Hitler, 25

International capital and the victor powers—the two were indistinguishable in Hitler’s mind—had thus reduced Germany to the status of a ‘colony’. The purpose of Versailles, he argued, was ‘to make Germany ripe’ for its fate as ‘a colony of international capital’, to ‘soften up our people’ in order to make them ‘international slave workers’. He lamented that Germany was a ‘wage slave of international capital’. Germany was no more than a ‘colony of the international Jewish finance syndicate’, Hitler argued, thus making the German people ‘the slave of the outside world’. In April 1922, he fumed that ‘we practically no longer have an independent German Reich, but really just a colony of the world outside’…

All this was embedded in a broader, though idiosyncratic, critique of European imperialism. On the one hand, Hitler was bitterly critical of the British Empire . ‘Where was the law,’ he asked, ‘when England flooded China and India with opium and North America with spirits in order to undermine these people the better to dominate them?’ He also charged that Britain had ‘reduced the Irish people from 8.5 to 4.5 million [through the potato famine]’, and had ‘cynically allowed’ some 29,000 Boer women to die a miserable death in the ‘concentration camps of South Africa’. He paid black people the back-handed compliment that he would rather have ‘100 Negroes in the hall than one Jew’. On the other hand, Hitler objected not so much to colonialism as to what he would later call the ‘negrification’ of the Germans…

The notion that Germany was being enslaved and reduced to the status of an African colony was widespread at the time, not just in far right circles. Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish veteran of the same division in which Hitler had served, who was later a victim of Nazism, wrote that as ‘The way the Entente powers talk of and to Germany makes me as bitter as if I personally were being treated like a negro’; on another occasion he compared the situation of the Reich with that of the Congo. Many Germans experienced occupation, reparations and the presence of enemy colonial troops as a form not only of subjugation but of emasculation, a sentiment which extended from the far right to the SPD and even women’s rights groups concerned about sexual violence. The Weimar Germany in which Hitler operated was thus both colonized and post-colonial in an era of continuing western imperialism. Defeat by the western powers had turned the international racial order upside down.

There had in fact been long-standing Anglo-Saxon doubts about the whiteness of Germans. As far back as 1751, in his Observations concerning the increase of Mankind, peopling of countries etc., Benjamin Franklin had included them along with the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes as a people of ‘swarthy complexion’. He ‘excepted’ only the ‘Saxons’—probably meaning the Lower-Saxons, whose ancestors had settled England. These, Franklin said, ‘with the English, make the principal body of White People on the face of the earth’. More recently, in 1916, the prominent American theorist Madison Grant published his lament for The Passing of the Great Race, which also identified Germans and Scandinavians as of clearly lower racial value than the Anglo-Celts, though preferable to eastern Europeans, Jews or blacks; of this, more later.