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

by Casper Erichsen

  The next morning the leaders of the Witbooi arrived at Osona, a settlement just a few miles south-west of Okahandja. Wearing their distinctive white bandanas, tied in a knot around their broad-brimmed hats, the Witbooi headmen were flanked by armed fighters. As was the custom, Chief Tjamuaha welcomed the Witbooi Kaptein, Hendrik Witbooi, as if they were old friends, though the two men had only previously met on the battlefield. Tensions were high, but the negotiations began cordially enough. Suddenly, however, shots were fired and fighting broke out. Surrounded on all sides, the Witbooi managed to force their way out of what appeared to be an ambush, and the Herero suffered heavy casualties. From the safety of the Okahandja mission station only a few miles away Göring was able to hear the sound of battle.6 As the wounded were brought back to their capital on the captured Witbooi wagons, he and Goldammer – both veterans of the Franco-Prussian War – attended to them as best they could. Göring later claimed to have extracted four bullets from the bodies of injured Herero fighters. The following day, the Germans attended the funeral of the fallen Herero, whose interment, Göring informs us, was accompanied by the ‘howling of mourning women’.7

  Almost seventy of Tjamuaha’s men had been killed and over a hundred injured at the battle of Osona. The Witbooi had lost only twenty-four men but, forced into a retreat, they abandoned thousands of cattle and many of their wagons. As their battered and broken caravan headed south, Hendrik Witbooi, who had lost two of his adult sons, wrote to Chief Tjamuaha:

  Well you knew that I wanted peace, but you deceived me. You wanted to lure me into your kraal and then kill me without warning. I defended myself as best I might. You know how the day went. I had to withdraw because I ran out of ammunition … Now I am once again prepared for war and soon I will again meet you at the same place. So sit there and wait for me … truly, now the Lord shall judge between us.8

  For Heinrich Göring the outbreak of war between the Herero and the Nama seemed, at least at first, like an incredible stroke of luck. He and Goldammer had garnered a great deal of good will by treating the Herero wounded. This may well have helped persuade Tjamuaha to agree to a second meeting at which Göring intimated that the ‘protection treaty’ he proposed was in fact some form of alliance between the German Kaiser and the Herero. After a week’s consideration, Tjamuaha agreed. The treaty – drafted in German – was intentionally flattering, purporting to place the Kaiser and Tjamuaha on equal footing: ‘His Majesty the German Emperor, King of Prussia … William I in the name of the German Reich, on the one hand, and Maharero KaTjamuaha [sic], Paramount Chieftain of the Hereros, on his own behalf and on that of his legitimate heirs, wish to conclude a protection and friendship treaty.’

  Tjamuaha signed with his characteristic mark – an ‘X’ surrounded by a circle – and at a stroke Göring had secured a legal foothold for Germany in South-West Africa. Yet his success in bringing the Herero under German ‘protection’ placed him in an almost impossible position. Although he had fulfilled part of his mission, he was aware that when the war between the Herero and the Witbooi Nama intensified, the Herero would demand to see evidence of the ‘protection’ his treaty spoke of. Worse, by forming an alliance with the Herero, Germany had become the enemy of the Witbooi. An alliance with them or the other Nama clans now seemed highly unlikely. There was, however, a more substantial obstacle that would prevent Heinrich Göring from hoodwinking the Witbooi into a protection treaty.

  Never was there a man less likely to be deceived by Göring than Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi, without question one of the most remarkable figures in the whole of African history. A later German governor believed he would undoubtedly have become ‘an immortal in world history had not the fates decided him to be born to an insignificant African throne’.9

  Despite standing only around five feet tall, Hendrik Witbooi was a feared military commander and the dominant force among the Nama peoples. He possessed a razor-sharp mind and, in stark contrast to the popular nineteenth-century European image of the African chief, he was extremely worldly. In 1885, he was fifty-five years old and had built up a body of knowledge and contacts that ranged far beyond the confines of his own people or the African south-west. He was well aware of events outside Africa and fully understood that the powers of Europe were seeking access to the continent and its people.

  Like most Nama, Hendrik was a devout Christian. He could recite long passages from the Bible in Dutch, as well as in Khoekhoegowab, his native language. Despite his religious fervour, he held the missionaries in fairly low esteem, recognising them as agents of European colonialism. His distrust of the missionaries went hand in hand with a general distaste for Europeans. During his teenage years in the Cape, he had witnessed the devastation wrought upon the Nama peoples by the Boers as they fanned out across the Cape, forcing Africans off their land and into bondage. It had been the expansion of white settlement that had led Hendrik’s father and grandfather to abandon the fertile Cape and move north into the desert wilderness of South-West Africa.

  Perhaps most significantly of all – for historians in particular – Hendrik Witbooi was educated and literate. Due to an old war injury – a missing thumb on the right hand – he was no longer able to write his own letters. Instead, he dictated his correspondence to his friend and confidant Samuel Izaak, who also filled in the pages of his meticulously kept diary.

  The history of imperialism in Africa is almost always written by the colonisers. Most African leaders left few written records. Furthermore, in most European accounts, both factual and fictional, Africans are mere ornamental details. They are either stereotypes or thin black figures, seen at a distance or through the sights of a rifle. The Sudanese, who die spluttering in the dust in the African memoirs of Winston Churchill, do so silently. Even Joseph Conrad, the European writer and traveller who came to see more clearly than most the true face of imperialism, conjured up in his masterpiece Heart of Darkness a nightmare vision of King Leopold’s Congo in which black men and women speak few words of their own. Like the subsequent Herero leader Samuel Maharero – who plays an important part in this story – Hendrik Witbooi maintained a constant stream of correspondence with other leaders and his own lieutenants. He also sent letters to the German governors, commissioners and commanders of the local garrisons. Seeking to outmanoeuvre them, he wrote to the colonial newspapers and drafted appeals to the British officials in the neighbouring territories. What stands out about the Africans of the south-west, and leaders like Hendrik Witbooi in particular, is not just their ability to resist imperialism though military and diplomatic means, but the fact that they left us their own accounts of that long struggle – a rare glimpse of colonialism and colonial violence through African eyes.

  Heinrich Göring’s initial approach to Hendrik Witbooi took none of this into account. Unbearably pompous and arrogant, Göring subscribed firmly to the delusion that Africans responded best to threats and had to be addressed in stern tones, like mischievous children. What chance there was of a constructive dialogue between the two men evaporated the moment Göring put pen to paper. Seeking an end to the war between the Herero and the Witbooi, he wrote to Hendrik Witbooi,

  I have always heard, and read too, that you are a reasonable man. So act reasonably now; realise that the best course is to return home and live in peace with your old father and your tribe. To recapitulate: The German Government cannot permit chieftains, who have placed themselves under German protection, to support your enterprise of plunging a protected chiefdom into war … I trust you will attend my words.10

  Witbooi simply ignored this letter. When eventually Göring’s deputy, Louis Nels, wrote suggesting a conciliatory meeting, Hendrik Witbooi replied,

  I gather that you want to negotiate peace, you who call yourself a Representative. How shall I respond? You are someone else’s representative and I am a free and autonomous man answering to none but God. So I have nothing further to say to you … a representative has less power than an autonomous man, I [see] no need to f
ollow your summons at this point.11

  Hendrik Witbooi’s contempt for the Germans was matched only by his fury with the Herero. As the war escalated, Göring, Nels and Goldammer became mere spectators. Again and again, Witbooi’s mounted fighters raided Chief Tjamuaha’s cattle, each attack demonstrating the military prowess of the Herero’s opponents and the worthlessness of their ‘alliance’ with the Germans.

  Unable to influence events, in 1886 Göring trekked across the southern parts of the protectorate in an attempt to persuade the minor Nama chiefs to sign protection treaties. The journey to the south revealed how vast the Nama’s territory was. Only about forty thousand strong, the Nama inhabited an area twice the size of Great Britain. To their east was the Kalahari Desert and in the west the Namib. Only in the middle of the territory did the dense grassland of the central plateau offer the Nama and their cattle some sustenance. The twelve Nama clans lived in scattered villages but were bound to each other through marriage and a strong political entity known as the Wittkamskap, a union of mutual protection and common purpose.

  Göring’s mission through Namaland was a wasted effort. Only a couple of the more minor chiefs agreed to sign. But Hendrik Witbooi, quick to re-establish his authority, scuppered even these small triumphs. When Chief Manasse of the Nama clan known as the Red Nation signed a treaty and accepted a German flag from Göring, Witbooi confiscated it. He then wrote to Göring: ‘I captured the flag which you had presented to [Chief] Manasse. It is now in my keeping. I should like to know what to do with this flag; I ask because it is an alien thing to me.’12

  In 1887, two years into his tenure as Imperial Commissioner, Göring was forced to report to Chancellor Bismarck that the situation in Namaland was ‘not very encouraging’.13 If the lack of progress was a disappointment for Bismarck, it was a disaster for the German South-West African Colonial Company. In 1885 it had bought out Adolf Lüderitz, who drowned the following year while exploring the Orange River. Angra Pequeña had subsequently been renamed Lüderitz Bay in his honour. But the minerals and riches that Adolf Lüderitz had dreamed of had never materialised, and the company’s ambition to transform the protectorate into a flourishing mining colony had come to nothing. By the time of Lüderitz’s death in late 1886, the company’s funds were once more exhausted and new investors could not be induced to come forward. Financially and politically, German South-West Africa seemed a failed enterprise. Serious questions began to be asked in Berlin as to whether the protectorate was even worth keeping. However, at the very moment that Göring’s mission seemed destined to fail, incredible news reached Berlin – gold had been discovered.

  Remarkably, the precious metal had been found only a few hours’ ride north of the headquarters Göring had set up in the Herero town of Otjimbingwe. The fortunate prospector was an Australian named Stevens, the owner of a small mine in a backwater called Anawood. Göring, in his role as Imperial Commissioner, had been the first on the scene and, having personally verified the find, he proudly transmitted the news to Berlin. He even insisted on personally escorting the gold samples back to Germany, arriving in Berlin in early December 1887.

  Only a year earlier, under almost identical circumstances, a gold strike in the Wittwatersrand Mountains of South Africa had led to the uncovering of one of the largest gold deposits on earth. The investors of the German South-West African Colonial Company held their breath in anticipation and Germany looked forward to her own colonial gold rush. All that remained was to determine the extent of the deposits.

  A team of the nation’s leading geologists and mineralogists was hastily assembled for an African expedition, but before they even reached South-West Africa, private mining companies and prospectors were rushing to invest. Germany’s desert protectorate had become the jewel in the Kaiser’s crown.

  For the prospecting expeditions arriving in South-West Africa, the powerlessness of the German authorities was a profound shock. They were especially disturbed to discover that in order to prospect for minerals on land owned by the Nama they had to seek permission not from Imperial Commissioner Göring but from Kaptein Hendrik Witbooi. The expedition leader – a man as incapable of diplomacy as Göring – alienated Witbooi almost immediately. Perhaps imagining himself a character in a Wild West novel, he informed him that he came in peace. Unimpressed, Hendrik coldly responded, ‘You come as friends? Well this is my land, and I don’t want anything to do with the white man.’14

  When the geologists and mineralogists arrived at Anawood, they made a sobering discovery. Although the gold samples that Göring had brought back to Germany were real enough, they had not come from Anawood, or anywhere else in South-West Africa. Small pieces of gold had been loaded into a musket and fired into the rock face. The gold find had been a hoax. The identity of the culprit remains a mystery, but the suspicion remains that it might have been a desperate, last-ditch attempt by Heinrich Göring to bring investment into the protectorate and save his mission.

  If Göring was behind the hoax, it did him little good. Rumours of the Anawood find had spread fast, and one of the first to hear the exciting news was the English trader Robert Lewis. Lewis had lived among the Herero for several years, and had forged strong bonds of friendship and trust with several Herero chiefs. In addition to his trading activities, Lewis was a prospector and the holder of a decade-old contract with Chief Tjamuaha. This contract gave him exclusive rights to all prospecting and mining in northern Hereroland, but did not extend into southern Hereroland where the Anawood mine was located. To gain these mining rights Lewis set about exposing Göring’s protection treaty as worthless.

  Tjamuaha and his councillors were receptive to Lewis’s claims. They were well aware that Göring’s promises were empty and the treaty a meaningless document. Furthermore, they had turned against Göring and the Germans months earlier, due to the behaviour of the prospectors and mineralogists who had flooded into their territory. Under the terms of the protection treaty the Germans were expected to ‘respect the customs and habits of the Hereros’, but many of the prospectors, living among a people they considered inferior, were violent and abusive. Often drunk, some had taken ‘liberties with the Herero women’. The chiefs were outraged. Yet it was Göring who transgressed the customs of the Herero most unforgivably.15

  In 1885 Göring had purchased the old mission building in the Herero settlement of Otjimbingwe and had later decided to add an extension to the old building. Whether Göring was aware of it is not known, but the extension was built over a Herero graveyard, and the bones of the sacred ancestors were disturbed.16

  When the news of this desecration reached Tjamuaha – probably through Lewis – he was enraged, and at the end of October 1888 he summoned Göring to Okahandja. Flanked by over a hundred of his people and Robert Lewis, he formally nullified the ‘protection’ treaty and dismissed Germany’s Imperial Commissioner from his own protectorate. Göring left Okahandja fearing for his life. His nerves shattered, his last official act was to issue a general evacuation order instructing all Germans, including the missionaries, to abandon the protectorate. It was roundly ignored, even by his assistants, Goldammer and Nels. But the Imperial Commissioner had left, and German South-West Africa was German only on paper.

  In Berlin, Göring’s flight was viewed as a catastrophe. Bearded men in flannel suits held long meetings in the Colonial Department, trying to understand the causes of this fiasco. Few of Germany’s colonial bureaucrats had ever left Europe, and they were baffled by Göring’s failed mission. But they were unwilling to even consider the possibility that he had been outmanoeuvred by independent, literate and educated Africans.

  Unable to come up with an acceptable explanation, they produced the next best thing: a scapegoat. The Colonial Department blamed Germany’s abject failure on the British, the perennial enemy, who, they claimed, were conspiring to wrest South-West Africa away from the Reich. Given the role that Lewis had played in Göring’s downfall, it was a vaguely plausible explanation and far more
palatable than the truth. When this conspiracy theory was served up to Bismarck he immediately accepted its logic, stating, ‘We are finding ourselves up against England rather than … the Hereros.’ In this version of events, Göring had not been outmanoeuvred by so-called ‘savages’, but was the victim of ‘Perfidious Albion’.17

  Göring was largely forgiven, thanked for his loyal service and appointed German ambassador to Haiti – the only black republic in the western hemisphere. In January 1893, not long before leaving for Haiti, Göring’s wife Franziska gave birth to a boy, whom she named Hermann.

  Throughout the winter of 1888–9 the question of what do to with South-West Africa rumbled on in Berlin. In January Ludwig Bamberger, a liberal member of the Reichstag, publicly asked the question many officials had long debated in private: should Germany finally abandon her claims to the protectorate? South-West Africa was running at a constant loss, and as long as the indigenous people resisted German rule and fought among themselves, there would be little prospect of the protectorate making a profit for the fatherland. Surely the sands and scrub of the Namib Desert, or even the grasslands of the central plateau, were not worth the effort of keeping them?

  Only by deploying a full-scale military expedition could Germany truly take control, and this Bismarck refused to mount. ‘There can be’, he informed the Colonial Department, ‘no question of applying force against the Hereros.’ Bismarck’s solution was in part a symbolic gesture, designed to appease nationalist and colonial lobby groups. He sent a tiny force to South-West Africa and gave their commander strict orders to avoid conflict with the Africans. However, to lead the expedition Bismarck appointed one of the very few German officers with any military experience in Africa, a man with very different ideas.18