The majority of prisoners in the other concentration camps and working on the railways eventually became victims of their captivity, with mortality rates ranging between 40 and 60 percent. From the time of its inception under von Trotha to the eventual closing of the camp in April 1907, mortality on Shark Island consistently exceeded the other camps. Prisoners sent to Shark Island could only have been expected to die. The German garrison in Lüderitz called the camp ‘Death Island’. This phrase was even used in an official report by Commander von Zülow of the Etappenkommando.32
Although the Nama on Shark Island were used as slave labour, the equanimity with which this resource was squandered strongly suggests that forced labour was a secondary function of the Shark Island camp. The camp’s main focus from September 1906 onwards was the extermination of Nama prisoners. Nama deaths were the ‘product’ of the Shark Island camp; forced labour was merely one of the means by which those deaths were brought about. Shark Island was a death camp, perhaps the world’s first.
The British Military Attaché to South-West Africa, Colonel Frederick Trench, independently came to the conclusion that the function of Shark Island was to liquidate as many of the Nama as possible, and perhaps even exterminate them as a race. Between 1905 and 1907 Colonel Trench was in regular contact with the chief administrators of German South-West Africa, including von Lindequist and Oskar Hintrager. In a report sent to the British embassy in Berlin on 21 November 1906 Trench claimed that the Germans’ ultimate aim was the eradication of the Nama, in order to make the colony safe for white settlement:
If I read correctly between the lines, the following are the principles accepted for the present and future administration of the Protectorate … The Hottentots [Nama] are to be ‘permitted’ to die out, but the Hereros and Damaras, who are good labourers and herdsmen, are to be retained, in a semi-servile state, as farm labourers etc. Steps are to be taken however to make the country a white man’s country and above all an all-German one.33
While there is no doubt that von Lindequist and much of the colonial administration in Windhoek were complicit in the liquidation of the Nama on Shark Island, how much was known in the national government in Berlin? Again there can be little question that news of what was happening on Shark Island had reached leading members of the Colonial Department and Chancellor von Bülow’s government.
The letters of Missionary Laaf, sent in October and December 1906, outlining conditions at Shark Island, were read by the new Head of the Colonial Department, Bernhardt Dernburg, and by November 1906 rumours of the conditions on Shark Island were known to have been circulating in Berlin. In December, while the missionaries were lobbying Colonel von Deimling to bring the Nama women and children off Shark Island, Georg Lebedour, a deputy of the Social Democratic party, raised the issue in the Reichstag. An anonymous correspondent described only as a ‘concerned citizen in Lüderitz’ had written to the socialist newspaper the Koenigsberger Volkszeitung reporting that ‘Around 2,000 [Nama] are presently under German imprisonment. They surrendered against the guarantee of life, but were nevertheless transferred to Shark Island in Lüderitz, where, as a doctor ensured me, they will all die within two years due to the climate.’34
Lebedour read passages from the Koenigsberger Volkszeitung article to the collected deputies. Chancellor von Bülow and Dernburg, the Head of the Colonial Department, were present in the chamber, and Lebedour directly challenged them to inform the Reichstag of ‘the extent of mortality rates on Shark Island and in other camps’. Thanks to Lebedour, it was impossible for either to claim ignorance on the matter after December 1906.35
Georg Lebedour was not a lone voice in the Reichstag. His ambush of Chancellor von Bülow’s government was part of a concerted campaign by the left and centre parties to block the passage of a colonial budget that sanctioned additional funds for German South-West Africa. In the same debate, Lebedour claimed that the government, influenced by the settlers and their supporters in Berlin, was exploiting the war in order to increase the colonial budgets and seize ‘native’ land. ‘The farmer lobby’, he warned the chamber, ‘are wishing, hoping and working towards the continuation of the war in the hope that the land of the natives will ultimately be confiscated.’ He continued: ‘It is tantamount to recklessness that the Government allows such people to drag it around by the nose and that it complies with these incomprehensible policies that will, inevitably, lead to the annihilation of some of the natives and the total slavery of others.’36
The Reichstag debates of November and December 1906 led to a bitter impasse and finally the defeat of the colonial budget. This in turn forced Chancellor von Bülow’s government to seek re-election the following year, in what became known as the Hottentot election. Not only did the horrors of Shark Island become well known in Germany, but the parties of the left and their millions of supporters were genuinely horrified by the activities of their government and the army in South-West Africa. Despite the influence of the colonial lobby and their potent propaganda campaign, support for the settlers and von Bülow’s government was far from universal. On the issue of colonialism, as in much else, Wilhelmian Germany was a deeply divided nation. The leader of the Social Democrats, August Bebel, spoke for many on the left when he stated that ‘under some circumstances’ colonialism was ‘a great cultural mission’, in which Europeans could ‘come to foreign peoples as liberators, as friends and educators’. In late 1906 he and his party, along with the Socialists, were convinced that what Germany was engaged in on Shark Island was not the cultural mission of colonialism but a war of extermination.
While the colonial authorities in Windhoek and their supporters in Berlin did everything they could to deny that Shark Island was a place of extermination, the officers who ran the camp did surprisingly little to disguise it – or to conceal the bodies of its victims. The concentration camp was clearly visible from the town. German settlers looking from the windows of their homes and passengers on ships arriving and departing Lüderitz harbour would have been able to see the figures of the Nama and Herero scrambling on the rocks. Likewise the prisoners could see the lights of Lüderitz and hear the sounds of normal life just across the harbour, as they sat frozen in their shelters at night. The prisoners working on the new quay did so in full view of the public. So Governor von Lindequist’s administration could not have been surprised when news of their suffering leaked to the German and eventually the foreign press.
Even more remarkable was the fact that the camp authorities made only half-hearted efforts to dispose of the bodies of those who died. An estimated eight to seventeen prisoners were dying on Shark Island each day. The accumulation of so many bodies, from a small camp situated not far from the centre of a town of only twelve hundred white residents, was not easy to overlook. Many were simply dumped into the sea. Leslie Cruikshank Bartlet, another of the South African transport riders who passed through the bay, came to Lüderitz in mid-1905 and witnessed the consequences:
I have seen corpses of women prisoners washed up on the beach between Lüderitzbucht and the cemetery. One corpse, I remember, was that of a young woman with practically fleshless limbs whose breasts had been eaten by jackals. This I reported at the German Police Station, but on passing the same way three or four days later the body was still where I saw it first.37
Other bodies were buried in shallow graves around Lüderitz and in the deserts beyond. Some of these mass graves have recently come to light. However, anticipating the concentration camps of the Third Reich, some of the dead of Shark Island became a resource exploited in the name of medical and racial science.
In the course of the war, an industry had developed around the supply of body parts. In the Swakopmund concentration camp in 1905, female prisoners were forced to boil the severed heads of their own people and scrape the flesh, sinews and ligaments off the skulls with shards of broken glass. The victims may have been people they had known or even relatives. The skulls were then placed into crates by the German soldiers and shipped to museu
ms, collections and universities in Germany. This practice was so widespread and accepted in South-West Africa that in 1905 it was depicted on a postcard. Clearly a retouched photograph, it shows five soldiers leaning over a line of skulls packed neatly in a wooden crate. One is carefully placing the final skull into the crate while his comrades pose with their pipes or smile at the camera.38
In June 1905 the German racial anthropologist Felix von Luschan had begun a correspondence with Ralph Zürn, the lieutenant in Okahandja whose aggression towards the Herero had helped spark the outbreak of war. Disappointed with the Herero skull Zürn had donated to him following his removal from the colony in 1904, von Luschan enquired about the possibility of acquiring further specimens. Zürn made some enquires of his own before assuring von Luschan that ‘in the concentration camps taking and preserving the skulls of Herero prisoners of war will be more readily possible than in the country, where there is always the danger of offending the ritual feelings of the natives’.39
By the time the Nama were incarcerated on Shark Island, the dissecting and exportation of prisoners’ bodies was no longer the prerogative of corrupt soldiers like Ralph Zürn. The process had become more professional and scientifically rigorous. Towards the end of 1906 the bodies of seventeen Nama prisoners, including that of a one-year-old girl, were carefully decapitated by the camp physician at Shark Island, Dr Bofinger. After breaking open the skulls, Bofinger removed and weighed the brains, before placing each head in preserving alcohol and sealing them in tins for export to the Institute of Pathology at the University of Berlin. There they were used by the aspiring racial scientist Christian Fetzer, then still a medical student, in a series of experiments designed to demonstrate the anatomical similarities between the Nama and the anthropoid ape.40
As well as preparing human remains for scientists in Germany, Dr Bofinger used the inmates of Shark Island for his own research. His area of study was scurvy, a fatal disease, the precise cause of which – an acute deficiency of vitamin C – had yet to be discovered in the early years of the twentieth century. The British had long known they could prevent the condition among the sailors of the Royal Navy by compelling them to eat sauerkraut and drink lemon juice. Outside the British Empire these practices had yet to catch on, and a lingering belief that scurvy was associated with bad hygiene or perhaps tainted meat had led doctors to look elsewhere for a cure. As many of the prisoners in Lüderitz suffered from bleeding gums and aching joints – classic symptoms of the condition – and were dying at an appalling rate, Dr Bofinger concluded that ‘the Herero and Nama prisoners handed over to me for treatment in Lüderitzbucht offered plenty of opportunity to observe several hundred cases of scurvy’.41
But Bofinger’s research was founded on the entirely false premise that scurvy was a contagious condition, spread through some form of bacterial transmission. Convinced that the disease was a major cause of death among the prisoners on Shark Island and that the squalor of the camp was helping to spread the disease, Dr Bofinger initiated a series of medical trials in which a range of substances, including arsenic and opium, were injected into living prisoners. He then determined the effects of these substances ‘by opening up the dead bodies’ in medical autopsies.
In his rush to find evidence to support his contention that an epidemic of scurvy was ravaging the population of Shark Island, Dr Bofinger overlooked the more obvious explanation for the incredibly high death rate: the prisoners were living, half starved, on the edge of the South Atlantic in huts made of rags and being forced to carry out manual labour in ice-cold water. They were dying of malnutrition, exposure and exhaustion, rather than scurvy. Ironically, one of the substances Dr Bofinger tested on the Shark Island prisoners was crystallised lemon juice; if the cause of their suffering had been scurvy, Bofinger might have stumbled on a cure.
According to Missionary Laaf, Dr Bofinger was deeply feared by the prisoners. Writing in the Missionary Chronicles of 1906, Laaf reported that prisoners he had spoken to claimed that anyone who entered Bofinger’s field hospital ‘will not come out alive’. Laaf noted that it ‘was never the case that even a single person recovered in the Lazarett [Field Hospital]’.42 Dr Bofinger was somehow unable to understand why he was so feared and complained that ‘the natives, especially the Nama, were only with difficulty persuaded to go the communal tent clinic that had been set up for them, and, in the course of the night, they would crawl back [and hide] in their own quarters’.
The death camp on Shark Island was finally closed in April 1907, over a year and a half after the Nama had surrendered and nearly three years since the battle of the Waterberg. What brought about the decommissioning of the camp was not a rejection of the policy of extermination, but a temporary shift in the balance of power that saw influence slip away from Governor von Lindequist and Oskar Hintrager, and fall into the hands of Major Ludwig von Estorff.
Von Estorff was the commander who had promised Samuel Izaak peace and freedom in return for his surrender in 1905, and had opposed von Trotha’s policies in the Omaheke. For this he had been dismissed by the general as an Alte Afrikaner – an old-fashioned colonialist whose judgement was clouded by an unhealthy preoccupation with the continued existence of the African peoples of German South-West Africa. In April 1907 von Estorff was appointed Commander of the South-West African Schutztruppe. By chance the promotion was approved while he was on a visit to Lüderitz, during which he had seen at first hand the fate of the Nama on Shark Island. On taking up his new post, von Estorff immediately signalled his unwillingness to permit officers and men under his command to be deployed in the administration of the Shark Island camp, calling it ‘a hangman’s duty’. Against the express wishes of von Lindequist’s office, he ordered the camp closed.43
On 8 April 151 men, 279 women and 143 children staggered across the narrow causeway between Shark Island and the mainland. They were taken through the town of Lüderitz itself, in full view of the local population. Some, including Samuel Izaak, were too weak to walk and had to be carried. Their destination was a sheltered bay on the other side of the harbour in which they were provided with blankets and food. Of the 573 Nama evacuated from Shark Island, 123 were so sick that von Estorff and Zülow believed that they were likely to die in the near future.
Estorff vented his disgust at what had taken place on Shark Island in a furious telegram to Oskar Hintrager. He warned, ‘I am not prepared to accept the responsibility [for their deaths], since they were brought here in contravention of the promise I gave them in Gibeon in 1905, with the explicit support of the Command.’44
Von Estorff also dispatched an emphatic protest to the Colonial Department in Berlin, and it was this that ultimately forced Lindequist and Hintrager to accept the closure of a facility they had fought so hard to keep open. Von Lindequist was in Berlin when the camp’s closure was authorised, lobbying the Reichstag for an increased colonial budget. Had he been in Windhoek, von Estorff might not have been successful.
Von Estorff’s telegrams to the Colonial Department initiated a ridiculous exchange of communications between the administration in Windhoek and the Colonial Department in Berlin. The Head of the Colonial Department, Bernhardt Dernburg, feigned shock at the fact that almost all the Nama prisoners had died on Shark Island, although he had been aware of it for months and had been directly challenged on the subject in the Reichstag only four months earlier.45 Under pressure, Governor von Lindequist sent a melodramatic telegram to Hintrager demanding, in unusually imperious language, that his deputy ‘Send, immediately, an official report outlining what the government knew about the conditions on Shark Island and also why nothing was done and why it was not reported to Berlin.’46 Von Lindequist, who had just been promised the post of Deputy Head of the Colonial Department, surely feared that the revelations about Shark Island might wreck his career. Yet the Shark Island scandal was in the end a short-lived and rather half-hearted affair.
The official report was compiled and edited by Oskar Hintrager, despite
the fact that he was one of the main architects of Shark Island. It absolved the colonial government of all blame and claimed that they had done everything, ‘to improve the plight of the natives [on Shark Island]’. Hintrager maintained that the prisoners had had ‘enough foodstuffs’ and ‘as much as possible the needs of the natives were met’.47 Not only was Hintrager’s investigation a whitewash, but the Acting Head of the Colonial Department responsible for accessing it was von Lindequist, who had been temporarily promoted while his superior, Bernhardt Dernburg, made an official tour of South-West Africa – which included an inspection of the now defunct camp on Shark Island.
Although von Lindequist, Hintrager, Dernburg and the politicians in Berlin explained away what had happened on Shark Island, Ludwig von Estorff was unable to forget. Shortly before he died on 5 October 1943, he wrote in his memoirs: ‘Lindequist had seen the horrible effects of the concentration camps on the Boer families in South Africa. The same happened here … Trotha had begun the evil work and Lindequist had finished it. I could only stand aside, sad but powerless to do anything about it.’48
The exact number of those who died on Shark Island will never be known. Throughout the concentration camps, the system of reporting deaths was haphazard and at times anecdotal. Indeed the recording of deaths on Shark Island began only in April 1906, and the deaths of many hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand, Herero prisoners who had been on the island before that date were not included in the official statistics.
According to the records that do exist, by March 1907 at least 1,203 Nama prisoners had died on the island. Of these 460 were women and 274 children.49 In the month of December 1906 alone, 263 prisoners died, an average of 8.5 per day. In late October 1907, Major von Estorff estimated that more than 1,900 Nama had died on Shark Island.50 These figures do not include the deaths of the Herero prisoners who were on Shark Island long before the arrival of the Nama. Missionary Laaf claimed they died in similar numbers.
The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism Page 26