2. U. van der Heyden and J. Zeller, Kolonial Metropole Berlin (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2002), p. 164.
3. Kolonial-Post, 1937, p. 6.
4. K. Epstein, ‘Erzberger and the German Colonial Scandals: 1905–1910’, The English Historical Review 74, No. 293 (Oct. 1959) pp. 637–63.
5. NAN, ZBU 456, D IV. l.3, vol. 6, p. 88.
6. NAN, ZBU 465, D IV. M.3, vol. 2, p. 147.
7. Ibid., p. 119.
8. Ibid., p. 239.
9. G. I. Schrank, ‘German South-West Africa: Social and Economic Aspects of Its History, 1884–1915’, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (New York: New York University, 1974), p. 212.
10. Walther, Creating Germans, pp. 58–9.
11. BAK, Kl. Erw. NL 1037, Nr 8, p. 6.
12. Walther, Creating Germans, p. 20.
13. Ibid., p. 30.
14. Ibid., pp. 90–1.
15. Ibid., p. 93.
16. Ibid., p 103.
17. L. Wildenthal, ‘She Is the Victor’, in G. Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 374.
18. J. W. Spidle, ‘Colonial Studies in Imperial Germany’, History of Education Quarterly 3.3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 231–47.
19. M. Baericke, Luederitzbucht: 1908–1914 (Windhoek: Namibia Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 2001), p. 33.
20. Klaus Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 2002), p. 138.
21. Walther, Creating Germans, p. 46.
22. There are still black Namibians today who carry the name von François, and trace their ancestry back to the von François family.
23. Decree of the Governor of German South-West Africa on the Half-Caste Population, 23 May 1912. Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1912), p. 752. Quoted in Helmuth Stoecker (ed.), Bernard Zöller (trans.), German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War (London: Hurst, 1986), p. 211.
24. R. Gordon and S. S. Douglas, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000); R. Gordon, ‘The Rise of the Bushman Penis: Germans, Genitalia and Genocide’, African Studies 57.1 (1998), pp. 27–54; E. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913); idem, Begegnung Mit Toten (Freiburg: Hans Ferdinand Schulz Verlag, 1959); M. Bayer, ‘Die Nation der Bastards’, Zeitschrift fuer Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 8.9 (1906), pp. 625–48.
25. E. Fischer, ‘Das Rehobother Bastardvolk’, Die Umshau 13 (1910), p. 1049.
26. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards, p. 57.
27. Ibid., p. 302.
28. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 118.
29. 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. 12.
Notes – 14 Things Fall Apart
1. H. Brodersen-Manns, Wie Alles Anders Kam in Afrika (Windhoek: Kuiseb Verlag, 1991); General Staff, The Union of South Africa and the Great War 1914–1918: Official History (Pretoria: The Government Printing and Stationery Office, 1924); C. C. Adams, ‘The African Colonies and the German War’, Geographical Review 1.6 (June 1916), pp. 452–4; D. E. Kaiser, ‘Germany and the Origins of World War I’, Journal of Modern History 55.3 (Sept. 1983), pp. 442–74.
2. E. M. Ritchie, With Botha in the Field (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915), section 1.
3. H. F. B. Walker, A Doctor’s Diary in Damaraland (London: Edward Arnold, 1917).
4. Ibid.
5. Helmuth Stoecker (ed.), Bernard Zöller (trans.), German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War (London: Hurst, 1986), p. 272.
6. The Times, 10 July 1915.
7. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 280.
8. J. Silvester and J. Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia (Leiden: Brill, 2003), pp. xv–xvi.
9. Ibid., p. xvii.
Notes – 15 ‘To Fight the World for Ever’
1. Quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 618.
2. Ibid., p. 588.
3. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 59.
4. Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 195.
5. The Times, 12 September 1918.
6. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 135.
7. Quoted in Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
8. The Times, 12 September 1918, p. 7: The ‘Militarist’ and Colonist.
9. William Roger Louis, ‘The South West African Origins of the “Sacred Trust”, 1914–1919’, African Affairs 66.262. (Jan. 1967), pp. 20–39.
10. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 346.
Notes – 16 A Passing Corporal
1. Gregor Dallas, 1918: War and Peace (London: John Murray, 2000), p. 274.
2. Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998), p. 99.
3. David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 25.
4. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 122.
5. Large, Where Ghosts Walked, p. 91.
6. Count von Arco-Valley survived the left-wing governments that followed the regime of Kurt Eisner. He also outlived both the Nazis and the war, only to be run over and killed by an American army jeep in 1945.
7. Harold J. Gordon, Jr, The Reichswehr and the German Republic 1919–1926 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 281.
8. Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler (London: Robinson, 2004), p. 176.
9. John Toland, Adolf Hitler (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), p. 81.
10. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots of Nazism (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), p. 148.
11. John Lukacs, Tocqueville: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau (New York: Doubleday, 1959), p. 187.
12. Kershaw, Hitler, p. 174.
13. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 225.
14. Toland, Adolf Hitler, p. 199.
15. Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Hutchinson, 1969), p. 367.
16. 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, p. 115.
17. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 222.
18. Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows; London: Turnaround, 2004), p. 274.
19. Quoted in Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 223.
20. G. E. Schafft, Racism to Genocide (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), p. 62.
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).
Notes – 18 Germany’s California
1. J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds), Nazism: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, 1919–1945 (University of Exeter Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 622.
2. Alexander Dallin, German Rule in Russia: 1941–1945 (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 296.
3. The Goebbels Diaries 1942–1943, ed. and trans. Louis P. Lochner (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), p. 126.
4. Hannah Arendt was among the first historians to suggest such a link, while recent publications by Adam Toze and Mark Mazower have done much to set Nazism within the wider context of colonialism and colonial violence.
5. Enzo Traverso, The Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003), p. 50.
6. Thanks to Robert Gordon for both of these quotations.
7. Hitler’s Table Talk 1941–44: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), p. 24.
8. Ibid., p. 574.
9. Monologue im Führerhauptquartier, 1941–4: die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims, herausgegeben von Werner Jochmann, p. 377: 30 August 1942.
10. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 469.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 19.
13. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, pp. 918–20.
14. Wendy Lower, ‘Hitler’s Garden of Eden in Ukraine: Nazi Colonialism, Volkdeutsche and the Holocaust, 1941–1944’, in Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (eds), In Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2005), p. 187.
15. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, p. 1090.
16. Robert Cecil, Hitler’s Decision to Invade Russia, 1941 (London: Davis-Poynter, 1975), p. 206.
17. Hitler’s Table Talk, p. 319.
18. Ibid., p. 617.
19. Ibid., p. 354.
20. Ibid., p. 425.
21. Ibid., p. 575.
22. Ibid., p. 34.
23. Ibid., p. 424.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 617.
26. Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (HarperCollins, 1991), p. 773.
27. William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (London: Secker and Warburg, 1960), p. 854.
28. Noakes and Pridham, Nazism, p. 915.
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
14. Labour Resource and Research Institute (LARRI), ‘Farm Workers in Namibia: Living and Working Conditions’, research paper (Windhoek: LARRI, 2006).
Acknowledgements
David Olusoga:
I would like to thank Casper W. Erichsen whose ferocious passion for the history and people of Namibia made this book possible. Susie Painter for her support, informed criticism and assistance. Marion Olusoga for her help with early drafts and translation. Neil Belton and Kate Murray-Browne at Faber & Faber for their enthusiasm and endless patience.
Further thanks for support and inspiration goes to:
Sally-Ann Wilson at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association whose financial support and belief in the story of Namibia and its tragic past first allowed the authors the opportunity to work together. Michael Poole and Roly Keating at the BBC who executive-produced and commissioned (respectively) a television documentary that allowed me to further explore the history of Namibia. Our agent Charles Walker at United Agents. Jeremy Silvester who introduced the authors, leading not only to this book but to a valued friendship. Thanks goes, also, to the great writers and scholars with whom I’ve had the opportunity to discuss this history: Adam Hochschild, Mike Davis, David Dabydeen and Henry Reynolds.
Casper W. Erichsen:
I would like to thank Inatu Indongo Erichsen for her loving support through it all, my son Helao David Wulff Erichsen and my mother Elisabeth Erichsen.
Further thanks for support and inspiration goes to:
David Olusoga, one of the most intelligent people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and a true friend, Susie Painter for surviving four mad years with us, Neil Belton and Kate Murray-Browne at Faber & Faber, Teis Wulff Owens, Janet Owens, Natascha Wulff, Angelo, Hannah and Mika Carlsen, the Indongo family, Bes, Gitte and Claus, Grandma Leona and Grandpa Joe.
Jeremy Silvester, Werner Hillebrecht and Ellen Namhila, Jan-Bart and Gertie Gewald, Aulden and Rachael Harlech-Jones, Helao and Jane Shityuwete, Kanjoo and David Lush, Robert and Rinda Gordon, Uno Katjipuka Sibolile, David Benade, Rudiger, Jessica, Finn and Narla Gretschel, Tim Huebschle, Steffen List, Robert Ross, Carsten Norgaard, the Muurholm clan, Alex Kaputu, Isak Fredericks, Gabs, Moonira and Momo Urgoiti, Patricia Hayes and Ciraj Rasool, Simon Wilkie, Gerhard Gurirab, Memory Biwa, Ivan Gaseb and Mette Gases, Hage Iyambo, Irleyn Kuhanga, Anette and Tommy Bayer, Bastian Schwarz and Hannelie Coetzee, Flemming G. Nielsen, the Vigne family, Mburumba Kerina, Utandua Austin, Mimi Mupetami, Naomi Boys, Nelson Garay Perez, Neville, Mandela, Martha, Abena and the rest of the History Society crew, Peter Pauli, the Feltons, Jens Friis, Steve, Judy and Nyasha Murray, Morten Levy, Sean Neary, Chris Lappin, Jata Kazondu, Shasheeda Mberira, Ndapewa Ithana, Adam Ross, my colleagues at Positive Vibes, Anders Thom
sen and Kim Isenbecker.
Plate section copyrights (numbered consecutively):
National Archives of Namibia: 1–7, 9–10, 12–19, 25–27, 29–30; Frankfurt am Mein University Library: 11, 31–32, 34–35; German Bundesarchiv Berlin: 33; Sam Cohen Library, Swakopmund: 21–22; Private collection: 23, 28, 36–38; Archives of the United Evangelical Lutheran Mission, Wuppertal: 24; Jeff Gaydish: 39; Casper W. Erichsen: 40–41
Index
Abel, Dr Wolfgang, 1, 2
Africa: German exploration, 1;
Portuguese exploration, 1;
size of German empire, 1;
German plans to annex more territories, 1;
German and Nazi aspirations to regain
colonies, 1, 2
African National Congress, 1
agriculture, 1
alcohol, 1
Aminuis, 1
Anawood, 1
Angola, 1, 2
Angra Pequeña see Lüderitz
Apartheid, 1
Arco-Valley, Count Anton von, 1
Armadale Castle (warship), 1
Arthur Koppel Company, 1
Askaris, 1
Astel, Karl, 1
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 44
