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For years, these questions have fueled some of the most intense debates in European historiography and memory culture. In a new exhibition, the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin examines not only the two systems of violence themselves but also the history of comparing them.
Controversial Kinship. Colonial and National Socialist Violence, on view from October 16, 2026, to April 11, 2027, is, the museum says, the first exhibition anywhere devoted entirely to this question. Rather than offering a single answer, it sets out to show where the question of the links between colonialism and National Socialism came from, how the answers to it have changed, and where the limits of historical comparison lie.
Colonialism, fascism, and National Socialism were already being compared in the 1930s. An important moment came with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. To many anti-colonial intellectuals, the brutality of Fascist Italy was nothing entirely new. They saw in it an extension of methods that the European powers had long used against colonized societies: violence, racial hierarchies, territorial conquest, forced labor, and the stripping of rights from entire groups.
The exhibition does not, however, adopt this interpretation as a ready-made key to twentieth-century history. Instead, it shows how the debate itself evolved over the decades that followed.
“My original intention was simply to historicize this debate—not necessarily to take a position, but to show that it has been going on since the 1930s, through the postwar period, and right up to the present day,” said Raphael Gross, President of the Deutsches Historisches Museum.
The history of comparison itself is one of the exhibition’s central themes. The museum asks under what historical circumstances scholars, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists, politicians, and Holocaust survivors compared colonialism, fascism, and National Socialism, when such comparisons were analytically useful, and when they became tools of political polemic.
Central to the whole project is the distinction between comparing and equating. European colonialism developed over centuries and involved many empires and vast areas of the world. National Socialist rule over much of Europe was far shorter. The two systems differed in their political contexts, aims, dynamics, and structures.
At the same time, there are areas where comparison can raise important questions. Among the themes the exhibition examines are repression, racism and antisemitism, conquest and settlement, concentration camps, collaboration, resistance, forced labor, industrialized extermination, and the visibility and invisibility of extreme violence.
“We are trying to set certain forms of violence that occur in both cases side by side and to show the similarities, but also the very clear differences, between these distinct systems of rule,” said the exhibition’s curator, Stephan Malinowski.
The Holocaust remains the most sensitive issue in the whole debate. The exhibition does not present the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe as the simple culmination of an earlier history of colonial violence. It treats the Holocaust as a radical break with those traditions and a turning point in the history of violence.
Similarities can be found in the language of race, in methods of dehumanization, in dispossession, in the subjugation of entire groups, and in the use of extreme violence against civilians. It does not follow, however, that a simple causal line runs from colonialism to the Holocaust. The further the analogy is stretched, the greater the risk of flattening distinct experiences and relativizing their historical specificity.
For German historiography, the question of possible continuities between the colonial experience of the German Empire and National Socialism remains particularly important. The most obvious point of reference is the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa in the early twentieth century. After the Battle of Waterberg in 1904, German troops drove the Herero into the Omaheke Desert and cut them off from water. Tens of thousands of people died of thirst, starvation, exhaustion, and persecution.
It has long been asked whether Germany’s colonial experience produced a repertoire of ideas and practices on which National Socialism later drew. Among the topics discussed are racial policy, the concept of Lebensraum, the colonization of Eastern Europe, and the history of concentration camps.
Even so, the exhibition avoids drawing
a straight line from Africa to Auschwitz. Similar practices do not necessarily indicate direct transfer, and a shared language of racism does not automatically prove institutional continuity. Points of convergence should be examined, but they cannot take the place of an analysis of differences.
Around 600 objects, drawn from the DHM’s own collections and from institutions in Europe, Africa, Israel, and the United States, are on display across some 1,100 square meters of the museum’s Pei-Bau. They include
For years, these questions have fueled some of the most intense debates in European historiography and memory culture. In a new exhibition, the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum) in Berlin examines not only the two systems of violence themselves but also the history of comparing them.
Controversial Kinship. Colonial and National Socialist Violence, on view from October 16, 2026, to April 11, 2027, is, the museum says, the first exhibition anywhere devoted entirely to this question. Rather than offering a single answer, it sets out to show where the question of the links between colonialism and National Socialism came from, how the answers to it have changed, and where the limits of historical comparison lie.
Colonialism, fascism, and National Socialism were already being compared in the 1930s. An important moment came with Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. To many anti-colonial intellectuals, the brutality of Fascist Italy was nothing entirely new. They saw in it an extension of methods that the European powers had long used against colonized societies: violence, racial hierarchies, territorial conquest, forced labor, and the stripping of rights from entire groups.
The exhibition does not, however, adopt this interpretation as a ready-made key to twentieth-century history. Instead, it shows how the debate itself evolved over the decades that followed.
“My original intention was simply to historicize this debate—not necessarily to take a position, but to show that it has been going on since the 1930s, through the postwar period, and right up to the present day,” said Raphael Gross, President of the Deutsches Historisches Museum.
The history of comparison itself is one of the exhibition’s central themes. The museum asks under what historical circumstances scholars, intellectuals, anti-colonial activists, politicians, and Holocaust survivors compared colonialism, fascism, and National Socialism, when such comparisons were analytically useful, and when they became tools of political polemic.
Central to the whole project is the distinction between comparing and equating. European colonialism developed over centuries and involved many empires and vast areas of the world. National Socialist rule over much of Europe was far shorter. The two systems differed in their political contexts, aims, dynamics, and structures.
At the same time, there are areas where comparison can raise important questions. Among the themes the exhibition examines are repression, racism and antisemitism, conquest and settlement, concentration camps, collaboration, resistance, forced labor, industrialized extermination, and the visibility and invisibility of extreme violence.
“We are trying to set certain forms of violence that occur in both cases side by side and to show the similarities, but also the very clear differences, between these distinct systems of rule,” said the exhibition’s curator, Stephan Malinowski.
The Holocaust remains the most sensitive issue in the whole debate. The exhibition does not present the systematic murder of the Jews of Europe as the simple culmination of an earlier history of colonial violence. It treats the Holocaust as a radical break with those traditions and a turning point in the history of violence.
Similarities can be found in the language of race, in methods of dehumanization, in dispossession, in the subjugation of entire groups, and in the use of extreme violence against civilians. It does not follow, however, that a simple causal line runs from colonialism to the Holocaust. The further the analogy is stretched, the greater the risk of flattening distinct experiences and relativizing their historical specificity.
For German historiography, the question of possible continuities between the colonial experience of the German Empire and National Socialism remains particularly important. The most obvious point of reference is the genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa in the early twentieth century. After the Battle of Waterberg in 1904, German troops drove the Herero into the Omaheke Desert and cut them off from water. Tens of thousands of people died of thirst, starvation, exhaustion, and persecution.
It has long been asked whether Germany’s colonial experience produced a repertoire of ideas and practices on which National Socialism later drew. Among the topics discussed are racial policy, the concept of Lebensraum, the colonization of Eastern Europe, and the history of concentration camps.
Even so, the exhibition avoids drawing
a straight line from Africa to Auschwitz. Similar practices do not necessarily indicate direct transfer, and a shared language of racism does not automatically prove institutional continuity. Points of convergence should be examined, but they cannot take the place of an analysis of differences.
Around 600 objects, drawn from the DHM’s own collections and from institutions in Europe, Africa, Israel, and the United States, are on display across some 1,100 square meters of the museum’s Pei-Bau. They include
Photo: David von Becker, DHM ©