Three of the genocides of the twentieth century occurred in the prime sites of German imperial interests – Southwest Africa, Anatolia, and Central and Eastern Europe. Upon the systematic repression and near-annihilation of the Herero and Nama of Southwest Africa, German authorities constructed an apartheid state and society. As a key element of the new order, Herero and Nama survivors and other Africans were largely transformed from pastoralists into wage laborers. In Anatolia, the result of genocide was a far more homogeneous society than had existed ever before. Upon that basis, Turkish nationalists built the Republic of Turkey as the supposed representative of one particular population group. Both genocides entailed a huge transfer of wealth that enabled the development of a white settler class in Southwest Africa and a Muslim bourgeoisie in Turkey. The establishment of racial and national states in Africa and Anatolia signified as well the deep rooting of racial and national capitalism.
Genocide, then, was one way of creating the color lines and national lines that defined the half-century from the mid-1870s to the mid-1920s. The paper that follows, then, situates genocide and its aftermath in the German imperial realm within these larger, global political and economic transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in the primacy of imperial politics in Germany.