The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  THE KAISER’S HOLOCAUST

  Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and

  the Colonial Roots of Nazism

  DAVID OLUSOGA

  and

  CASPER W. ERICHSEN

  Dedicated to the memory of

  Jørn Wulff

  Karen Wulff

  &

  Olorunjube Franklin Ojomo

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  INTRODUCTION

  1: The World behind the Fog

  2: The Iron Chancellor and the Guano King

  3: ‘This Is My Land’

  4: Soldier of Darkness

  5: ‘European Nations Do Not Make War in That Way’

  6: ‘A Piece of Natural Savagery’

  7: King of the Huns

  8: ‘Rivers of Blood and Money’

  9: ‘Death through Exhaustion’

  10: ‘Peace Will Spell Death for Me and My Nation’

  11: ‘You Yourselves Carry the Blame for Your Misery’

  12: The Island of Death

  13: ‘Our New Germany on African Soil’

  14: Things Fall Apart

  15: ‘To Fight the World for Ever’

  16: A Passing Corporal

  17: A People without Space

  18: Germany’s California

  EPILOGUE

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Plates

  INTRODUCTION

  Cell 5

  At 10.30 p.m. on 14 October 1946, Private Harold F. Johnson of ‘C’ Company, 26th US Infantry, walked along the corridor leading to Cell 5. Taking up the position he was to occupy for the next few hours, he leaned forward and peered through the viewing hole into the cell. ‘At that time’, Johnson later informed a Board of Inquiry, the prisoner was ‘lying flat on his back with his hands stretched out along his sides above the blankets. He stayed in that position for about five minutes without so much as moving.’ At about 10.40, Johnson informs us, the captive man ‘brought his hands across his chest with his fingers laced and turned his head to the wall … He lay there for about two or three minutes … Later he seemed to stiffen and made a blowing, choking sound through his lips’. Private Johnson raised the alarm. He shouted for the Corporal of the Relief, Lieutenant Cromer, who ran noisily down the spiral staircase from the corridor above, quickly followed by the Prison Chaplain, Captain Henry F. Gerecke. Only when all three were assembled did Johnson unlock and swing open the cell door. Cromer rushed past and was the first inside, followed by the Chaplain; Johnson came in behind ‘holding the light’. Chaplain Gerecke leaned down and grasped hold of the prisoner’s right arm, which hung limply over the edge of his metal bunk. He searched frantically for a pulse. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘this man is dead.’1

  The prisoner who lay in Cell 5 of the Nuremberg Prison, with shards of glass from an ampoule of cyanide still in his mouth, had once been Prime Minister of Prussia and President of the Reichstag. He was the former Commander-in-Chief of the most feared air force in Europe and a ruthless administrator who had overseen the deadly exploitation of Eastern Europe. He considered himself – as he had boasted to his jailers only weeks earlier – a ‘historical figure’, and was convinced that ‘in fifty or sixty years’ statues in his image would be erected all across Germany. He was Hermann Göring, and in the last twist of his strange life he had cheated the hangman, committing suicide just two hours before his execution.

  Seven months earlier, in one of the opening addresses of the Trial of German Major War Criminals, one of the American prosecutors, Robert Kemper, had described the Nuremberg Trials as ‘the greatest history seminar ever’. The case for the prosecution was in itself a monumental piece of historical research. Outside the chamber, a team of historians, translators, archivists and documentary filmmakers had assembled to catalogue and file, estimate and quantify the litany of aggression and murderous criminality committed during the twelve years of Hitler’s ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. From millions of individual tragedies, they had formed a prosecution case. The documents linking these crimes to the twenty-three accused men had been duplicated, indexed and translated into French, Russian and English. The indictment alone ran to twenty-four thousand words. The preparation of the case for the prosecution could perhaps have lasted longer than Nazi rule itself. As it was, the first three days of the trial were entirely taken up just reading the indictment into the official record.

  Over the course of the trial, the defendants were condemned by the records from their pasts. Their own signatures, on their own documents, were submitted against them. The minutes of incriminating meetings they had attended were recited to them; their speeches and edicts read, sometimes shouted, back at them. Those who had escaped their prisons and concentration camps recounted their appalling stories. Perhaps at no other time and in no other place has the work of historians and archivists been put to such dramatic effect. In our time, only the Truth and Reconciliation Committees of post-Apartheid South Africa have come close to replicating the drama of Nuremberg.

  What happened at Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946 was more than a trial: it was the elaborate centrepiece of an enormous act of national exorcism. The Allied powers believed that the prosecution of the surviving members of the Nazi elite would be a key step in the ‘de-Nazification’ of the German people. The post-war settlement was, in part, predicated upon the willingness of Germany’s battered and exhausted population to reject Nazism. With every major city in ruins, five million Germans dead and four armies of occupation on German soil, all but the most fanatically pro-Nazi were willing to acknowledge that the Third Reich had been an unparalleled national calamity. When confronted at Nuremberg with the stark truth of what Germany had done under the Nazis, some came to other conclusions. The Nazi leaders in the dock, and the thousands of henchmen who had enacted their decrees, came to be seen as ‘other’. Their actions had showed them to be inhumane; perhaps, therefore, they were unhuman. Led by such men, the Third Reich had been capable of crimes that were both terrible and unique in history. Nazism, so the argument went, had been an aberration in European history, a discontinuity.

  This is the great post-war myth: the comforting fantasy that the Nazis were a new order of monsters and that their crimes were without precursor or precedent. They were not. Much of Nazi ideology and many of the crimes committed in its name were part of a longer trend within European history. Nazism was both a culmination and a distortion of decades of German and European history and philosophy. It was, in part, the final homecoming of theories and practices that Europeans had developed and perfected in far-flung corners of the world during the last phase of imperial conquest. There is nothing within that historical subsoil that made the ultimate flowering of Nazism inevitable, but there is much that makes it understandable. At Nuremberg, however, all such historical precedent was plunged into darkness. ‘The greatest history seminar ever’ did not look back far enough into history.

  The Nuremberg Trials took as their start date the year in which a new age of barbarism had seemed to overwhelm Europe – 1914. This was year zero for the prosecuting nations, all of whom agreed that World War I had been the calamity that set Europe on course for the greater tragedies of World War II. The generation who had mutilated their own continent had, in the process, been disfigured politically and ideologically. The national enmities and the trauma of mass, mechanised killing had sown the seeds for the savagery that lay at the heart of Nazism. At Nuremberg, everything before the Somme, Verdun and Ypres was regarded as mere detail, as it was presumed that Nazis
m as an ideology had emerged fully formed from the chaos and resentment following Germany’s defeat in 1918.

  In its narrow historical focus, if in no other way, the trial of Hermann Göring was typical. When questioning began, on the morning of 13 March, Göring was asked for a ‘short account of his life up to the outbreak of the First World War’. The president of the court repeatedly stressed the need for brevity. It was only when Göring’s account reached 1914 that he was encouraged to elaborate and detailed questioning began.2 Over the course of the 218-day trial, Hermann Göring, the lead defendant, delivered only four sentences about his life before World War I and the role of his family in Germany’s longer history.

  Had the Nuremberg prosecutors looked further into Göring’s past, and his nation’s, they would have discovered another story of death camps and racial genocide. They would have seen that the ideas of many of the philosophers, scientists and soldiers whose theories inspired Hitler had underpinned an earlier, forgotten holocaust. Perhaps they might have recognised a continuity in German history and understood that Nazism was anything but unique. They might also have grasped the importance of the few sentences Göring uttered at the start of his cross-examination, in which he described his family background and the world before 1914 that had formed him and his generation.

  Göring, for his own reasons, was determined to use his last stand in the dock at Nuremberg as an opportunity to place the Third Reich within the mainstream of world history. One strand of his defence strategy was to claim that Nazism and the principles on which it had been founded were not unique but merely Germanic incarnations of the same forces with which the prosecuting powers had built up their own empires and expanded their own power.

  On the second day of direct examination by his defence counsel Dr Otto Stahmer, Göring was asked for his definition of the term Lebensraum – the theory of living space on which the Nazis’ invasion of the USSR and their plans for its later colonisation had been founded. He replied: ‘That concept is a very controversial one. I can fully understand that the Powers – I refer only to the four signatory Powers – who call more than three-quarters of the world their own explain this concept differently’.3

  Speaking a few days later in Cell 5 to G. M. Gilbert, the psychiatrist given access to the Nuremberg defendants, Göring directly compared the crimes he was defending in court with those perpetrated in the empires of the victor nations. The British Empire, he claimed, had ‘not been built up with due regard for principles of humanity’, while America had ‘hacked its way to a rich Lebensraum by revolution, massacre and war’.4

  Göring’s attempts to compare the crimes of the Third Reich to the genocides and massacres of the age of empire could easily be dismissed as a desperate defence tactic. But behind the bluster, arrogance and amorality of a man who was patently unable to confront his own crimes, there is an uncomfortable truth.

  When Göring was asked to speak briefly about his life before 1914, he outlined what he called ‘a few points which are significant with relation to my later development’. He told the court of his father, who had been the ‘first Governor of South-West Africa’, pointing out that in that capacity the elder Göring had had ‘connections at that time with two British statesmen, Cecil Rhodes and the elder Chamberlain’.5

  Hermann Göring’s father, Dr Heinrich Göring, had indeed been a key factor in his son’s ‘later development’. In 1885 he had been appointed by Chancellor Bismarck to help establish the German colony of South-West Africa, today the southern African nation of Namibia. Dr Göring’s role was one of slow negotiations with the indigenous African peoples, with no garrison and little funding. Fifty years later, an official Nazi biography of Hermann Göring shamelessly attempted to glamorise the elder Göring’s record as an empire-builder. It describes how ‘Young [Hermann] Göring listened, his eyes sparkling with excitement, to his father’s stories about his adventures in bygone days. The inquisitive and imaginative lad was … thrilled by his accounts of his pioneer work as a Reichs Commissar for South-West Africa, of his journeys through the Kalahari Desert and his fights with Maharero, the black king of Okahandja.’6

  In truth, Heinrich Göring had no fights with any of the ‘black kings’ of South-West Africa. For three years he travelled across the southern deserts with a wagon full of so-called ‘protection treaties’, desperately attempting to dupe or cajole the leaders of the local African peoples into signing away rights to their land. When his promises of protection were exposed as empty, he was recognised as a fraud and summarily expelled.

  What inspired the elder Göring to volunteer for service in Africa was that, like many Germans in the late nineteenth century, he could foresee a time in which the land of that continent might become living space into which the German race could expand. It was imagined that Germany’s colonial subjects – the black Africans of her new-found empire – would become the cheap labour of the German farmers. Those tribes unable or unwilling to accept their diminished status would face the industrial weapons that Göring knew would one day appear in the South-West. Those Africans who stood in the way of the German race simply had no future. Like his son fifty years later, Dr Heinrich Göring understood that the weaker peoples of the earth were destined to fall prey to the stronger, and rightly so.

  These beliefs were hardly controversial in certain political circles in the late nineteenth-century Europe. But in Germany, some writers and politicians began to draw the distinction between Europeans and what Hitler was later to call ‘colonial peoples’ much closer to home. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, they began to argue that Germany’s destiny was to become the masters of an empire built on the continent of Europe itself. Germany was too late to take her share of Africa or Asia, but just over her eastern borders, in the lands of the Slavic peoples of Poland and Russia, was all the space she would ever need.

  The Göring family perfectly encapsulates that shift in German colonial ambitions. Both father and son were committed imperialists. The father spent his brief colonial career struggling with pitiful resources to construct the most meagre foundations of a colony in the deserts of South-West Africa. More than half a century later, his son commanded the industrial energies of an expanded and mobilised Reich, and forged a short-lived but genocidal empire in the European East. While the father, whose prospective victims were black Africans, fits our view of a colonialist, the son does not. Yet the Nazis’ war in the East was one of imperial expansion, settler colonialism and racial genocide.

  Today that war is commonly portrayed as an epic military disaster. The battles of Kursk, Leningrad and Stalingrad are now well known, but behind the lines, in civilian areas under German control, another war was fought. Land was cleared, crops confiscated and millions enslaved. Whole villages were simply wiped off the map in punitive raids, just as thousands of villages in Africa, Asia and the Americas had been during the centuries of colonial expansion. In the fertile Ukraine, ethnic German farmers settled on the land of Ukrainian families. In many cases they were simply transplanted into the homes of Ukrainian Slavs, given their houses along with their contents, while the previous owners were driven into the camps. In Berlin, rooms full of bureaucrats spent their days planning the resettlement of millions more Germans at the expense of millions more Slavs and Jews.

  Throughout the grim process of colonisation, Hitler, in his underground bunker in an East Prussian forest, sat late into the night describing to his captive audience of generals and party apparatchiks the wonders of the empire that was just beginning to emerge. He spoke endlessly of the great radial autobahns that would link the new Eastern settlements to Berlin and of the new breed of farmer soldiers who would become the masters of the East – the overlords of the Slavic hordes. Millions of those subhumans would need to be liquidated and the rest reduced to a primitive existence – denied medicine, education and even the most basic rights. If, like the natives of previous empires, they dared to resist the will of their masters, their villages would simp
ly be bombed from the air.

  The Nazi war to build an empire in the East was classically colonial in that it was characterised by genocidal violence, much of which – particularly that ranged against Slavic civilians and Soviet POWs – has been largely forgotten. Colonial genocide has always been a drawn-out process of massacres, famines, enslavement and hidden liquidations. A form of warfare without glory or glamour, it has never been the stuff of memoirs. The wars that built the British and French empires, that kept the rubber flowing in the Belgian Congo, that cleared the Pampas of Argentina and the Great Plains of the US, have similarly been overshadowed by an alternative and more glamorous history of colonialism, focusing on great battles and notable heroic figures.

  The empires of Germany’s Second and Third Reichs died soon after birth. The former took with it hundreds of thousands of lives; the latter, millions. Both were inspired by a nationalist and racial fantasy that began in the late nineteenth century. What was forgotten at Nuremberg and has been forgotten ever since is that the imperial ambitions and many of the crimes committed by the Third Reich have a precedent in German history. The nightmare that was visited upon the people of Eastern Europe in the 1940s was unique in its scale and in the industrialisation of killing. The fusion of racism and Fordism was a Nazi innovation. Yet in many other respects, Germany had been here before.

  Five thousand miles from Nuremberg lies the tiny Namibian town of Lüderitz. Trapped between the freezing waters of the South Atlantic and the endless dune fields of the Namib Desert, it is without doubt one of the strangest places on earth. The sea of sand dunes stops literally on the edge of town; they seem encamped, as if waiting for permission to enter. In the mornings, when the desert is screened behind a thick curtain of sea mist, Lüderitz looks completely un-tropical. It resembles an overgrown Arctic research station or a defunct whaling settlement, perhaps in the Falkland Islands or Greenland. Even on a good day the town looks half dead.