Degree Name
MA (Master of Arts)
Program
History
Date of Award
5-2021
Committee Chair or Co-Chairs
Stephen Fritz
Committee Members
Daniel Newcomer, John Rankin
Abstract
The Nazi violence did not have its origins only in the brutality of the First World War or radical nationalist ideologies, but also in European colonialism. Hence, the goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that colonial processes were fundamental to the origins of the Holocaust. To prove this, I applied the content analysis to detect colonial discourse (stereotype, ambivalence, and mimicry) in three legislations from different contexts, which prohibited sexual relations and marriages between races. The documents analyzed exemplified the segregationist thinking of each period of colonization. Portuguese laws from the beginning of modernity demonstrate the transition from religious to racist thought. Analyzing German Southwest Africa, there is the application of racist pseudoscience, and finally, in Nazism, a mixture of both, but also an evolution of colonial discourse. At the end, I proved the existence of colonial discourse in the Nuremberg Laws, demonstrating how earlier colonialisms influenced the Holocaust.
Document Type
Thesis - unrestricted
Recommended Citation
Adamatti, Bianka, "The Tangled Roots of the Holocaust: An Analysis of the Evolution of Colonial Discourse through the Prohibition of Sexual Relations and Marriages between Races" (2021). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 3884. https://dc.etsu.edu/etd/3884
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Legal Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons