Those are two very interesting books to read back to back. I disagree with two ideas in this essay. The first idea is the notion of German military superiority in 1941. The gap was the other way around, although the Nazis did drink their own Kool-Aid after Guderian's triumph in France, as did the Anglo-Saxons. But Max Werner knew better and he was soon working for the OSS. See my https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321837484_Western_perceptions_of_Soviet_strength_during_the_Soviet-German_War that I wrote under Tooze's supervision.
The Nazi vision was not to replicate the British or French empires in the East. Their vision to was replicate the American achievement. What they had in mind was settler colonialism at a continental scale, not political and economic domination of the East. The Americans had replaced the native population over centuries; the Nazis wanted to do it in years. Germs had played a larger role than violence in America; the Nazis tried to use genocide to achieve the same result. The effort floundered because of the refusal of the Red Army to capitulate. We must not be confused by the complicated system of slave labor that emerged and the challenges of German population policy in the early-1940s. That was not the intent. They had made plans to actually exterminate more than 100m people in the East to make way for German homesteaders. That was no longer a possibility once the German army was stopped in its tracks. What obtained in the deep rear of the Soviet-German frontlines had NOT been planned for. What emerged instead was a make-shift system, made necessary by the failure to achieve strategic objectives in the war against the Soviet Union. The Holocaust itself emerged from a bureaucratic logic, as argued by Bauman, and Aly and Heim. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/physical-anthropology-and-nazi-population-policy for a short summary.
So, the appropriate model is to be found not in Anglo-French empires or even in the Iberian empires in the New World, but Anglo-Saxon settler colonies. They very consciously wanted to replicate the American achievement. And they were driven to do so by the specter of being reduced to the status of Sweden and subject to permanent Anglo-Saxon hegemony — Churchill's 'pyramids of peace' — see the introduction in The Deluge.
Hi Branco,
Those are two very interesting books to read back to back. I disagree with two ideas in this essay. The first idea is the notion of German military superiority in 1941. The gap was the other way around, although the Nazis did drink their own Kool-Aid after Guderian's triumph in France, as did the Anglo-Saxons. But Max Werner knew better and he was soon working for the OSS. See my https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321837484_Western_perceptions_of_Soviet_strength_during_the_Soviet-German_War that I wrote under Tooze's supervision.
The Nazi vision was not to replicate the British or French empires in the East. Their vision to was replicate the American achievement. What they had in mind was settler colonialism at a continental scale, not political and economic domination of the East. The Americans had replaced the native population over centuries; the Nazis wanted to do it in years. Germs had played a larger role than violence in America; the Nazis tried to use genocide to achieve the same result. The effort floundered because of the refusal of the Red Army to capitulate. We must not be confused by the complicated system of slave labor that emerged and the challenges of German population policy in the early-1940s. That was not the intent. They had made plans to actually exterminate more than 100m people in the East to make way for German homesteaders. That was no longer a possibility once the German army was stopped in its tracks. What obtained in the deep rear of the Soviet-German frontlines had NOT been planned for. What emerged instead was a make-shift system, made necessary by the failure to achieve strategic objectives in the war against the Soviet Union. The Holocaust itself emerged from a bureaucratic logic, as argued by Bauman, and Aly and Heim. See my https://policytensor.substack.com/p/physical-anthropology-and-nazi-population-policy for a short summary.
So, the appropriate model is to be found not in Anglo-French empires or even in the Iberian empires in the New World, but Anglo-Saxon settler colonies. They very consciously wanted to replicate the American achievement. And they were driven to do so by the specter of being reduced to the status of Sweden and subject to permanent Anglo-Saxon hegemony — Churchill's 'pyramids of peace' — see the introduction in The Deluge.
Anusar