(p. 24):

Belgium's king, Leopold II, issued a decree on September 29, 1891, which gave his representatives in the Congo a monopoly on "trade" in rubber and ivory. By the same decree, natives were obliged to supply both rubber and labor, which in practice meant no trading was necessary.

Leopold's representatives simply requisitioned labor, rubber, and ivory from the natives, without payment. Those who refused had their villages burned down, their children murdered, and their hands cut off.

These methods at first led to a dramatic increase in profitability. Profits were used, among other things, to build some of the hideous monuments still disfiguring Brussels: the Arcades du Cinquantenaire, the Palais de Laeken, the Château d'Ardennes. Few people today remember how many amputated hands these monuments cost.

(pp. 46-47):

At the battle of Omdurman, the entire Sudanese army was annihilated without once having got their enemy within gunshot.

The art of killing from a distance became a European specialty very early on. The arms race between coastal states of Europe in the seventeenth century created fleets that were capable of achieving strategic goals far away from the home country. Their cannons could shatter hitherto impregnable fortresses and were even more effective against defenseless villages.

Preindustrial Europe had little that was in demand in the rest of the world. Our most important export was force. All over the rest of the world, we were regarded at the time as nomadic warriors in the style of the Mongols and the Tartars. They reigned supreme from the backs of horses, we from the decks of ships.

Our cannons met little resistance among the peoples who were more advanced than we were. The Moguls in India had no ships able to withstand artillery fire or carry heavy guns. Instead of building up a fleet, the Moguls chose to purchase defense services from European states, which thus were soon in a position to take over the part of rulers in India.

The Chinese had discovered gunpowder in the tenth century and had cast the first cannon in the middle of the thirteenth. But they felt so safe in their part of the world that, from the middle of the sixteenth century onward, they refrained form participating in the naval arms race.

Thus the backward and poorly resourced Europe of the sixteenth century acquired a monopoly on ocean-going ships with guns capable of spreading death and destruction across huge distances. Europeans became the gods of cannons that killed long before the weapons of their opponents could reach them.

Three hundred years later, those gods had conquered a third of the world. Ultimately, their realm rested on the power of their ships' guns.

(pp. 54-57):

Unfortunately, the British often missed out on their splendid game. Their opponents learned all too quickly that it was pointless to fight against modern weapons. They gave up before the British had the pleasure of wiping them out.

Lord Garnet Wolsley, commander of the British troops in the first Ashanti war in 1874-76, met resistance and really enjoyed himself. "It is only through experience of the sensation that we learn how intense, even in anticipation, is the rapture-giving delight which the attack upon an enemy affords. . . . All other sensations are but as the tinkling of a doorbell in comparison with the throbbing of Big Ben."

The second Ashanti war in 1896 provided no opportunity for experiences of that kind. Two days' march away from the capital, Kumasi, Robert Baden-Powell, the commander of the advance troop, later to found the Boy Scouts, received an envoy offering unconditional surrender.

To his disappointment, Baden-Powell did not fire a single shot at the natives. To get hostilities going, the British planned extreme provocations. The king of Ashanti was arrested together with his whole family. The king and his mother were forced to crawl on all fours up to the British officers sitting on crates of biscuit tins, receiving their subjugation.

(pp. 100-101):

The first person to divide the abstract human being of medieval theology into several species, of which some were considered to be closer to animals, was William Petty. "There seem to be several species even of human beings," he wrote in The Scale of Creatures (1676). "I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned Africans in colour . . . but also . . . in natural manners an din the internal qualities of their minds." Here human beings are divided up not only into nations or peoples, but also biologically separate species. This occurred in passing and aroused no particular attention.

At the beginning of the 1700s, the anatomist William Tyson set off on a search for the missing link in the hierarchy of creation. In his book Orang-Outang, or The Anatomy of a Pygmie (1708), Tyson demonstrated that in its build, this primate is more like humans than other animals and the pygmy more like primates than other people. Tyson classified the pygmy as an animal, "wholly a brute," but so close to humans that "in this chain of creation for an intermediate link between ape and man I would place our pygmy."

Nor did Tyson cause any commotion. Not until the end of the eighteenth century, when Europeans were well on their way to conquering the world, did the idea of a hierarchy of the races seriously take root.

The same year as the publication of Cuvier's first lecture, 1799, a doctor from Manchester, Charles White, produced the first extensively motivated and illustrated hierarchy of race, entitled An Account of the Regular Graduations in Man. In it he"proves" that the European stands above all other races: "Where shall we find unless in the European that nobly arched head, containing such a quantity of brain . . . ? Where that perpendicular face, the prominent nose and round, projecting chin? Where that variety of features and fullness of expression . . . those rosy cheeks and coral lips?"

White's illustrations to his thesis -- a series of profiles with primate and native halfway between ostrich and European -- had enormous power and were still common in my childhood. At the moment of publication, White's thesis seemed to have an almost irresistible authority that continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, in pace with the development of European arms technology.

(p. 107):

In a letter to Lyell in 1859, Darwin considers the idea that this process perhaps also occurs between the human races, "the less intellectual races being exterminated."

In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin made public his conviction. Today between the primates and civilized man are intermediate forms such as gorillas and savages, he says in chapter 6. But both these intermediate forms are dying out. "At some future period not very distant as measured in centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races."

Similarly, the gorillas will die out. An even larger gap than that now found between the gorilla and Australian aborigine will in the future widen between the lower apes and the coming, even more civilized man. Namely, the gap left behind by those who have been exterminated.

(p. 103):

The Guanches were an advanced, Berber-speaking Stone Age people, the first people to be destroyed by European expansion. They were of African origin but had lived for a long time in "the fortunate isles," what are now the Canary Islands, and had lost contact with the mainland. Their numbers have been estimated at about eighty thousand -- before the Europeans arrived.

In 1478, Ferdinand and Isabella sent an expedition with guns and horses to Grand Canary. The plains were quickly captured by the Spaniards, but in the mountains the Guanches continued a stubborn guerrilla warfare. Finally, in 1483, six hundred warriors and one thousand five hundred women, children, and old people capitulated -- all that remained of a once numerous population.

Las Palmas surrendered in 1494. Tenerife held out until 1496. Finally, one lone native woman signed to the Spaniards to come closer. "There was no one left to fight, no one to fear -- all were dead."

Neither horses nor guns decided the outcome of the war. Bacteria were victorious. The natives called the unknown disease modorra. Of Tenerife's fifteen thousand inhabitants, only a haldful survived.

(pp. 111-112):

When Europeans went east as Crusaders in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they came across people who were superior to them in culture, diplomatic cunning, technical knowledge, and not least in experience of epidemics. Thousands of Crusaders died because of their inferior resistance to bacteria. When Europeans went west in the fifteenth century, they themselves were the bearers of those superior bacteria. People died everywhere the Europeans went.

In 1492, Columbia arrived in America. The extent of the so-called "demographic catastrophe" that followed has been estimated differently by different scholars. Certainly it was without equivalent in world history."

Many scholars today believe that there were roughly equal numbers of people in America as in Europe -- over seventy million. During the following three hundred years, the population of the world increased by 250 percent. Europe increased fastest, by between 400 percent and 500 percent. The original population of America on the other hand fell by 90 or 95 percent.

Swiftest and most thorough was the demographic catastrophe in the heavily populated parts of Latin America that had first come into contact with Europeans: the West Indies, Mexico, Central America,a nd the Andes. In Mexico alone there may have been 25 million people when the Europeans arrived in 1519. Fifty years later, the number had fallen to 2.7 million. Fifty more years later there were 1.5 million Indians left. Over 90 percent of the original population had been wiped out in a hundred years.

The great majority of those people did not die in battle. They died quit epeacefully of disease, hunger, and inhuman labor conditions. The social organization of the Indians had been wrecked by the white conquerors, and in the new society only a small fraction of the Indians was as yet usable, for, as a labor force for the whites, the Indians were of low quality. And there were many more Indians than the few whites could exploit with existing methods.

The direct cause of death was usually disease, but the underlying cause was this: the Indians were far too numerous to be of any economic value within the framework of the conquerors' society.

(pp. 115-116):

In the backward southwestern parts of South America, the European conquests had not yet been completed when Darwin arrived in August 1832. The Argentine government had just decided to exterminate the Indians who still ruled the Pampas.

The assignment was given to General Rosas. Darwin met him and his troops by the Colorado River and thought he had never seen a more loathsome army of bandits.

In Bahía Blanca, he saw more forces, drunken and covered with blood, filth, and vomit. He interviewed a Spanish commander who told him how they had forced information out of captured Indians about where their kinfolk were. In this way, he and his soldiers had recently found 110 Indians who had all been captured or killed, "for the soldiers saber every man."

(p. 117):

We human beings, Lyell says in his Principles of Geology (the chapter headed "Extirpation of Species by Man"), have no reason to feel guilty because our progress exterminates animals and plants. In our defense, we can state that when we conquer the earth and defend our occupations by force, we are only doing what all species in nature do. Every species that has spread over a large area has in a similar way reduced or wholly eradicated other species and has to defend itself by fighting against intruding plants and animals. If "the most insignificant and diminutive species . . . have each slaughtered their thousands, why should not we, the lords of creation, do the same?"

The gentle Lyell had as little desire as the gentle Darwin to do the Indians any harm. But the right to eradicate other species that Lyell so thoughtlessly ascribed to man had already long been used even to exterminate humans.

(pp. 145-146):

The Jews could not really be regarded as "a people of inferior culture" in the sense [Friedrich] Ratzel meant. A standard accusation against them was the opposite, that their position in German cultural life was far too dominating. but in his book Politische Geographie (1897), Ratzel nevertheless is able to pair them with people who, according to him, are condemned to annihilation. Jews and gypsies are brought together with "the stunted hunting people in the African interior" and "innumerable similar existences" into the class of "scattered people with no land."

Land with no peoples, on the other hand, no longer exists. Not even the deserts can today be regarded as ownerless empty spaces. So a growing people needing more land has to conquer land, "which through killing and displacement of the inhabitants is turned into uninhabited land."

Pericles depopulated the island of Aegina to prepare room for Attic settlers. Rome carried out the same transplantations. Sine then these have become increasingly necessary as uninhabited land became rarer and, finally, nonexistent. "Colonization has long since become displacement."

The history of American colonization provides a great many examples of people being removed and displaced. "The higher the culture of the immigrants stands above that of the original inhabitants, the easier the process. . . ." The United States is the best example of swift spatial expansion: from 1.8 million square kilometers in 1783 to 4.6 million in 1803 and 9.2 million in 1867.

Europe is the most thickly populated continent and the one whose population is growing fastest. So colonies are for Europe a necessity.

But it is a mistake to think that colonies have to be on the other side of the oceans. Border colonization is also colonization. Occupations near at hand are more easily defended and assimilated than distant ones. Russia's spread into Siberia and Central Asia is the most important example of this type of colonization, Ratzel maintains.

Hitler was given Ratzel's book in 1924, when he was in Landsberg prison writing Mein Kampf.

(pp. 149-150):

In Southwest Africa in 1904, the Germans demonstrated that they too had mastered an art that Americans, British, and other Europeans had exercised all through the nineteenth century -- the art of hastening the extermination of a people of "inferior culture."

Following the North American example, the Herero people were banished to reserves and their grazing lands handed over to German immigrants and colonization companies. When the Hereros resisted, General Adolf Lebrecht von Trotha gave orders in October 1904 for the Herero people to be exterminated. Every Herero found within the German borders, with or without weapons, was to be shot. But most of them died without violence. The Germans simply drove them out into the desert and sealed off the border. [ . . . ]

When the rainy season came, German patrols found skeletons lying around dry hollows, twenty-four to fifty feet deep, dug by the Hereros in vain attempts to find water. Almost the entire people -- about eighty thousand human beings -- died in the deserts. Only a few thousand were left, sentenced to hard labor in German concentration camps.

Thus the words "concentration camp," invented in 1896 by the Spaniards in Cuba, anglicized by the Americans, and used again by the British during the Boer War, made their entrance into German language and politics.

(pp. 152-153):

A German schoolmaster is sitting on the roof this evening. For seven years he has spent his vacations in the Sahara and his idea of sport is to get as far south as possible before he has to return. Tomorrow he is to take the bus to Niamey, then fly back to Germany, where the neo-Nazis are attacking some refugee camps almost every night, his crackling transistor tells us. In Sweden, too, refugee quarters have been set on fire. In Paris, Le Pen is speaking on May Day.

"I've heard him," says a French engineer working for Michelin in Nigeria. "I thought that when Fascism came back, it would be disguised in bright friendly colors, so that it would be difficult to recognize. I didn't think it would come in a brown shirt and black leather. I didn't think ti would be shaven heads, swastikas, boots, and officer's shoulder belts. I didn't think it would call itself 'national and socialist.'"

But just as recognizably, it is coming, swaggering with its heritage from Nazism. The same roar after every sentence when the leader speaks. The same hatred of aliens. The same preparedness for violence. The same wounded manhood.

(pp. 153-154):

The Pan-German League's "elbow room" was given wings when Friedrich Ratzel renamed it Levensraum at the turn of the century.

The geographer Ratzel was originally a zoologist. In the concept of Lebensraum, he linked the biological theory of life with the geographical theory of space, into a new theory, charged with political dynamite.

Between the never-ending movement of life and the unalterable space of the earth lies a contradiction that always and everywhere gives rise to struggle, Ratzel writes in Der Lebensraum (1901, in book form 1904). Since life first reached the limits of space, life has been fighting with life for space.

What is called the struggle for existence is really a struggle for space. True "lack of space" we see most clearly in animals living together in colonies. The first to arrive take the best places, those who come later have to be content with the worst. Among them, infant mortality is greatest, and corpses lie scattered over the ground.

Similar courses of events arise in human life, says Ratzel. His readers knew what he was aiming at. Germany was one of the last to arrive among the European nations. In a world the colonial powers had already divided up between themselves, Germany had to be content with the worst places. This was why the children of the unemployed were dying in Berlin and Hamburg -- that was the conclusion the reader was expected to draw.

As a young man, Ratzel had traveled in North America and seen the way whites and Indians fought over lands. This struggle became for him a paradigm, which he constantly returned to.

A few hundred thousand Indians, degraded and removed to unfavorable areas, had seen their continent Europeanized as to people, animals, and plants. The Spaniards built towns and ruled the crop-growing Indians. The Germanic and French settlers in North America took over the land from the natives in order to cultivate it themselves. "The result was an annihilating struggle, the prize for which was the land, the space."

(p. 156):

The Lebensraum theory urged Germany to use the strength the country had gained through new means of production (industry) to acquire more of the old means of production (land), roughly like the new industrial barons showing off their power by displacing the old nobility from their manors and estates.

(pp. 157-158):

In the war against the western powers, the Germans observed the laws of war. Only 3.5 percent of English and American prisoners of war died in captivity, though 57 percent of Soviet prisoners of war died.

Altogether, 3.3. million Russian prisoners of war lost their lives, two million of them in the first year of the war, through a combination of starvation, cold, disease, execution, and gassing. The first to be gassed in Auschwitz were Russians.

There is a crucial difference between these killings and the murders of Jews. Of non-Jewish Russians, only certain categories -- first and foremost intellectuals and Communists -- were totally exterminated. Among other Russians, according to the plans, some ten million or so were to be weeded out, but the remainder were to live on as a slave labor force under German command. On the other hand, the Jewish people as a whole were to be exterminated.

In that, the Holocaust was unique -- in Europe. But the history of Western expansion in other parts of the world shows many examples of total extermination of whole peoples.

(p. 159):

The main intention behind the conquest was not to murder Jews, just as the Americans did not advance westward in order to murder Indians. The intention was to expand Germany's own Lebensraum. The Russian Jews lived in just those areas Hitler was after, making up 10 percent of the total population there and up to 40 percent of the urban population.

To faithful Nazis, the killing of Jews was a way of implementing the most central point of the party program. For those less faithful, it was a practical way of reducing the consumption of food and making room for the future German settlement. German bureaucracy spoke of "de-Jewishing" (Entjudung) as a way of clearing out "superfluous eaters" (überzähligen Essern) and in that way creating a "balance between population and food supply.