Updated

A new exhibition at Berlin's German Historical Museum examines links between colonial rule and Nazism, Deutsche Welle reported on 10 November 2026. The show, "Controversial Kinship: Colonial and National Socialist Violence", is curated by Stephan Malinowski, a Professor of Modern European History at the University of Edinburgh. It opens with a hippopotamus-hide whip used in African colonies beside a canister of Zyklon B, and it touches on Hitler's 1941 description of Eastern Europe as Germany's India. The exhibition does not aim to settle the debate over whether the two systems of violence can be compared. Deutsche Welle said the debate is especially intense in Germany, where critics fear comparisons relativize Nazi crimes and the Holocaust. Malinowski rejects the view that such comparisons would require the same attention to colonial crimes, while historian Edward Kissi, of the University of South Florida, says colonial violence was as extreme as Nazi violence but that Nazi violence was annihilatory. The article notes that the two diverge most clearly over the systematic mass murder of European Jews, which Malinowski describes as murder for the purpose of murder.