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

by Casper Erichsen

  The memoirs of Margarethe von Eckenbrecher, Was Afrika Mir Gab und Nahm (What Africa Gave to Me and What It Took Away), although originally published in 1909, went through a series of reprints during the inter-war years and continued to woo readers well into the Nazi era with its highly romanticised recollections of the life of a settler woman in German South-West Africa.

  Another important book set in German South West Africa was Verschüttete Volksseele: Nach Berichten aus Südwestafrika (The Buried Folk Soul: Reports from South-West Africa). It was the work of Dr Mathilde Ludendorff, the mystic philosopher and wife of General Erich Ludendorff – the man who had been one of the driving forces behind schemes for German settlement in Poland, the Baltic and the Ukrainian Crimea during World War I. Verschüttete Volksseele was based on a collection of letters from settlers in German South-West Africa that had been collated by Mathilde Ludendorff over several years. It painted the settler society, as it had existed in German South-West Africa just before World War I, as one in which the settlers had discovered their true German identity. Not only was Verschüttete Volksseele deeply nostalgic for the lost colony, it continued the tradition – begun by Friedrich von Lindequist – of rewriting the history of the wars that had led to the virtual extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. Mathilde Ludendorff claimed that the wars against the Herero and Nama had been racially justified. She also wildly exaggerated the numbers of settlers who had died in the initial outburst of violence.

  Similar historical distortions characterised another hugely popular book from the inter-war period. Gustav Frenssen’s Peter Moor’s Fahrt nach Südwest (Peter Moor’s Adventures in South-West Africa) was a simplistic dramatised account of the Herero-Nama genocides, based closely on interviews with veterans of the German Schutztruppe. The novel gripped its (mainly young) readers with tales of danger and heroism. Repeatedly, over the course of the story, Frenssen justified the destruction of the Herero and Nama by allowing his characters to regurgitate the traditional racist caricatures found in the German press during the genocides. Peter Moor, the central character, discovers the Herero to be untrustworthy and primitive. He dismisses them as barbaric peoples, doomed to a just and inevitable extinction. Frenssen’s novel was the best-selling children’s book in Germany until 1945.

  The most important colonial novel of the inter-war era was Volk Ohne Raum (People Without Space). It was the work of Hans Grimm, Germany’s greatest purveyor of colonial fairy tales. A former professor of law, Grimm had briefly lived in German South-West Africa and spent many years in South Africa. The novel is set partly in German South-West Africa during the Herero-Nama genocides. But Volk Ohne Raum is more than mere nostalgia: it is a political tract posing as a novel. It tells the barely believable story of Cornelius Freibott, a naive Candide-like figure whose journey across the globe and through his troubled life leads him to adopt the same political opinions as his creator. The book was so popular, and so important in keeping alive the memory of the colonies and popularising the Lebensraum theory in inter-war Germany, that its somewhat ridiculous plot is worth describing in detail.

  Freibott’s misadventures begin when he and his father are forced to abandon their lives as traditional peasant farmers, and seek employment in industry. Denied a pure Völkisch life on the land, Freibott escapes industry and, after joining the navy, finds himself in Africa, the continent that is to change his life. In the British Cape Colony, he learns of Britain’s enormous colonial power and imbibes the classic Pan-Germanic hatred of Britain as a force holding Germany back for her own selfish interests. In Africa, Freibott also recognises that colonial expansion has provided Britain with an enormous ‘living space’. The empire, he concludes, has permitted millions of British emigrants to avoid the ravages of industrialism and modernity, the forces that had atomised his own family in Germany.

  Freibott is then swept up into the Boer War and persecuted by the British for fighting with the Boers. Interned in a prisoner-of-war camp, he finally grasps the message that the Pan-Germans and colonial societies had been trying to explain all along: German emigrants can only be free in colonies of their own, and Germany herself can only be rid of her problems when she acquires enough colonial living space to accommodate her people without space. Inspired by his epiphany, Freibott journeys to the only place on earth where German settlers have found Lebensraum – German South-West Africa. The date is 1907.

  As Hans Grimm had lived in South Africa between 1897 and 1911 and was briefly resident in German South-West Africa, he knew the crimes his countrymen had committed against the Herero and Nama. However, he was equally well versed in the alternative history used to cover up the genocides, and it is this myth that provides the backdrop for Freibott’s adventures in the colony. There is no mention of the concentration camps or the Extermination Order in Volk Ohne Raum. By contrast, British misdeeds committed during the Boer War are covered in exhaustive detail.

  After further adventures in Africa, Freibott returns to Germany in the early 1920s in order to preach the importance of Lebensraum to his fellow countrymen. On his return he learns another critical lesson: that the Jews, although masters of the German language, are not members of ‘the tribes which constitute the Germans and the German Reich’. In a final twist, Freibott is murdered by a misguided socialist at the very moment he comes fully to understand Germany’s mission in the world.

  Grimm’s Volk Ohne Raum is today dismissed as a work of breathtakingly poor quality. It weighs in at over 1,500 pages, is badly written (even compared to Grimm’s other works) and populated entirely by two-dimensional characters who are little more than mouthpieces for the author’s own racial and political views. Grimm’s formula – crude and simplistic though it may have been – was nevertheless a sensational success. Between its publication in 1926 and 1935, 315,000 copies of Volk Ohne Raum were sold. By 1942 sales had reached over half a million.15

  Volk Ohne Raum – the most successful of Grimm’s books – was in effect Friedrich Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory told through the experiences of a German everyman, and Grimm’s book arguably did more to keep the concept of Lebensraum current, during the interregnum between the Second and Third Reichs, than any propaganda campaign. Critically for the Nazis, who praised the book and its author effusively, Volk Ohne Raum reminded the German people that Lebensraum – the ideological foundation upon which South-West Africa had been conquered and ethnically cleansed – was the same concept that underpinned the Nazis’ calls for territorial expansion and national renewal. Germany needed Lebensraum now as much as it had before the Great War, Grimm told his readers. A Nazi propaganda poster of the 1930s made the same connections. It showed a map of Africa with the four lost colonies highlighted. The text read: ‘Here also is our living space.’ The ‘also’ is critical. It spoke of the belief that while the African empire might be won back, Germany had other and equally valid claims to living space elsewhere.

  Through Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory, Nazi ambition could be linked with the supposed injustices of the past. The word Lebensraum itself, along with the phrase Volk Ohne Raum, became constant refrains on the streets and in the meeting halls of Hitler’s Germany. As well as appearing on posters and being incorporated into the plots of novels, arguments for the expansion of Germany’s Raum were slipped into the subtexts of films and hammered home from the lectern and in innumerable political tracts. By the late 1930s it was taken as axiomatic that Germany was chronically overcrowded, and Lebensraum was transformed from a dubious nineteenth-century Social Darwinian theory to something akin to a national religion. Millions believed that as a strong and vigorous race the Germans had a right to expand beyond the borders ascribed to their nation at Versailles, and to do so at the expense of other nations and other races.

  The two regions of the earth in which millions of Germans earnestly believed their nation had legitimate claims to seek Lebensraum were the former colonies in Africa and the European East. Both shared a common narrative. Both, it was felt, had been unj
ustly stolen. Bitterness about both losses was palpable in inter-war Germany, a land that abounded with veterans’ organisations and fellowships of old comrades. While veterans of the Western Front comforted themselves with the myth of the ‘stab in the back’, veterans of the East, along with the former Schutztruppe of the colonial empire, harboured a different grievance. They railed against the loss of the Lebensraum they had conquered on two continents, and alongside their bitterness grew a sense of entitlement to the lands from which they had been expelled.

  Notes – 17 A People without Space

  1. M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  2. J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds), Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945 (University of Exeter Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 133.

  3. Annegret Ehmann, ‘From Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy: The Role of the So-Called Mischlinge’, in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (eds), The Holocaust and History: The Known, The Unknown, The Disputed and The Reexamined 1998, p. 123.

  4. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 25.

  5. Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State, p. 48.

  6. O. Hintrager, ‘Das Mischehen-Verbot von 1905, in Deutsch-Suedwestafrika’, Africa-Nachrichten 22.2 (Feb. 1941), pp. 18–19.

  7. Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 138.

  8. Ehmann, ‘Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy’, p. 121.

  9. Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch, German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1920–1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), p. 15.

  10. Ehmann, ‘Colonial Racism to Nazi Population Policy’, p. 121.

  11. Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 71.

  12. L. H. Gann and Peter Duigan, The Rulers of German Africa, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1977), p. 254.

  13. NAN, WH/SMA ‘erster Jahresbericht der Kolonialen Lehrschau und Schulungsstaette Dr H. E. Göring-Kolonialhaus Hannover 1939/40’.

  14. B. Bennett, Hitler over Africa (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1939), p. 1.

  15. S. Friedrichsmeyer, S. Lennox and S. Zantop (eds), The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press 1998).

  18

  Germany’s California

  On the afternoon of 16 July 1941, a secret conference was held on Hitler’s private train, the Amerika. In a siding outside the Polish town of Angerburg, this fifteen-carriage armoured behemoth was an awesome sight. Propelled by two locomotives, she had armourplated flak cars at each end, both equipped with heavy antiaircraft guns. Other carriages contained the offices and sleeping berths of Hitler’s numerous adjutants, bodyguards and servants. There was a fully equipped dining car and carriages of additional accommodation for visitors. The Führer’s private coach consisted of a large drawing room with table and chairs, as well as sleeping quarters. The nerve centre of the Amerika was in the ‘command coach’, with its map room, communications centre and conference room. She was a miniature Chancellery on wheels, and that July the whole train hummed with activity as communiqués were sent and received via teleprinters and radio-telephones.

  Five hundred miles away on the great Russian Steppe, 3 million German soldiers were coming to the end of day twenty-five of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the USSR. For over three weeks, the mechanised brigades of the Blitzkrieg had destroyed everything in their path. Great fleets of Panzers had sailed across the vast golden wheat fields, silhouetted against a dark-blue summer sky that was regularly punctuated by columns of smoke rising from burning farms and homes. Hundreds of thousands of Russian prisoners of war marched past the invader. The majority of the Germans who looked down from the trucks and Panzers and the majority of bewildered Russians who squinted up to see the faces of their conquerors were to die in the coming months and years. Neither captives nor captors had any idea of the catastrophes awaiting them.

  If the men on board the Amerika in mid-July 1941 had wanted to look for early indications of disaster, they had already begun to appear. On 3 July Hitler’s Chief of the Army General Staff, Franz Halder, had confided in his diary that the Russians were almost defeated. Entries made days later reveal not only a dramatic change of opinion but Halder’s shock at the breathtaking inaccuracy of the military assessment of the Red Army, on which Germany had planned the invasion. The confident predictions about the likely behaviour of Soviet soldiers and the technical abilities of their officers had been proved completely false by recent experience. Pre-invasion assessments on the morale and equipment of the Russians had also been proved catastrophically inaccurate, and whole Russian divisions – of whose existence German Intelligence had been completely unaware – had already been thrown into battle.

  But on 16 July the Nazi leadership, and much of the army, dismissed the Intelligence failures and other ominous portents as defeatism. They remained electrified by the daily dispatches from the front. The unimaginable scale of the battle itself and the incredible speed of the German advances blinded even the generals to the impossibility of their task.

  If success blinded the generals, it expanded Hitler’s vision. His dream of destroying the USSR with one gargantuan blow was slowly becoming a reality. Exactly as he had predicted, the German armies had kicked down the door and the USSR, eaten from within by ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, had begun to collapse. With victory seemingly in sight, Hitler felt confident enough to draw up plans against his other enemies. On 14 July he had signed a decree that diverted armaments production away from the army, which was to be drastically reduced in size. The factories of the Reich were to concentrate their efforts on aircraft production and expanding the German navy for a renewed struggle against Britain and her supporters in America.

  Hitler, now more than ever, was convinced of his own genius. He was fifty-two and had reached the apex of his life. In power for almost a decade, he had erased the shame of the Versailles Treaty, reclaimed much of the nation’s lost territory and overseen the rebuilding of Germany’s economy – or at least taken credit for its revival. As a former soldier who had spent four years in the filth of the Western Front, he had had the unimaginable satisfaction of arriving in Paris at the head of a conquering German army and chasing the British off the continent. Yet these conquests, critical though they were, had been merely geopolitical. Victory against the USSR was of a different order. The fight against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, the ‘re-invasion’ of the East, was a crusade steeped in the Völkisch and colonial traditions from which Nazi ideology had emerged.

  From the windows of the Amerika, a new world was slowly becoming visible – a world without Bolshevism, without Stalin and eventually without the Jews in Western Europe. The time had come to set out the shape and character of the ‘New Order’ that would fill the void left by the USSR, and Hitler’s deepest-held ideological passions came to the fore; the racial obsessions and distorted Social Darwinism that underpinned his most fundamental beliefs were liberated by military victory. Freed from the pragmatic considerations that had limited his plans only weeks earlier, Hitler had a vision of appalling clarity and set about planning the ethnic cleansing, resettlement and ruthless exploitation of what he later called ‘the future German empire’.

  At three o’clock on 16 July, Hitler sat at the long conference table in the Amerika’s command coach. He had gathered around him the men who were going to administer and exploit the new empire in Russia. Göring was there, not as Air Reich Marshal, but as overseer of the Four-Year Economic Plan. Alfred Rosenberg, ‘the philosopher of National Socialism’, had come to the meeting in the fervent hope that his vision of a network of national states bound to Germany and turned against Moscow might win his leader’s approval. But Hitler had no interest in these visions for the Eas
t. Another of the National Socialist luminaries at the conference table was Heinrich Lammers, Hitler’s legal adviser, Chief of the Reich’s Chancellery and honorary SS General. Lammers, along with Hitler’s personal secretary Martin Bormann, were men on their way up in the party. Representing the army was Wilhelm Keitel, the Chief of Staff who had threatened to resign in the hope of dissuading Hitler from invading Russia. It was his only act of resistance. Now utterly convinced of the Führer’s genius, Keitel was not a man to stand in the way of the colonial fantasy unveiled a on board Amerika. His compliance ultimately led him to the Nuremberg gallows.

  The minutes of the meeting on 16 July were taken by Martin Bormann. They reveal that Hitler was adamant that Germany’s task in Russia was not occupation but colonisation. In the privacy of his inner sanctum and in the company of the party elite, Hitler spoke with clarity and without rhetoric. He began with a warning. ‘It is essential’, he said, ‘that we should not proclaim our aims before the whole world. Rather Germany should emphasise that we were forced to occupy, administer and secure a certain area … we shall act as though we wanted to exercise a mandate only.’ With this veil in place the real work of colon isation could begin. ‘We can’, Hitler reassured his audience, ‘take all the necessary measures – shooting, resettling etc. – and take them we shall … It must be clear to us’, he insisted, ‘that we shall never withdraw from these areas.’1