Quotes. What information consumes is rather obvious it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a. In Germanys extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust. In recent years, some in the African American community have expressed a disconnect from Holocaust topics, seeing the genocide of Jews as someone elses nightmare. After all, African Americans are still struggling to achieve general recognition of the barbarity of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of slavery, the oppression of Jim Crow, and the battle for modern civil rights. For many in that community, the murder of six million Jews and millions of other Europeans happened to other minorities in a faraway place where they had no involvement. However, a deeper look shows that proto Nazi ideology before the Third Reich, the wide net of Nazi era policy, and Hitlers post war legacy deeply impacted Africans, Afro Germans, and African Americans throughout the twentieth century. Americas black community has a mighty stake in this topic. Understanding the German Reich and the Holocaust is important for blacks just as it is for other communities, including Roma, eastern Europeans, people with disabilities, the gay community, Jehovahs Witnesses, and many other groups in addition to Jews. Get The Times of Israels Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories. Army Backward Planning Template' title='Army Backward Planning Template' />Free Sign Up. The dots are well known to many scholars but are rarely connected to form a distinct historical nexus for either the Holocaust or the African American communities. This is understandable. The saga behind these connections started decades before the Third Reich came into existence, in a savage episode on another continent that targeted a completely different racial and ethnic group for death and destruction. But the horrors visited on another defenseless group endured, and became a template for the Final Solution. Students of the Holocaust are accustomed to looking backward long before the Third Reich and long after the demise of the Nazi war machine. African Americans should do the same. Germany comes to Africa. Army Backward Planning Template' title='Army Backward Planning Template' />It is settled, everyday history that Nazi Germany aggressed against its neighbors in part because of a twisted concept known as Lebensraum that is, the self declared mandate to achieve living space for an overcrowded Germany. Lebensraum declared that the Third Reich was inherently entitled to supplant and destroy other nations to advance German biological supremacy. This racist philosophy underpinned Germanys invasion, subjugation, and rape of much of Eastern Europe. However, students of Lebensraum know it was not a Hitlerian concept. Army Backward Planning Template' title='Army Backward Planning Template' />Table of contents. Table of contents. The Associated Press delivers indepth coverage on todays Big Story including top stories, international, politics, lifestyle, business, entertainment, and more. In Germanys extermination program for black Africans, a template for the Holocaust Decades before the Nazis turned to the Jews, German colonialists in Southwest. Rather, it was coined in the last gasp of the nineteenth century by German geographer Friedrich Ratzel. Friedrich Ratzel University of LeipzigIn the second half of the 1. Germany suffered massive urban overcrowding due to its shift from an agrarian society to an industrialized nation. As it changed, Germany found itself in the throes of a concomitant population boom and rampant poverty. Low priced American grain only exacerbated Germanys economic woes. Germans in large numbers were sleeping on city streets. The social upheaval ignited the so called Flight from the East. In the 1. Beethovens Ninth played on for the secure classes, a million desperate Germans boarded steamers with their luggage and their memories, immigrating to American shores. Some 2. 15,0. 00 came in 1. Things did not improve in Germany. In the 1. 88. 0s, another 1. Germans came to America, bringing their beer and brats. Upon arrival to this country, they poured west into such centers as Milwaukee and St. Louis. It was an epic population influx for America that in large measure helped build the continental United States and the nations social fabric. But in the Second Reich, rapid multimillion person population loss and the tearfully destitute conditions propelling the outflow, were devastating to the German national identity. A concept arose Volk ohne Raum, that is, a people without space. As the father of German geopolitics, Ratzel, with his post Darwinian notions of racial supremacy, insisted that colonizing land to create extra living space was the cure for Germanys urban overcrowding. In those turn of the twentieth century days, a weakened Germany turned its focus from the Balkans and the Slavic realms to Africa. Indeed, Ratzel wrote that Africa was an ideal candidate for the push to achieve Lebensraum. Africa, with its wide open spaces and rugged, romantic beauty, had long beckoned white Europe. By the early 1. 88. England, Belgium, Portugal, France, and other countries were planning or had inaugurated colonies throughout the African continent. Many were incomprehensibly brutal and exploitative regimes. Kaiser Wilhelm feared Germany would be shut out of Africa and its natural resources, including gold. Scramble for Africa A comparison of Africa in the years 1. Somebody. 50. 0 WikipediaThe Second Reich enthusiastically joined the so called Scramble for Africa. Beginning in November 1. Germany convened the Berlin Conference of leading European powers to cooperatively carve up the African continent. Out of that international conclave came an agreement, enacted in the Name of God Almighty, that would systemize an orderly territorial invasion by European powers, as well as river navigation, land use, and the other needed rules for the future occupation of the coast of the African Continent. As part of the treaty, European governments also agreed to interdict and suppress the Arab slave trade a lofty moralistic ideal with a double edge. Stemming Arab slave exports also kept able bodied Africans on the land and available to labor in abject and cruel, slave like conditions on colonial plantations. Beginning in 1. 88. Germany colonized four territories across the breadth of the continent Togoland, the Cameroons, Tanganyika, and a main coastal presence in Southwest Africa, now known as Namibia. In Southwest Africa, German settlers were able to establish lucrative plantations by exploiting the labor of local Herero and Nama also known as Hottentot indigenous peoples. Install Windows 95 On Parallels Movie on this page. German banks and industrialists combined to provide needed economic support and investment. Berlin dispatched a small military contingent to protect white settlers as they confronted the lightly armed African natives considered subhuman in Germanys twisted notion of racial hierarchy. German Cameroon, painting by R. Hellgrewe, 1. 90. WikipediaOnce entrenched, the German minority established a culture of pure labor enslavement. Tribeswomen were subjected to incessant and often capricious rape and not infrequently, their men were killed while attempting to defend them. Whites routinely stole the possessions of natives, such as cattle, and found ways to seize ancestral lands over trivialities. Confiscation was often facilitated by predatory European lending practices enforced at gunpoint by the German military. In 1. 90. 3, on the verge of utter dispossession, Nama warriors revolted against the 2,5. Later, Herero fighters joined. Scores of German settlers were massacred in a sequence of surprise attacks. The 7. 00 plus Schutztruppe or protection force was overwhelmed. The colonial governor called for reinforcements. General Lothar von Trotha, ca. WikipediaIn 1. 90. Berlin dispatched 1. Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, Supreme Commander of German Southwest Africa, had learned from other European battles in Africa, such as Britains costly Boer War.