Not all settlers, however, qualified for these loans. Governor von Lindequist, along with Hintrager, set down a number of criteria that aspiring farmers had to meet to be considered. They were expected to prove their ‘German citizenship’, demonstrate that they were of ‘good repute’ and had ‘knowledge of an orderly agricultural enterprise’ to be awarded loans.12 By these means, von Lindequist could control who was able to own land in the colony. Such regulations were part of a programme of social engineering to ensure that the expanding white population would constitute a new colonial Volk. The popular colonial magazine Kolonie und Heimat (In the Colonies and at Home) described the type of German settler that was needed in South-West Africa:
The man who is easily disheartened, who is afraid and used to leading a good social life, who needs spiritual replenishment and cannot bear loneliness or exertion in great heat, he should stay at home with his mother. But, the man who is not afraid of work and who carries a little bit of the devil in him, he is the right man for our Southwest.13
Völkisch fantasists and colonial fanatics like Paul Rohrbach had predicted that the hardships confronting new settlers in Germany’s colonies would transform them into a rugged frontier people. Reconnected to the soil, united by race and culture and away from the moral pollution of Germany’s cities, they would reject the superficiality and materialism of modernity, in favour of traditional modes of life. In reality, however, many of the settlers who came to South-West Africa did their best to replicate the materialism and decadence of modern Germany.
Life in Windhoek, for many of its residents, was far removed from the frontier fantasy. By 1912 the town offered most of the vices and indulgences that Völkisch and Pan-German agitators believed settlers would be better off without. Alongside its farm provision stores, Windhoek boasted several lawyers’ practices, a notary, a bookstore, a tailor, two bakeries, eight hotels and two stores selling women’s clothing. In 1912, Clara Brockmann, a famous female settler, enthused, ‘In the large stores of Windhoek one can obtain everything that moves the heart; luxury and extravagance is cultivated even in the elegant, small towns. One lives like in Germany. The social activity is blooming.’ The social life of the German population, now known as the Süedwester, had once been limited to campfire gatherings and improvised Bierkellers. By 1912 the colony had its own racecourse, bowling alleys and a movie theatre – although most social events were still lubricated by the produce of the colony’s nine breweries and eighty-two bars. The march of progress was by no means restricted to the capital. Swakopmund had been founded in 1892 as a coastal outpost, manned by just nineteen Europeans. By 1909, it had a total of 112 businesses, including barbershops, beauty salons, laundries, a watchmaker and its own newspaper, the Deutsch Südwestafrikanische Zeitung.14
In the years before World War I, German South-West Africa was so alluring that even the sight of the Namib Desert and the Skeleton Coast, which had once struck dread into the hearts of hardened sailors, no longer seemed forbidding to prospective settlers. In her popular memoir, Was Afrika Mir Gab und Nahm (What Africa Gave To Me and What It Took Away) published in 1909, Margarethe von Eckenbrecher described her first sight of her new homeland, glimpsed from the rails of a steamer en route to Swakopmund:
The Namib offered the most glorious view, veiled in a blue haze, above which rested, rosy in the gleam of the sun, the enormous mass of the Brandberg [Mountain]. It is among the most beautiful things I have ever glimpsed in my life, so splendidly exalted and yet so desolate and lonely.15
Another settler, Lydia Höpker, who came to South-West Africa in 1910, described the colony as a paradise. Arriving just two years after the end of the war that had depopulated much of the colony, she was particularly taken by the emptiness of the landscape: ‘Everything was so dewy fresh and untouched, roundabout loneliness [sic] and quiet; only from afar did the call of a bird resound now and again. We hiked silently through this beautiful morning. A dreamlike feeling enveloped me, and I felt enchanted, as if in another world.’16
As the number of settlers increased, supporters of colonialism in Germany were able to claim that German South-West Africa was a fully grown colony. Not only had it attracted thousands of settlers, in 1912 exports exceeded imports for the first time. In the context of the German economy as a whole, the figures were almost insignificant, yet even the British Consul, in his report of 1913, reluctantly had to accept that the colony was thriving. Clara Brockmann proudly announced in 1910 that the colony had become ‘Our new Germany on African soil’.17
As enthusiasm for the colonies reached new levels, Germany set out to exploit South-West Africa and her other colonies fully, by establishing of a network of colonial colleges and research institutions. A German Colonial School was founded in Witzenhausen and three-quarters of its graduates went on to apply their skills in Germany’s overseas possessions.18 In Hamburg, the Colonial Institute taught ‘Ethnology of the German Protectorates’ and ‘Tropical Hygiene’, while the prestigious Berlin School of Commerce offered a course in ‘Colonial Economics’, taught by Dr Paul Rohrbach.
At many institutions, the teaching of undergraduates existed alongside extensive research programmes, many devoted to maximising the productivity of the colonies. To help students from less fortunate backgrounds access careers in the empire, scholarships were established by German companies such as Deutsche Bank and Witzenhausen Steel – both beneficiaries of increased colonial trade and government investment in the new colonial infrastructure.
Graduates of the colonial schools were drawn to the fertile north of German South-West Africa, the territories once owned by the Herero. There, new land could be broken and new methods applied. In the south, however, thousands of new settlers with little interest in farming were attracted by the thought of treasure and prospect of instant wealth.
In 1908 a coloured worker from Cape Town, Zacharius Lewala, had stumbled across a peculiar-looking stone while working on the rail line near Lüderitz. Zacharius, who had previously spent years labouring in the mines of Kimberley in South Africa, immediately recognised it as a raw diamond. Just miles from Lüderitz, in the sands that Adolf Lüderitz had scoured for minerals thirty years earlier, the Germans had uncovered one of the world’s largest deposits of alluvial diamonds.
The discovery of diamonds came at a critical moment for the town of Lüderitz. As the war against the Herero and the Nama had drawn to an end, the army drifted away. The hotels were left empty and the bars fallen silent. ‘It seemed’, wrote a settler, ‘as if Lüderitz was falling back into hibernation.’19 When rumours of diamonds reached Lüderitz, people had run into the streets to rejoice. Within a year, each of the desert hills surrounding the bay had been claimed by competing diamond companies. Hundreds of men groped through the sand or shovelled it into the spinning wire drums of the clarifica tion machines that separated the gems from the worthless rock.
Like all rushes, whether for diamonds, gold or oil, the Lüderitz diamond rush gave birth to folklore. The most enduring legend is that in certain sites it was not even necessary to dig, as the diamonds lay on the surface of the sand. There are stories of one diamond field, located just a few miles north of Lüderitz, in which prospectors would gather at nightfall and wait for the moonlight to pick out the twinkling diamonds that could be grabbed from the sand in handfuls.
The reality of diamond prospecting was not so romantic. The vast bulk of the work was done by black workers imported from the Owambo Kingdoms in the far north. Chained together at the legs, the Owambo were made to crawl across the desert on all fours, fumbling in the burning hot sand for diamonds. They were reduced to this miserable existence by drought and famine in their homelands that forced them to seek work from the Germans. The hardships of the labour itself were aggravated by the brutality of the overseers and their meagre rations. Many of the workers died.
As they criss-crossed the deserts, the Owambo may have discovered more than diamonds. In late 1904 and early 1905, when the death toll on Shark I
sland began to rise, many bodies had been disposed of in the desert outside Lüderitz. They had been interred in mass graves dug in what the German authorities must have presumed would always be uninhabited wasteland. That wasteland was now diamond fields, and the Owambo labourers were searching for diamonds in areas that contained the remains of Shark Island prisoners. Today two such mass graves have emerged from the sands just outside Lüderitz. Hidden in the still restricted diamond zone, the bones of what are almost certainly victims of the camps lie bleached and exposed in the sun. Abandoned diamond-excavating machines stand a few hundred yards away, half engulfed by the yellow sands of the Namib.
At the height of the diamond rush, the white population of Lüderitz was unconcerned by grim discoveries in the desert. As money began to flow into Lüderitz again, the old boomtown mentality swiftly returned. The bars reopened and the excesses of the war years were quickly surpassed. For a brief moment Lüderitz became one of the most dynamic places on earth.
Between 1908 and 1913, 52 million marks’ worth of diamonds were discovered in South-West Africa.20 With each find, the excitement mounted and the population of the south swelled. Just a few miles inland from Lüderitz, an entirely new town sprang up in the desert. Kolmanskuppe had a casino, a bowling alley and a spacious meeting hall in which regular vaudeville performers played to a full house. Those who had already made their fortunes built extravagant villas on the edge of the new town, overlooking the diamond fields.
During the diamond rush, the south of the colony was undoubtedly a man’s world. There were tales of hard-living prospectors who made a fortune in an instant, and squandered it in just weeks in the bars and brothels of Lüderitz. Yet while the south did much to revive the wartime legend of the ‘Wild South-West’, the colonial societies and Germany’s foremost colonial experts were struggling to erase that image. In the years leading up to World War I, the economic progress of the colony became inextricably linked with the issue of gender and those responsible for its future sought to remake South-West Africa into a colony that would attract German women. To be a fully productive, ‘racially healthy’ settler society, the south-west needed not just farmers, but farmers’ wives.
The first campaign to encourage women to emigrate to South-West Africa had been launched in 1896, when the German Colonial Society offered free passage to the wives and fiancées of men serving in the colony. In a more overt attempt at social engineering, unmarried women were given free passage and employed as domestic servants. This was regarded as a way for the young women usefully to expend their energies until they found husbands. Clara Brockmann believed that a settler with a wife worked ten times better than one without, and H. Ladeburg, author of Die Koloniale Frauenfrage (The Question of Women in the Colonies), suggested that through ‘marriage with a racial comrade [a male settler will] raise himself not only ethically, but also economically.’21
By 1913 there were three thousand white women in the colony, around a quarter of the total white population. Twenty years earlier there had been fifty-five. However, the campaign to encourage white women to settle in the colony had less to do with increasing agricultural productivity than with demands for Rassenreinheit – German racial purity.
German settlers in the south-west, like white settlers across the continent, had for decades taken African and mixed-race women as their concubines. Many had had mixed-race children. A small number had married their African or mixed-race partners and settled down to care for their children; others returned to Germany and abandoned their African families.
The first attempt to stamp out racial mixing was made by Curt von François in 1892. To discourage soldiers in the German garrison from taking up with African women, von François threatened to withhold their rights to a free plot of land in the colony at the end of their service. Despite these sanctions, a number of Germans, both among the settlers and von François’s garrison, continued to live with and marry Africans, particularly women from the mixed-race Rehoboth Baster people.22
Even after German women had begun to arrive in the colony in larger numbers, sexual unions between white settlers and black or mixed-race women continued. The colonial economist Moritz Bonn claimed that ‘the main cause of bastardisation in Africa was not the absence of white women but the presence of black ones’. Yet what truly disturbed Leutwein, and later governors, was not mixed-race couples but mixed-race children. Under German law, the children of German fathers automatically inherited their citizenship. Whether or not the normal rights of citizenship applied to mixed-race offspring became the subject of a complex and protracted legal dispute. Believing it was impossible to prevent white settlers marrying, cohabiting with or raping African women, Leutwein and his successors tried to prevent their mixed-race offspring being legally defined as Germans.
As scientific racial theories began to shape attitudes in the colonies, the debate about racial mixing focused on fears that black blood would seep into the white population itself. Racial purity became an issue that weighed heavily upon the shoulders of the officials of South-West Africa and colonialist agitators back in Germany. The magazine Kolonie und Heimat argued that the imperative task facing the captains of the colonial project was that of ‘keeping our races abroad clean’.
The fight against racial pollution in South-West Africa was enthusiastically led by Deputy Governor Oskar Hintrager, a fanatical white supremacist. In September 1905 Hintrager, working closely with Hans Tecklenburg, the former Deputy Governor under von Trotha, passed an edict banning the colony’s marriage registry officials from officiating at mixed marriages. In 1907 the High Court in Windhoek nullified all existing marriages between Whites and Africans. The presiding judge also ruled that that once a bloodline had been ‘contaminated’ with black blood, nothing could change the status of subsequent generations. African blood was regarded as such a powerful pollutant that those infected by it were permanently excluded from the white race.
When left-leaning deputies in the Reichstag complained about the racial laws in German South-West Africa, the colonists openly compared themselves to the former Confederate States of the US and to the Boers, who had rebelled against British attempts to impose liberal racial laws on them.
In March 1907 Dr Angelo Golinelli of the Colonial Department redrafted Paragraph 17f of the Colonial Home Rule Act, allowing men who maintained relationships with Africans to be disenfranchised. Settlers with black or mixed-race wives were also officially barred from receiving government allowances, or loans to help them buy and equip new farms or make improvements to existing plots.
Irrespective of how many years a couple had been married, the number of children they had, or the past record of the settler in civic life or military service, men with mixed-race families were expected to abandon them in the name of racial purity. Those who refused were banished socially and economically from white colonial society.
In May 1912, in the tradition of his predecessor, Governor Seitz passed his own Race Law. Seitz’s decree required the registration of all mixed-race children at birth. It also provided the legal foundations for the forcible break-up of mixed-race families. The decree stated that ‘If the cohabitation of a non-native man with a native woman becomes a source of public annoyance, the police may require the parties to separate and, if this does not happen within a specified time, may compel such a separation.’23
The racial laws pioneered in German South-West Africa became the model for racial legislation in other German colonies. Similar laws were passed in German East Africa in 1906 and Togo in 1908. In Germany’s colony in Samoa, Secretary of State Wilhelm Solf personally intervened to ban interracial marriage in 1912, despite generations of racial mixing. In Berlin in 1905 there was even talk of a ban on interracial marriage, based on the German South-West African laws, being introduced in Germany itself. Although the law was not passed, the few mixed-race people who lived or had been born in Wilhelmian Germany were not permitted the status of citizenship.
The racial legislation
pioneered in German South-West Africa propelled the issue of racial mixing out of the colonies and into Germany itself. A series of colonial debates held in the Reichstag between 1905 and 1912 were reported in the newspapers and discussed at length in the publications of the various colonial societies, and an entire lexicon of quasi-legal and pseudo-scientific terminology, much of it used in German South-West Africa, was introduced. Terms such as Rassenmischung (race mixing), Rassenreinheit (racial purity), Rassenschande (racial shame), Mischlinge (people of mixed-race) and die Mischlingefrage (the mixed-race question) seeped into the language. This terminology created the foundations of an increasingly biological understanding of race and racial mixing. It flowed into the much older discourse on the place of the Jews in German society and their supposed inferiority to ethnic Germans.
Not only was German South-West Africa the colony in which racial laws and new racial categories were pioneered, it also became the field-laboratory of German racial scientists. In the years after the Herero and Nama wars, they set out on expeditions to prove scientifically the danger that racial mixing posed to the settler population.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was commonly asserted by both scientists and colonial enthusiasts that racial mixing led to some form of ‘degeneration’ – a decline in the health and intellect of mixed-race offspring. Over generations, it was believed, mixed-race people would continue to produce children marked by a range of physical and mental inferiorities, even if they bred only with ‘pure’ whites. Various theories had been put forward to explain ‘racial degeneration’, and much evidence to the contrary had been ignored. Felix von Luschan, Director of the Berlin Museum of Ethnology, and formerly of the Berlin Colonial Show, believed that in mixed-race populations negative traits inherited from the lower race would dominate to the extent that, after several generations of Blutsmischung (blood mixing), such populations would eventually produce offspring who were pure-blooded members of that lower race. Von Luschan claimed to have personally studied this effect, known as Entmischung (de-mixing), in ‘Hottentots’.
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 28
