60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

colonialism and the holocaust – towards an archeology of genocide 105
The claim to utter disposability of the indigenous population according
to the colonial masters’ economic and security requirements had
been evident even earlier in other colonies in the readiness to resettle
the native population according to economic needs, to cram them
into reserves, or expel them completely from the colonial territory.
Whether in the Indian reservations in North America or the reserves
in German Southwest Africa, the common thread was that people
deemed superfl uous to the new colonial society were simply physically
removed. Not surprisingly, the land to which they were to be
resettled was almost without exception unusable. That the economic
and social decline that all too often ensued in such cases was intended
or at least willingly accepted, suggests pre-existing genocidal
tendencies. The German plans, naturally on a much larger scale, for
the resettlement of populations in Eastern Europe and the cramming
together of Jews in ‘reserves’ may have borrowed from these experiences.
At the very least, the fact that the reserve policy was regarded
as ‘normal’ practice in handling indigenous populations meant that it
was not perceived as being criminal. 28
Genocides: similarities and diff erences
The most radical consequence of a policy of conquest and settlement
based on the conceptions of ‘race’ and ‘space’ was genocide. This section
attempts to explore the connections between the genocidal moments
in colonialism and National Socialism. It shows how genocidal
tendencies developed at the colonial frontier and how their degree of
organisation and the responsible groups of perpetrators in many ways
resembled the state crimes of modern bureaucratic genocide. However,
it is necessary fi rst to diff erentiate between how colonial and Nazi
genocides are to be understood.
In the Third Reich, genocidal policy arose in such a concentrated
fashion and was directed against so many diff erent groups in such a
short period that the genocides can justifi ably be seen as one, if not
the main characteristic of National Socialism. Although they were
the product of the same policy aimed at achieving a racial utopia, the
Nazi genocides can be diff erentiated according to the motives and
methods used for destroying the various groups of victims. Such a differentiation
is necessary particularly for the sake of comparison with
genocides committed in colonial contexts.
28 Similarly, Gerlach (1998: 262) argues that the so-called territorial plans made the
civilisation break a gradual one.