60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

100 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness
Racism here does not mean simply the ascription of various characteristics
to diff erent races and the consequent valuation of races within
an assumed ethnic hierarchy, but a conception of the world ‘that
is applied both internally and externally and can be defi ned as the
comprehensive “biologization [Biologisierung] of the social”’ (Herbert
1995: 13). Seen under this aspect, the victims of the forced sterilisation
policy, of the murder of ‘life unworthy of life’, the Soviet prisoners of
war, as well as the Jews were all victims of the same inhumane ideology
(Burleigh 2000: 345-381). 11
In this racist view of history and society, the Volk is understood as
an organic whole, whose preservation and growth was to be ensured
under any circumstances. Eugenic measures like breeding and the
‘purifi cation’ of the ‘body of the Volk’ from ‘impurities’ and ‘sickness’
were to guarantee the survival and rise of the German Volk in a
struggle for existence understood in Social Darwinian terms. 12 What
the Volk, whose greatness lay in the number of its ‘racially healthy’
members, lacked above all was ‘living space’. The conception of space
was thus directly associated with the racial ideology. It incorporated
ideas of economic autarchy as well as the idea of a settlement area for
Germans, which was to be found in Poland and Russia where they
would fi nd the living space that they supposedly lacked. 13
Race and space were also at the heart of colonialism. Above all, the
settler colonies, like the later German occupation policy in the East,
created an economy characterised by the attempt to gain an enormous
dependent territory. This was not to involve a partnership of
equals but the subjugation, on occasion even the annihilation, of the
original inhabitants. This policy was motivated and justifi ed by racism
– that is, humanity’s division into higher races, destined to rule,
and lower races, destined to be subjugated. At the lowest end of the
scale were groups that were doomed to destruction, or that were to be
deliberately murdered (see McGregor 1997, Dubow 1995). 14
11 This is clearly evident in the fact that the practice of ‘euthanasia’ was fi rst applied to
‘a-socials’ and the disabled, then used in concentration camps, and its practitioners
were later used by Himmler when the mass murder of the Jews began.
12 There is a relatively large literature on this question. See Burleigh (1994), Weingart et al.
(1988). On the international context, see Kühl (1997, 1994).
13 For a striking example of the settlement policy, see Wendy Lower’s interesting article
(2002) on the Hegewalt project, Himmler’s model for an active SS settlement policy.
Lower uses the term ‘colonial’ more or less synonymously with ‘settler’.
14 For a comparison of eugenic and racist discourses in Australia and Germany, even if
direct infl uence is not proven, see Barta (2001).