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

by Casper Erichsen

  Most of the buildings are brightly painted in reds, oranges and yellows, and are randomly scattered over the half-dozen or so hills that surround the wide and blustery bay. The vivid colours of the buildings contrast with the sea-weathered rocks of the hills, which resemble wrinkled and dusty elephant hide. Recently the main avenues have been tarmacked, but the back alleys remain rough and pitted dirt tracks. Everywhere piles of dust and sand linger on street corners. A visitor arriving by ship would see nothing to indicate they were in Africa. On landing, their confusion would be compounded by a white population speaking German and hundreds of black Africans speaking the Afrikaans of the Boers.

  Today most visitors to Lüderitz arrive by road. The B4 highway, an arrow-straight ribbon of black tarmac, shoots across the Namib Desert following the line of the old narrow-gauge railway that once connected the southern settlements of what was then German South-West Africa to Lüderitz Bay and from there to the great shipping lanes of Imperial Germany. Each night, out beyond the town limits, the sand dunes inch their way onto the tarmac of the B4, in their nightly attempt to suffocate the town. Each morning a huge yellow excavation machine thunders out of town to clear the highway. The desert itself seems determined to seal Lüderitz off from the outside world. Like the forests of the Congo as witnessed by Joseph Conrad, the dunes of the Namib seem to be waiting with ‘ominous patience … for the passing away of a fantastic invasion’.7

  In 1905 this tiny settlement was chosen as the site of a new experiment in warfare. Until perhaps only thirty years ago, Lüderitz’s oldest residents had their own memories of what happened here in the first years of the twentieth century; they said nothing. Today it remains a secret. The tourist information office on Bismarck Strasse has nothing to say on the subject, none of the guidebooks to Namibia mention it and most of the history books they recommend as further reading are similarly mute. Yet what happened in Lüderitz between 1905 and 1907 makes it one of the pivotal sites in the history of the twentieth century.

  The experiment took place on Shark Island, a squat, mean-looking ridge of rock that lies just across the bay, in full view of the whole town. It was in its way a resounding success, bringing to life a new device: a military innovation that went on to become an emblem of the century and take more lives than the atom bomb. For here, on the southern edge of Africa, the death camp was invented.

  Today Shark Island is the municipal camping site for the town of Lüderitz. A new restaurant overlooking the island offers excellent South African wines and South Atlantic seafood. Diners are encouraged to sit out on the balcony and enjoy views of an island upon which, a century ago, three and a half thousand Africans were systematically liquidated. Just a couple of hundred yards away, beneath the waters of Lüderitz Bay, divers have reported Shark Island to be surrounded by a ring of human bones and rusted steel manacles. The human beings who were made to wear those chains and whose remains lie beneath the waves have been almost erased from Namibian and world history. The names of their tribes – the Herero, Witbooi Nama, Bethanie Nama – mean nothing to most people outside of Namibia.

  Shark Island is not Namibia’s only secret. There is a mass grave under the sidings of the railway station in the Namibian capital, Windhoek, and another on the outskirts of the seaside holiday town of Swakopmund. The national museum itself is housed in a German fort which was built on the site of another concentration camp.

  But for most, Namibia is seen as a quaint backwater, a relic of Germany’s short-lived foray into colonialism, and a microcosm of late nineteenth-century Germany that has somehow survived intact into the twenty-first. In the gift shops tourists buy postcards and picture books that depict this lost idyll. Streets are named after military commanders from aristocratic families. In the shopping malls one can buy replica hats of the Schutztruppe, the German colonial army. They come emblazoned with the red, white and black insignia of Germany’s Second Reich – the age of the Kaisers. The German imperial flag, with its severe black eagle, is also for sale, alongside local history books that skirt over the wars that were fought under that banner – wars that almost wiped out two of Namibia’s indigenous peoples.

  What Germany’s armies and civilian administrators did in Namibia is today a lost history, but the Nazis knew it well. When the Schutztruppe attempted to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of Namibia a century ago, Hitler was a schoolboy of fifteen. In 1904, he lived in a continent that was electrified by the stories of German heroism and African barbarism emanating from what was then German South-West Africa.

  Eighteen years after the Herero-Nama genocide, Hitler became closely associated with a veteran of the conflict. In 1922 he was recruited into an ultra-right-wing militia in Munich that was indirectly under the command of the charismatic General Franz von Epp, who had been a lieutenant during Germany’s wars against the Herero and Nama. As both a young colonial soldier and, later, a leading member of the Nazi party, von Epp was a fervent believer in the Lebensraum theory, and spent his life propagating the notion that the German people needed to expand their living space at the expense of lower races, whether in Africa or Eastern Europe. It would be an exaggeration to claim that Hitler was von Epp’s protégé, but in the chaos of post-World War I Munich, von Epp, perhaps more than any figure other than Hitler himself, made the Nazi party possible. It was through von Epp, in various convoluted ways, that Hitler met many of the men who were to become the elite of the party: von Epp’s deputy was Ernst Röhm, the founder of the Nazi storm troopers. Via the party’s connections to von Epp and other old soldiers of Germany’s African colonies, Röhm and Hitler were able to procure a consignment of surplus colonial Schutztruppe uniforms. Designed for warfare on the golden savannah of Africa, the shirts were desert brown in colour: the Nazi street thugs who wore them became known as Brown Shirts.

  Today von Epp is viewed as a minor player in the story of Nazism. When the party came to power in 1933, his role was to campaign for the return of the colonies lost at Versailles for which he had fought as a young man. But by 1939 von Epp had become a marginal figure, excluded from Hitler’s inner circle and eclipsed by younger men. His critical role in the development of the party as a political force has been overlooked. Yet in his writings before the war, Hitler recognised the role von Epp had played. In countless pictures and party propaganda films, von Epp and Hitler stand side by side.

  In the last pictures taken of him, von Epp sits next to Hermann Göring. Both have been stripped of their uniforms and decorations as they await trial under American custody at Mondorf-les-Bains. The old general looks gaunt, slumped back in his chair squinting at the photographer. A generation older than many of his fellow inmates, von Epp died in custody just weeks after those pictures were taken. Had he lived to stand trial alongside Göring, might von Epp’s testimony have led the prosecutors to see the continuities between the genocide he had taken part in as a young infantry lieutenant and the acts of the Third Reich?

  Today the memory of Germany’s empire has become detached from European history. Nineteenth-century colonialism has long been viewed as a specialist subject, a historical annexe in which events were played out in near-complete isolation from Europe. Yet in colonial history, ideas, methods and individuals always moved in both directions. Hitler’s 1941 statement that he would treat the Slavs ‘like a colonial people’ has lost its resonance, but for the Führer it was a phrase full of meaning, a shorthand readily understood by a generation of Nazis who were boys when the Kaiser sent his armies to Africa to destroy native rebels who had placed themselves in the path of Germany’s racial destiny. Our understanding of what Nazism was and where its underlying ideas and philosophies came from is perhaps incomplete unless we explore what happened in Africa under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

  Notes – Introduction: Cell 5

  1. Leonard Mosley, The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Goering (London: Pan, 1977), pp. 427–8.

  2. The Trial of German Major War Criminals: Proceedings of the International Militar
y Tribunal Sitting at Nuremberg, Germany, 20th November, 1945, to 1st October, 1946 (London: HM Stationery Office, 1946–51), Part 9 (12–22 March 1946), p. 63.

  3. Ibid., p. 81.

  4. G. M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, p. 202.

  5. Trial of German Major War Criminals 9, p. 63.

  6. Erich Gritzbach, Hermann Goering: The Man and His Work (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1939), p. 222.

  7. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness with The Congo Diary (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 58.

  The World behind the Fog

  Sometime in the late summer of 1484 two ships slipped out of Lisbon harbour, caught the wind in their sails and turned south. They were the caravels of Diogo Cão, and they were heading further south than any Europeans had ever ventured. King João II of Portugal had ascended to the throne determined to advance the age of exploration begun by his illustrious father King Henry ‘the Navigator’. The prize sought by João and every navigator and explorer of the fifteenth century was a sea route to India and China. In the same year that Diogo Cão left Lisbon harbour, Portugal had officially abandoned the notion of attempting to reach India by crossing the Atlantic, an idea then being suggested by little-known navigator Christopher Columbus. In 1484 the focus of Portuguese interest was Africa, the great continent to the south, around which they were convinced lay the shortest route to India.

  In the fifteenth century the Portuguese, like other Europeans, knew almost nothing of Africa. African kingdoms and peoples who had been in regular contact with Europe during the empires of ancient Greece and Rome had, from the fifth century onwards, been cut off from Europe by the rise of Islamic North Africa. For almost a millennium, black and white humanity had been separated, and in parts of Europe black Africans became almost mythological figures. Africa was imagined as a land inhabited by monstrous creatures, where the sun’s heat was so intense it might prove deadly to Europeans. Yet it might also offer riches and bountiful trade, and beyond its shores more wealth might flow from India and China.

  Although by the middle of the fifteenth century black Africans had been brought to Portugal and the wealth of the continent was already flowing back to Lisbon, each new discovery raised more questions and uncovered new mysteries. Despite several expeditions, no explorer had been able to map even the coast of the continent, while the interior remained completely unknown. Critically, no one had any idea how far to the south Africa stretched.

  On his first expedition in 1482, Diogo Cão had discovered the Congo, a river larger and more powerful than anything Europeans had previously encountered. Yet he had failed to find a route around the continent. How large was Africa? What perils might lie along that seemingly endless coastline? What other great rivers, strange peoples and exotic animals were waiting to be discovered? In late 1484 Diogo Cão’s two caravels sailed east along the lush green shores of West Africa. The wealth of the coast was clearly visible. Enormous kingdoms had risen and fallen over centuries. Millions populated the fertile forest belt, hundreds of miles thick, and broad rivers regularly cut into the forests, offering possibilities for future explorers and traders to penetrate the unknown interior. Tracking along the lagoons at the mouth of the River Niger, they then turned south along the coast of Cameroon, passing the mouth of the Congo. Further south they sailed past the coast of what is today Angola, finding shelter in the natural harbours that were later to become the centres of Portugal’s slave empire. The further they went, the more the landscape began to change. The tangled forests of fig trees and giant baobab trees that fought for space on the shoreline of the Congo Basin began to dwindle. Mile by mile the trees became smaller, fewer and further apart.

  As they passed the mouth of the Kunene River, the explorers saw a green island feeding off the Kunene’s waters; this was the last dense burst of vegetation they were to encounter on their journey. South of this, the shore they surveyed was utterly desolate. Vast fields of sand dunes stretched back from the shore, a sea of yellow running parallel to the cold blue of the ocean. Dark and sombre mountain ranges were occasionally visible in the far distance, half lost in the heat haze.

  Each morning a heavy sea mist would roll in and blanket the coast with a thick grey fog, as if the icy waters of the South Atlantic were turned to steam on contact with the roasting sands of the southern desert. Salt and spray hung in the air and bitter winds raked the coastline, whipping up the sands, reshaping the dunes and cutting into the faces of the sailors on deck. As they pushed further and further south, they will have seen humpback whales cruising to their breeding grounds and the broad fins of the great white sharks that still patrol the coastline. Nearer the coast, they will have come across Cape fur seals and killer whales. In the icy Benguela currents that stream up the coast from their source in Antarctica, the explorers would have encountered the bizarre sunfish and various species of sea turtle. But on the coastline there was nothing but stillness, solitude. An early twentieth-century description of this little-travelled coastline gives some indication of its desolation and danger:

  Heavy squalls and gales of wind are frequent, and often come on without warning, and with a cloudless sky. Sometimes sand is blown from the desert in large quantities, filling the air with minute particles, which are a long time subsiding; these conditions are accompanied by intense heat. The ordinary state of the atmosphere along this coast causes great refractions, and fogs are also frequent … the rollers frequently set in along this coast from the westward with great fury, and there is almost always a tremendously heavy swell thundering upon the shores, it is advisable to give the land a good berth …1

  What Diogo Cão had ‘discovered’ was the coastline of modern-day Namibia, the Skeleton Coast. The dunes he viewed in the distance were those of the Namib Desert, an enormous belt of bleak coastal sands, 1,000 miles long and ranging between 30 and 100 miles in width, that sealed off the interior of south-western Africa from the rest of the world.

  In January 1486 the explorers came across a small bay populated by hundreds of thousands of Cape fur seals. Here Diogo Cão and his men became the first Europeans ever to set foot in the Namib. Before landing they carefully lowered one of three stone padrãos they had carried from Lisbon into a launch. The padrãos were stone markers inscribed with the Portuguese coat of arms and a dated inscription that declared the land upon which they were planted as claimed by the King of Portugal. Cão and his men planted the padrão on a hill above the bay, where it stood 6 feet high, alone on the horizon in a land without trees, framed by the black hulk of the Brandberg Mountain in the far distance. The raising of the padrão claimed the empty desert for Portugal and King João II, but also marked the southern extent of Diogo Cão’s now failed journey to find a route to India. It was not the last time the Namib would disappoint and dishearten a prospective empire-builder.

  The padrão itself was to stand where Cão had left it for 408 years. In 1893 it was finally uprooted by sailors of the German Navy and returned to Europe, becoming a trophy of the German Naval Academy in Kiel. Today, at what is known as Cape Cross, a quarter of a million Cape fur seals, the descendants of those who greeted Diogo Cão, still sunbathe noisily at the foot of a granite replica of the missing padrão. Here at least, little has changed since Diogo Cão rowed ashore.

  Although the Namib had been claimed for Portugal, the Portuguese never arrived to take possession or to seek out its elusive inhabitants. An order for the exploration of the coast was given in 1520, but nothing seems to have happened. This was unwanted real estate: there were no thriving coastal populations to trade with or enslave, no broad rivers slicing into the heart of the continent, no gold, spices or precious stones. This was a land which profited no one – a wasteland with a murderous coastline which only added weeks of travel and additional danger to the journey around Africa. A later Portuguese writer summarised the Namib in one line, ‘All this coast is desert and without people.’2

  For the next four centuries the Skeleton Coast and the Namib Desert beyond it became mute w
itnesses to the rise of the age of empire. Ships travelling to India in the sixteenth century via the Cape were so fearful of the coastline that they travelled 250 miles offshore to avoid its hidden rocks and treacherous currents.3 The Dutch, the master navigators of their age, dared to come closer, as they headed to their empire in the East Indies. Their sailors reported that, when peering through the fog, they could on occasion spot black figures on the shores staring back at their ships. The Dutch called these unknown people strandloopers – beach runners. From the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth century this was the limit of human contact between the peoples of south-western Africa and Europe.

  Although European ships occasionally sought shelter in the natural bays and harbours, those travellers never dared attempt to cross the desert or make contact with the mysterious strandloopers. The only Europeans who embarked upon that hopeless journey were stranded survivors from ships wrecked in the Benguela Currents. They stumbled blindly inland until they succumbed to the heat. It was their whitened, weathered bones that gave the Skeleton Coast its name.

  For a brief moment in the 1780s, it looked as though all that might change. The nation that had eventually superseded the Portuguese as the world’s prime maritime power turned its attention to the Namib coast. Influenced by the spurious accounts of travellers who claimed to have ventured into the lands north of the Orange River (the modern-day border between South Africa and Namibia), a British parliamentary committee began to consider what role the Namib might play in Britain’s global empire. Three centuries of inaction surely meant that Portugal’s claims to ownership had lapsed, and from their comfortable offices in London the committee members speculated that the Namib might be the perfect location for a penal colony. In fact, the parliamentarians were so confident that the Namib was a suitable site for European settlement that they even debated whether it might also be offered as a new home to those loyal subjects of the crown who had fled the American colonies after the Revolutionary Wars.