitism may have been a defining feature of National Socialism, but it was a diplomatic and practical hindrance for the

German Colonial movement’s revisionist goals. The German colonial movement was indeed racist, but it was much more interested in the racial lessons it could learn from

Italy’s present overseas empire than in finding ways to incorporate the ideology of

Nazism into colonial policies. Indeed, when a colonial police education and policy were finally introduced in Germany they drew directly from the Italians’ overseas experience

225 and not the Nazi worldview. This biological racism that was so influential was focused on the creation of a racial ‘other’, but the transnational network of fascist colonialists also used it to affirm their own identity. Rather than notions of Aryan and non-Aryan, overseas colonialism allowed for the creation of a different national community that extended beyond the borders of the state and affirmed an alternative racial vision of a new, fascist Europe.

In the end this vision of a new Europe was never realized, nor would Italian- trained German colonial troops set foot on African land. Yet, the story of the German colonial movement demonstrates the significance that overseas colonialism continued to play well after Germany ceased to be a colonial power and the influence that colonial revisionism had in creating a German national identity under National Socialism.

Despite its national specificities, this colonial nationalism was not only similar to that which existed in Fascist Italy, but was actively influenced by Italian Fascism and its overseas empire. This fascist collaboration in overseas empire not only challenges the bounded nature of nations and states, but also demonstrates the mobility of racial thinking and ideologies. Indeed, it was not only ideas of colonialism and nation, but also of biological racism, that were shared and exchanged in both directions across the borders of

National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy.

226

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