All units not required for the operations on the border of the Omaheke were to be sent east, back into Hereroland, to execute the second half of von Trotha’s plan. Once resupplied, these troops were formed into what became known as Aufklaerungspatrouillen – Cleansing Patrols. Their task was to sweep across Hereroland and ‘clean up the entire district of broken groups of Hereros’.
As von Trotha was well aware, there were several thousand Herero still within Hereroland. They fell into two categories. The first were escapees from the battle of the Waterberg, who had managed to avoid German patrols and move back towards their homelands. The second were Herero who had not been at the Waterberg and, in many cases, had taken no part in the rebellion. Although at least fifty thousand Herero had gathered at the Waterberg under their Paramount Chief Samuel Maharero, there were still perhaps twenty to thirty thousand Herero who had stayed in their villages throughout the uprising. Many lived in isolated settlements in the northern and western parts of the colony, far from the areas of white settlement. Not only had some of these communities not taken part in the uprising, they may well have known very little about the war at all. Such communities spent 1904 living in their traditional villages preoccupied with the daily difficulties of keeping themselves and their cattle alive. On von Trotha’s orders, these people were to be shot on sight.8
They proved easy targets for the German patrols. Time and again the diaries of commanders in the Cleansing Patrols reveal that their attacks were focused upon ordinary Herero villages, rather than upon anything resembling a military force. This fact is borne out by the low rates of casualties (from action rather than disease) among the men of the German units.
There are very few descriptive passages in the diaries and dispatches of the soldiers involved in the Cleansing Patrol, but there are a few unguarded phrases that hint at the slaughter that took place across Hereroland in 1904 and 1905. Wilhelm Lorang, a soldier in von Epp’s company, later explained that, as he understood it, the Extermination Order permitted the Germans to ‘shoot, kill, hang. Whatever you liked. Old or young. Men, women, children.’ According to Pastor Elger, a missionary based in the Herero town of Karibib, the motto of the Patrols became ‘Clean out, hang up, shoot down till they are all gone.’9
From Africans working for the Schutztruppe, there is another set of accounts that describe in more detail the actions of the Cleansing Patrols. In late 1904 Hendrik Campbell, a member of the mixed-race Baster people from the town of Rehoboth, was in command of a contingent of Baster men compelled to fight for the Germans under the terms of their protection treaty. Campbell and his men witnessed the actions of one of the Cleansing Patrols in the last weeks of 1904:
At Katjura we had a fight with the Herero, and drove them from their position. After the fight was over, we discovered eight or nine sick Herero women who had been left behind. Some of them were blind. Water and food had been left with them. The German soldiers burnt them alive in the hut in which they were laying … Afterwards at Otjimbende we [the Basters] captured 70 Hereros. I handed them over to Ober-Leutenants Völkmann and Zelow. I then went on patrol, and returned two days later, to find the Hereros all lying dead in a kraal. My men reported to me that they had all been shot and bayoneted by the German soldiers.10
The area over which the Cleansing Patrols operated was 100,000 square miles in size. Although the Germans considered the entire region ‘Hereroland’, it was also home to communities of Damara, Owambo and San. Most soldiers had only been in the colony a few months and could not distinguish these different African peoples. Many of those killed by the Cleansing Patrols were almost certainly non-Herero. Hundreds of miles from their senior commanders, operating on the fringes of an endless desert and under orders to shoot Herero on sight, it may well have been a very small step for exhausted men to reinterpret their orders as a licence to kill all Africans.
On occasion, the Cleansing Patrols were unable to reach bands of Herero in the desert and instead sent lone messengers out into the bush in the hope of luring them into ambushes with false promises. In the most famous case, a group of some three hundred Herero, who had made camp on the western perimeter of the Omaheke Desert, were located by a German patrol. On 29 October the Germans sent a messenger to the Herero camp to assure them that if they reported to the waterhole of Ombakaha, 20 miles to the east, they would be allowed to surrender and their lives would be spared.11
The next day, their leader Joel Kavezeri and eighty of his men set out for Ombakaha to accept the German offer. When they arrived they were offered some tobacco and – as it was noon – were permitted to sit in the shade of a tree. They then entered into negotiations with the local German commander, Lieutenant von Beesten, who, in the middle of their conversation, suddenly ran for cover, shouting orders for his troops to open fire. One of the few survivors, Gerard Kamaheke later described what had happened:
I sat there waiting, when suddenly the Germans opened fire on us. We were nearly surrounded, and my people tried to make their escape. I tried to fight my way through, but was shot in the right shoulder and fell to the ground, and I lay quite still and pretended to be dead. I was covered with blood. The German soldiers came along bayoneting the wounded; and as I did not move they thought I was dead already and left me. The chiefs Saul and Joel and all the other headmen were killed. I got up in the night and fled back to our camp, where I found our women and children still safe and also some survivors of my 70 men. We then fled away towards the Sandveld and scattered in all directions.12
In the Official German History of the campaign in South-West Africa, Ombakaha is described as a battle, yet not a single German soldier was killed or wounded. In his own report, Lieutenant von Beesten noted that ‘all enemy fighters were shot at distances between 10 and 300 metres’ – the optimum range of the Maxim gun.13
Ombakaha was not an isolated event. Across Hereroland, bands of Herero were tricked into believing it was safe to return from the bush, and then killed. Such massacres encouraged the Herero to move into the more remote parts of their territory or enter the Omaheke.
Despite its brutality, it was evident as early as November 1904 that the Extermination Order and its agents were failing to ethnically cleanse South-West Africa of the Herero. Furthermore, extended operations even in the more fertile areas of Hereroland had pushed von Trotha’s men to the very limit of their endurance. About half of the soldiers involved in operations against the Herero were suffering from the effects of typhoid, dehydration or chronic dysentery. On 25 October Senior Lieutenant Haak (who was to die in action a month later in one of his first active engagements) described the state of a group of Schutztruppe recently arrived in Windhoek from the bush:
These are the troops who have been in the field the longest. It is impossible for me to really describe their appearance and the condition of their horses as they arrived in town yesterday. The uniforms were hanging like rags off emaciated human shapes, whose faces were burnt beyond recognition, with stubbly beards and long hair; some had replaced missing boots with cloth that was wrapped from their feet to the knees. The poor horses looked pathetic.14
It seems that Theodor Leutwein became fully aware of the Extermination Order only some weeks after it had been proclaimed at Osombo zoWindimbe. Still nominally Governor of South-West Africa, Leutwein was horrified by von Trotha’s policy, more on economic than humanitarian grounds. On 23 October he wrote to the Colonial Department informing them that Chief Salatiel Kambazembi – one of the key Herero chiefs under Samuel Maharero – had requested negotiations to end the war. Leutwein also requested formal confirmation that as civilian governor he had the authority to accept a Herero surrender.
During the tussle for power that followed, von Trotha wrote to Leutwein admitting that the battle of the Waterberg had failed to exterminate the Herero and explaining how his new policy would lead to their ultimate annihilation, no matter what obstacles Leutwein might put in his way: ‘the eastern border of the colony will remain sealed off and t
errorism will be employed against the Herero showing up. That nation must vanish from the face of the earth. Having failed to destroy them with guns, I will have to achieve my end in that way.’15
Von Trotha sought support for his extermination policy from the army, and again, the civilian branches of government were pushed aside. Leutwein effectively resigned and was given leave. After eleven years as governor, he left the colony. The military rule that von Trotha had declared on his arrival in Windhoek in June 1904 was now unchallenged.
It is a mark of the brutality of German colonialism in South-West Africa that Governor Theodor Leutwein and Major von Estorff – of whom we shall hear more later – are almost heroes in this sorry history. The Alte Afrikaners (Old Africans), as von Trotha called men like Erstorff and Leutwein, had few moral qualms over disinheriting Africans of their land and property. They set out systematically to undermine their social structures and adopted a culturally corrosive policy of divide and rule. But their conception of colonialism still had a role for the Africans, if only a subservient one. The gulf between the policies and attitudes of Leutwein and Erstorff, and those of Lothar von Trotha, was symptomatic of the great shift from the old paternalist racism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to the new biological racism of the twentieth century.
Although Theodor Leutwein’s policies resulted in his removal from office, he had nonetheless been completely correct in concluding that von Trotha’s plan to exterminate the Herero was logistically and militarily impractical. By November 1904 the appalling conditions of von Trotha’s men and the impossibility of their task had become apparent to the military authorities in Berlin. On 23 November General von Schlieffen, still in overall command of the strategy of the war, wrote to Chancellor von Bülow that ‘while von Trotha’s intentions are commendable, he is powerless to carry them out’.16 Chancellor von Bülow and the civilian officials of the Colonial Department did not share von Schlieffen’s admiration for von Trotha’s intention. In the early stages of the war von Bülow’s coalition government, swept along by an overwhelming popular support for the war, had supported the generals’ hard line. However, when Chancellor von Bülow received the text of the Extermination Order, he was horrified.
Von Bülow feared that Germany’s international reputation, already tarnished by her actions in East Africa and China, would be further damaged should the Extermination Order become widely known. In the same year that Germany sent von Trotha to crush the Herero, the international campaign against the horrors in the Congo Free State reached its apex. Under Leopold’s regime, millions of Congolese women had been kidnapped and their men forced to collect increasingly unrealistic quotas of wild rubber. When quotas were not met or resistance offered, the mercenaries of the King’s Force Publique had inflicted barbaric punishments and unleashed murderous raids against innocent villagers. During the autumn of 1904, the newspapers of Europe and America carried almost daily reports cataloguing the barbarity of Leopold’s colony and condemning the King himself in the harshest terms. With details of the war in South-West Africa beginning to appear in the foreign press, Von Bülow feared that von Trotha’s policies, in particular the Extermination Order, might be seen in the same light and had the potential to ‘demolish Germany’s reputation among civilised nations and indulge foreign agitation’.17
It is perhaps unsurprising that Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who did more to undermine Germany’s reputation than any of his contemporaries, was blind to the dangers of the Extermination Order and von Trotha’s brutality. Wilhelm continued to applaud von Trotha’s ‘vigorous action’ and energy, long after the Extermination Order had become a matter of grave concern to German politicians. Untroubled by the potential scandal the Kaiser wrote to the general: ‘You have entirely fulfilled my expectations when I named you commander of the colonial troops, and I take pleasure in expressing, once again, my utter gratitude for your accomplishments so far.’18
In late November 1904, Wilhelm was confronted by both his Chancellor, von Bülow, and his Chief of the General Staff, von Schlieffen. Von Bülow complained that German policy in South-West Africa was barbaric and potentially scandalous, while von Schlieffen considered von Trotha’s strategy commendable but utterly impractical. What followed was a battle of wills between the Kaiser and von Bülow.
Von Bülow’s office requested that Wilhelm rescind the Extermination Order with immediate effect. Rather than responding, the Kaiser and his entourage left Berlin on a five-day hunting trip to his Hohenlohe estate in eastern Prussia. Only on 8 December – five days after receiving the Chancellor’s request – did Wilhelm finally agree that von Trotha should also ‘treat mercifully those Herero who voluntarily surrender’.19 When von Bülow asked the Kaiser to agree to a specific text explicitly withdrawing the Extermination Order, Wilhelm took another eight days to reply. Meanwhile the killing in Hereroland continued.
When General von Trotha received the telegraph of his new orders, he was reportedly enraged and instantly offered his resignation, which was refused. In an attempt to appease him, von Schlieffen reassured von Trotha that ‘His Majesty has not forbidden you to shoot the Hereros’, rather that ‘the possibility of showing mercy is to be restored’.
Just four days after agreeing to rescind von Trotha’s Extermination Order, Kaiser Wilhelm received a report he had secretly commissioned some weeks earlier. On 10 November 1904, the Kaiser had personally instructed Count Georg von Stillfried und Rattonitz, an officer in von Trotha’s army on sick leave in Germany, to report ‘on his views on the native question and military conditions in South-West Africa, in the past two years’. He had not informed Chancellor von Bülow, the Reichstag or General von Schlieffen, circumventing all official channels of civilian and military authority.
Although he only held the rank of Lieutenant, Count von Stillfried was an aristocrat and as such was trusted by the Kaiser. Stillfried had first arrived in South-West Africa in 1900 and been placed in command of a small unit of troops. By all accounts, he was admired by his men and fellow officers alike. He had fought at the Waterberg, and had a genuine understanding of the colony and German operations therein. On 12 December, exactly eleven months after the start of the war, Stillfried’s report – fifty-five pages long and painstakingly handwritten in neat gothic calligraphy – was presented to the Kaiser. Stillfried recommended that in order to ensure the Herero would pose no future threat to German colonialism, ‘The surviving natives have to be disarmed all and one, and anyone in possession of a rifle should be punished with death.’ The chiefs, the dynasties around which the Herero nation was built, were to be eradicated, to ensure the docility of the Herero. Stillfried recommended that ‘All chiefs should be executed and their families – even if they are innocent – should be deported to another colony so that they will never again gain influence among their people.’20
What distinguishes Stillfried’s recommendations from the policies of General von Trotha is that they took into account the economic realities of the colony. Stillfried understood that the war to annihilate the Herero had generated a compelling argument for their continued survival, in the short term at least. During the conflict the demand for cheap labour had become so acute that it enormously increased the value of the Herero as an economic asset. However, the means by which Stillfried proposed the labour of the Herero be exploited was profoundly different from anything Theodor Leutwein had ever suggested. He recommended that ‘All natives from the warring tribes, apart from those who work for the Government, should be leased out either in large or small numbers to private persons, farmers and merchants and so forth. Here they should perform labour for food.’21 He went on,
All native prisoners will have to carry a numbered identification tag made from brass and if away from their homes will be entitled to produce a pass. All natives who have been sentenced to captivity shall be placed in confined areas nearby the place where they will work. They shall be supervised by one of their compatriots but not by a chief. [The supervisor] will
provide the police with a continuous flow of information.22
‘Confined Areas’ – Geschlossenen Niederlassungen – was the critical phrase in the Stillfried Report. It alluded to a device that had been disastrously deployed only three years earlier during the Boer War. There the British commander-in-chief, Lord Herbert Kitchener, had forced around thirty thousand Boer women and children, and over one hundred thousand black and coloured Africans, into large enclosures of barbed wire, several layers thick. Poorly run, insanitary, and badly provisioned, these enclosures saw over twenty-five thousand Boer civilians, and perhaps as many as fourteen thousand Africans die, most from disease and the effects of malnutrition. In the British Parliament, the Liberal MPs C. P. Scott and John Ellis had condemned the practice and described the enclosures as ‘concentration camps’.23
The military rationale for the British use of concentration camps in the Boer War had been to separate a guerrilla army from a local civilian population from whom they received susten ance and among whom they took refuge. Four years earlier, the Spanish rulers of Cuba had forced civilians into similar camps during the revolt of 1896. The concentration camp was therefore not a new concept, but the way in which Count Stillfried recommended it should be applied was entirely novel. When Kitchener had launched his clearance campaign and set up the camps, British intelligence believed that there were twenty thousand Boer guerrillas still in the field. In South-West Africa, the Herero were already a defeated and scattered people. They were not engaged in a guerrilla war and, following the battle of the Waterberg and the disintegration of Herero leadership, they had not been able to field anything resembling a military force.
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 18