The Kaiser's Holocaust

by Casper Erichsen

  Still unwilling to attack, Leutwein informed Hendrik Witbooi on 20 May that he had not yet commanded his troops to storm the Naukluft as his ‘conscience still whispers that you may one day accuse me of having allowed you too little time’. Three months later, in a remarkably candid letter, Leutwein told Hendrik Witbooi that if he were to allow the Witbooi to keep their autonomy, ‘I should be blamed not only by my Lord the German Emperor but by all the German people. You are more spoken about in Germany than you suppose … Incidentally, our letters are forwarded to Berlin, and are also communicated to my men.’13

  Leutwein’s decision to postpone the attack was not motivated exclusively by his desire to avoid bloodshed, nor his growing respect for Hendrik Witbooi. He was equally eager to avoid being defeated, and it was only after reinforcements had arrived from Germany that he finally, and perhaps reluctantly, launched his assault. It is, however, some measure of his determination to use diplomacy, and his appreciation of the Witbooi Nama as a military force, that the attack came on 27 August, almost four months after the Germans had first arrived in the Naukluft Mountains.

  Despite his caution, Theodor Leutwein still underestimated the military skill and resolve of the Witbooi. The German attack began with a ponderous advance through the narrow gorges of the Naukluft during which they were ambushed by Witbooi fighters firing down on them from virtually invisible positions. Ludwig von Estorff, an officer who had recently arrived in the colony but who was to stay in South-West Africa for the next seventeen years, had his first encounter with the Witbooi in the Naukluft. Writing afterwards he admitted that the Witbooi were ‘Far superior to us when it came to marching, enduring deprivation, and knowledge of and ability to use the terrain i.e. their agility. It was only in weaponry, courage, perseverance and discipline that the [German] troops surpassed the enemy.’14

  Of these four factors it was their ‘weaponry’ that saved the Germans in the Naukluft. After suffering heavy casualties, Leutwein abandoned efforts to outfight the Witbooi and set about battering them into submission with artillery. Having fought against the Germans for a year and a half, and with his people on the verge of starvation, Hendrik Witbooi finally accepted German offers of a peace treaty on 9 September after an unrelenting artillery barrage.

  For the Witbooi, the thirteen-day battle in the Naukluft Mountains was a salutary lesson in the power of German artillery. It was this, above all else, that convinced Hendrik that he had no choice but to come to terms with the Germans. For Theodor Leutwein, who had nearly been defeated, the battle was taken as dramatic confirmation of his conviction that South-West Africa could not be colonised by military means alone.

  On 15 September 1894, a decade after Bismarck had first laid claim to South-West Africa, the Witbooi Nama signed a ‘Protection and Friendship Treaty’. As the Witbooi remained a potent military force even in defeat, the terms of the treaty were relatively favourable. They were to abandon the Naukluft and settle permanently in their former base at Gibeon in the south of the colony. There, Leutwein would establish a military post and appoint a garrison commander. That commander, the treaty stated, would be instructed by Leutwein ‘to maintain friendly and accommodating relations with the Captain [Witbooi] and his people’.15

  Hendrik Witbooi’s main obligation under the treaty was to ‘maintain peace and order in his territory’.16 In recognition of these services rendered to the German government, he was to be paid an annual stipend of 2,000 marks. Witbooi was to retain much of his traditional authority, and all whites living in his territory were ‘obliged to adhere to the laws and customs of his land’.17 Economically the war had cost the Witbooi much, but, under the terms of the treaty, they retained their land and were at liberty to rebuild their cattle herds.

  The first signs of tension between the pragmatism of Leutwein’s strategy and the aspirations of the colonial lobby in Berlin emerged over the protection treaty with the Witbooi. Although Leutwein had ended the war and brought about the peaceful conditions necessary for increased German settlement, he was lambasted by the colonial societies and by elements within the tiny Windhoek settler community. What particularly offended the governor’s opponents was that he had failed to crush the Witbooi decisively in battle and then failed at the negotiating table by not imposing draconian terms upon them. The Kaiser himself became embroiled in the ensuing scandal. His advisers went as far as to suggest that he refuse to ratify the treaty with Witbooi as it was ‘objectionable in several respects’.18

  What particularly irked the colonial societies and large sections of the public was the slow pace of settlement. In the ten years since the Conference of Berlin, only 1,200 German settlers had migrated to South-West Africa. Although Leutwein’s policies promised an eventual end to the independence and military power of the Africans and an increased rate of German settlement, a long-term, gradualist approach was increasingly out of step with the prevailing mood in Berlin at the end of Germany’s first decade as a colonial power.

  Notes – 5 ‘European Nations Do Not Make War in That Way’

  1. Sven Linqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996), p. 135.

  2. William Winwood Reade, Savage Africa (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1864), p. 452.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 10.

  5. A. Heywood and E. Maasdorp (eds), The Hendrik Witbooi Papers (Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1995), p. 130.

  6. Ibid.

  7. H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), p. 71.

  8. Ibid., p. 72.

  9. Ibid., p. 73.

  10. Heywood and Maasdorp, Witbooi Papers, p. 148.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., p. 175.

  13. Ibid., p. 177.

  14. L. Von Estorff, ‘Kriegserlebnisse in Suedwestafrika’, in Militaerwochenblatt (1911), Beiheft 3.

  15. Heywood and Maasdorp, Witbooi Papers, p. 207–8.

  16. Ibid., p. 209.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 78.

  ‘A Piece of Natural Savagery’

  Many of the eager young men who abandoned Europe for the colonies during the second half of the nineteenth century were attracted by the allure of life on the colonial frontier. Many others, however, including the millions of Germans who emigrated to the United States, were just ordinary men and women who wanted little more than a job and perhaps their own plot of land. Both poor and poorly educated, such people were not drawn from Europe by the prospect of adventure; rather, they were pushed out of the continent by powerful economic, social and even religious forces. It was the dramatic emergence of such pressures that convinced many Germans that the settlement of their overseas colonies, and in particular German South-West Africa, was a matter of grave national importance.

  By the last quarter of the century the twin forces of industrialisation and urbanisation had begun to disrupt traditional modes of life profoundly. The industrial boom that followed unification had been accompanied by the concentration of huge swathes of farmland into the hands a tiny number of powerful landowners. Millions of rural families were displaced. Landless and destitute, they gravitated to the cities where they were conscripted into the new industries. This same pattern had, of course, taken place elsewhere in Europe, but in Germany the sheer velocity of the transformation was breathtaking and the social rupture caused by mass urbanisation was aggravated by an unprecedented population boom.

  During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Germany experienced a baby boom even greater than that which followed World War II. Between unification and 1914 the population more than doubled, reaching 68 million – a figure that neither France nor Britain has yet to reach. This was welcomed by the new industrialists, who saw it as a guarantee that their factories would never run short of labour, and by the militarists, who longed for an ever-larger army. Others interpreted Germany’s growing population as eviden
ce of the essential vitality of the Germanic race. In the 1880s and 1890s, however, it was the engine for a social disaster.

  As early as the 1870s Germany’s cities were seriously overcrowded. At the time of unification, Berlin already had a higher population density than London. By the end of the 1890s, the majority of Berliners were either first- or second-generation immigrants from the countryside. City planners, such as they were, failed repeatedly (and understandably) to grasp the sheer enormity of the country’s population boom. Numbers that forecasters believed would not be reached for decades were exceeded within years. Even the most forward-thinking municipalities found themselves completely incapable of housing the thousands who arrived each year from the countryside. Germany became a nation of enormous slums.

  The poorest districts of Berlin were among the most overcrowded and unhealthy in Europe. Conditions in the capital were made worse by the construction of the Hinterhöfe, blocks of seven-storey red-brick tenements built around central courtyards. They had been conceived as the solution to the city’s housing problem and instead became its emblem. Whole families were crowded into single rooms, several families into apartments designed for one. Poverty and overcrowding inexorably led to the familiar nineteenth-century urban cocktail of endemic and epidemic diseases – tuberculosis, typhus, cholera and influenza.

  The masses trapped in these tiny single-roomed hovels eventually became known as the Volk Ohne Raum – people without space. Their plight became a national fixation and was taken by many in nationalist circles as evidence that what Germany needed, above all, was space. The search for space, new land for the excess population, became a key feature of fin de siècle German thinking and politics.

  The widespread perception that the nation was incapable of finding space for its population was strengthened by an unrelenting stream of emigration. Over the course of the nineteenth century millions of Germans emigrated to the Americas. By the 1890s a fresh exodus of staggering proportions was under way. Within just ten years, 1,445,181 German immigrants arrived in New York alone, many of them quickly moving on to German agricultural settlements across the country or to the so-called ‘German Triangle’ around Cincinnati, Milwaukee and St Louis. Thousands gathered on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in what became known as Klein Deutschland – Little Germany. By 1900 the German population of New York was 324,224 – only Berlin and Vienna could boast larger German populations – making New York the third-largest ‘German’ city on earth.

  While some argued that emigration was a necessary safety valve needed to maintain social order, others asked why Germany was incapable of offering succour to her own people. Conservatives worried that the loss of so many economically active citizens might undermine the economy, while militarists feared that it could rob the nation of the manpower needed to defend (or perhaps expand) the Reich. Yet what the nationalists found most disturbing, when they looked across the ocean to the German communities of the Eastern Seaboard and Midwest, was the enthusiasm with which the emigrants, known as the Auswanderung, abandoned their ‘German-ness’ and embraced America.

  In certain circles, the loss of the Auswanderung was regarded as a form of racial haemorrhaging. Schemes by which German immigrants might be helped to maintain their cultural roots were discussed and plans were drafted for the establishment of German language schools abroad. To the right and the nationalist wings of German politics one solution was to redirect the flow of the Auswanderung away from the United States and towards Germany’s African colonies. This would not only prevent German emigrants from being subsumed into an alien culture but transform the colonies themselves.

  As a renewed enthusiasm for colonial settlement took hold in the 1890s, ‘paper possession’ of large parts of Africa was no longer enough. Successful and populated colonies came to be regarded as an essential feature of any powerful European state. Pragmatists like Theodor Leutwein, who warned that such colonies would take decades to establish, were condemned as backward-looking and eventually as unpatriotic. Looking back on the period from 1907, Sir Eyre Crowe of the British Foreign Office eloquently described the mood:

  The dream of a colonial empire had taken deep hold on the German imagination. Emperor, statesmen, journalists, geographers, economists, commercial shipping houses and the whole mass of educated and uneducated public opinion continued with one voice to declare: We must have real colonies, where German immigrants can settle and spread the national ideals of the Fatherland and we must have a fleet and coaling stations to keep together the colonies which we are bound to acquire …1

  Underlying the new colonial enthusiasm of the 1890s were deeper and older ideas about the nature of the German people – the Volk. A generation of journalists, politicians and philosophers, repelled by the economic distress and materialism of their age, turned to mysticism for solutions. The German character itself, they believed, was essentially un-urban and un-industrial. Therefore what the nation’s leaders might consider progress was really a social catastrophe that served to separate the people from their true essence.

  At the very core of their thinking lay the belief that only through interaction with the soil could a German encounter his or her true sprit, and fully become part of the Volk. These Völkisch theorists argued that the true danger of mass emigration to America was not simply the loss of population, but specifically the loss of Germany’s peasants and small farmers. No successful society, they claimed, could ever be founded upon industry and the city.

  In order to preserve the German peasant from the forces of industrialisation, Völkisch theory undertook a remarkable feat of doublethink. As the bulk of the agricultural land in Germany itself had fallen into the hands of rich landowners, the true Germanic mode of life – that of the farmer peasant – was now permanently denied to millions of Germans. Without this bond to the land the nation would eventually face a spiritual calamity. But this precious connection, between Volk and soil, could be replicated in the African colonies. Even though the soil they would be tilling was that of another continent and not the sacred earth of Germany, life as a farmer in a distant colony was far preferable to an urban existence in Germany. In a strange leap of consciousness that contradicted many older Völkisch ideas, they claimed that only by leaving Germany could the Auswanderung become truly German.

  If Germany were able to settle her colonies, they argued, the whole nation would be redeemed. Germany would have a new colonial population on which it could call for raw materials, export markets and military manpower in times of war. But more importantly, the children of the colonies, immersed from birth in a true Germanic life and bound to the soil, would become a living repository of the Völkisch spirit. Germany’s colonies would become the incubators in which those values would be preserved, safe from the forces of modernity and industrialisation that would inevitably continue in Germany.

  The organisation that promoted these arguments most vigorously was the Pan-Germanic League. Founded in 1894, the Pan-Germans espoused a virulent form of racial nationalism. While passionately advocating settler colonialism in Africa, the league, like other branches of the nationalist right, also claimed that Germany’s population problems were so acute that they necessitated the colonisation of Germany herself. As old antipathies towards the ethnic Polish population of Prussia, the most eastern region of the German Reich, became increasingly racialised in the later nineteenth century, schemes to strengthen the ‘German element’ of the population and prevent the ‘Polonisation’ of Prussia were proposed. What became known as ‘inner colonialism’ promised to keep Prussia German and channel the Auswanderung away from the United States. Some schemes were even enacted and landless Germans, who otherwise might have washed up on Ellis Island, were given bank loans and encouraged to settle in eastern Prussia.

  In addition to the idea of ‘inner colonialism’, the Pan-Germans also breathed new life into old concepts and began privately to debate the idea that Poland and the Baltic states might be ‘acquired’ by Germany and colonised.
The expansionist dreams of the Pan-Germanic strain of German nationalism are best illustrated by a map issued by the league in 1899, outlining the borders of Germany as they dreamed they might be in the year 1950. On the Pan-German map most of Poland has been annexed by Germany, as well as the French province of Alsace-Lorraine and the area around the port of Dunkirk, parts of Belgium and the Netherlands. Also incorporated into the great Reich are southern Denmark, the German-speaking provinces of Switzerland, as well as Hungary, Bohemia, Slovakia, northeastern Italy and parts of Lithuania.2

  Extreme as their policies were, the men of the Pan-Germanic League were not figures of the lunatic fringe. The league was a highly respectable, even intellectual organisation. Its leading members held seats in the Reichstag; others were academics at the nation’s most respected universities. An inordinately large number of German schoolteachers were members of the Pan-Germanic League. To the league and other advocates of German racial nationalism, their enthusiasm for the settlement of German South-West Africa went hand in hand with an enthusiasm for ‘inner colonialism’ in the ‘Eastern Marches’, and even for the future creation of a ‘Greater Germany’.

  Even for those who did not fret about the ethnic make-up of eastern Prussia, or harbour dreams of life on the frontier, the overseas colonies that Germany had grabbed in 1884 had an almost mesmerising appeal. Although, as Bismarck had predicted, Germany’s colonies were of little economic consequence (the costs of garrisoning South-West Africa made that colony an active liability), they were a source of endless fascination and immeasurable national pride. In Berlin a Colonial Museum and a Museum of Ethnology were opened. Shops in the capital began to supply specialist clothing, designed for tropical conditions, and equipment for use in the colonies, much of it laughably impractical.3