Now I Am in Distant Germany, It Could Be That I Will Die: Colonial Precedent, Wartime Contingency, and Crisis Mentality in the Transition from Subjugation to Decimation of Foreign Workers in the Nazi Ruhr

By the end of the Second World War over half a million foreign civilians were living within the confines of a system of forced labor in and around the Ruhr region of Germany. While the use of some degree of coercion had characterized this foreign labor deployment scheme since its institution in 1939, mass execution was not introduced as a tool for controlling foreign workers until September 1944. What prompted this resort to extreme violence? The conventional explanation for so-called crimes of the end phase of this sort has been that the collapse of German society at the end of the war removed constraints on ideologically committed perpetrators who had become increasingly radicalized and brutalized by the war, creating a vacuum of authority where they could act on violent impulses. This dissertation seeks to correct the prevailing view, arguing instead that moments of crisis activated longstanding institutional and cultural norms that endorsed specific kinds of violence within specific contexts, and that a series of these crises in western Germany prompted the resort to executions as a temporary measure to prevent societal collapse within a restructured but still functioning system of authority. This dissertation traces the genealogy of end phase violence and the wider system for controlling forced labor back to the German colonial experience. Colonial notions of extracting labor within the tight controls of an apartheid regime persisted into the Third Reich, as did patterns of thinking that criminalized resistance to domination and justified the utilization of extreme violence when resistance occurred within a climate of crisis. Still, there was not a straight line from Africa to the mass execution of foreign workers in the Ruhr, and norms established in the colonies were malleable and subject to change when confronted by historical contingency. Nazi conception of race and community elaborated on the colonial foundation, while the subsequent conquest and subjugation of people in the East, along with the .