In South West Africa, Germany’s military descended into “dysfunctional extremes of violence,” nearly wiping out the Herero and Nama peoples, as the historian Isabel V. Hull tells us. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s constitution isolated the army from external oversight and critique, and its militarism snowballed in Germany’s empire and informed fascism’s advance.[63] Arendt called this the “boomerang effect,” and it was not isolated to Hitler’s rise. She looked at Europe’s race thinking and “wild murdering” and “terrible massacres” in the colonies and
