The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  For all their sabre-rattling, the colonial authorities, like the German settlers of the south, were shocked by the sudden rising of the Nama. When General von Trotha was informed of the uprising, he used it as an opportunity to call for further reinforcements, but with the vast bulk of his army on the fringes of the Omaheke or protecting the settlers around Okahandja and Windhoek, only around two hundred German soldiers could be mustered in the south.13

  Only when his forces had reached the settlement of Otjimanangombe on the Bechuanaland border on 9 October, completing the cordoning-off of the Omaheke, did von Trotha turn his attentions to the situation in Namaland. On 24 October, the general arrived back in Windhoek. He then placed Colonel Berthold von Deimling in command of the campaign against the Nama.

  Like Franz von Epp and Maximilian Bayer, Colonel von Deimling had been among the first officers to arrive in South-West Africa in the winter of 1904. Unlike his comrades, Deimling was not a veteran of the Boxer Rebellion, having spent the year 1900 frustrated behind a desk in the General Staff. Command of the southern army was an enormous opportunity for a man already in his fifties to prove his mettle. Deimling was another advocate of von Moltke’s principles of concentric encirclement, upon which the battle of the Waterberg had been fought. While officers like Ludwig von Estorff had openly criticised von Trotha’s strategies, Deimling had been in full agreement. Confident that ‘war is not a matter of knowledge, but of talent’, he set out to apply the same principles against the Nama.

  It was not until the first week of December 1904 that Deimling began offensive operations. His first action was to march on the Witbooi who were then encamped in Rietmont. Although the Witbooi did not make a stand at Rietmont, they were forced into a hasty evacuation of the settlement, and it was during the attack on Rietmont that Hendrik Witbooi’s diaries – invaluable to later historians – were captured.

  A few days later Deimling’s men, having had their first taste of the difficulties of marching through the southern deserts, attempted to surround the Witbooi in the Auob Valley, 60 miles north-east of Rietmont. It was here that the only real battle of the war took place. When they reached Auob, the Germans were pinned down by the withering Nama rifle fire, which led to fifty-nine German casualties, killed or wounded.14 However, the real significance of Deimling’s attacks at Rietmond and Auob was that they encouraged the Witbooi to adopt exactly the form of guerrilla warfare that von Trotha and von Schlieffen had desperately sought to avoid in their war with the Herero.

  From the moment the war began, Hendrik Witbooi and the other Nama commanders recognised that a mass battle with the Germans would be near-suicidal. As the Witbooi and other Nama tribes had fought both against and crucially alongside the Germans, they were familiar with their tactics and fully understood the power of modern artillery and machine-guns. They were therefore determined to fight strictly according to their own military traditions.

  During their wars against the Herero in the 1870s and 1880s, the Nama had operated in small, highly mobile bands known as commandos. Originally conceived as a cattle-raiding tactic, the commando system was easily adapted to guerrilla warfare and was to prove devastating against the unwieldy German columns. In each ambush or raid on a German convoy or isolated farm, the Nama would capture all available weapons, ammunition, horses and cattle. They kept the weapons and took cattle and horses into South Africa to sell to British traders, providing the Nama with the funds needed to purchase ammunition and continue the war.

  The Nama knew the locations of the hundreds of waterholes scattered across the south. This allowed them to conduct offensive operations over a vast range and to seek refuge where the Germans would not dare to venture. Water, more than any other commodity, determined the nature of the German-Nama War. As often as not, the Germans were forced to abandon their patrols or turn back in mid-pursuit when their water bottles ran dry.

  Many of the German troops who had been dispatched to German South-West Africa, and who now found themselves confronting the Nama, were ill-equipped for combat in the south. Large numbers had arrived in June and July, deep winter in the southern hemisphere. New to Africa, they were totally unprepared for the excruciating heat of high summer – November to February – during which temperatures regularly exceeded 40 degrees Celsius. As operations in the south got under way, large numbers of troops quickly began to suffer from dehydration. When water was available, the Germans struggled to locate or confront the Nama commando units. Mounted pursuits were known to last for weeks. Under certain conditions both pursuers and pursued could see each other across the desert, but to the utter frustration of the Germans, the Nama always remained out of rifle range. At times the Nama lured the Germans through ever-changing landscapes into regions of the desert they did not know. Drawing them into the mountains, or into narrow gorges, the Nama would suddenly turn and ambush their pursuers.

  At night the Germans sat huddled around campfires, their sentries peering into the darkness, fearing night-time raids. As temperatures fell to just 3 or 4 degrees above freezing, they were forced to wrap themselves in their saddle blankets, foul-smelling and soaked with horse sweat. One soldier described how the men of his units would ‘huddle together to beat the cold … In this way, I have spent many a night with open eyes, kept company by my most trusted companion, my rifle, while looking up into the star-speckled night sky.’15

  Many mornings the Germans would wake to discover that the trails left by the Nama’s horses had been blown away by the strong winds that always seemed to accompany sunset. During the campaign against the Herero, the Germans had had African scouts, skilled trackers capable of picking up a half-obscured trail in the desert. Now at war with almost the entire indigenous population of the colony, they were on their own. Young German volunteers, with only a few months’ experience and almost no knowledge of bush craft, were completely incapable of determining in which direction the Nama had escaped.

  The result was a war of over two hundred minor engagements but, with the possible exception of the attack on the Auob Valley, no formal battles. In this respect it was like most colonial conflicts, except that now it was the colonised rather than the coloniser who dictated the tactics. In many of the two hundred known encounters, the Germans were attacked by an unseen enemy. Industrial weaponry – light field artillery and the Maxim machine-gun – that across the colonial world had allowed small European armies to crush much larger forces, became liabilities rather than assets. Soldiers weighed down by the very weapons that were supposed to win them the war became easy targets for Nama riflemen, or found themselves too slow to pursue their opponents effectively.

  Even when they were able to give chase, unaccustomed to the landscape, unfamiliar with the complex network of waterholes and with their energy sapped by the heat, the German soldiers were always unable to engage the Nama on terms advantageous to their weapons and tactics. In his memoirs Constantin Jitschin, a cavalryman who was fighting the Nama near the Auob Valley in January 1905, described the war against the Nama as he experienced it:

  Our soldiers gradually became tired of the fighting. But then, this guerrilla war was also uncommonly strenuous. Every time we thought we were about to engage them in battle, we were too late. The enemy no longer presented himself for open battle, he always avoided it. We were in a very bad state. Everyone had burned faces and stubble-beards. Many mothers would not have been able to recognise their own sons in these wild southwest men. The physical and emotional strain that we had to endure could be read from the faces of everyone.16

  One of the German commanders who best adapted to the demands of Nama guerrilla warfare was Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, adjutant of the Schutztruppe and another veteran of the Boxer Rebellion. Sometime around May 1905, Lettow-Vorbeck was placed in command of a ragtag force sent out to hunt down the Bethanie Nama and their leader, Cornelius Fredericks. Lettow-Vorbeck’s account brings to life the challenges facing the officers and men of the southern army and the dire state of the Schutztruppe in
1905:

  Since we did not have a force ready to take on Cornelius, one comprising of helpers, typists, orderlies and a few other zealots was put together and placed under my command. It took a while before we picked up Cornelius’ trail. We wanted to surprise him in his camp at night, but someone warned him and he fled in the last minute. Now, I followed him breathlessly – three hours’ march, two hours’ rest, day and night. Then, at a steep black ridge, the chase went vertical. He had to cut loose the women, children, the old and those that that would be spared by us. Finally, we caught up with the fighters and our front took fire. Flanking them on the left we galloped over the rocky ground. The enemy rode as fast as they could, we were right behind them. But our troops were at the end of their abilities, and we could go no further. The opportunity appeared to ride to nearby Chamis [a German supply post] and to continue with a fresh company. With them, the enemy was once again found, and it came to a small battle. But it was without results: Cornelius escaped.17

  Lettow-Vorbeck never caught up with Cornelius Fredericks. In January 1906 he was wounded and after recuperating left the colony bound for Germany. He later became the dominant force in the Schutztruppe of Cameroon and then German East Africa. He was merely one of the more fortunate (and later more famous) of the many German casualties of the war.

  Of the twenty-one thousand troops who served in South West Africa between 1904 and 1907, around ten thousand eventually left the colony due to their wounds or as a result of sickness. As in the war against the Herero, disease more than combat decimated the German ranks. To cope with the numbers of soldiers who succumbed to typhus and other conditions in the south, a string of field hospitals was established along the road between the town of Keetmanshoop and the port of Lüderitz.

  In December 1904, just three months into the war against the Nama and with fifteen thousand troops now under his command, General von Trotha considered the situation so desperate that he wrote to Berlin requesting that operations be suspended. He also reiterated his belief – first expressed at the outbreak of the Nama War – that a railway should be constructed from Lüderitz to the interior to allow military operations to be conducted in the south. Understandably, Oskar Stuebel, the Director of the Colonial Department, interpreted these requests as ‘a declaration of bankruptcy on the part of General von Trotha’, who after all was confronting a Nama force of just two thousand fighters.18

  General von Trotha’s problems in the south were not all of Hendrik Witbooi’s making. Since October 1903 Jacob Morenga, another highly able and well-regarded Nama leader, had been fighting his own guerrilla war against the Germans. Morenga was perhaps the greatest exponent of guerrilla warfare in the whole history of South-West Africa. His tactics were based around the incredible horsemanship of his men and an understanding of the landscape that came from a lifetime’s experience. He lived almost entirely off his enemies’ supplies, launching repeated raids on German farms and outposts. When German patrols pursued him, Morenga would lure them ever deeper into the mountains, until, exhausted, lost and running out of water, they were forced to abandon the pursuit.

  In May 1906, Morenga was interviewed by a South African journalist for the Cape Times. When asked if he was aware that ‘Germany was one of the mightiest military powers in the world’, he replied: ‘Yes, I am aware of it, but … [Germans] cannot fight in our country. They do not know where to get water and do not understand guerrilla warfare.’19

  Other than his tactical genius, Morenga’s greatest strength was his ability to draw men to him. When he first launched his war against the Germans, he had only eleven followers. By September 1904 his band had grown to 150. By November the following year, the Germans claimed that around three hundred armed and mounted men rode under Morenga’s banner.

  Born to a Herero father and a Nama mother, Morenga understood how to forge alliances across cultural barriers in a way that the older chiefs were unable to do. Hendrik Witbooi never fully forgave the Herero for the deaths of his sons at the battle of Osona in 1885 and was at times limited by the deep bonds and divisions of ethnicity. Morenga was free of such constraints and gathered around him a cadre of men who shared his anticolonial vision. Among his followers were a senior Bondelswarts leader, several Herero and even a white Australian named E. L. Presgrave, of whom little is known.20

  During the Nama War, Jacob Morenga became a legendary figure among the black peoples of southern Africa, known as ‘The Black Napoleon’. His status was boosted by tales of his cunning and audacity. When he and his men stole the horses of a German patrol – who were sleeping around a campfire only yards away – he left a letter addressed to the German commander, thanking him for the horses and asking if the Germans might consider feeding their horses better in future as he had ‘no use for emaciated nags like these’.21 Despite the humiliation they suffered at his hands, some German officers were willing to admit that Morenga was a formidable opponent. In Im Kampfe gegen die Hereros (The War Against the Hereros), Captain Maximilian Bayer described Morenga as a ‘towering personality … an astute soldier’ and ‘an enemy who deserved our respect’.22

  Morenga showed the power of the Africans when they fought according to their own military traditions and put aside ethnic divisions. These were lessons that, by the start of 1905, were being learned more widely. Although Hendrik Witbooi’s declaration of war came too late to save the Herero, there was a brief phase in the war during which Herero and Nama forces fought together against their colonisers. After the battle of the Waterberg, several hundred Herero fighters had ridden south, seeking to join the forces of Hendrik Witbooi. Among them was Samuel Maharero’s son Friedrich, who found the Witbooi camped near the Auob Valley, on the southern fringes of Hereroland, preparing for battle. They included Hendrik Witbooi’s nephew Petrus Jod, the pious Witbooi schoolteacher with whom Friedrich had spent the summer of 1896, when both had been displayed as human exhibits at the Berlin Colonial Show. For a brief moment, both men fought together against the nation that had invaded their land and had regarded them as objects to be put on display. Records show that a month later Friedrich Maharero had reached Bechuanaland, where his father and the remains of his community had found exile. Petrus Jod is believed to have died fighting the Germans sometime in October 1905.23

  In April 1905, seven months after hostilities had begun, von Trotha decided to base himself in the south and take personal command over the campaign. Constrained by his narrow imagination and devoted to his simplistic view of Africans, von Trotha merely replicated the approach he had used against the Herero, issuing the Nama with an edict not dissimilar to the Extermination Order of 1904. Issued on 23 April 1905, von Trotha’s declaration, describing the Nama using the pejorative ‘Hottentot’ and written in the same bizarre pidgin as the Extermination Order, warned Hendrik Witbooi and his people that they would suffer a similar fate to the Herero should they continue to fight:

  The Great and mighty German Emperor is prepared to pardon the Hottentot people and has ordered that all those who surrender voluntarily will be spared … I announce this to you and add that those few refusing to surrender will suffer the same fate suffered by the Herero people who, in their blindness, believed that they could successfully wage war against the mighty German Emperor and the great German People. I ask you: Where are the Herero people today? Where are their chiefs today?24

  Von Trotha also placed a price in the head of the Nama leaders, offering thousands of marks ‘to whoever delivers these murderers, dead or alive’. Neither this financial inducement nor the proclamation itself had any effect on the course of the war; they were an indication of von Trotha’s growing desperation.

  By the middle of 1905, the number of Nama conducting operations in the field was no more than around 1,500, and von Trotha’s inability to defeat or capture such a small force of African insurgents was becoming increasingly embarrassing to the German Chief of Staff and the Colonial Department. The settlers – once von Trotha’s greatest admirers – began to turn
against him. With thousands of Herero still unaccounted for in the north and the entire south consumed by the Nama insurgency, the decisive blow that von Trotha promised would crush the ‘rebellious Africans’ had clearly failed to materialise. By the summer of 1905, the hero of 1904 had come to be seen as an inflexible militarist whose policies were a threat to the colonial economy. At the very moment that his stature and reputation were under attack, General von Trotha suffered two personal calamities. In June 1905 Lieutenant Thilo von Trotha, the General’s nephew to whom he was particularly close, was killed in a clash with the Bethanie Nama.25 Soon afterwards von Trotha’s wife died in Germany. The assurance and confidence that had marked von Trotha’s first months in command now began to escape him. In late September 1905 he wrote to the Kaiser requesting that he be relieved of his command, once an appropriate successor was found.26

  At the beginning of July 1905, General von Trotha and his commanders were consumed with their own dilemmas and had no idea that Hendrik Witbooi and his men were in a desperate state. Despite all their military successes, they had been forced to take refuge at Tsoachaib, a dry and desolate riverbed about 30 miles west of Gibeon, where at least a hundred Witbooi men, women and children were struggling to survive.27 It was winter and freezing winds blew down the Naukluft Mountains 25 miles away. They had little food and no tobacco to numb the pain of their injuries. Hendrik’s deputy Samuel Izaak was particularly ill, weakened by malnutrition and half poisoned by bad water. As his condition worsened, he pleaded with Hendrik Witbooi to enter into peace negotiations with the Germans. Exhausted by almost a year at war, Hendrik’s brother Peter and many of the elder men agreed. The prospect of surrender was strongly opposed by the younger men who had witnessed the battle of the Waterberg and the massacres of Herero that followed. They were championed by Hendrik Witbooi’s son Isaak. In mid-July, in the midst of their internal debate, a messenger arrived at Tsoachaib with a letter from the German military authorities that urged Hendrik to surrender. On 27 July, addressing the German District Commissioner for the southern district of Keetmanshoop, Hendrik responded as follows: