# Controversial kinship: From colonial rule to the Holocaust?

- URL: https://talkfuse.com/story/controversial-kinship-from-colonial-rule-to-the-holocaust/
- Published: 2026-11-10T15:49:00+00:00
- Updated: 2026-11-10T17:12:28+00:00
- Original publisher: DW (publisher lean: Centre)
- Original article: https://www.dw.com/en/controversial-kinship-from-colonial-rule-to-the-holocaust/a-79902228?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
- Topics: Art, Asia, Culture, Europe, World

## Key points

- A Berlin exhibition explores links between colonial violence and Nazism.
- It highlights both shared practices and the Holocaust’s distinct character.
- Nazi rule mobilised around 13 to 14 million forced labourers.

## Summary

A new exhibition in Berlin examines how European colonialism and Nazism were connected, while addressing the dispute over how far the two histories can be compared. It highlights examples of shared practices and ideas, but also stresses that the Holocaust’s industrialised mass murder was distinct; the exhibition aims to explore the debate rather than settle it.

The German Historical Museum exhibition, curated by historian Stephan Malinowski, opens by placing a whip used in African colonies beside a canister of Zyklon B. It traces arguments that colonial territories helped develop racial ideologies and methods of domination, and notes that the Nazis later mobilised around 13 to 14 million forced labourers. The article says the scale of Nazi forced labour was comparable to the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted more than three centuries.

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