The outbreak of hostilities, based as it was on false rumours and a misinterpretation of events, might otherwise have been limited to Okahandja and resolved through negotiations. However, by 1904, the Herero people had endured several years of abuse and provocation and events in Okahandja were the spark that set all of Hereroland ablaze.
In the following days, a wave of violence radiated out from Okahandja. Brandishing clubs, knives and guns, the Herero attacked German farms and isolated homesteads across the great central plateau. Settlers were killed in their beds, on occasion by their own Herero servants. Men who had murdered or raped Herero, whom the German authorities had failed to punish, were hunted down. Traders who had extorted cattle and exaggerated debts were also killed. The Herero seized (at times seized back) large numbers of cattle from the traders and the settlers.
The wave of violent anger that began in Okahandja was, in part, a furious reaction against Lieutenant Zürn himself. As the historian Jan-Bart Gewald has shown, it was Zürn more than anyone who had substantially deepened Herero grievances and pushed them to the point at which a relatively minor incident in one town could lead to a general uprising across the whole of their territory.
One episode that had exacerbated tensions occurred just five weeks before fighting in Okahandja broke out. It concerned the forging of a land treaty. At the end of 1903, Zürn had summoned a number of Herero leaders from northern Hereroland to a meeting at the German fort in Okahandja. He had demanded they sign a contract that transferred large tracts of their ancestral land to the German authorities and established a second Herero reservation. When the chiefs refused to sign the treaty, Zürn had them unceremoniously removed from his office. He then forged what he imagined were passable imitations of their signatures: a series of indistinct ‘X’s. In fact, several of the Herero chiefs were perfectly able to read, write and sign their own names. On 8 December 1903 Zürn announced that the boundaries of northern and central Hereroland had been formally agreed, irrespective of the chiefs’ rejection of the necessary treaty.4
This transgression had infuriated the Herero, but even before this Zürn had established himself as a figure of hate. On at least one occasion in 1903 Zürn had ordered his men to exhume skulls from various Herero graves in Okahandja. By the early twentieth century, race scientists in Germany were paying increasing sums for the skulls of Africans and other ‘native’ peoples, and Ralph Zürn had probably come to regard the skulls of the Herero as an easy source of additional income. For the Herero, the desecration of their ancestors’ remains, as Heinrich Göring had discovered two decades earlier, was regarded as an act so odious as to be utterly unforgivable.
In 1905, Ludwig Conradt, a German trader and close friend of Chief Samuel Maharero, claimed that the desecration of the graves at Okahandja had been one of the main reasons why the Herero had risen up.5 Even among settlers who had little contact with the Herero leadership, it was fairly well known that Zürn had goaded them to the point of revolt and that he was at least partially responsible for the war. Samuel Maharero also singled out Zürn as the chief author of the conflict, writing to Leutwein on 6 March 1904, ‘This is not my war … it is that of Zürn.’
It is reasonable to assume that Leutwein and the German authorities knew that Zürn was the immediate cause of the violence. But once the war had begun, concerted efforts were made to ensure that all blame was laid on the Herero, and Samuel Maharero in particular. In June 1904 Zürn was quietly relieved of his command and sent back to Germany. As a final insult to the people whose destruction he had set in train, he brought back to Germany a Herero skull looted from the graves at Okahandja. In Berlin he donated the skull to the collection of Felix von Luschan, the racial anthropologist who, eight years earlier, had attempted to carry out anthropological examinations on Herero and Witbooi – including Friedrich Maharero, Chief Samuel’s son – during the Berlin Colonial Exhibition.6
Friedrich Maharero was probably by his father’s side in January 1904 when they received news of the Germans’ attack. They were at that time some distance from Okahandja, visiting a sick friend. As the violence spread from the town, the Paramount Chief issued a formal order to his people. In this open letter, Maharero accepted that the war could now not be stopped and set down the rules by which the Herero would fight. He specifically forbade violence against women and children and, apart from a few incidents in the early chaotic days of the conflict, this edict was obeyed. While German men were attacked and killed, only four women and one child were killed during the whole course of the war.7
What happened to the Lange family at the settlement of Barmen, 25 miles from Okahandja, was typical. On the evening of 12 January, farmer Lange was dragged from his house and beaten to death. In panic, his wife grabbed two of her three children and fled with them into the bush. Mrs Lange and her children were not pursued by her husband’s killers. A day later she and her children were picked up by a Herero patrol and escorted to Okahandja, where they were handed over to the German authorities. Brunhilde, the family’s youngest child, who had been abandoned in the family home, also survived unharmed. A sheepherder discovered the child and delivered her to a local mission station.8
Samuel Maharero’s order also made it clear that the war was solely against the Germans and was not to become a general race war against all whites. Boers and Englishmen, traders as well as settlers, were not to be attacked. Nor were the mixed-race Baster people or the Herero’s old enemy the Nama. Again, these instructions were strictly carried out.
By contrast, the settlers and their allies among the Schutztruppe, once they had recovered from the initial shock of the uprising, conducted a brutal war against the Herero. Herero working for German companies or farmers were arrested and imprisoned. There were cases of lynching, and isolated Herero communities who did not take part in the rising – and even declared their ‘loyalty’ to the Kaiser – were nonetheless attacked. Photographs taken by settlers in early 1904 depict the beaten bodies of Herero men hanging from trees. In late January three gallows were erected on a hilltop in Windhoek and the execution of captured Herero became a regular public spectacle. The corpses of hanged rebels were left for days, as a warning to others.9 In one of the Cape Town newspapers, an anonymous correspondent, signing ‘A German Settler’, wrote: ‘We have commenced to hang these black rascals instead of shooting them and I can assure you we hang them nicely.’10
Within days of the outbreak of war in German South-West Africa, news reached Berlin that German settlers, subjects of the Kaiser, had been killed. The deaths of whites and the publication of casualty lists – constantly updated, if often inaccurate – made it impossible for the Herero rising to be viewed as simply another native revolt. The conflict in South-West Africa came to be regarded, by both the public and the government, as a national emergency and a blow to German national pride.
From the start, the outburst of intense fury against the Herero was channelled and manipulated by an array of nationalist and pro-colonial societies. Along with the right-wing press, they set out to portray the Herero as savages, their uprising motivated by innate brutality. Ignoring the facts, they repeatedly claimed that the Herero had launched an indiscriminate racial war and that, as savages, they fought without restraint. Many newspapers also carried reports of atrocities – most exaggerated, some entirely fabricated – claiming that a number of German children had been killed, that white women had been raped and that some of the male settlers who had been killed had had their noses and testicles cut off.11
To amplify the impact of these stories, artists produced fantastic illustrations. One engraving showed a gang of marauding Herero holding down a defenceless German woman in a white dress.12 As the artist had no knowledge of life in South-West Africa, he depicted the Herero wearing the overalls and hats common among black sharecroppers in the Deep South of the United States.
With large swathes of the German public increasingly transfixed by events in South-West Africa, few people dared to challeng
e the accuracy of the reports from the colony. In an atmosphere of ‘war fever’, investigation into what had sparked the rebellion was eclipsed by the larger issue of how Germany should respond. The dominant argument – which runs through much of the propaganda – was that the Herero had to be punished. A campaign launched by the German Colonial Society drummed up support for a large-scale military intervention. In a public statement, issued only days after fighting in Okahandja had started, the society warned that ‘Europeans can assert themselves only by maintaining the supremacy of their race at all cost.’13 Other newspapers and pro-colonial pamphlets denounced the Herero, claiming that as a ‘savage race’ they would respond only to overwhelming military force.
These racial assumptions tapped into the general atmosphere of militarism that pervaded the Germany of the Kaisers. While to large sections of the German public the uprising was seen as an affront to German national honour, the army saw it as a rare opportunity. With the exception of the German contingent who had taken part in the crushing of the Boxer Rebellion three years earlier, and the small colonial force that had recently fought a murderous war in German East Africa, few of the soldiers in Kaiser Wilhelm’s enormous army had actually tasted battle. Germany had been at peace since 1871. The glorious battles fought against the French at the time of unification were now history. An entire generation, inculcated in the Prussian warrior cult, had been starved of the chance to fight. Thousands rushed to volunteer for the war against the ‘Negro Chief’ Maharero. When rumours of an expeditionary force began to circulate, and later when placards appeared across Germany calling for volunteers, young officers clamoured for places and their families called in favours from influential contacts.
Civilians were not immune to the jingoism. Otto Seifert, an ordinary citizen, was so incensed by the reports of Herero savagery that he wrote to his Kaiser suggesting tactics that might be employed against them. The Herero could easily be defeated, he informed Wilhelm, if Germany were to ‘poison their water supplies’. Seifert continued,
After all we are not fighting against an enemy respecting the rules of fairness, but against savages. Never must we allow the Negroes to prevail. The consequences of such a victory would be dire indeed since even now the Negroes believe that Africa belongs to them rather than to the Lord above.14
The Kaiser was inclined to agree. Sixteen years into his reign and with an enormous army standing idle under his colours, the rising of the Herero offered Wilhelm II and Germany the rare opportunity to showcase her military might and underline her status as a colonial power. In February 1904 Wilhelm placed command of the war against the Herero in the hands of the highest military authority in the land, General Alfred von Schlieffen. Today von Schlieffen is best remembered as the tactician whose plans for a simultaneous attack on France and Russia were posthumously realised in the summer of 1914. In the late winter of 1904, he turned his attention from the dilemmas of Germany’s strategic position in Europe and focused on an insignificant colonial conflict at the other end of the world. He promptly dispatched the largest colonial army ever assembled by Germany.
From the middle of February, and at regular intervals thereafter, steamers of the Woermann Line left for Swakopmund, now the main port of German South-West Africa. The latest industrial weaponry was stacked in the holds: light portable artillery, repeating-rifles and Maxim machine-guns. On the decks, hundreds of soldiers waved at the jubilant crowds as they slipped out of Bremen or Hamburg. Most were young volunteers, but a small number were seasoned colonial soldiers, veterans of the Boxer Rebellion and the war fought against the Wahehe people of German East Africa ten years earlier.
Among the contingent of volunteers sent to South-West Africa on the steamship Lucie Woermann was a Bavarian Senior Lieutenant, Franz Xavier von Epp. In the photograph of von Epp in colonial uniform, he stands tall, with a neatly trimmed moustache and deep-set, staring eyes. At thirty-six, he was an experienced, battle-hardened colonial officer, and a passionate advocate of racial and Social Darwinist theories. We know how von Epp viewed the coming war against the Herero, and what he thought of Germany’s colonial mission, thanks to a diary that he kept throughout his time in South-West Africa. Much more than a military journal, the pages are peppered with his thoughts on race, space and German national destiny. While en route to South-West Africa he wrote, ‘The world is being divided … With time we will inevitably need more space; only by the sword will we be able to get it. It will be up to our generation to achieve this. It is a matter of our existence.’15
Also aboard the Lucie Woermann was another German officer with his own vision of Germany’s destiny in Africa. Captain Maximilian Bayer had volunteered for service against the Herero and, like von Epp, he believed that Germany was destined to expand her living space. Bayer regarded the recent history of the United States as a model of how Germany might transform her own colonial frontiers. German South-West Africa was to be Germany’s ‘Wild West’, and the local Africans would ultimately go the way of the Native Americans. Believing the whole process to be ordained by God, Bayer wrote:
Our Lord has made the laws of nature so that only the strong have a right to continue to exist in the world, and so that the weak and purposeless will perish in favour of the strong. This process is played out in a variety of ways, like, for example, the end of the American Indians, because they were without purpose in the continued development of a world that is striving towards a higher level of civilisation; in the same way the day will come when the Hottentot [Nama] will perish, [it will] not [be] any loss for humanity because they are after all only born thieves and robbers, nothing more.16
By 1 March, two thousand German troops had landed in South-West Africa. They were transported across the Namib Desert in the open carriages of the new narrow-gauge railway line and readied for action. It was then, as the new arrivals began to mix with Alte Afrikaners (Old Africans) – the troops and settlers who had lived in the colony for years – that rumours of the military prowess of the Herero began to diminish their confidence. While awaiting transport in Swakopmund, von Epp was appalled to learn that Samuel Maharero’s men were armed with Mauser rifles, identical to those carried by his own men. ‘The black swine know how to use them too,’ he confided to his diary.17
While von Epp and Bayer and other German officers viewed the war as a racial crusade, their commander, Governor Leutwein, had a different view of how the uprising should be managed. It had taken Leutwein over a month to get back from the south after the suppression of the Bondelswarts Nama. He had travelled by sea, landing at Swakopmund on 11 February, finally reaching Okahandja on the 18th. It was perhaps only then that the full complexity of the situation in Hereroland became apparent to him. Whereas the defeat of the Bondelswarts had been merely another stage in the slow process of German expansion, the rising of the Herero nation risked becoming a fully fledged colonial war.
Since the outbreak of hostilities, the force under Samuel Maharero had swelled to around four thousand fighters. However, following the initial surge of bloodletting, the Herero had not sought to press home their advantage, nor attempted to assault the various fortifications in which much of the German population had taken refuge. Instead they had withdrawn to Okanjira, an area of low rugged mountains set amidst a maze of impassable gorges, two days’ march from Okahandja. As the shooting war had in effect come to an end, Leutwein’s instinctive approach was to open up negotiations with Samuel Maharero, whom he had known for a decade. But in the first week of April, Kaiser Wilhelm, acting through intermediaries in the General Staff, denounced any efforts to negotiate with the Herero. Wilhelm issued an order demanding that the Herero uprising be ‘relentlessly suppressed’, and von Schlieffen instructed Leutwein to march on Hereroland and deliver a decisive blow.
Publicly Leutwein did not oppose or criticise his orders, but privately he regarded von Schlieffen’s strategy as doomed. Even with two thousand reinforcements, Leutwein had just over three thousand soldiers under his command. Wi
th this force he was expected to confront a Herero force of four thousand, while policing the rest of the colony.
It is remarkable that, even after two decades of contact with the peoples of South-West Africa, the military elite in Berlin were able to convince themselves that such a small and inexperienced force would be able to overwhelm a substantially larger Herero army. The generals were similarly unperturbed by the enormous logistical difficulties of supplying the force in the deserts of South-West Africa. Nor were they concerned by the fact that the Herero knew the territory in minute detail, whereas the Germans did not even have proper maps of Hereroland. Although some overconfidence can be explained by the inordinate faith they placed in artillery and the Maxim gun, their readiness to discount the military and strategic abilities of the Herero also points to deeply held racial suppositions.
Leutwein it seems was disturbed by the lust for vengeance that emanated from Berlin. As early as February 1904, he had come to suspect that Kaiser Wilhelm and some of his advisers within the General Staff were clamouring not merely for the defeat of the Herero, but for their annihilation. Writing to the Colonial Department, he openly counselled against a war of extermination, on grounds of pragmatism rather than humanity: ‘I do not concur with those fanatics who want to see the Herero destroyed altogether. Apart from the fact that a people of 60,000 or 70,000 are not so easily annihilated I consider it a bad mistake from an economic point of view.’18
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 15
