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

by Casper Erichsen

  For many Herero, the victims of the war and the camps live on as more than names. Despite the catastrophes that have befallen them and the sustained efforts of the missionaries, the Herero have managed to maintain their ancient religion, with its visceral connection to the spirit world of their ancestors. To a people for whom the land can become the embodiment of the dead, the whole country, pockmarked with graves, is a memorial to the genocides. When the Herero town of Otjimanangombe was established in the 1920s, the local community refused to build their homes on two low hills that lie just to the east. In late 1904 a German patrol had encountered a group of Herero on the hills and in the skirmish that followed several German solders and Herero fighters lost their lives. For the Herero, the hills of Otjimanangombe became a place in which the living have no business.

  In the 1990s the taboo was broken when a tree from one of the hills was felled and used to build a fence. A week later the town’s main well stopped flowing. When government engineers were unable to solve the problem, the Herero elders took matters into their own hands. After communicating with the ancestors of the Oseu family, two of whom had fallen in the skirmish of 1904, they slaughtered a cow and buried its bones on the hill. The next week, to the satisfaction of the elders, the water returned. A few years later when the engineers of Namibia’s Mobile Telecommunications Company considered erecting a mobile phone mast on one of the hills they were prevented by the people of Otjimanangombe.12

  Despite their recent calamities and persistent poverty, the Herero are a highly organised people. Each year, they come together to mark the anniversary of their holocaust. In the last weekend in August, thousands converge on Okahandja, still nominally the Herero capital. The women wear long Victorian-style dresses and hats shaped like the horns of a cow, the men a military uniform based on that of the South African army which brought German rule to an end in 1915. Together they march from the Apartheid-era township on the edge of Okahandja. Passing the site of the old German fort where their uprising began, the procession makes its way to a small cemetery in which stand the graves of Samuel Maharero and his son Friedrich. Silently circling the graves, running their fingers along the perimeter walls, the mourners pay their respects.

  Colonialism left the Herero their memories and the spirits of their ancestors but little else. The war that exterminated 80 percent of the 1904 population cost them almost all of their land. Although some land redistribution has taken place since Independence, the vast majority of commercially viable farmland in Namibia is owned by around four thousand white commercial farmers. Around one hundred thousand Herero still live on the former ‘native’ reserves, onto which their grandparents were driven in the 1920s by the South Africans. Trapped by grinding poverty, they subsist by farming on communal land so overgrazed and under-watered that much of it can barely sustain goats, never mind cattle. A further two hundred thousand black Namibians work as labourers on the white-owned commercial farms. Conditions on some are a throwback to another age. Many farm labourers live in debt to their employers, who run farm shops selling basic supplies. The debt problem is in some cases exacerbated by an affliction that ravages isolated communities of repressed former colonial peoples across the world: alcoholism. The US State Department’s Country Report on Human Rights Practices for Namibia, published in 2008, stated that ‘Farm workers and domestic servants working on rural and remote farms often did not know their rights, and unions experi enced obstacles in attempting to organize these workers. As a result, farm workers reportedly suffered abuse by employers.’13

  Modern Namibia is one of the most unequal societies on earth. The concentration of wealth, land and privilege in the hands of a tiny racial minority remains entrenched. Yet some black Namibians, especially in the north and among the younger, post-Independence generation, have managed to escape the poverty trap and form an emerging black middle class. Black social mobility is centred on Windhoek, which has become one of the most racially and ethnically integrated cities in southern Africa. But although there are reasons to be optimistic about the possibility of change and development in the capital and the north, southern Namibia – seemingly frozen in time – is a cause for concern.

  Life for black Namibians in the south is marred by acute poverty and rampant unemployment. The descendants of the Nama clans who once dominated the region live, like the Herero, either by subsistence farming or labouring on white farms. Gibeon, the capital of the Witbooi Nama since the 1840s, has fared as badly as any other southern town. Beyond the main road, with its old German colonial houses, lies a maze of unpaved backstreets leading to hundreds of desperate hovels, with neither running water nor adequate sanitation. Those fortunate enough to hold family farms keep goats and, where possible, cattle. Much of the rest of the population are maintained by the remittances of family members working in the cities or by the elderly, who receive a monthly pension of around $45.

  Yet there are still sporadic flashes of the past in Gibeon, reminding visitors that this was once Hendrik Witbooi’s realm. The occasional horse rider emerges from the desert and passes through Gibeon, seeking water from the nearby Fish River. The old German prison on the outskirts of town, with its barred windows and crumbing yellow bricks, is a reminder that this was once a town that was capable of revolt rather than in need of resurrection. The descendants of the Witbooi family still live in Gibeon. The 81-year-old great-granddaughter of Hendrik Witbooi, Alvina Petersen, the descendant of a leader whose name was heard in the Kaiser’s Potsdam palace and along the corridors of power in Berlin, lives in a shack made from old rusty oil drums, hammered flat and painted bright pink. From her concrete porch, overlooking the Fish River, Mrs Petersen and her husband Hans sit and reflect on the century that brought their people little but disaster.

  The act of remembering is perhaps what binds the Nama communities together. Despite the poverty, the cemetery at Gibeon, where the survivors of Shark Island are buried, is better cared for than much of the rest of the town. While the Nama lament the calamity of the genocides, they also revel in the old stories of Kaptein Hendrik, and the years when the Witbooi fighters, with their rifles and white bandanas, refused to yield to the might of Germany. Every other year representatives of each Nama community turn their attentions to Lüderitz. Gathering on Shark Island, they commemorate the three thousand who died on that desolate rock.

  Across the bay, the town of Lüderitz retains the feel of frontier settlement, despite the new hotels and modern housing developments. It is a town trapped in the past: the chimney of one of the old factories was until recently painted in the red, white and black of Wilhelmian Germany, a nation that ceased to exist ninety years ago. Lüderitz is still the gateway to the diamond zone, but today most diamonds are discovered out at sea, by giant prospecting ships that literally hoover up the seabed and sift the sand for the precious stones. Interlopers who sneak into the waters of southern Namibia, and prospect without a government licence, are occasionally caught, and their ships impounded in the harbour. The other method of prospecting uses huge metal sea walls and powerful pumps literally to push the Atlantic Ocean back from the shoreline. In early 2008 such an excavation on the Namib coast uncovered the wreck of an Iberian caravel, from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Around the disintegrated remains of the ship – perhaps the oldest ever found off the coast of sub-Saharan Africa – were thousands of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins, copper ingots, a stash of ivory, some exquisite fifteenth-century navigational instruments and human remains. In Namibia, the past seems to emerge of its own volition.

  Ten years earlier, the Namib began to yield up human remains from another chapter of Namibia’s history. In 1999 the existence of several mass graves near Lüderitz was brought to the attention of the post-Independence Namibian government. The graves lie within a radius of 3–4 miles from Lüderitz in the Sperrgebiet, the diamond fields that were sealed off from the outside world in 1908. For a century, only the employees of the diamond companies have had access to this a
rea. The closest grave, only about an hour’s walk north of the town, is a truly shocking sight. Femurs, vertebrae and skulls bleached and flaking are scattered across the sand, intermingled and disregarded. Interspersed with the bones are pieces of clothing: the collars of Victorian shirts with their blue and white pin-striping, leather belts and the hessian sacking. Nearby are the giant electric excavating machines, imported from Germany by the diamond companies just before World War I. Enormous and rusted, they are half buried, their chains of metal buckets like the vertebrae of a fossilised dinosaur. In 2006 representatives of nine of the Nama authorities came together to issue a statement requesting the Namibian government commission a forensic survey on the human remains in the mass graves. Namibia’s history is on the march.

  In Germany, too, it has been the dead as much as the living who have dragged the story of the Herero and Nama genocides from the historical shadows. In recent years, the skulls and even preserved heads of prisoners from the concentration camps have been found in the medical collections of a number of German universities. Freiburg University is said to have twelve skulls from Namibia in its anthropological collection, while the Medical History Museum of Berlin’s Charitie Hospital is believed to hold forty-seven Namibian skulls. It is suspected that among the human remains at the Charitie Hospital are seventeen decapitated heads of Nama prisoners, prepared and dispatched from Shark Island in 1906 by the camp physician Dr Bofinger. These ‘specimens’ were later studied by Christian Fetzer, a Berlin medical student who endeavoured to identify anatomical similarities between the Nama and the anthropoid ape. Fetzer’s theories were influenced by the work of Eugen Fischer. In October 2008, the Namibian government formally requested the repatriation of all Namibian remains held in German universities.

  The history of German South-West Africa has returned to modern Germany, in part due to the campaigning of the Herero and Nama and their many supporters in Germany. Mixed-race German Namibians, some of whom trace their ancestry back to the wave of rapes in the concentration camps, have also demanded their history be acknowledged. In 2001 the Herero filed a legal case for reparations against the German government and a number of German companies which they claimed had profited from the genocides or played a part in the exploitation of their ancestors. Three years later, on the centenary of the battle of the Waterberg, the German Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, travelled to Namibia and addressed a Herero gathering on the battlefield. In a speech that condemned the actions of General von Trotha, Minister Wieczorek-Zeul surprised many, in both Namibia and Germany, by asking for forgiveness and using the term genocide to describe Germany’s treatment of the Herero and Nama. Although a brave and admirable step – for which Wieczorek-Zeul was roundly condemned by parts of the German press – the German government’s apology made no mention of the concentration camps, and seemed to place blame for the genocides on von Trotha and the Schutztruppe. When von Trotha departed the colony in November 1905, around forty thousand Herero were still alive. The Nama had not even surrendered. Of those Herero still living in November 1905, perhaps only around ten thousand would survive the camps or escape capture.

  What happened in Namibia between 1904 and 1909 cannot be ascribed to the murderous racism of a single fanatic general. The victims of these genocides were killed in the battles of 1904, by armies led by Leutwein as well as by von Trotha. They died of thirst and exhaustion in the Omaheke, in ambushes and attacks by the Cleansing Patrols. They were shot while trying to surrender to the Peace Patrols in 1906 and an unknown number were hanged or shot by settlers in early 1904, during the first few weeks of the uprising.

  While the camps were established by the army, under the jurisdiction of von Trotha, much of the abuse and systematic murder that took place within them was directed by civilian administrators, bureaucratic killers like von Lindequist and Hintrager. At Shark Island, it was the army who attempted to have the camp closed and the Nama prisoners evacuated, only to be thwarted by von Lindequist and Hintrager. The camps and the regime of forced labour, although not responsible for the majority of deaths, may have cost as many lives as the two dreadful months of the Extermination Order.

  As Namibia’s history has slowly emerged since Independence, those who found it unpalatable have been unable to contest effectively the question of ‘intent’ – the historical litmus test of genocide. If the Extermination Order stands as proof of von Trotha’s genocidal ‘intent’, his removal from office at the end of 1905 speaks of the physical impossibility of exterminating a whole nation in a country of 82.4 million hectares, with inadequate maps, almost no roads, pre-World War I military technology and the Nama still undefeated.14 Yet ‘intent’ is stamped onto the Namibian genocides in all its ugly stages. It was implied in von Trotha’s warning to the Nama of April 1905; that they should surrender or suffer the same fate as the Herero. It can be read in Lindequist’s statement of December 1906, expressing his hopes that the Nama on Shark Island would be ‘reduced somewhat’ in number, and seen in the fact that his administration allowed the quay development at Lüderitz to grind to a halt, due to the deaths of the workforce.

  While denialists have been unable to sidestep the test of genocidal ‘intent’, they have been more successful in focusing attention on von Trotha and the Extermination Order. By accident or design, this has diverted attention away from the aspect of this history that is perhaps most uncomfortable: the development in South-West Africa of Germany’s first concentration camps (Konzentrationslager), an instrument of mass killing that many find it difficult to accept as part of German history, outside of the context of Hitler’s Third Reich.

  What does the re-emergence of the dead from the Namib Desert, and the unearthing of documents and human remains from the archives and universities, mean for modern, liberal Germany? What is the significance of the fact that thirty years before Hitler came to power, in a forgotten German colony, her soldiers and bureaucrats attempted to exterminate two indigenous peoples, ultimately in concentration camps, and in the name of a Kaiser rather than a Führer?

  The images held in the Namibian National Archives of healthy jackbooted soldiers guarding concentration camps or posing amid emaciated, skeletal prisoners have a resonance that today is all too obvious and all too powerful. So much of what took place in German South-West Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century horribly prefigures the events of the 1940s: concentration camps, the bureaucratisation of killing, meticulous record-keeping of death tolls and death rates, the use of work as a means of extermination, civilians transported in cattle trucks then worked to death, their remains experimented upon by race scientists, and the identification of ethnic groups who had a future as slaves and those who had no future of any sort. All were features of the German South-West African genocides that were replicated in different forms and on a much vaster scale in Europe in the 1940s.

  There is, however, no direct ‘causal thread’ linking the Herero and Nama genocides to the crimes of the Third Reich. No unstoppable historical force carried Germany from Waterberg to Nuremberg. But the Herero and Nama genocides, along with the Nazi vision of race war and settlement in Eastern Europe, can both be seen as aspects of a larger phenomenon: the emergence from Europe of a terrible strain of racial colonialism that viewed human history through the prism of a distorted form of Social Darwinism, and regarded the earth as a racial battlefield on which the ‘weak’ were destined to be vanquished.

  Notes – Epilogue: The Triumph of Amnesia

  1. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 593.

  2. P. Katjavivi, A History of Resistance in Namibia (London: Currey, 1988), p. 14.

  3. J. Gewald, We Thought We Would Be Free (Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 2000).

  4. J. Silvester and J. Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia (Leiden: Brill, 2003).

  5. As quoted in J. Silvester, The Politics of Reconciliation: Destroying the
Blue Book (Windhoek: forthcoming), p. 13.

  6. Silvester and Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found, p. xxxii.

  7. ‘The Native Bluebook’, Windhoek Advertiser, 31 July (1926).

  8. Klaus Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 2002), p. 211.

  9. ‘Nuwe spoorlyn ontspoor by Tsaukaib’, Die Republikein, 17 March 2009, Suiderland.

  10. Ibid.; a widely available book on the history of Namibia’s railways, Brenda Bravenboer and Walter K. E. Rusch, The First One Hundred Years of State Railways in Namibia (Windhoek: TransNamib Museum, 1997), is similarly mute on the matter of forced labour used to construct the Lüderitz–Aus Railway.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Namibia Country Reports on Human Rights Practices 2007. Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 11 March 2008. http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2007/100496.htm