In conclusion, Dr Fuchs stated that in order to reduce the mortality rate, ‘It is necessary to provide [the prisoners] with accommodation that is sheltered from the wind, properly ventilated rooms, warm clothes (coats, trousers, blankets, shoes) and some variation in the food (rice, flour and, where possible, also some meat, onions or lard) as well as medical attention’.43
Fuchs’s report was intended to be secret. Copies were sent only to Hans Tecklenburg in Windhoek, Oskar Stuebel, Director of the Colonial Department in Berlin, General von Trotha and Colonel Dame, the head of the Etappenkommando. In response, von Trotha, Tecklenburg and Dame all argued that despite the horrendous death rate, the flow of Herero prisoners to Swakopmund and the other coastal camps at Lüderitz had to continue in order to meet the pressing need for labour. Colonel Dame noted that while it might be unfortunate that women prisoners were made to work at the Swakopmund and Lüderitz camps, the need for labour was so acute that ‘there is no alternative’.44 Oskar Stuebel accepted Fuchs’s claim that better food might improve conditions at Swakopmund, but then proceeded to denounce the rationale behind Fuchs’s report. Not only did he fail to implement Fuchs’s recommendations for better conditions, he rejected his suggestion that prisoners who were already sick should be sent inland, away from the freezing conditions at the coast.
There is even evidence that – at least in the mind of Deputy Governor Tecklenburg – the camps were intended to weed out the weak and leave only the stronger Herero. In a letter written to the Colonial Department in June 1905, Tecklenburg argued that the high death rates were in Germany’s long-term interests. The concentration camps would leave the Herero culturally broken and decimated. Any Herero who survived the hardships would become the slaves of the German colonisers and they would necessarily be the strongest and fittest. He noted that,
The more the Herero people now feel the consequences of the uprising on their own bodies, the less the coming generations will feel inclined to rebel. Sure, the death of so many natives has a negative commercial impact, but the natural life-force of the Hereros will soon allow them to recover their numbers; the future generations, which could possibly be mixed with a bit of Damara blood, would thus have been bottle-fed with [an understanding of] their inferiority to the white race.45
Wilhelm Eich, the Rhenish Missionary in Okahandja, where 1,500 Herero had been divided between three small concentration camps, claimed on 19 June 1905 that ‘The overseer of Camp I [the military camp] told me recently that he was under orders only to seek out the strong for His Majesty [Wilhelm II].’46
The most damning evidence suggesting that the mass deaths of prisoners in the concentration camps was known of and approved by the German authorities is found in the National Archives of Namibia. In the vaults of the archives is a Totenregister – a death register – for the Swakopmund camp.47 It records the deaths of some of the thousands of Herero prisoners who perished in between January 1905 and 1908. Similar Totenregister may have existed for the other camps but have since been lost, or were deliberately destroyed.
The pages of the Swakopmund Totenregister are divided into columns in which the military clerk or camp officer entered the names, genders and ages of deceased prisoners. However, officiating clerks had no need to enter details in the column indicating the ‘cause of death’. That came pre-printed – ‘death through exhaustion, bronchitis, heart disease or scurvy’.
Notes – 9 ‘Death through Exhaustion’
1. J. Gewald, ‘The Great General of the Kaiser’, Botswana Notes and Records 26 (1994), pp. 67–76; A. Eckl, S’ist ein uebles Land hier (Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 2005); H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986).
2. Most historians mistakenly refer to this event as taking place on 2 October, as this is the date that appears on von Trotha’s so-called Extermination Order.
3. Gewald, ‘The Great General’, p. 68.
4. Eckl, S’ist ein uebles Land hier, p. 284.
5. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, pp. 160–1; Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule (Hamburg: LIT, 1996), p. 164.
6. Ibid.
7. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 157.
8. Ibid., p. 159.
9. ELCN: RMS: V 12 Karibib, 1904.
10. Union of South Africa, Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (London: HMSO, 1918), pp. 117–18.
11. J. Silvester and J. Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. 106–7; BAB, Colonial Department, File 2117, pp. 112–16.
12. Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, pp. 106–7.
13. Bundesarchiv Berlin (BAB), Colonial Department, File 2117, pp. 112–16.
14. Anonymous, Tagebuchblaetter aus Suedwest-Afrika (Berlin: Boll und Pickardt, 1906), pp. 35–6.
15. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 161.
16. Ibid., p. 163.
17. BAB, Colonial Department, File 2089, pp. 7–11.
18. I. Hull, Absolute Destruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 30.
19. Ibid., p. 65.
20. BAB, Colonial Department, File 2117, p. 59b (insert: pp. 1–57).
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. ‘Concentration Camps during the Boer War’, Stanford University Library Collection: http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/ssrg/africa/boers.html.
24. C.W. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently among Them’: Concentration Camps and Prisoners-of-War in Namibia, 1904–08 (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2005), p. 22.
25. Ibid., pp. 24–8.
26. NAN, Accession 569, Memoirs of Pastor Elger.
27. Hull, Absolute Destruction, p. 71.
28. Erichsen ‘The Angel of Death’; J. Zimmerer and J. Zeller (eds), Genocide in German South-West Africa: the Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (Monmouth: Merlin Press Ltd., 2008); J. Gewald, Herero Heroes (Oxford: James Currey, 1999); Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting; Hull, Absolute Destruction; J. Gaydish, ‘Fair Treatment is Guaranteed to You: the Swakopmund Prisoner-of-War Camp 1905–1908’, Unpublished conference paper (Windhoek: UNAM, 2000).
29. NAN, Zentralbureau (ZBU) 454, D.IV.l.3, vol. 1, pp. 58–9.
30. The Herero elders in the Swakopmund concentration camp wrote a letter to the Mission Head asking for access to translated books of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Moses. According to the author of the letter, the enslavement of the Israelites had some resonance with the prisoners. Evangelical Lutheran Church Namibia (ELCN), RMS, Missions-berichte 1906, p. 120.
31. ELCN, RMS, Chroniken 31, Swakopmund.
32. J. Zeller, ‘Ombepera I koza – The Cold is Killing Me’, in Zimmerer and Zeller, Genocide in German South-West Africa, pp. 65–83.
33. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death’, pp. 48–53.
34. Kommando der Schutztruppen im Reichskolonialamt, Sanitaets-Bericht Ueber die Kaiserliche Schutztruppe fuer suedwestafrika waehrend des Herero und Hottenttotenaufstandes fuer die Zeit vom 1. Januar 1904 bis 31. Maerz 1907. Erster Band, 1. Administrativer Teil. (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1909), pp. 45–50.
35. NAN, ZBU 454, D.IV.l.3, vol. 2, pp. 336–40; NAN, ZBU 454, D.IV.l.3, vol. 1, p. 163; NAN, BKE 224, vol. 2, 74. d. spec. I, pp. 29–31.
36. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death’, pp. 22–3.
37. NAN, ZBU 2372, IX. H. vol. 1, pp. 58–61.
38. Cape Archives, GH 23/97, ‘Statement under oath by: Jack Seti, John Culayo and James Tolibadi’, Ministers to Governor, 22 August 1906.
39. See, for example, B. Lau, ‘Uncertain Certainties’, in History and Historiography (Windhoek: Namibian National Archives, 1995).
40. ZBU 454, D.IV.l.3, vol. 1, pp. 58–9.
41. Deaths in the military concentration camp, which was begun early February 1905, until 29 May were 399 prisoners out of 1,100 – 111 of these died in the last two weeks of May. ZBU 454, D.IV.l.3, vol. 1, pp. 58–9.
42. Ibid.
; 43. Ibid.
44. BAB, Colonial Department, File 2118, p. 157.
45. Ibid., pp. 152–6.
46. ELCN, RMS Correspondence VII 31.1, Swakopmund 1–7, Eich to Vedder, 19 June 1905.
47. NAN, BSW 107, VA/10/6.
10
‘Peace Will Spell Death for Me and My Nation’
In the last days of September 1904, six weeks after the battle of the Waterberg, nineteen Witbooi Nama soldiers galloped through the Auas Mountains of southern Hereroland. They wore armbands in the German colours and desert-brown German uniforms, ripped and torn by thorn bushes. They were part of a contingent of one hundred Witbooi men, sent north earlier in the year, to fight alongside von Trotha’s men, in accordance with the treaty of protection Hendrik Witbooi had signed with Governor Leutwein back in 1894. In the aftermath of the battle of the Waterberg, they had slipped away from their German commanding officers and rushed south.1
At the Waterberg, the Witbooi had watched as the Germans bombarded and machine-gunned Herero women and children. As part of the patrols sent out towards the Omaheke, they had been ordered to execute captured Herero and had come to understand that the ultimate aim of von Trotha’s army was not the defeat of the Herero, but their annihilation.2 Although supposedly the allies of the Germans, they had been routinely abused and threatened. German officers had pointed to Herero corpses and told them that they were next.3
After a week in the saddle and a journey of almost 200 miles, the nineteen Witbooi finally reached the small village of Rietmont in the Urigab Highlands. It was here, during the summer months, that Hendrik Witbooi and his key lieutenants resided. By coincidence Carl Berger, a German missionary from the nearby town of Gibeon, the Witbooi’s main settlement, was with Hendrik Witbooi in Rietmont when they arrived. According to Berger, the nineteen men were unusually reserved and insisted on speaking with their leader in private. After their meeting, Hendrik Witbooi called a council of the Witbooi elders, who gathered on wooden stools under a tree by their Kaptein’s house. Berger was allowed to attend and later wrote an account of the meeting,
Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi, who was seated on his usual little field chair … looked a lot older. His posture was slouched and one could hear from his words that his soul had suffered greatly. He told us what his people had said. We told him that it was all unthinkable. He himself knew the Germans for many years and therefore was aware that what his people had told could not possibly be true. To this, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said in muted tone, ‘Who can I believe if not my own people?’4
Despite Berger’s protestations, Hendrik Witbooi had good reasons to believe the reports from the Waterberg. Since the start of the Herero-German War, many settlers in the southern Nama lands had begun to call openly for the disarmament of the Witbooi and the other Nama clans. Dark mumblings that had once been restricted to the bars and clubs were now flowing freely from the mouths of soldiers and farmers. Some suggested that the position of Kaptein should be forcibly dissolved. In a letter of August 1904 Lieutenant Schmidt, the German District Commissioner in charge of the southern town of Keetmanshoop, warned Governor Leutwein that ‘Even the least observant among the natives have a feeling that once the Government has finished with the Herero, they will come down on the people of Namaland.’5
Not only did settlers make such remarks openly, often directly to the Nama; some of their most inflammatory utterances were printed in the newspapers. On 14 December 1904 Georg Wasserfall, the editor of German South-West Africa’s largest newspaper, the Deutsch Suedwestafrikanische Zeitung, wrote an editorial in which he openly stated, ‘The Herero should not be exterminated – the Nama, yes – the reason being that the Herero are needed as labourers, and the Nama are an insignificant tribe.’6 In May, Baron von Nettelbladt, a South African regarded as an expert on events north of the Orange River, penned an article for the South African News in which he claimed that while the Herero ‘belong to the industrious and healthy Bantu races’, the Nama ‘appear to be no good for any kind of labour, and … belong to the dying nations’.7
Hendrik Witbooi, the other leaders of the smaller Nama tribes, and a significant number of their people, were fully literate and able to read these articles. They were left in no doubt that the mood in the south was darkening. Throughout 1904 there had been other portents: in April, for example, the German garrison in the south had doubled and the implementation of a previously agreed land settlement was repeatedly postponed. It was in this climate that Hendrik Witbooi received news of the battle of the Waterberg and the massacre of Herero prisoners.
On 2 October, the day before von Trotha issued the Extermination Order at Osombo zoWindimbe, Hendrik Witbooi dictated a series of letters to the leaders of the other Nama clans declaring his intention to rise up against the Germans. One of the greatest tragedies in the story of Germany’s rule over South-West Africa is that the letters to the Nama chiefs were written only after the Herero had been defeated and driven into the Omaheke. In January 1904, when the Herero War had begun, Samuel Maharero had attempted to forge a grand anti-colonial alliance with his former Nama enemies. He had written to Hendrik Witbooi asking him to join the fight. In what must be Samuel’s most elegant and passionate letter, he wrote:
I appeal to you, my brother, do not shy away from this uprising, but make your voice heard so that all Africa may take up arms against the Germans. Let us die fighting rather than die of maltreatment, imprisonment or some other tragedy. Tell the kapteins down there to rise and do battle.8
Samuel Maharero’s letter never reached Hendrik Witbooi. His messengers were intercepted south of Windhoek by Hermanus van Wyk, leader of the Rehoboth Basters, who confiscated the letter and handed it over to Governor Leutwein. When Hendrik did call upon the Nama Kapteins ‘to rise and do battle’, all hope of a grand African alliance had been lost, and with it any realistic chance of some sort of victory.
A leader of almost irresistible charisma, Hendrik Witbooi was revered as a holy man by many of the Nama. By 1904 he was in his seventies and had come to believe that his last mission in life, as ordained by God, was to expel the Europeans from the African continent. Despite the seeming impossibility of this endeavour, Hendrik was able to draw much of the Nama nation to him. Within a month the Witbooi were joined by Chief Manasse Noreseb of the so-called Red Nation, Simon Kopper of the Franzmann Nama and the Veldschoendragers under Kaptein Hans Hendrik. The Bethanie Nama were split down the middle. Half sought to remain neutral, but the rest joined the Witbooi under the leadership of Cornelius Fredericks, the nephew of Joseph Fredericks, the chief who had been duped by Heinrich Vogelsang into signing Adolf Lüderitz’s fraudulent treaty twenty years earlier. Some of the Nama clans rejected Witbooi’s call to arms. The Tsain Nama of Keetmanshoop, the Hai Khauan of Berseba and the Baster people of Rehoboth chose not to fight, seeking to save their people from the horrors of war. The Topnaar Nama from around Walvis Bay and the Swartsboois who lived among the Herero in the north-east were all taken prisoner by units of von Trotha’s army before they had the opportunity to join Hendrik Witbooi’s alliance.
Despite everything he had heard of German treatment of the Herero at the Waterberg, and in the Omaheke Desert, Hendrik Witbooi and his allies were determined that the war in the south would be fought according to the rules and conventions that were a central part of Nama tradition. Hendrik’s declaration of war reveals that his aim was to drive the Germans out of Nama territory and not to annihilate them. The declaration was personally delivered by Hendrik’s deputy Samuel Izaak and addressed to Sergeant Beck, the District Commissioners of Gibeon and the representative of German power in the Witbooi’s own territory. It read: ‘I leave it at your discretion to transport all women and children to Lüderitz Bay in ox wagons so that they may return to Germany … Men without weapons … are also free to join them. They will not be molested.’9
The Nama uprising, like that of the Herero nine months earlier, began with a wave of attacks against the centres of German sett
lement and isolated farms. Despite having spent the previous months demanding the army be let loose against the Nama, most German settlers were completely taken by surprise when the war arrived on their doorsteps.
The first casualties of the war were the Gibeon District Commissioner von Burgsdorff – killed while trying to accost Hendrik Witbooi – and Ludwig Holzapfel, one of the settlers who had most vocally demanded the total disarmament of the Nama, even suggesting to the colonial government that they be ‘punished for their sins’. On the orders of Hendrik Witbooi, both Ludwig Holzapfel and District Commissioner von Burgsdorff were given proper Christian burials. Holzapfel’s wife and children, who were with him when he was intercepted by Witbooi fighters, were left unharmed.10
The sparing of Frau Holzapfel and her children was in fact quite normal throughout the German-Nama War. While around forty male German settlers and soldiers were killed in the initial weeks, Hendrik Witbooi went to extraordinary lengths to ensure the safety of women and children. It was so widely understood that the Witbooi and other Nama would not attack women and children that, in the town of Gibeon, only German men took refuge in the local fortress, leaving the women and children in their homes. On 8 October, the same day that the Germans blew up Hendrik Witbooi’s family church, a column of Witbooi soldiers escorted a group of German women and children from the surrounding towns through the war-ravaged county and delivered them safely to Gibeon.11
While Hendrik Witbooi was willing to have his men escort German women and children to safety, he harboured no illusions as to what treatment his own people might expect from General von Trotha. As the Nama men prepared for war, many of the women were sent across the borders to the British Cape Colony or Bechuanaland. Hundreds of others, along with their children and even the elderly, had no choice but to stay with their men. In October 1904 whole Nama clans abandoned their settlements and travelled into the deep desert. There they set up remote encampments to house the women and children, while the men rode off to attack the Germans.12
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