Weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels directed German newspapers to portray the regime’s concentration camps as far less severe than British internment facilities used during the Boer War nearly four decades earlier. Adolf Hitler, in private discussions with his inner circle two years later, likened the “Russian space” to “our India,” suggesting that Germans would apply colonial-style rule over Ukrainians in a manner similar to British control over India.

These statements reflect broader historical debates about the links between European colonialism and Nazi atrocities. For decades, activists and scholars have argued that the Third Reich’s genocidal policies were an extension of the exploitative and violent practices established by British, French, and other colonial empires. This perspective is now being explored in a new exhibition at the German Historical Museum in Berlin titled "Controversial Kinship," which opens in tandem with a Bundestag debate over Germany’s recognition of its colonial-era genocide against the Nama and Herero peoples in Namibia.

Curated by Stephan Malinowski, professor emeritus of European history at the University of Edinburgh, the exhibition examines both the continuities and distinctions between imperial abuses and Nazi crimes. Malinowski emphasized that it took until 2026 for a major German museum to tackle this complex subject, noting the ideological tensions surrounding the discourse. “If we are being criticized from both sides, then we are probably doing something right,” he said, highlighting the effort to return to core historical facts amid politicized debates.

The exhibition begins with a stark visual juxtaposition of a Zyklon B gas canister—used by the Nazis to kill hundreds of thousands of Jews—and a sjambok, a whip employed by German colonial administrators in Namibia to subjugate indigenous populations. These objects symbolize the argument by several 20th-century intellectuals who perceived colonial violence and Nazi genocide as interconnected phenomena. For example, Austrian Jewish Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry described the Holocaust as part of a broader “century of barbarism,” echoing early anti-colonial voices like black Marxist thinker CLR James, who linked the persecution of Jews to that of Africans shortly after the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom.

However, the museum also stresses critical differences. According to museum director Raphael Gross, the Nazi regime’s methodical and ideologically driven attempt to exterminate entire populations—most notably European Jewry—represented a radical escalation unprecedented in prior colonial repression. The exhibition includes a 1939 correspondence between Mahatma Gandhi and Austrian Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, where Gandhi counsels the use of non-violent resistance against Nazi oppression. Buber responds by emphasizing the brutal reality of concentration camps and the impossibility of open dissent under Nazi rule.

Hitler’s own contempt for Gandhi’s approach is documented in 1937 remarks to Lord Halifax, future British foreign secretary, advocating violent suppression of Indian independence leaders. Malinowski stressed that the exhibition does not seek to excuse colonialism or its legacies but aims to bring greater nuance to a heavily politicized historical conversation. “There isn’t a moral hierarchy here,” he said. “You can’t show that one was better or worse than the other. But you can show that they were different.”