The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  At the beginning of 1884 Bismarck was still waiting to see how the British would react to Adolf Lüderitz’s acquisition of Angra Pequeña. Despite several dispatches to the British government enquiring as to whether they had any historic claim on Lüderitz’s land, the British had remained silent. Through high-handed inaction and a series of blunders, the British authorities gave the impression (to Bismarck at least) that they were attempting to strangle the new German colony at birth. In March 1884 news arrived that the British Cape government had, somewhat suspiciously, stumbled across a batch of previously lost documents that proved Britain had rights over Angra Pequeña. Bismarck was furious.

  Three months later Heinrich von Kusserow, the pro-colonial official from the Foreign Office, sent Bismarck a memorandum that offered a positive assessment of Angra Pequeña as a potential trading post. Von Kusserow also took the opportunity to remind the Chancellor that the British – the very power that threatened to undermine German interests in Africa – had pioneered a colonial model offering Bismarck the possibility of acquiring colonies without the attendant financial burdens. Although much of the British Empire was made up of Crown Colonies, run by British administrators and garrisoned by British soldiers, other possessions were merely ‘protectorates’. This was Britain’s famous ‘paper empire’, in which the administration and development of vast areas was undertaken by private companies working under a Royal Charter and with only the nominal protection of the British flag. These companies recruited their own private armies and financed their own affairs.

  There were already stretches of the African coast on which German traders were the dominant presence. If they could be persuaded to run those areas as colonies according to the British charter company model, then the declaration of an African empire would be a mere formalising of arrangements that already existed. Encouraged by von Kusserow, Bismarck began to regard the British model as a way of yielding to the public mood. Just weeks after receiving the von Kusserow memorandum, Bismarck made his final and irrevocable leap into the dark. ‘Now let us act,’ he told von Kusserow.14

  In the spring of 1884 the highest levels of the German government were flung into action to secure the future empire. On 19 April, Bismarck informed Adolf Lüderitz that his private colony would receive full protection. Nine days later the Hamburg trader Adolf Woermann was summoned to Berlin and told that all German traders working on the West African coast were to be placed under the protection of the Reich.

  Government and private business now began working together to give shape to the new empire. In May, Adolf Woermann supplied Bismarck with a set of guidelines that laid out in detail what would need to be done on the ground if Germany were to secure territory in West Africa. The guidelines told the government upon which shores the German flag should be planted and which African tribes would have to be coerced into signing trade agreements. Exactly a month after promising protection to Lüderitz, Bismarck telegrammed the man who was to have the honour of declaring the birth of Germany’s African empire: the African explorer and long-time advocate of colonial expansion Gustav Nachtigal.

  A Special Commissioner of the German government, Nachtigal was already on standby in Lisbon harbour on the German gunboat the Möwe (Gull). On receiving Bismarck’s order, he set sail along the West African coast with orders to raise the German flag over the territories that were to become her new colonies. After this he was to make the long journey south, over the equator and along the Skeleton Coast, to Angra Pequeña. It would take him until July to reach West Africa, and in the intervening weeks Bismarck concentrated his attentions on diplomatic manoeuvres to convince the British that nothing untoward was taking place. Lulled into complacency by Bismarck and completely unaware of Nachtigal’s mission, British administrators in London and at the Cape continued their leisurely debate as to the whether or not to annex the 900 miles of coastline between the Orange River and Portuguese Angola.

  In July the Möwe finally arrived off the coast of Senegal, the first potential German colony. In 1884 Senegal was the site of a German trading post and German traders were highly active in the area, yet this first landing of the Möwe was an abject failure. Nachtigal came ashore, with his flags and declarations at hand, only to discover that the local African leader had just signed a protection treaty with the French. Hopes of a German colony in Senegal were dashed for ever.

  Gustav Nachtigal’s subsequent landings were more successful. At Togo he came ashore and claimed Little Popo in the name of the Kaiser. In August he raised the German flag at various trading posts along the Cameroon coast. At the mouth of the Cameroon River, Nachtigal was personally met by one of Woermann’s younger brothers, and the Möwe was joined in convoy by two of the Woermann company’s steamers. Woermann’s representatives in Cameroon had even paved the way. When Nachtigal arrived at Douala he found the substantive details of the treaty had already been agreed between the local kings, the Woermann company and the agents of another German shipping line, Jantzen & Thormaehlen. By the time the British representative in the region arrived, the German flag fluttered over the bay and Germany had laid claim to 40 miles of impenetrable malarial mangroves – a coastline fatal not just to Europeans but to the Africans of the interior and even livestock, all of whom fell prey to the tsetse fly and the mosquito.

  The final part of Nachtigal’s secret mission had been to sail south and conduct friendship treaties with the people of south-western Africa on his way to Angra Pequeña, but given the accelerating pace of the ‘scramble for Africa’, Bismarck was unwilling to wait for Nachtigal and the Möwe. He dispatched two fast navy corvettes – the Elizabeth under Captain Schering and the Leipzig under Captain Herbig – that thundered into the silent bay on 7 August 1884. The next morning soldiers from both ships assembled in neat lines around the flagpole and were called to attention on the rocky waterfront. The German flag was slowly raised and a proclamation read out declaring that Adolf Lüderitz’s private empire now enjoyed the protection and sovereignty of ‘His Majesty Kaiser Wilhelm I’. Out in the harbour the two warships fired a twenty-one-gun salute and south-western Africa became the Protectorate of German South-West Africa.

  To claim the rest of the Skeleton Coast, between the Orange River and the border with Angola to the far north, another German warship – the gunboat Wolf – was diverted to Africa en route to Singapore. In late 1884, in austere harbours and on windswept promontories all along the Namib shoreline, the crew of the Wolf repeated the same bizarre ceremony. Sailors in blue jackets raised their country’s flag over empty land, their only witnesses the birds and the fur seals. One ceremony was held at Swakopmund at the mouth of the Swakop River, another at Cape Frio. A flag was also raised at Cape Cross in the shadow of the padrão hauled ashore by Diogo Cão four hundred years earlier. Unlike the fifteenth-century Portuguese, however, the Germans were to make real their claim of ownership.

  There were few other episodes during the ‘scramble for Africa’ that illustrate so graphically the near-insanity that gripped the minds of otherwise reasonable men. From the comfort and splendour of London and Berlin, representatives of two of the world’s greatest powers raced each other across oceans and fought a battle of wits to acquire one of the most desolate places on earth, a land virtually uninhabitable to outsiders and, ostensibly, worthless.

  By the end of the 1884 almost 1 million square miles of Africa had been brought under nominal control of Germany and her charter companies. In addition, Germany had claimed possessions in Samoa and New Guinea. In October 1884 Germany’s right to exploit her new empire in Africa was recognised by the powers of Europe and the United States at the Berlin Conference, held in Bismarck’s own villa on Wilhelm Strasse. The African empire over which Germany claimed rights of protection at the conference was over five times the size of the Reich itself. Fourteen million Africans had (in theory at least) become the colonial subjects of Germany – although almost none of them had any idea that this seismic event had even taken place. At the start of
her colonial odyssey, Germany found herself with considerable holdings, high aspirations but almost no experience in administering overseas possessions. Her few supposed colonial experts were quickly conscripted into the great enterprise. The explorer Gustav Nachtigal had already been made a Colonial Commissioner. Soldiers such as Curt von François and Hermann Wissmann made the leap from colonial mercenaries of King Leopold II to founders of the German army in Africa. Yet in the charter model of colonialism, it was the traders, not the servants of the crown, who were expected to shoulder the greatest burdens. Much of the pressure on Bismarck had come from the shipping companies and the merchants. Now they had their protectorates, it was up to them to make it pay, or so the theory went.

  Bismarck’s savvy diplomatic manoeuvres had captured the public mood and satisfied the popular call for colonies, but outside the trading houses of Hamburg and Bremen, the loudest of those calls had been for territories where ordinary Germans might settle and farm. Of the four African colonies, two were completely unsuitable for settlers. Togo and Cameroon would only ever be trading colonies, home to a skel eton staff of traders, agents, missionaries and increasingly soldiers – malaria and yellow fever made that a certainty. Of Germany’s other two colonies, it was South-West Africa that seemed to offer the only real potential for settlement, although few could see it in 1884.

  The process of transforming German South-West Africa into anything resembling a viable colony would take decades. In the first instance the Africans of the territory would have to be made to sign ‘protection treaties’ with Germany. And here again the trader was to lead the way; the flag would merely follow. Through his audacity, and the double dealing of his agent Heinrich Vogelsang, Adolf Lüderitz had won the right to exploit his possessions around Angra Pequeña, but he had also been burdened with the responsibility of administering the territory, a task that almost instantly proved too much for him.

  In February 1885 the Tilly, the ship that had launched Lüderitz’s empire, sank, taking with it much of his fortune. Further bad luck followed. Dreaming of diamonds, gold or at the very least copper, he funded a series of prospecting expeditions. They found nothing. Adolf Lüderitz would not live to realise the wonderful irony: these ruinously expensive expeditions, led by expert geologists and geographers imported at his own expense, had marched blindly across some of the richest deposits of surface diamonds on earth and come back empty-handed. With his funds dwin-dling, Lüderitz entered into discussions with a group of British financiers. Bismarck was horrified. To keep the British out of Germany’s newly won colony, the Chancellor quickly conjured into existence a German company ready to take over Lüderitz’s remaining assets.

  The German South-West African Colonial Company was a fragile concern from its inception. Most of its initial capital was spent buying out Adolf Lüderitz, and by the end of its first year of operation it had lost 45,159 marks.15 The charter system of informal colonies led by traders had run aground. Short of capital and bereft of ideas, the company turned to the state for help. In order to keep hold of German South-West Africa and prevent the encroachment of British interests, Bismarck was forced to create the entity he had always sought to avoid: a state-financed colonial administration. With deep reluctance he appointed an Imperial Commissioner.

  Notes – 2 The Iron Chancellor and the Guano King

  1. The Times, 27 August 1884.

  2. Journals of the London Mission Society (Schmelen, 1819), Cape Archives, Cape Town.

  3. J. C. G. Röhl, From Bismarck to Hitler: Problems and Perspectives in History (London: Longmans, 1970), p. 61.

  4. Helmuth Stoecker (ed.), Bernard Zöller (trans.), German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War (London: Hurst, 1986), p. 18.

  5. Ibid., p. 31.

  6. Hans Ulrich Wehler, ‘Bismarck’s Imperialism’, Past and Present 48 (1991), p. 129.

  7. Ibid., p. 269.

  8. The Times, 25 June 1888.

  9. The Times, 16 September 1885.

  10. The London Globe, 11 December 1884. Quoted in Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Domestic Origins of Germany’s Colonial Expansion under Bismarck’, Past and Present 42 (1969), p. 127.

  11. Woodruff D. Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), p. 30.

  12. Stoecker, German Imperialism, p. 31.

  13. H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), p. 23.

  14. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 68.

  15. Mary Evelyn Townsend, The Rise and Fall of Germany’s Colonial Empire 1884–1918 (New York: Macmillan, 1930), p. 129.

  ‘This Is My Land’

  On 2 September 1885 the newly appointed Imperial Commissioner of German South-West Africa, Dr Heinrich Ernst Göring, arrived in Walvis Bay aboard the British cruiser the Namaqua. Walvis Bay, by far the best anchorage on the southwest African coastline, had been seized by the British in 1878 and, along with the local African porters who unloaded ships arriving at the docks, the only residents were a handful of British officials.

  Dr Göring, an overweight middle-aged provincial judge, was an unlikely Imperial Commissioner. He had no experience of Africa, but, by virtue of his birthplace on the German-Dutch border, he was fluent in Dutch, the language spoken across south-western Africa by the Nama and increasingly the Herero. His other key qualification was his knowledge of law: the first stage in the colonisation of South-West Africa was to be a legal rather than a military affair.1

  It is a common misconception that the Berlin Conference simply ‘divvied up’ the African continent between the European powers. In fact, all the foreign ministers who assembled in Bismarck’s Berlin villa had agreed was in which regions of Africa each European power had the right to ‘pursue’ the legal ownership of land, free from interference by any other. The land itself remained the legal property of the Africans. To begin to divest the peoples of the south-west of their property, Bismarck instructed Göring to negotiate a series of ‘protection treaties and alliances between the German Reich and the autonomous rulers in South-Western Africa’.2 In return for vague promises of ‘protection and friendship’, the Africans were to be bound to Germany.

  He was given a staff of just two. The clerk Louis Nels was to help with administrative and legal matters, and the soldier Hugo Goldammer was given the grand title of Chief of Police, despite the fact that there was not a single policeman or soldier for him to command. In mid-September 1885 the three Germans left Walvis Bay and headed north towards the lands of the Herero. On 3 October their four covered wagons, each pulled by a team of eighteen oxen, reached the Herero capital at Okahandja. The town consisted of a hundred or so round huts, built from mud and branches and set along a bank of the Okahandja River, which, like all rivers in South-West Africa, flowed only briefly during the short rainy season. On a large bend in the river stood a row of brick houses belonging to Herero leaders. The most impressive, described by one German trader as ‘resembling a villa’, had its own stables and was the home of the foremost Herero chief, Maharero Tjamuaha.3

  Being of the opinion that ‘natives are easily impressed by appearance’, Göring halted on the outskirts of Okahandja so that he, Nels and Goldammer could change their clothes. Göring, who had a particular penchant for dress uniforms, donned a navy-blue jacket with gold trim, a pith helmet, baggy trousers and riding boots. This attempt at a grand entry did not produce the anticipated response. Rather than being ushered into the presence of Chief Tjamuaha, Göring and his colleagues were directed to the local German mission station and told to wait. In late 1885 Chief Tjamuaha had more pressing concerns than the arrival of three overdressed German officials.4

  Just as Göring and his colleagues reached Okahandja, the Witbooi, the most powerful of the Nama clans, had arrived en masse at the Herero settlement of Otjimbingwe just two days’ ride away. In
accordance with a peace treaty signed only a year earlier to end a decade-long war, they were seeking safe passage to fresh pastures in the fertile areas in the northern reaches of Hereroland. En route the Witbooi had been joined by several hundred Nama from other clans. They travelled in an enormous column made up of hundreds of wagons and thousands of cattle, stretching for over a mile. The Nama fighters were well armed and highly organised. Their leaders were unwilling to accept the Herero’s traditional monopoly on the lush terrain of the central plateau.5

  The threat posed by the Witbooi and their allies completely overshadowed the sudden appearance of Dr Göring and his entourage. But after a few days’ wait, Chief Tjamuaha found time to grant Göring an audience. Old, tall and heavy-set, Tjamuaha was an impressive figure. In the Herero’s praise poems he is described as ‘so very black, black as the shadows by the mountains in the west’. As well as one of the most powerful men in South-West Africa, he was said to be one of the richest, owning more than thirty thousand head of cattle. Dressed in a thick cotton blazer, the chief greeted his German visitors warmly and settled down to talk. But while Göring was in mid-flow, he was hastily ushered out and the meeting abruptly terminated.