The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism

by Casper Erichsen

  Only in German East Africa had the German Schuztruppe taken the initiative. There a large force of African Askaris, led by German officers, came under the command of the inspirational Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. A veteran of the battle of the Waterberg, von Lettow-Vorbeck had witnessed the declaration of the Extermination Order at Osombo zoWindimbe, and in 1905 had been dispatched south to fight the Nama. By the end of 1914 von Lettow-Vorbeck had launched attacks against Belgian forces in the Congo and British positions in Kenya and Uganda, and had repelled a landing in East Africa by a large force of the British Indian Army at the battle of Tanga, the defining battle of a campaign that was to drag on until 1918.

  In German South-West Africa, despite the dramatic landing at Lüderitz and the capture of Swakopmund, little was achieved in 1914. In stark contrast to the tactics of von Lettow-Vorbeck, Major Victor Franke, another veteran of the Herero and Nama wars and a recipient of the Pour le Mérite, made little attempt to confront the invading forces on the landing grounds. Enormously outnumbered, he had withdrawn his men inland, to positions behind the great shield of the Namib Desert. There they concentrated their efforts on maintaining control of the all-important railway hubs, in the south and centre of the colony, and defending the heartland of German settlement in the former Herero pasturelands around Windhoek. Before the Union army was able to launch an assault across the Namib to confront Franke’s Schutztruppe, General Louis Botha, the South African Prime Minister and commander of the Union forces in Swakopmund and Walvis Bay, was forced to return to Cape Town to deal with a rebellion among Boer soldiers.

  With Botha out of the picture for several months, the South African expeditionary force in Swakopmund, Lüderitz and Walvis Bay were left with nothing to do but settle into their billets and wait. For the officers in the Union army’s logistics corps, the hold-up was an unalloyed blessing, allowing them and the thirty thousand black labourers they had brought with them to stockpile supplies and grapple with the enormous difficulties of fighting in the Namib Desert.

  With so much time on their hands, some South African soldiers amused themselves by exploring the nearby deserts. In Swakopmund this led a handful of officers to stumble upon the last visible relic of the concentration camps that had been in operation in the town only six years earlier.

  In February 1915 Eric Moore Ritchie, a lieutenant in Botha’s personal bodyguard, came across an enormous cemetery on the southern edge of Swakopmund. It was situated near the European graveyard, but stretched out into the desert. While the European graves were well tended and shaded by exotic trees, those in the desert were merely rough mounds of sand, a sign of hastily dug, shallow graves. They had been dug in neat rows but had neither headstones nor crosses. Writing later, Lieutenant Ritchie described being particularly struck by the size of Swakopmund’s cemetery. Not only was the desert graveyard several times the size of the European cemetery, it was hugely out of proportion to a town the size of Swakopmund.2 Another South African soldier, the medical officer Dr Henry Walker, also happened upon the desert graveyard in early 1915. In A Doctor’s Diary in Damaraland, Walker’s war memoirs, he recalled his confusion as to why so many bodies, presumably those of ‘natives’, lay interred on the fringes of such a small town:

  Beyond the European cemetery is what is said to be the native burial-place. Rows and rows of little heaps of sand occupy about a thousand yards of desert. Some of these heaps have crude little crosses of sticks placed on them. It was very puzzling to explain why so many natives were buried near Swakopmund, in a place that was not even enclosed.3

  The thousands of ‘little heaps of sand’ in Swakopmund’s desert graveyard, the last resting places of the thousands of Herero who had died in the town’s concentration camps, are still clearly visible today. Eroded by the wind and constantly shifting sands, they are less pronounced than they were in 1914, when Lieutenant Ritchie and Dr Walker encountered them, yet almost a century later the graveyard remains a shocking sight. Its scale is only truly apparent from the air, or on summer evenings when the low southern sun casts long shadows that pick out each individual grave. Swakopmund’s graveyard, like the history of Shark Island or the Extermination Order, is well known to locals, and yet for a century the graveyard has been the town’s unspoken secret. It is now sealed off from Swakopmund by a row of expensive modern villas, and many of the graves have been almost obliterated by the tyres of dune-buggies rented to tourists who used the graveyard as part of their desert race track. In 2007 a low wall was built to enclose the graves, and a plaque erected by Namibia’s Herero community marks the site.

  Thirty years to the month after the Conference of Berlin had ratified Germany’s claim to South-West Africa, the South Africans finally started their advance across the Namib and Kalahari deserts. The South-West African campaign lasted just five months. As the main German settlements were captured one by one by the South Africans, the true horror of the fate that had befallen the Herero and Nama began to come to light. When South African units fighting in the north captured the fertile central plateau, they discovered a land largely depopulated and filled with horrific stories of recent events. In early May 1915, Dr Walker, the medic who had discovered the Swakopmund graveyard, arrived in the town of Otjimbingwe, in the wake of the fleeing Schutztruppe. Walker was struck by the profound fear that the German settlers felt at the prospect of life without the protection of their troops. ‘Here, as elsewhere,’ he noted, ‘the German farmer and villager are living in constant dread of natives, both Hottentot and Herero; and if an evil conscience makes people afraid, they have every reason to be so.’ Walker, who was by now beginning to piece together the story of the Herero and Nama genocides, had come to understand why the German farmers feared retribution, and had grasped the relationship between the Swakopmund graveyard and the strikingly low numbers of Herero and Nama remaining in the colony. The German settlers of Otjimbingwe, Walker reported, are

  reticent as to what has become of the natives in these parts, for although a large Herero reserve is shown on the map, none are to be seen except a few … servant-girls, all very subdued and tame, and given to the singing of German hymns. Ugly rumour has it that most of them were driven into the desert to die of hunger or thirst.4

  On 5 May 1915, after marching uncontested into the town of Karibib, the South Africans uncovered the most shocking evidence of the recent genocides. Not far from Karibib, advancing South African units came across the stables and supply station at Okawayo. There they discovered the last survivors of the Shark Island concentration camp, still interned six years after the camp had been closed down.

  In 1909 the Etappenkommando, the rear supply division of the Schutztruppe under the command of Major Ludwig Maercker, had reported that 240 Nama prisoners remained alive at Okawayo. Most of them were Witbooi or Bethanie Nama. The South Africans failed to record how many were still alive in 1915, but among the survivors was Samuel Izaak, the leader of the Witbooi Nama. A decade after he had surrendered to the Germans on his own terms, Izaak was finally released. The Nama from Okawayo were eventually returned to their former hometowns of Bethanie and Gibeon, where the few who remained subsisted as landless labourers on German farms built on their tribal lands. Samuel Izaak was fifty-nine years old and terminally ill when the South Africans arrived. He died in June before reaching his hometown, Gibeon. Okawayo was later converted by the South Africans into an internment camp for captured Schutztruppe officers.

  A week after the South Africans had reached Okawayo, General Botha’s troops marched into Windhoek and by the beginning of July, the bulk of Major Franke’s Schutztruppe had been forced into an area of scrub around Otavi and Tsumeb, two mining settlements in the north. After an indecisive encounter with South African units, Franke rather meekly surrendered. The next day, Governor Theodor Seitz, who just two years earlier had assured the crowds at the inauguration of the Rider Statue that the Germans would be ‘the masters of this place, now and for ever’, issued an order of surrender.

&
nbsp; On 21 October 1915 German South-West Africa became the British Protectorate of South-West Africa, and a week later the Union army general, E. Howard Gorges, was appointed its first administrator. With the Schutztruppe defeated, General Botha’s policy for the occupation of South-West Africa was to maintain ‘the standing of the white race’.5 The relationship between whites and the African majority was one of the many aspects of German colonial rule that remained almost untouched by the transfer of power from Berlin to Pretoria. Hence the sur render terms agreed between General Botha and Governor Sietz were unusually generous: German civilian administrators were permitted to remain in their posts, German schools were reopened, and men who had served as reservists were allowed to return to their homes and farms and carry on with their businesses. Only the Schutztruppe themselves were interned as prisoners of war.

  The Herero and Nama who had survived the genocide revelled in the defeat of the Germans and had done everything in their power to assist the advance of the Union forces, but few believed that the South Africans would liberate them, restore their rights or return their homelands. The Herero, and even more so the Nama, were well aware of the dire treatment of black Africans south of the Orange River. They did, however, hope that the end of German rule might usher in a more lenient administration in which they might regain a little of their cultural (if not economic) independence.

  The South Africans, who just four years earlier had passed the Native Land Act, the foundation stone on which the Apartheid system was later to rest, had no interest in seeing the recent history of the colony reversed. There were those, however, in both Cape Town and London, who saw enormous benefits in having that history publicly exhumed.

  In the aftermath of the German surrender, General Botha ordered the seizure and translation of all official German documents. Although the Schutztruppe had had the foresight to burn their own archives, the records of the central colonial administration in Windhoek and the files of several District Government Offices had been seized intact. As the South African garrison in Windhoek set up camp on the site of the former concentration camp, beneath the shadow of the Rider Statue, the mammoth task of translating three decades’ worth of documents began. Through this process, the first detailed history of the Herero and Nama genocides began to emerge.

  Even before the South African victory, the British press had tried to rekindle memories of the ‘miserable war of extermination’ the Germans had fought against the Herero. The final German surrender inspired a new intensity in this propaganda campaign. On 10 July 1915 The Times ran an article under the headline ‘German Frightfulness’ that reminded its readers that the war against the Herero had tarnished Germany as with ‘lasting disgrace’.6

  The subtext behind these condemnations was the hope that evidence of ‘German Frightfulness’ might ultimately be used to prepare a case for the confiscation of South-West Africa, and possibly all of Germany’s colonies. Just over a week after the article appeared in The Times, Andrew Bonar Law, the British Colonial Secretary, pompously declared in the House of Commons that ‘Nothing has done more to make the African natives appreciate the value of British rule than the experience they have had of German rule in Africa.’7 Of the eleven Members of Parliament who spoke in the Commons alongside Bonar Law in the July 1915 debate on the German colonies, seven openly advocated annexation; four had no practical suggestions on the matter. None were opposed.

  It was not until America entered the war in the spring of 1917, and the prospect of a final victory over Germany re-emerged, that the British and South Africans felt able to focus their attention on the fate of her former colonial possessions. On 28 April 1917, just three weeks after President Woodrow Wilson issued his declaration of war, the British Imperial War Cabinet met to discuss the matter of the German colonies. The meeting brought together General Botha, Jan Smuts and John X. Merriman, who officially concluded that South Africa would do all in her power to ensure that South-West Africa was not returned to Germany in the following peace settlement.8

  The cataloguing and publicising of the atrocities committed in the German colony would be, in Merriman’s phrase, the ‘strong point’ of a case for permanent confiscation. Compelling evidence of German colonial atrocities was needed, not only to condemn Germany, but to unify the Allies behind the Anglo-South Africa policy. Evidence of ‘German Frightfulness’, it was argued, might prove particularly valuable in convincing anti-imperialists in the American public that the confiscation of German colonies was not merely a pretext for the expansion of the British Empire.

  British and South African condemnation of Germany’s treatment of the Herero and Nama in 1917 was belated and disingenuous. Britain’s own record of colonial and even genocidal violence laid her open to charges of hypocrisy. Moreover, during the Herero and Nama wars the British government had raised no official objections to Germany’s treatment of her imperial subjects. Even when warned by their own military attaché, Colonel Trench, of the Germans’ intentions to exterminate the Nama on Shark Island, London had lodged no complaints.

  Britain’s humanitarians had focused only a fraction of their energy on the crimes committed in South-West Africa under the Germans. They had reserved their most vocal denunciations for the Belgians and Portuguese, whom they regarded as the most cruel and inhumane of the colonial powers. The British press had similarly failed to fault German policy in South-West Africa. Throughout the Herero and Nama wars British newspapers had vacillated between their general enthusiasm for the great white colonial mission, and a barely disguised tone of condescension at the ineptitude and inexperience of the Germans. While they had dutifully reported the deaths of whites, they had often overlooked the killings and even massacres of Africans. When it had suited their purposes, they had lionised figures like Curt von François.

  In the Cape Colony, the Cape Argus newspaper had repeatedly reported the German treatment of Herero and Nama prisoners in the concentration camps. Yet the Cape government had lodged no official complaints nor investigated claims that just across its border a system of concentration camps was in operation. On occasion, the South Africans had actively assisted the Germans. It was South African soldiers who finally captured and executed the Nama guerrilla leader Jacob Morenga, inside the Cape Colony in September 1907.

  There can be little doubt that in September 1917, when the South Africans commissioned an official investigation into the treatment of the Herero and Nama under German rule, they were motivated primarily (perhaps exclusively) by self-interest and opportunism. Yet the investigation and the resulting report were characterised by a remarkable dedication to factual precision. Howard Gorges, John X. Merriman, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts were all astute enough to realise that their report needed to reflect recent events accurately, as any exaggerations or fabrications would be easily discredited by the German government and press. But the South Africans, who by this time had processed and translated thousands of captured German documents, also understood that Germany’s crimes against the Herero and Nama had been so terrible that there was no need for exaggeration.

  The officer commissioned to run the investigation was Major Thomas Leslie O’Reilly, of whom surprisingly little is known. He was a lawyer by profession, and an officer in the reserve of the Active Citizen Force. The records indicate he had joined General Botha’s army just before the push inland from Swakopmund in February 1915, but after the German surrender, he had returned to South Africa on a year-long leave of absence. In 1916 he came back to South-West Africa and was appointed magistrate of the town of Omaruru in western Hereroland. There he encountered a Herero community who were not only willing to recount the story of their recent persecution, but who lived, even in 1917, under the lash of the local farmers whose taste for casual violence continued long after the surrender of the Schutztruppe. Having served on the Special Criminal Court, O’Reilly had adjudicated in cases of maltreatment and even murder of Africans by their German and Boer employers. In September 1917, when O’Reilly received a
telegram from Howard Gorges asking if he would be interested in drafting a report on German abuses, he replied, ‘I am as keen as mustard on it – I have been doing quite a lot of graft locally in that direction and even if they [Pretoria] change their minds, I intend going into the matter privately … It is quite enough to make one’s hair stiffen.’9

  He was given just three months to carry out his research and produce an initial draft of the report. The completed draft would then be submitted to the Administrator’s Office in Windhoek and edited by Howard Gorges, before finally being published as a ‘Blue Book’, the term given to all British Parliamentary Reports. The foundation for much of O’Reilly’s work was the mountain of translated German documents that had been assembled in Windhoek. They included orders and letters drafted by Curt von François, the very first ‘protection treaties’ bearing the signature of Heinrich Göring, and the papers of Theodor Leutwein, General von Trotha and Friedrich von Lindequist. In addition to the captured documents, O’Reilly punctuated his report with passages written by the former Commissioner for Settlement in South-West Africa, now political journalist, Dr Paul Rohrbach.