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In recent years, historians in Germany, France, and elsewhere have been engaged in a major controversy about "connecting lines" and structural similarities between European colonialism and fascism. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, some scholars have recently argued that the history of the Holocaust can only be understood by taking into account Nazism’s "colonial roots." More specifically, it has been suggested that German colonialism and the Herero wars (1904-1907) in particular served as a model for the German war of extermination in Eastern Europe (1939-1945). This essay seeks to critically examine the notion of direct continuity from German 1904 South-West Africa Colonial massacres to Auschwitz. Based on a critical examination of the allegedly "exceptional" character of the German colonial wars, it will be argued that the "taboo violation" of 1904 was in fact very much in line with common European colonial standards and that Nazism’s "colonialism" was more a fantasy rather than a historical reality.