“IF I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” When Sir Isaac Newton said this back in 1676, he meant it as an acknowledgment of the body of previous scientific and philosophical works that provided the foundations for his own discoveries.

The observation stands true for a great many disciplines, a nod to the ideas and inventions of the past that we then build upon to create new wonders. But while we tend to view progress as something inherently good and for the benefit of humanity, we ignore that evil too stands on the shoulders of its own giants.

Take the Holocaust; there is a tendency to see this as a horrific diversion in the otherwise linear progression of Western civilisation. But viewed from another angle, one can argue that the Nazis’ industrial-scale genocide was not a historical accident but in fact the logical consequence of established trends in Western history.

The idea of concentration camps did not suddenly spring up in the minds of Nazi planners. During the American civil war, prisoner of war camps in both the Union and the Confederacy quickly ballooned into large-scale internment camps such as Andersonville which “produced scenes of wretched, disease-ridden and emaciated prisoners as repulsive as any to come out of the Second World War”.

A few decades later, the concept inspired Spanish general Valeriano ‘the butcher’ Weyler, during the Cuban rebellion of the late 1800s, to use similar camps to intern the civilian population in order to separate them from the rebels and deprive the latter of much-needed logistical support. As with the Civil War camps, the purpose was not to eliminate the inmates but again, conditions in the camps led to hundreds of deaths.

The blueprint for Auschwitz was laid in Namibia.

Around the same time, the British were fighting the Boer war in South Africa, and faced with an unorthodox enemy decided to create camps of their own where the civilian Boer population (mostly women and children) was interned. Again, “callous lack of care” in these camps caused the deaths of 28,000 Boer women and children, along with some 20,000 black people.

However, it was in Namibia that the real blueprints for what eventually became Auschwitz and Dachau were laid. Latecomers to the colonial game, the Germans ended up with the parts of the world the other colonial powers didn’t want, such as Namibia. But in a departure from the colonial norm, the Germans decided they had no need for the local population.

This is partly because they were inspired by the views of political philosopher Friedrich Ratzel who advocated migration as being crucial to the survival of human ‘races’ and who first used the term Lebensraum, which later gained such terrible currency. Emptied of its native population, Namibia was to be a new Germany, populated by the racially pure. To achieve this, German general Lothar von Trotha declared:

“Any Herero found within the German borders…will be shot... The Herero people must leave.” What resulted was the first genocide of the 20th century; the Herero were forced to “march into death” into the desert, with German soldiers sealing the perimeter and bayoneting those who attempted to escape.

Survivors were herded into concentration camps like Shark Island and Luderitz where food was so scarce that “prisoners fought like wild animals and killed each other to secure a share.” Some 80 per cent of this population died in the genocide perpetrated on African soil by Europeans. But even in death there was indignity; according to historian Dennis Lauman, Herero women prisoners “boiled and scraped the skin off the heads of Herero who had been killed. Those skulls were then shipped off to Germany for museum displays and eugenics research”.

That very research led to the development of the racial studies that provided the pseudo-scientific basis for later genocides.

So when the Nazis came to power, the concentration camp model was very much in place, as were the philosophical underpinnings of genocide. What they brought to the mix was the industrialisation of murder; Thanks to the wonders of technology, bayonets and bullets were replaced by far more efficient gas chambers and crematoriums.

That in turn would not have been possible without the presence of a large industrial base and companies willing to aid in this endeavour. IG Farben, the predecessor of pharmaceutical firm Bayer, was instrumental in developing Zyklon-B, the poison gas used in the chambers. Manufacturing giant Siemens built the furnaces, and IBM provided the information systems that allowed the Nazis to track all this.

But even then, the scale of the killings would not have been possible if the Nazis hadn’t inherited a large and efficient bureaucratic system — the product of centuries of evolution in how government works.

So the Holocaust was not an aberration of history, it was as author Enzo Traverso concludes, “an authentic product of Western civilisation”.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2016