Journal of Namibian Studies, 23 (2018): 29 – 52 ISSN: 2197-5523 (online) Copyright © 2018 Otjivanda Presse.Bochum ISSN 1863-5954 (print) ISSN 2197-5523 (online) From German South West Africa to the Third Reich. Testing the continuity thesis Klaus Bachmann* Abstract The connections between the atrocities committed by German colonial forces in German South West Africa and the mass murders perpetrated by Nazi Germany later in Central and Eastern Europe have become an important aspect of the scholarly debate about German colonialism. This article tests several elements of these continuity claims: whether there was elite continuity between the Kaiserreich and the Third Reich, whether formal and informal knowledge about the atrocities in the German colony were available to and used by the Nazi elites and whether the former German colonies played a role in foreign policy strategies of the Third Reich. The author deems it more appropriate to speak about a rupture rather than continuity between colonial elites and the Nazi movement, he argues, that formal knowledge about colonial violence was hardly available to the Nazis and they did not even consult the scarce institutional knowledge which would have been available. Informal knowledge was available but tended to downplay or negate the atrocities and therefore was unsuitable to inform policy makers of the Third Reich. Their main objective in Southern Africa was to pull South Africa out of the British war effort, rather than reconquering their former colonies. Introduction In 1904, the German colonial authorities reacted to uprisings of first the Herero and then the Nama in the South West African colony by resorting to extreme violence. 1 After the Schutztruppe, a special military force created for deployment in the German colonies, had crushed the Herero uprising and forced the Herero to flee into the desert, * Klaus Bachmann is professor of social sciences at SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw, Poland. He also taught and researched at the Universities of Vienna, Bordeaux, Stellenbosch, at Johns Hopkins University (Washington, D.C.) and Renmin University (Bejing). He has published on contemporary Polish and German history and focusses on International Criminal Law and Transitional Justice. His most recent book is Genocidal Empires. German Colonialism and the Third Reich, Frankfurt/M., Lang, 2018. E-mail: k.bachmann@feps.pl 1 The issue, which of the German actions during the wars against the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa were genocidal according to critera of International Criminal Law, excedes the scope of this article. It is dealt with in detail in: Klaus Bachmann, “Germany’s colonial policy in German South West Africa in the light of international criminal law", Journal of Southern African Studies, 43 (2), 2017: 331-347, and in Bachmann, Genocidal Empires. All actions, genocidal or not, are comprised in this article under the notion of ‘extreme violence’.