Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani sees a link between the violence of the coloniser and the slaughter of Jews and Slavs by the Nazis. The racial theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and others who claimed the Aryan race was superior meant that Jews and Slavs, who were both regarded as not Aryan, could be placed beyond the pale of civilisation and were thus candidates for the “laws of nature”, not of war.
According to Mamdani, in World War II, the Nazis “observed the laws of war against the Western powers but not against Russia”, and not against Jewish civilians and resistance fighters. British, American and French prisoners of war were treated according to the rules of the Third Geneva Convention, but Russians were not.
A bizarre feature of this distinction between the “civilised” and those ripe for the slaughter was that the Nazis’ Jewish prisoners of war serving in the Western armies were not slaughtered. But Russian soldiers were. This does not mean that Jewish and non-Jewish prisoners were treated entirely equally. Jewish prisoners were usually separated from others and there is some evidence that they were treated more harshly.
But the vast majority survived the war and there is no evidence that any were killed because they were Jewish. Scholars have made various attempts to explain this. But perhaps the most plausible explanation is one that none of them offers – that serving in a Western European or American army meant that Jews, in the eyes of their Nazi captors, had attained at least a sufficient degree of “Europeanness” to save them from death. Serving in the Russian military conferred no such “honorary Aryan” status because Soviet Russia was considered a mortal enemy of the Aryan race – a “non-Western” presence in Europe…..more
