The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  Throughout the war, the British had put millions of her colonial subjects into uniform and called on them to fight Fascism. Yet their status as colonial subjects, without a political voice and on the wrong side of the colour-bar, was not widely regarded as being at odds with the propaganda of a war against Nazism. The hypocrisy of the Western democracies, who condemned the racism of the Nazis while ruling over 600 million colonial subjects, was ridiculed by socialists of various shades. Some characterised the war between the Western democracies and Germany as a clash between a group of imperialist powers and a would-be imperialist power.

  Although wartime Allied propagandists had rightly condemned the Nazi East as a ‘slave empire’, post-war governments maintained that the horrific depths to which Nazi imperialism had sunk had no bearing on the future of their own empires or on the general principle of colonialism. But the experiences of the war forced post-war advocates of empire to denounce the model of colonialism that had emerged from the Social Darwinian revolution in the late nineteenth century. When Germany had drawn the line between ‘superior’ and ‘lower’ races across the continent of Europe itself, and condemned the Jews as a parasitic race and the Slavs as a ‘colonial people’, a nexus of a biological anti-Semitism, Rassenkrieg and Lebensraum had been unleashed. Only then had the general populations of the colonial powers who confronted Hitler been able to see at close quarters what the colonial ‘conquest of the world’ could mean, and where the clinical logic of biological racism could lead. That the victims of Nazi imperialism were white Europeans helped overcome the barrier of racism and made the realisation easier.

  Rather than reject the colonial project in the wake of Nazism, the Western colonial powers evoked the alternative vision of colonialism: the nineteenth-century notion of the ‘civilising mission’. They used it to claim that their systems were distinct from Nazi imperialism and therefore fit to continue in the twentieth century, perhaps beyond. The British in particular spoke of their empire as ‘communities’ or ‘families’ of nations.1 Pointing to the successes in their territories (where they could be found), colonialists across Europe sought both to placate indigenous independence movements, and to demonstrate to the world and the multi-ethnic United Nations that the violence and genocidal racism of the Nazi colonial experiment was not an innate feature of all imperial ventures.

  The cold facts of 1945 were that the British were almost bankrupted by the war and needed the foreign exchange from their colonial produce to support a faltering currency. The French, Belgians and Dutch were seeking to re-establish themselves as powers on the international stage, unable to accept their status as geopolitical minnows in a world of Super Powers. At the very moment the European powers needed their empires financially and geopolitically, they claimed more vociferously than ever that colonialism was motivated not by self-interest but by Christian paternalism.

  As in the lead-up to the Paris Peace Conference and the Versailles Treaty, the Americans had, at first, seen things differently. Attracted to the principle of international supervision of post-war dependent territories, they had gone so far as to predict that the war would see the age of empire brought to an end. However, by 1945 America’s traditional antipathy towards European empire-building, and British expansionism in particular, was drowned out by deeper fears. The slow dawning of the Cold War convinced Truman’s administration that the European empires were needed as a balance against the power of Stalin’s USSR. When France, Belgium and the Netherlands – all of whom had been occupied by the Wehrmacht only months earlier – returned to their colonies in Asia and Africa and imposed their own occupation on the local populations, they encountered little resistance from across the Atlantic.

  As the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were being condemned as the masters of a ‘slave empire’, a new age of European colonialism in Africa and Asia was stuttering into life. Those who stood in its way were the colonial subjects themselves, who had dared to imagine that the defeat of Nazism might herald the new era of racial equality and self-determination that wartime propaganda had alluded to.

  In the context of the post-war renewal of European colonialism, the history of exterminatory wars and slavery in Africa and Asia was an unwelcome intrusion that risked demonstrating how Western colonialism had, in the past, been capable of atrocities similar in character (if rarely in scale) to those so recently seen in Europe. But if colonial history was brushed under the carpet, the genocides committed by Germany in South-West Africa had, by 1945, been comprehensively buried.

  In 1919, South Africa had dramatically revealed to the world the atrocities carried out in German South-West Africa. Yet in the years after Versailles, the same nation had quietly and efficiently entombed the history they had gone to such efforts to unearth. Despite all their condemnations of German colonialism, the South African administrators of the Mandate of South-West Africa had established a white settler society in the colony, which was in most respects indistinguishable from that which Germany had spent three decades struggling to build. In 1921 the Herero and Nama lands that had been confiscated by Kaiser Wilhelm II were incorporated into the ‘Crown Lands of South-West Africa’. Eight thousand square miles of territory were set aside for white settlers who were encouraged to migrate north from South Africa. The same year, the policy of native reserves begun by the Germans in 1903 was revived. From a total of 57 million hectares, 2 million were set aside for the ‘natives’, who made up 90 percent of the colonial population.2 With the best farmland earmarked for whites, the native reserves were situated on unproductive, marginal land. One reserve, at Aminuis in the Omaheke Desert, in which thousands of Herero were made to settle, was described as being ‘deadly for cattle’, by the South African’s own Reserves Superintendent.3

  After the last Nama uprising had been crushed and the will of the Herero to resist dampened by an intimidatory campaign of aerial bombardment, they, along with the other ‘native’ tribes, were bound to the white economy by a taxation system carefully designed to force them to seek work on white-owned farms for part of the year. In 1927, the South Africans completed the disempowerment of the black population by suppressing their history.

  At the core of South African policy in South-West Africa was the ambition to erase the nationalism and jingoism of the war years, and instil in the white population a sense of unity that placed racial consciousness above nationalism and language. Of the twenty thousand whites resident in the Mandate of South-West Africa in 1921, almost eight thousand were Germans who had remained in the colony after 1918. Over the course of the early 1920s, the South African administration became increasingly aware that the history contained in the Blue Book of 1919 was a significant obstacle to the unity of the white population. The leaders of the German settler community were open in their desire to see the Blue Book obscured, or perhaps officially repudiated as a ‘war pamphlet’.4 Chief among their complaints was that Major O’Reilly’s report had been based, in part, on the testimonies of ‘uneducated blacks’.

  In July 1926 August Stauch, a German settler respected as the overseer who had identified the first diamonds found outside Lüderitz, put forward a proposal to the newly elected Legislative Assembly, calling for the destruction of all copies of the Blue Book. In support of Stauch, the Windhoek Advertiser assured its readers that ‘The Germans were ready and anxious to cooperate in the building up of South West Africa … [but] could not do so fully until the stigma imposed by the publication of the Bluebook in question had been removed from their name.’ Further encouragement for the proposal came from D.W. Ballot, leader of the ruling Union party, who reminded his fellow settlers that ‘Few civilized races could look back over their colonial history without regrets in regard to some of the incidents that have darkened their past.’5

  In 1927, all copies of the Blue Book were recalled from public libraries and government offices and burned. Copies held in British colonies abroad were transferred to the Foreign Office and the testimonies that had shocked delegates at Versai
lles were purged from the Official History.6 In a eulogy to the Blue Book, the editor of the Windhoek Advertiser, J. D. L. Burke, concluded that its destruction would allow the white nations in South-West Africa to ‘go forward together unhampered by the suspicion and rancour of the past’.7 The burning of the Blue Book was the moment the South African authorities, with the acquiescence of the British, took over the process of historical fabrication and distortion begun by the German authorities two decades earlier.

  By the end of World War II, the white population of the Mandate of South-West Africa had reached almost thirty thousand. United and racially privileged, this tiny minority ruled over a black African population of well over a quarter of a million.

  In January 1946, Britain placed the former German colonies of Togoland, the Cameroons and Tanganyika, which had been awarded to her as mandates by the League of Nations, under the trusteeship of United Nations. France, Belgium, Australia and New Zealand all pledged to do the same with their mandates. But Pretoria refused to loosen her grip on South-West Africa. Two years later, elections brought the National Party to power in South Africa and their government immediately set about expanding existing laws into the Apartheid system. After a farcical sham referendum, South Africa informed the United Nations in 1949 that she would continue to rule South-West Africa as a mandate. The territory was effectively incorporated into South Africa. As independence movements grew in strength across the continent, South Africa slipped into her age of isolation, dragging South-West Africa with her. The ‘wind of change’, like the early Portuguese explorers, were unable to penetrate the Namib or reach the people of the southwestern interior.

  Just as there were connections, both personal and historic, linking Germany’s colonial empire in Africa and the Nazi regime, South African Apartheid had its own links to German South-West Africa. Several young Boer nationalists who studied in Germany in the 1930s were at one time or another the house-guest of Oskar Hintrager, the former Deputy Governor of German South-West Africa. A vocal supporter of Boer Nationalism, Hintrager, assisted by General von Epp, wrote a regular column in support of the Boers in the Nazi colonial press. In the 1950s, as the Apartheid system was being established, he wrote the book, Geschichte von Südafrika, in which he claimed that the Boers were not Dutch, but of Germanic racial descent. As members of the virile Germanic Volk, Hintrager suggested, the Boers had quite naturally risen to power over the other, lesser races of South Africa.

  Hintrager had been one of the principal authors of the race laws passed in German South-West Africa. The similarities between the legislation he helped devise and the laws passed by the South Africans in the Mandate of South-West Africa meant that, for many German South-West Africans, the transition from German colonial rule to South African Apartheid was effortless. In 1948 two South-West African senators were selected to represent ‘the reasonable wants and wishes of the coloured races’ in the South African Assembly. One was Dr Heinrich Vedder, the former missionary who had witnessed the suffering of the Herero in the Swakopmund concentration camp. In a speech to the South African Senate, Vedder claimed that the separation of the races had been pioneered not in South Africa but in South-West Africa under German rule, where ‘from the very beginning the German government carried out that which has unfortunately not yet been attained in South Africa – namely Apartheid’.8

  During the 1950s the intricate architecture of Apartheid was put in place, piece by piece, on both sides of the Orange River. On Human Rights Day 1959, thirteen Africans were killed by police armed with sten-guns while demonstrating in the ‘Native Location’ on the outskirts of Windhoek. Five months later, sixty-nine black South Africans were shot – again by police armed with sten-guns – at a demonstration in the Sharpeville township near Johannesburg. Both South Africa and her colony became pariah states.

  For South-West Africa, political ostracism compounded her geographic isolation and exacerbated the cultural gulf between the white population and a fast-changing Europe. Many German South-West Africans, like their British and Boer neighbours, became increasingly culturally disconnected from the continent of their birth or their ancestry. For some, this was deliberate. Post-war South-West Africa became a bizarrely backwards land in which small German communities, living in isolated settlements on the endless grasslands of the fertile plateau, lamented the defeat and collapse of both the Second and Third Reichs. Alongside the last of the ageing Schutztruppe veterans, another community was washed onto the South West African shore by the tides of German history. Well into the 1990s, South-West Africa was renowned among journalists and travellers for the ‘Bush Nazis’: Germans, some veterans of Hitler’s armies, who defiantly celebrated Hitler’s birthday in the local Biergarten or flew the swastika flag above their farmhouses.

  In the small town of Omaruru, one baker celebrated the Führer’s birthday by marking his bread rolls with the swastika. In 1987, on the death of Rudolph Hess, a group of German Namibians placed an advertisement in the Windhoek newspaper the Allgemeine Zeitung describing Hitler’s deputy as ‘the last representative of a better Germany’. As late as 2005, a Windhoek magazine published an article paid for by a group calling themselves International Action Against Forgetting, celebrating the death of the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. ‘With joy and satisfaction’, it read, ‘we take notice of the death of the big monster. On September 20th, the earth and its inhabitants were delivered from Simon … His biggest crime was to live 96 years.’

  Pro-Nazi statements such as these have been repudiated by many German Namibians in recent years, and the Nazi-sympathising and neo-Nazi elements within the community are no doubt small, and getting smaller with each passing year. But the refusal of that minority to condemn the Nazi past tends to go hand-in-hand with a rejection of Namibia’s own history. A culture of denial has developed, that regards attempts by the Herero and the Nama to uncover and commemorate the extermination of their ancestors as an attack on Germany and German Namibians in particular.

  Supporters of this position dismiss the genocides as a historical ‘theory’ and tend to be most defensive on the subject of concentration camps. In early 2009 the Windhoek-based Allgemeine Zeitung published a letter by a German Namibian condemning the use of the word ‘concentration camp’ (Konzentrationslager) on a memorial erected by the Herero, near the site of one of the Swakopmund camps. Yet Konzentrationslager was the term used by von Schlieffen in the order he sent to von Trotha to establish the camps and was used by the Schutztruppe themselves.9 The issue of forced labour is similarly vexed, but is more usually ignored than denied. Another article published in 2009, in a supplement of Die Republikein, the main Afrikaans newspaper, contrasted the slow pace of work on Namibia’s new southern railway line with the lightning speed by which a similar line had been constructed between 1905 and 1906. The article claimed that the original Aus–Lüderitz railway line had been completed in a matter of months by one hundred German soldiers. It made no mention of the thousands of prisoners, most of them Herero women and children, who actually built that railway, or of the almost two thousand of them who died of exhaustion in the southern deserts.10

  The story of the Herero and Nama genocides is not of consequence only as an unheeded augury of the calamities that were to befall Europe in the twentieth century. Neither is it a historical cudgel with which to beat Germany and the German population of Namibia, or force them to accept guilt for the crimes of their forefathers. It is of consequence in and of itself. To the descendants of its victims, the genocides are not a distant memory but an open wound that shapes their day-to-day existence.

  South-West Africa was the continent’s last colony, only achieving independence in 1990, after the collapse of Apartheid South Africa. Pretoria’s grip on the colony she had seized in 1919 was broken only after a bitter and protracted war, fought by the forces of SWAPO (The South West African People’s Organization) and her Angolan and Cuban allies. That final and emphatic rejection of white colonial rule is regarded by many Namibians
as a direct continuation of the wars fought against German rule at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Herero, Nama and others. Among the Namibian leaders who confronted the South Africans in the 1950s and 1960s was the Herero chief Hosea Kutako, a veteran of the battle of the Waterberg and a survivor of the Omaruru concentration camp. One of the Nama leaders who worked alongside him was Hendrik Samuel Witbooi, the great-nephew of Hendrik Witbooi.

  Among the freedoms that were opened up to the black citizens of the new nation of Namibia in 1990 was the freedom to challenge the Official History that had been established by the white minority. Over the course of the twentieth century, South-West Africa had become a nation assured of its own creation myth: a distorted frontier fantasy that had hardened into a state mythology, underwritten by Pretoria and underpinned by the pact of racial unity between Boer, Briton and German that had been consecrated in 1927 on the pyre of the Blue Book.

  Yet the black majority – Herero, Nama, Owambo, San, Damara and many others – had kept their own histories alive, handing both stories and artefacts down through the generations. The old had shown the young where their ancestors where buried, and told them of the ‘holy ground’ where blood had been spilt. Survivors of the camps and the forced-labour regime had given their children the brass identification tags they had been forced to wear, physical tokens of their family’s part in their people’s calamity. Even today the very last Herero and Nama people born into post-genocide German slavery can recount the stories passed on to them by relatives and elders. Ms Unjekererua wa Karumbi, an elderly Herero woman, lives on a former reserve on the edge of the Omaheke Desert. Now in her eighties, she can still recall the names of all eight members of her family who were ‘taken to Lüderitz’ during the war. Only one of the eight survived. Throughout the years of South African rule, she dreamed of travelling to Lüderitz in order ‘see for myself how they died’. The South Africa Pass Laws and crippling poverty made this impossible. Elderly and bed-ridden, her memory is fading and she is beginning to stumble over the list of names told her by her uncle.11