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

by Casper Erichsen

  In 1903 my wife was expecting her first baby, so in accordance with the universal custom of the Hereros I sent her, by ox-wagon, to her mother’s home … Before leaving Omaruru we met a German named Dietrich, who asked me whether he would be allowed to travel with us in my wagon to Karibib. I said I had no objection, so Dietrich came along with us … That evening we outspanned about 12 miles from Omaruru on the main road. We killed a sheep and had our evening meal which Dietrich shared with us. We gave him the fried sheep liver to eat [a delicacy]. Then two boys went to attend to the cattle and my wife went into the hood of the wagon with her baby to sleep … I said ‘Good-night’ to Dietrich and went to sleep … suddenly I was awakened by the report of a revolver. I jumped out of the tent of the wagon and saw Dietrich running away on the road to Omaruru … I went back to the wagon, the baby was crying and I shook my wife to wake her. As I touched her I felt something wet. I struck a match and saw that she was covered with blood and quite dead … I took up my baby and found that the bullet which killed my wife had gone through the fleshy part of its left leg just above the knee.23

  Dietrich was charged with manslaughter, not murder, and was at first acquitted. He was finally sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, but later released and made a non-commissioned officer in the Schutztruppe.

  The outrage felt by the Africans at their treatment by settlers and soldiers was aggravated by a colonial legal system that made it nearly impossible for them to obtain justice under the law. Although the African elite had retained possession of their land, their legal rights had been silently stripped from them.

  The courts were staffed by former soldiers or settlers, few of whom had even the most rudimentary legal training. In Leutwein’s memoirs, Elf Jahre Gouverneur (Eleven Years as Governor), he noted that the evidence of one settler was deemed legally to outweigh that of up to seven Africans. When whites who had killed Africans were convicted, they were almost always sentenced to terms of imprisonment lasting just months. Africans found guilty of killing whites were hanged.

  The racial bias of the German legal system was equally blatant in cases of rape. When accusations of rape by settlers were brought before the courts, it was not uncommon for the judges to rule against the victim and sentence them to be jailed or whipped for bearing ‘false testimony’.

  From Windhoek, Governor Leutwein was unable to dictate the verdicts of all the provincial courts, nor control the behaviour of the settlers. Out in the provinces, authority lay in the hands of the District Officers posted in a network of miniature fortresses and garrison houses with command over small units of soldiers. These officers, answerable to the governor, were responsible for maintaining the peace and upholding the terms of the protection treaties. As many Schutztruppe soldiers planned to settle in the colony at the end of their term of service, they were firm allies of the settlers and, like many of them, were dissatisfied with Leutwein’s policies. Some were also prone to dealing with the Africans in an extremely aggressive and provocative manner. The excessive violence and even murders that characterised their responses to minor infractions or local disputes were in part a consequence of the very nature of the German forces in South-West Africa.

  Unlike the other colonial powers, the Germans, upon staking claim to a colonial empire in 1884, had chosen not to form a regular colonial army. Instead they had formed small ‘protective forces’ – Schutztruppe. What marked out the Schutztruppe of South-West Africa from those stationed in Germany’s other African colonies was that the entire force – both officers and men – were white. Black Africans were not conscripted into its ranks, as was the case elsewhere. Under the protection treaties signed by both the Herero and Nama, the Africans were obliged to send men to fight alongside the Germans when requested and, on those occasions, the African fighters were given the desert-brown Schutztruppe uniforms and placed under the command of German officers. Yet no Africans were ever formally recruited. The Schutztruppe was a white man’s army, and in South-West Africa it became a hothouse of ultra-nationalism and racial fanaticism.

  The Schutztruppe’s reputation for extremism was matched only by its record of indiscipline. They and the colonies in general were regarded by the regular army as a dumping ground into which disgraced officers could be placed. A disproportionate number of Schutztruppe officers in South-West Africa were men with a chequered past; some had only agreed to serve in the colonies in the hope of reviving their careers.

  In the last years of the late 1890s and early years of the twentieth century, as levels of racial abuse in South-West Africa began to increase, a succession of junior Schutztruppe officers were implicated in murders, rapes and beatings of Africans. The tendency of such officers to adopt a disproportionately violent stance towards Africans was aggravated by the sheer isolation of their postings. Many units were stationed tens or even hundreds of miles from their commanding officers. From tiny garrison stations, they were responsible for vast areas but were for the most part unsupervised, unrestrained and often under-occupied. Those who committed the most grievous excesses were dismissed and their crimes explained away as cases of ‘tropical frenzy’. Governor Leutwein’s inability to exercise control over such officers provided the sparks that led to war and disaster in German South-West Africa.

  In 1903 the young officer Lieutenant Walter Jobst was stationed in Warmbad, a remote Nama settlement on the border with the Cape Colony and 200 miles from the nearest town of any significance. Jobst had been a member of the German contingent that had carried out punitive raids in China in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion. By 1903 he had come to value African life as cheaply as he had Chinese life three years earlier.

  The people of Warmbad, a Nama clan known as the Bondelswarts, were only about one thousand strong. Since Jobst’s arrival, they had come to regard him with a mixture of fear and repugnance. In late October 1903, a dispute erupted between Jan Christian, the chief of the Bondelswarts, and a Herero woman on her way to the copper mines of the Cape. It concerned, of all things, the price of a goat. Although this minor incident had already been resolved by the time Lieutenant Jobst became involved, he still chose to summon Jan Christian to appear before him. Under the terms of the protection treaty between the Germans and the Bondelswarts, Jobst had no jurisdiction over affairs between Africans, and the chief ignored the summons. Jobst’s response was to gather a group of his men and confront Jan Christian. A series of interviews recently conducted among the elders of the Nama community in Warmbad reveal how the event is remembered in the Nama’s traditional oral history:

  The two Germans went straight to the house of the Chief and entered his room where he was lying on the bed with a scarf on his head. The soldiers forced him out of the bedroom. In the meantime, the Lieutenant had also made his way to the Captain’s house. He had a mongrel dog with him. When he saw the soldiers wrestling with the Chief, he shouted an order at his soldiers: ‘Shoot him!’ They pulled the trigger and shot the Chief dead. The only word that he could say before he collapsed was: ‘Now the war starts.’24

  Within seconds Lieutenant Jobst, his sergeant and another soldier were gunned down by the Bondelswarts just yards from the dead chief’s house.

  Although lives had been lost, what had happened at Warmbad posed no real threat to the colony. Yet the reaction in both Windhoek and Berlin escalated wildly. Governor Leutwein privately condemned the behaviour of Lieutenant Jobst, but his public response was to issue a blood-curdling declaration of war against the Bondelswarts. Anything less would have risked incurring the ire of the settlers, the German colonial societies and his superiors in the Colonial Department in Berlin. The Kaiser’s reaction to a minor incident, in a one-horse town in the southern wastelands of an economically defunct colony, can only be described as hysterical. He demanded that military reinforcements be immediately dispatched, not just to South-West Africa, but to all German territories, ‘lest we lose all our colonial possessions’.

  In late November, a force of Schutztruppe began the lon
g trek south from Windhoek to Warmbad, a journey of 500 miles. Governor Leutwein himself headed the column, personally taking command of the crushing of the Bondelswarts. He left much of northern Hereroland in the hands of Lieutenant Ralph Zürn, a young officer as belligerent and impetuous as the late Lieutenant Jobst.

  Notes – 7 King of Huns

  1. J. C. G. Röhl, Wilhelm II: The Kaiser’s Personal Monarchy, 1888–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1053.

  2. M. Goertemaker, ‘Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert’, Schriftenreihe der Bundeszentrale fuer politische Bildung 274 (1996), p. 357.

  3. Dietlind Wünsch, Feldpostbriefe aus China (Berlin: Chr. Links Verlag, 2008), p. 197.

  4. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 205.

  5. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), vol. 1, p. 63.

  6. The US census of 1890 suggested that westward migration into unsettled regions had, to all intents and purposes, come to an end and the frontier had ceased to exist – other than in the American psyche.

  7. See for example K. May, Winnetou (Bamberg: Karl-May-Verlag, 1953) or discussion thereof in S. Friedrichsmeyer, S. Lennox and S. Zantop, The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and Its Legacy (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998).

  8. F. Ratzel, Deutschland (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1943); idem, Anthropo-Geographie (Stuttgart: Elibron Classics Series, 2005); A. Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942); C. O. Sauer, ‘The Formative Years of Ratzel in the United States’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 61.2 (June 1971); G. Buttmann, Friedrich Ratzel: Leben und Werk eines deutschen Geographen 1844–1904 (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliches Verlagsgesellschaft, 1977).

  9. See, for example, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Ratzeliana I.2, Luschan to Ratzel (March 1897).

  10. Sven Linqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996), p. 144.

  11. Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler, p. 194.

  12. Jon M. Bridgeman, The Revolt of the Hereros (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 57.

  13. Paul Rohrbach, Der Deutsche Gedanke in der Welt (Düsseldorf: Langewiesche, 1912), pp. 141–2.

  14. Clarence Lusane, Hitler’s Black Victims (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 43.

  15. Rohrbach, Der Deutsche Gedanke, pp. 141–2.

  16. H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), p. 106.

  17. Helmut Bley, Namibia under German Rule (Hamburg: LIT, 1996), p. 130; Brenda Bravenboer and Walter Rusch, The First 100 Years of State Railways in Namibia (Windhoek: TransNamib Museum, 1997), p. 16.

  18. Bley, Namibia under German Rule, p. 133.

  19. NAN, BKE 222, B. II.74. d, vol. 6, p. 48.

  20. Quoted in Klaus Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 2002), p. 92.

  21. Bley, Namibia under German Rule, pp. 139–40.

  22. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting, p. 136.

  23. J. Silvester and J. Gewald, Words Cannot Be Found: German Colonial Rule in Namibia (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 96.

  24. C. W. Erichsen, What the Elders Used to Say (Windhoek: Namibia Institute for Democracy, 2008), pp. 22–3.

  ‘Rivers of Blood and Money’

  By 1904, the European quarter of the town of Okahandja had developed into a thriving colonial outpost. A string of German stores and settler homesteads ran along the main street, and a fortress had been constructed to house the local garrison and defend German interests. Opposite the fortress stood the new railway station connecting Okahandja to Windhoek, just 50 miles to the south. Outside the town, in the fertile grasslands of Hereroland, large tracts of pasture had been bought up by settlers and Okahandja had become the central node in a network of German-owned farms.

  The Herero section of Okahandja, just a few miles to the north, had grown into a large sprawling settlement, always teeming with life. Thousands of Herero also lived in the surrounding areas. They made a living from riverbed farming and, on the plains beyond the mountains, reared their prized long-horned cattle, coming to town for supplies, and to buy and sell their livestock. Other Herero travelled to Okahandja from all over Hereroland, as the town was home to their Paramount Chief, Samuel Maharero.

  Samuel ran his court from a splendid villa, built in the fashion of the German settlers. With a vast personal fortune based on cattle and increasingly on the sale of land, his home, furnished with plush velvet sofas and heavy carpets, reflected his social position. Govenor Leutwein described Samuel Maharero as ‘a true ruler’, a proud man of ‘impressive appearance’ At home in Okahandja, among his own people, he was regarded as a ‘family person’, a ruler who devoted much of his time to his children and to grooming his son Friedrich Maharero for the Herero chieftaincy.1

  For Samuel, and many Herero, Okahandja was also a holy place, the spiritual centre of the ruling Maharero clan, whose ancestors were buried in a family cemetery by the Rhenish mission. It was also at Okahandja that Samuel Maharero maintained the holy fire of his clan, through which the living generations kept in touch with their ancestors.

  On the morning of Tuesday 12 January 1904 Okahandja was deathly silent. It was the height of summer, and the sweltering heat lay like a shroud over empty streets. The only activity in the German quarter was within the walls of the fortress. Three dozen soldiers and armed settlers huddled behind the parapet watching over their own homes and shops through the sights of their rifles.

  The German population of Okahandja had abandoned those homes and shops because of a rumour. Two days earlier, while on his journey to Okahandja, Alex Niet, a local Boer trader, had passed a column of around three hundred armed Herero men, also heading for the town. When Niet had reached Okahandja, he had reported this news to Lieutenant Ralph Zürn, the local Station Commander.

  Lieutenant Zürn, a junior officer still in his twenties, had been placed in charge of a large area in the very heart of Hereroland. His term of command coincided with negotiations for the establishment of a second Herero reserve. This offered Zürn ample opportunity to demonstrate his utter contempt for the Herero. His arrogance, and a series of abuses committed against the Herero of Okahandja, fuelled both the Herero’s sense of injustice and Zürn’s paranoia that they would eventually seek retribution. When Zürn heard from Alex Niet that three hundred Herero were on the move, he was convinced it was the prelude to some sort of uprising and ordered all whites in Okahandja to evacuate their homes and take shelter inside the fortress.2

  For two days, soldiers and setters had remained on twenty-four-hour watch over the town, and for two days nothing happened. That morning two of the more senior settlers, Councillor Duft and Dr Maass, volunteered to leave the safety of the fortress and venture out into Okahandja to investigate. They headed through the empty streets towards the Herero camp and on their way they passed a Herero Church elder known as Old Johannes, who glanced ambiguously at them and mumbled a few incomprehensible sentences in the Herero language, Otjiherero. Although puzzled by the old man’s behaviour, Duft and Maass continued towards the Herero settlement. As they approached they saw around a hundred Herero men saddling their horses. Overcome with fear, the two men ran back to the fortress convinced that the arrival of so many Herero was the preparation for an attack and that Johannes’s ‘facial expression’ had been some sort of a warning.

  Back inside the walls of the fort, Duft and Maass briefed Lieutenant Zürn, who again jumped to the worst conclusion. Without making any attempt to establish the facts, Zürn sent a telegram to the Colonial Department in Berlin reporting, not that the Herero were preparing to attack, but that the uprising had already begun.

  It is not known who fired the first shot, but what is clear is that shortly after Duft and Maass arrived back at the fort, both soldiers and settlers had begun to fire from the battlements into the streets of Okahandj
a. In response, the Herero emerged from their homes and laid siege to the fortress. They also attacked the German quarter, raiding homes and stores, and killing two German couples who had decided not to take refuge in the fortress. To prevent the Germans sending reinforcements from Windhoek, the Herero tore up the railway tracks and managed to overturn a railway coach just outside the station.

  The German missionaries of Okahandja, whose mission station stood just 300 yards south of the fort, were caught in the crossfire. When the firing started, Missionary Phillip Diehl was forced to rush for cover as bullets tore through the mission station. ‘One bullet’, he wrote afterwards, ‘penetrated my study, embedding itself in the wall above my desk … If I had been sitting there, as I had at the same time the previous day, I would now be a dead man.’3 One of few photographs of Okahandja, taken in January 1904, shows the steeple of Diehl’s church pockmarked by rifle fire. Later Diehl was shocked to discover that the bullets that had been aimed at his home had come not from the rifles of the Herero, who had carefully avoided the mission compound, but from the German fortress.

  The one hundred Herero men that Duft and Maass had seen saddling their horses that morning were not the harbingers of an impeding uprising. They were merely representatives of one of the northern Herero clans recently arrived in Okahandja in order to seek the arbitration of Paramount Chief Samuel Maharero in an inheritance dispute. They were some of the armed Herero riders that the trader Alex Niet had seen riding to Okahandja a few days before.

  The Herero viewed the Germans’ actions prior to 12 January as extremely hostile and provocative. Not only had the whole community and the entire garrison barricaded themselves in the fortress and ranged their guns over the town but – as Samuel Maharero had discovered – Zürn had also requested that reinforcements be urgently sent from Windhoek. Although the Herero had not been planning an attack, and Samuel Maharero had not even been in Okahandja on the morning of 12 January, the behaviour of Lieutenant Zürn and his men had raised tensions to such an extent that the Herero response, when it came, was bloody and emphatic.