Genocidal extermination for land theft predated the Nazis

Evidence

The Nazis saw some of the residents of the lands they usurped as fit for slave labor, but the Jews were considered beyond redemption and therefore faced eradication, in part to make room for German settlers. As the war went on, the scale and speed of death was unprecedented—no one had previously built gas ovens or crematoria and put them to use day after day to eliminate a vast population. But though the Nazis’ killing spree took state-sponsored hate to new extremes, extermination for the purposes of land theft was not Hitler’s innovation. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 886

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the On Sacrifice article’s treatment of how extreme violence becomes normalized/ritualized in ‘civilized’ societies; this passage extends that logic to genocide’s colonial prehistory.
• XREF: connects to: Extermination of American Indians was effectively forgotten by the world by 1940 — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1477; American eugenics served as a model for Nazi Germany — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4293; Nazi ethnic cleansing radicalized earlier nationalist population policies into genocide — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 49