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

by Casper Erichsen

  Although his early studies had been in zoology, Ratzel’s later work was in the new discipline of geography, and by the 1880s he had emerged as one of Germany’s foremost geographers. The theories that Ratzel developed as a geographer were heavily influenced by concepts drawn from his zoological background and the work of his original mentor, Ernst Haeckel. Ratzel’s interest in the anatomical sciences remained strong for much of his life. One of his many friends, with whom he maintained a healthy correspondence, was the racial anthropologist Felix von Luschan.9

  It was in the late 1890s that Ratzel began to fuse ideas inspired by Social Darwinism with the theories about space and migration being developed in geography. Specifically he applied the notion of the ‘struggle for existence’ to the study of migration, both animal and human. To Ratzel the invasion and colonisation of the world outside Europe by the white race, and the displacement of indigenous peoples, was all part of the ‘struggle for existence’, motivated above all by the search for ‘living space’. Darwin had shown that when animals moved to new environments, over time they adapted and evolved to those new conditions. From this Ratzel concluded that when human races migrated they adapted their cultures to the new environment.

  If a race was successful in adapting to the conditions of a different territory their culture advanced and their population increased. These two factors naturally motivated adaptable races to migrate. Human history, in Ratzel’s view, was driven forward by a constant series of migrations, each inspiring new adaptations to new environments and each adaptation advancing the culture and increasing the population of the migrating race. Ratzel even speculated as to whether the drive to migrate was, in itself, a feature of a virile and vigorous race.

  Migration, Ratzel argued, was essential for long-term survival of a race. Each people had no choice but to increase the amount of space it occupied. To stop migrating and adapting to new environments was, in Ratzel’s conception, to stop advancing and risk being overtaken by other races better fitted for survival.

  It was crude Social Darwinism, partly inspired by nationalism and colonialism and scribbled on a map. In 1897 Ratzel published his influential book Politische Geographie and named his new theory Lebensraum – living space. Friedrich Ratzel’s academic theories were, at times, intertwined with his political support for colonialism. During the first wave of colonial enthusiasm that swept over Germany in the 1880s, he helped found the right-wing and expansionist German Colonial Society. He became committed to the idea that any colonies Germany was able to grab hold of during the ‘scramble for Africa’ needed to be settled by German farmers, rather than just exploited by industry or traders. Ratzel claimed that territories used only as a source of raw materials or as markets for trade goods were not true colonies. Colonisation took place only when a conquered territory was farmed, and even then, only if the land was placed in the hands of small peasant farmers rather than large land companies. When discussing Germany’s empire, Ratzel specified German South-West Africa as one potential source of Lebensraum for the German people.

  Lebensraum theory also dismissed the current notion that the races who came into contact with European colonialists suffered some form of inexplicable extinction. Ratzel felt no need to deny the true cause. Colonial peoples disappeared because they were persecuted, enslaved and exterminated. This was done by colonialists, traders and soldiers. There was little mystery. He hedged his bets somewhat by arguing that perhaps the inner cultural weakness of the native races of Africa, America and Asia made them passive, and therefore incapable of withstanding the European assault. However, he was clear that the means of their destruction was the gun and the gallows. All this was acceptable because the people Europeans were destroying were what he termed ‘inferior races’.10 Their land was required by a stronger race who quite naturally took it by force.

  Importantly, given the role his ideas (and innumerable distortions of them) were to play in the story of German colonialism, Ratzel felt that wars of extermination were an inevitable aspect in the search for Lebensraum. To capture space, the vigorous nations of the earth would have no choice but to fight wars against the indigenous peoples in a ‘struggle for space’. When looking for examples of the sorts of conflict that had been effective in ‘quickly and completely’ displacing indigenous races he listed those fought during the nineteenth century in North America, southern Brazil, Tasmania and New Zealand.11 These wars, that Ratzel viewed as models for future colonialism, were wars of extermination; some were genocides.

  The man who most forcefully promoted and distorted Social Darwinian theories such as Lebensraum in German South-West Africa was not Governor Theodor Leutwein – who disliked theoretical justifications for colonialism – but the Commissioner for Settlement, Dr Paul Rohrbach.

  Rohrbach was sent to South-West Africa in 1903 by the Colonial Department, to evaluate the colony’s potential for large-scale farming and mass settlement, and to carry out a comparative study of the colonial methods used by the British in South Africa and those deployed in German South-West Africa. Specifically, he aimed to determine if the system of forced expropriation of land, used successfully by the British, might be applied in the German colony.

  Rohrbach’s mission was part of a larger, government-backed scheme, aimed at increasing the pace of German settlement. Although by 1903 the pace of settlement was greater than it had ever been, migration to the German colonies was as nothing when compared with the continuing flood of emigrants to the United States. Even some of those who had migrated and settled in German South-West Africa clearly harboured ambitions to leave for America eventually, as they registered their new farms under names such as Dixie, Alabama and Georgia.

  To help lure more settlers to the colony, Rohrbach had been granted a budget of 300,000 marks and given a special mandate. He was to report directly to the Colonial Department in Berlin, an arrangement that, in theory, made him the most senior official in the colony after Governor Leutwein.12 Rohrbach was well suited to this role. He was highly able, and resilient enough to withstand the hardships of travel in the deserts; above all, he was utterly dedicated to the colonial mission and an advocate of the Social Darwinian and racial theories that underpinned it.

  In his book Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (German World Policies), written in 1912, Rohrbach described, with breathtaking frankness, the principles that he had come to believe should govern the colonisation of Africa:

  It is not right either among nations or among individuals that people who can create nothing should have a claim to preservation. No false philanthropy or race-theory can prove to reasonable people that the preservation of any tribe of nomadic South African Kaffirs … is more important for the future of mankind than the expansion of the great European nations, or the white race as a whole. Should the German people renounce the chance of growing stronger and of securing elbow room for their sons and daughters, because … some tribe of Negroes … has lived its useless existence on a strip of land where ten thousand German families may have a flourishing existence and thus strengthen the very sap of our people?13

  In 1903 Rohrbach, like Governor Theodor Leutwein, understood that the Africans, once disinherited and pacified, could become a considerable economic resource. However, the experience he gained in South-West Africa later led him to conclude that whole African nations could be legitimately exterminated. In 1907, he published Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft (German Colonial Commerce), in which he stated: ‘In order to secure the peaceful White settlement against the bad, culturally inept and predatory native tribe, it is possible that its actual eradication may become necessary under certain conditions.’14

  During his time in South West Africa, Paul Rohrbach was most preoccupied with what opportunities colonialism might offer his own people, not with what it would mean for the indigenous races. The destruction or enslavement of the lower races – whichever it had to be – was merely an effect of colonialism, rather than its aim. Pushing aside notions that had been used to jus
tify colonialism in the early nineteenth century – racial paternalism, the spread of the Gospel and the suppression of the slave trade – Rohrbach saw its sole function as the spread and the advancement of the white race. This stood in marked contrast to the more pragmatic stance of Governor Leutwein, who saw his role as balancing the opposing interests of both black and white, until the Africans could be forced to accept their lowly position.

  Rohrbach imagined that during the twentieth century Germany might settle 2 million of its sons and daughters on African soil. From those pioneers, subject as they would be to the unique conditions of a frontier society, would evolve a new variant of the German character. Rohrbach saw the colonies as the crucible from which a more virulent strain of ‘German-ness’ would emerge and slowly be transfused into the body of the Reich:

  The colonial type is … a source of great inner wealth for any nation which develops it successfully. It is not that the lazy and timid, but the active and determined men of a nation find their way across the seas, which explains much in the American character … In view of our very large numbers it is of no consequence if several thousand people leave home annually, even if they are ever so strong and capable. Across the ocean, however, the selection gradually produces a race of special qualities … It is … better accustomed to living on a big scale both without and within.15

  With these notions at the forefront of his mind, Rohrbach surveyed the farmland of German South-West Africa and sought to determine by which methods it might be made most productive.

  In the same years, Governor Leutwein set about constructing the infrastructure needed to realise large-scale settlement of German South-West Africa. While the principle of divide and rule, by which he had subdued the Nama and Herero, had been borrowed from the British, the governor and his allies in the Colonial Department now looked to the American West for inspiration. On the American frontier, white settlement had been accelerated by two critical policies: the rapid construction of the railways and the creation of native reserves. Angelo Golinelli, the official in charge of South-West African affairs at the German Colonial Department, wrote that railways in the colonies ‘are built as a prelude to subjugation and pacification’.16 As in the United States, the train would transport cattle to market, take supplies and labour to the white settlers and allow for the rapid deployment of the army, should the ‘natives’ resist the other element of Golinelli’s policy – their gradual confinement in reserves. Governor Leutwein believed the development of the railways was so critical that in 1897 he travelled to Berlin and made a personal appeal to the Reichstag for the necessary funds.17

  By 1902 a line connecting Windhoek with the rapidly developing port of Swakopmund had already been completed. In 1903 work commenced on a second railway project, linking Swakopmund to the copper mines at Otavi – the colony’s only industrial venture of any real consequence. As the Otavi line began slowly to inch its way across the desert, the various ways the Africans might be forced to make way for German settlers were being debated among the missionaries and colonial administrators. In 1903 Leutwein agreed, albeit half-heartedly, to an official policy of reserves, and two were established, a Witbooi reserve in Rietmont and a Herero reserve at Otjimbingwe.

  The Herero and Nama were perfectly able to see that the coming of the railways and the establishment of reserves were the first moves in the gradual annexation of South-West Africa. Above all, they feared being forced into areas that were too small or infertile for them to practise their traditional pastoral lifestyles. When the Herero chiefs were asked to agree to the establishment of a second reserve near Okahandja, they rejected the German proposals. But in 1903 neither the Herero nor the Nama leadership regarded any of these developments as cause to rise up and rebel against German rule.

  For all their losses of land and independence, the Herero and Nama still had economic power over central and southern parts of the colony. They had sold land and cattle, the latter in vast quantities. Some had slipped into debt to the traders and others had lost land in unfair treaties, but most of the tribes remained masters of much of what they surveyed. According to Paul Rohrbach’s own figures, by 1903 only 10 percent of the farmland owned by the Africans, which the settlers might be able to exploit profitably, had been purchased.18 The situation was less favourable for some of the smaller southern Nama clans. The Bondelswarts and the Veldschoendragers had lost considerable amounts of their land to private settlers and land companies, but the largest tribes, including the Herero, had retained the greater part of their ancestral land.

  The sale of land by Nama Kapteins had given the German settlers a firm foothold in the south of the colony, but it had also enriched the Nama elite. Hendrik Witbooi, now in his early seventies, rather than being disinherited by the colonial process, was growing steadily richer by selling plots of land. One farm sold to the settler Dr Kämpffer brought Witbooi seven annual payments of 1,000 Reichmarks – in itself a small fortune. Kämpffer, whose son became a celebrated writer of colonial fiction under the Nazis, was no doubt making a point when he named his farm Deutsche Erde – German Soil.19 Other settlers, unable to persuade the chiefs to sell them a plot, were forced into an even more unpalatable relationship. In a deeply resented inversion of the customary colonial relationship, they were forced to lease land from the Nama or Herero.

  While the land sales brought the chiefs large fortunes, they still counted their real wealth in cattle. Both the Herero and Nama had recovered from the disastrous Rinderpest epidemic of the late 1890s. By 1903 the Herero herd stood at around fifty thousand, while the Nama owned perhaps as many as twenty-five thousand cattle. As the average price of a head of cattle in southern Africa was around 150 Reichmarks, Samuel Maharero, who, like many of the other chiefs, owned thousands of cattle, was in effect a millionaire.

  The prosperity of the African elite, relative to that of most white settlers, was taken as further proof that Leutwein’s system of gradual colonialism had failed disastrously. The settlers dismissed South-West Africa as a colony in which the whites were beholden to the blacks in ways that ran counter to the very principles of colonialism. Viewing the colony through the prism of late nineteenth-century racism, they sought not merely the rapid advancement of their interests and prosperity, but the immediate and utter subjugation of the Africans.

  In the summer of 1900, members of the white population in South-West Africa had used an upcoming Reichstag debate on the use of corporal punishment in the colonies as an opportunity to let their opinions of the Herero and Nama be known in Berlin. In their address, forwarded to the Colonial Department, they wrote:

  From Time immemorial our natives have been used to laziness, brutality and stupidity. The dirtier they are the more they feel at ease. Any white men who have lived among natives find it almost impossible to regard them as human beings at all in any European sense. They need centuries of training as human beings; with endless patience, strictness and justice.20

  The centre of opposition to the governor and the cauldron in which the settlers’ racial hatreds fermented was Windhoek. By 1903 the capital had become a European enclave into which few Africans ventured. Although by European standards it was more a large village than a small town, it was just big enough to become a fantasy-land. Beneath von François’s fortress, the enormous disparities between the Africans and the settlers, in both numbers and military power, were rendered almost invisible. Convinced of their own strength and of the need to circumvent the governor, retired soldiers of the German Schutztruppe and the most extreme settlers came together in bars and taverns like the infamous Kasino Sylvester to vent their frustrations. There they condemned the supposed leniency of the governor, and denigrated the Africans as ‘baboons’ and the colony as ‘Monkeyland’. Well aware of the discontent among the settlers, Theodor Leutwein described them as ‘inclined, with the inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race, to appear as members of a conquering army, even though we had conquered nothing’.21

  The racial c
ontempt that both settlers and soldiers felt towards the Africans was compounded by their frustrations, impatience and greed. The result was a wave of violence and abuse, the records of which can be seen in the Namibian National Archives in Windhoek. Official reports of beatings, rapes and murders committed in the years up to 1904 speak of a colony slipping out of control, in which isolated settlers and Schutztruppe officers were able to act with almost complete impunity against ordinary Herero and Nama, and even members of the wealthy elite.

  The most commonly reported incidents were beatings. Many of these attacks were viewed by their perpetrators as semi-official acts of corporal punishment. They were carried out with sjamboks – hippopotamus-skin whips – and were invoked by the smallest infraction or perceived lack of respect towards a white person. A mistake made while working for a settler, a minor theft, simple failure to respond to a question – all could be punished by whippings or beatings.

  One case reported in 1902 involved a German baker named Schaeffer, who accused the ageing Herero under-chief, Assa Riarua, of insolence and attacked the old man. Dragging Riarua from his store and out into street, Schaeffer publicly flogged him ‘until the blood ran’. The humiliating abuse of a prominent Herero elder was such a serious – and potentially dangerous – event that Governor Leutwein personally intervened in the case, fearing the Herero might retaliate. Yet even this blatant case of abuse did not result in a custodial sentence. An out-of-court settlement was reached in which Schaeffer was ordered to pay a fine of 20 marks.22

  The case that most deeply damaged Herero relations with the Germans took place in the middle of 1903. Barmenias Zeraua, the son of Herero Chief Zacharias Zeraua, later recounted the events that led up to the death of his wife: