The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
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The Africans who met their deaths on Shark Island were not the only victims of the Lüderitz camp system. Another concentration camp, run by the railway company Firma Lenz, also reported extremely high death rates. In total, perhaps as many as three or four thousand Africans died in the Lüderitz camps, a figure four times the German population of Lüderitz in 1907.51
According to a census carried out by Deputy Governor Hintrager in 1908, there were a total of thirteen thousand Nama alive in the colony at the beginning of that year; the pre-war Nama population had been around twenty thousand. Of the Nama who rose up against the Germans in 1904 – estimated at anywhere between five and ten thousand people – around 2,400 were sent into the concentration camp system; only around five hundred of them were alive when the camps were closed down. By 1909, only 248, just over 10 percent of those who had been imprisoned, remained alive.52
For some Nama communities, the extermination had been almost total. In October 1907 Major von Estorff reported that ‘there are no longer any Veldschoendragers left’. The Witbooi had been nearly wiped out, and of the Bethanie Nama who joined the Witbooi against the Germans, less than a hundred were alive by 1909.53
The Herero, whose pre-war population had been estimated at around eighty thousand, had been similarly decimated. Those who survived the concentration camps were formally released by the Kaiser on his birthday in January 1908, a little over four years since the beginning of the uprising. Despite the Kaiser’s orders, many Herero were not released immediately. Some camps were kept open until April 1908 to allow the authorities access to Herero labour in order that the Lüderitz to Keetmanshoop railway – the last major infrastructure project for which forced Herero labour was required – could be almost completed. According to the colonial census, only 16,363 Herero remained in the colony in 1908; 5,373 of them were children, many of whom had been born in the concentration camps, some as a result of rape. Eighty percent of the Herero nation had been killed or driven out of the colony.
Around a thousand Herero, including Samuel Maharero, had managed to escape into British Bechuanaland. Exiled from their homelands, they eked out a meagre existence. Although some were allowed to settle in a reserve at the eastern edge of the Kalahari, poverty forced many to seek work in the gold mines of the Transvaal. An unknown number found refuge in the Owambo lands to the north.
Notes – 12 ‘The Island of Death’
1. H. F. B. Walker, A Doctor’s Diary in Damaraland (London: Edward Arnold, 1917), Chapter X, 18 July.
2. C.W. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently among Them’: Concentration Camps and Prisoners-of-War in Namibia, 1904–08 (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2005), pp. 65–9.
3. ELCN, RMS, Correspondence VII. 31, Swakopmund 1–7, Eich to Vedder 24 May 1905.
4. Ibid., Eich to Vedder 16 December 1905.
5. H. Vedder, Kurze Geschichten aus einem langen Leben (Wuppertal-Barmen: Verlag der Rheinischen Missions-Gesellschaft, 1953), p. 139.
6. NAN, ZBU 456, D IV. l.3, vol. 5, p. 98.
7. Ibid., p. 106b.
8. Kuhlmann as quoted in I. Hull, Absolute Destruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 78.
9. Cape Argus, 28 September 1905.
10. Ibid.
11. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death’, pp. 88–94.
12. L. Sinclair (ed.), Collins German Dictionary Plus Grammar (Glasgow: HarperCollins Publishers, 2001).
13. See J. Grobler, Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg), 13–19 March 1998.
14. B. Auer, In Suedwestafrika gegen die Hereros (Berlin: Ernst Hofmann & Co., 1911), pp. 189, 208.
15. F. Cornell, The Glamour of Prospecting (New York: F. A. Stokes, 1920).
16. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, pp. 103–4.
17. There were two missionaries in Lüderitz due to the many prisoners sent there, because these were seen by the mission as souls still in need of saving. Missionary Laaf was the first to arrive, in December 1905, and was later followed by Nyhof.
18. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, pp. 103–4.
19. Union of South Africa, Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and Their Treatment by Germany (London: HMSO, 1918), Chapter XX, testimony by Samuel Kariko.
20. Cornell, Glamour of Prospecting.
21. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, pp. 93–6.
22. NAN, HBS 52, 28 November 1906.
23. Ibid., 24 December 1906.
24. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, p. 116.
25. Ibid., pp. 102–3.
26. Archiv der Vereinten Evangelischen Mission Wuppertal-Barmen, RMG 2.509a, C/h 23a, Bl. 348, letter the Rhenish Mission Society in Barmen, Inspector Spiecker by hand.
27. NAN, ZBU 2396, Witbooi Geheimakten, pp. 96a–96b.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., pp. 97–8.
30. Ibid.
31. H. Drechsler, Let Us Die Fighting (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1986), p. 211.
32. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, ‘Todesinsel’, Bezirksamtman Zülow to Gov. 6/01/07, pp. 120–30.
33. Cape Archives, PMO 227–35/07, British Military Attaché, Col. F. Trench to British Embassy, Berlin, 21 November 1906.
34. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death’, p. 155.
35. Ibid.
36. Notably this debate was watched by a contingent from German South-West Africa including Governor Lindequist and Major Bayer, who had come to support the cause. Stenographische Berichte uber die Verhandlungen des deutschen Reichstages, 11. Legislature, II. Session. 1905/1907. Reichstag. – 140. Sitzung. 13 December 1906, p. 4367.
37. Union of South Africa, Report on the Natives of South-West Africa, Chapter XX.
38. J. Zimmerer and J. Zeller (eds), Genocide in German South-West Africa: the Colonial War of 1904–1908 and Its Aftermath (Monmouth: Merlin Press Ltd., 2008), pp. 76–7.
39. Zürn to Luschan, 25 June 1905. MfV,1B 39, vol. 1 775/05. Quoted in A. Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 245.
40. C. Fetzer, ‘Rassenanatomische Untersuchungen an 17 Hottenttotenkoepfen’, Zeitschrift fuer Morphologie und Antropologie 16 (1912).
41. Dr Stabsarzt Bofinger, ‘Einige Mitteilungen uber Skorbut’, Deutsche militaerarztliche Zeitschrift 39.15 (1910).
42. ELCN, RMS, V.16, Chronik der Gemeinde Lüderitzbucht, pp. 28–9.
43. BAB, Colonial Department, File 2140, ‘Note for the Reichstag about the Native Prisoners of War on Shark Island’, p. 88.
44. Ibid.
45. NAN, ZBU 2369, Secret Files, p. 113.
46. Ibid., p. 115.
47. BAB, Colonial Department, File 2140, ‘Note for the Reichstag About the Native Prisoners of War on Shark Island’, p. 157.
48. Ludwig von Estorff, Wanderungen und Kaempfe in Suedwestafrika, Ostafrika und Suedafrika 1894–1910 (Windhoek: John Meinert (Pty) Ltd, 1996), p. 134.
49. NAN, ZBU 456, D IV. l.3, vol. 5, p. 135.
50. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, pp. 152–3.
51. ‘Population statistics in Lüderitz (German) as of end-1906: 836 men, 94 women and 49 children under 15 years.’ NAN, ZBU 154, A. VI. a.3, p. 207. For a further discussion on these figures see Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death’, pp. 134–45.
52. They had, in a grotesque mirror image of the literal sense of the word, been decimated.
53. NAN, ZBU 2369, Witbooi Geheimakten, p. 153.
13
‘Our New Germany on African Soil’
The morning of 27 January 1912 found the town of Windhoek abuzz with excitement. The red, white and black of the German tricolour hung from beneath windows and fluttered from masts erected along the main streets. It was the Kaiser’s birthday, an occasion always celebrated with a degree of patriotic fervour in German South-West Africa, but in 1912 the celebrations were particularly memorable. Around seven o’clock in the morning, before the summer heat rendered even the most gentle physical activity almost intolerable, the citizens of Windh
oek began to make their way up the steep hill upon which the German fortress stood. Their journeys took them through the centre of Windhoek, a town that had been transformed by war and by the slave labour of the defeated Nama and Herero. Along Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse, they passed the window displays of the new shops that sold imported luxuries. Along Garten Strasse, they passed the hot water springs that fed the city’s new swimming pool. Those who cut through the Memorial Gardens walked over manicured lawns and between duck ponds. What had once been the home of the Herero was now a European city in miniature.1
That morning, the men of Windhoek wore their best white linen suits, and the ladies who accompanied them dressed in long ornate frocks of white lace. The new colonial elite were prosperous, proud, and acutely aware of rank and status. To emphasise their position, many had added the prefix ‘von’ to their surnames, implying a lost aristocratic heritage.
In front of the fortress, a 16-foot tall bronze statue of a mounted Schutztruppe towered above the growing crowds. The Rider Statue, as it became known, had been paid for by private donations raised in Germany. It was the work of the sculptor Adolf Kürle, and was intended as a memorial to the soldiers and settlers who had lost their lives in the wars against the Herero and the Nama.2
Stern and austere, with a rifle in his hand, the rider was also a dramatic representation of the rugged ‘colonial type’ that the colonial societies and German nationalists had always claimed would emerge from the hardships and struggles of the colonial frontier. The unveiling of the Rider Statue on the Kaiser’s birthday in 1912 was the moment that German South-West Africa came of age.
The men of the Windhoek garrison, dressed in the same Schutztruppe uniform as the rider, stood nearest the statue on the morning of the inauguration ceremony. After both soldiers and civilians had placed wreaths at the foot of the plinth, local notables addressed the crowd from a specially built podium draped in the national flag. The keynote speaker was Theodor Seitz, the new governor. Seitz began by reminding the assembled crowd of the many sacrifices that had been made by the colonial army in the name of the Fatherland during the wars begun in 1904, but he ended with a simple statement of fact:
The principle behind this monument is to honour the dead and to encourage the living to propagate and build up what was achieved in a hard war, fought selflessly for the love of the Fatherland… The venerated colonial soldier that looks out over the land from here announces to the world that we are the masters of this place, now and for ever.3
The Germans were masters not only of South-West Africa’s future, but of its past. Their version of the war had been set in stone and was now cast in bronze. The inauguration of the Rider Statue was the culmination of the process of historical denial and distortion begun by Friedrich von Lindequist. The brutality of the settlers in the years leading up to the war, General von Trotha’s Extermination Order and the concentration-camp system were expunged from official history.
Part of the motivation behind the commissioning of the Rider Statue had been a determination to remember the Germans who had died in the war. Yet its location, on the lawns outside the old fortress, represented an equally determined effort to forget the suffering of the Herero and Nama. The statue had been erected on the site of Windhoek’s main concentration camp, where only four years earlier perhaps as many as four thousand Herero, mainly women and children, had been starved, beaten and worked to death.
By 1912 nothing remained of the camp. The mud huts and thorn-bush fences were gone, and the bodies of the victims had been interred in mass graves scattered across the town. But no one who attended the inauguration ceremony could have possibly misinterpreted the significance of the location. The site of the former camp was now the centrepiece of the German version of the war, a history in which a genocide was transformed into a heroic struggle for civilisation and progress.
From his granite plinth, the Rider gazed out far beyond the city limits into hills that surround the town, once dotted with Herero villages. The Herero who had survived the war no longer lived in Windhoek Valley. When the concentration camps had been closed in 1908, the survivors had been distributed among the settlers and made to work virtually as slaves, raising cattle on land that had once been theirs. They lived in small, isolated groups. Under restrictions imposed by the colonial administration, all Africans over the age of seven were prohibited from travelling without their employers’ permission and were made to carry passes, similar to those that had already been adopted in the British parts of South Africa (formerly the Cape Colony). Cut off from what remained of their families and communities, their culture almost atrophied.
In 1908 Matthias Erzberger, a Reichstag member for the Zentrum party spoke out and condemned the treatment of Africans in the colony. In the Reichstag itself he asked if they had not in fact been reduced to the status of slaves. Erzberger was loudly scorned by his fellow deputies and later referred to as a ‘nigger lover’.4 Three years later, when Major Ludwig von Estorff complained that the Herero on the farms ‘are treated no different than slaves’, he was simply ignored.5
The few Nama rebels who had survived the concentration camps were treated differently. Although the war had ended and the concentration camps had been decommissioned, the survivors of Shark Island were still incarcerated in 1912. They were held by the German army in a converted military stables in central Hereroland. Out of sight, Samuel Izaak, his sons and around a hundred of his people were being permitted slowly to die off. A headcount of the Nama held at Okawayo, conducted by the Germans in July 1909, revealed that of the Witbooi there were only thirty-nine men, sixty-five women and fifty-two children, some of whom had been born in captivity at Okawayo. Of the Bethanie Nama who had joined the Witbooi in rebellion, only thirty men, forty women and twenty-two children remained alive.6
The Nama clans who had rejected Hendrik Witbooi’s appeals to rise up in 1904 had survived the war but had later been confined to small reserves. The Berseba Nama, some of the Bethanie Nama and the mixed-race Basters of Rehoboth all found that their territories had become islands of indigenously owned land in a sea of German farms. With so little land, many were forced to abandon their traditional lifestyles and seek employment as farm labourers.
In 1909 it had been suggested that the colony should make use of the Nama being held at Okawayo, by distributing them among the German farms in the south. However, the colonial authorities quickly discovered that although the colony was suffering an acute shortage of labour, the farmers had no interest in taking a people they regarded as inferior labourers, even as slaves. In March 1909, Major von Maercker, an officer of the Etappenkommando, wrote that ‘giving the natives to the farmers as workers etc. will only cause problems, because, as we have experienced already, the Nama, who are on average small and weak, are poorly suited as farm labourers and are therefore not very popular with the farmers’.7
In the same year, the colonial government in Windhoek again toyed with the idea of deporting the Nama, this time to German East Africa. Well aware of the Nama’s reputation as guerrilla warriors, Freiherr von Rechenberg, the Governor of East Africa, vetoed the plan, fearing that the Nama might ‘spread their dangerous influence among the people here’.8
In the years before World War I, with the Herero and Nama decimated and the survivors reduced to virtual slaves, German South-West Africa truly belonged to the Germans. While the Herero and Nama had been incarcerated in the concentration camps, Governor von Lindequist and Deputy Governor Hintrager had confiscated their former homelands. In December 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm had formally expropriated all Herero land, and in 1906, von Lindequist and Hintrager issued instructions for the Land Surveyors’ Department to draft a new map of South-West Africa, subdividing much of the prime farmland of the Herero and Nama into hundreds of farm plots. On 8 May 1907, just weeks after Shark Island camp had finally been closed, the Kaiser completed the land grab, issuing a decree expropriating all Nama lands, apart from Berseba and the land of the Bondelswarts at Warmbad.9
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By 1908 the German government had acquired a total of 46 million hectares of land that had once been the property of Nama, Damara, Herero and San peoples. The German settlers, some of whom had previously leased their land from the Africans or owed outstanding payments, were notified by the German colonial newspaper Deutsche Kolonialzeitung that each farmer would be able to submit a claim for his ‘possession’ to the Fiscal Department of the colonial government.
In 1913 there were 1,331 German farms; before the Herero and Nama wars there had been just 480. By the same year there were almost fifteen thousand settlers in the territory – in 1904 there had been only around five thousand, and in 1891 only three hundred. Many of those who had settled after the war were former soldiers, men who had chosen to stay behind and claim a plot of the land they had conquered. To cater for the farming boom, a host of new businesses had emerged. In Windhoek alone there were ninety-eight registered businesses in 1913; ten years earlier there had been just fifteen.10
The colony’s Deputy Governor, Oskar Hintrager, who also acted as Secretary for Immigration and Settlement, was particularly dedicated to turning German South-West Africa into a model agricultural colony. Hintrager had spent years studying the example of the United States, and had marvelled at the endless wheat fields of the Midwest and the great profits made by the cattle ranchers of the western prairies. ‘Agriculture’, he explained to his superiors, ‘is the backbone of all other vocations.’11 To ensure that agriculture became the engine of the colonial economy, Hintrager and his colleagues set about providing aspiring farmers with interest-free loans. The average loan was six thousand Reichmarks, enough to buy basic tools and a farmhouse. In addition to the loans, new farmers were sold the cattle that had been confiscated from the Nama and Herero at drastically reduced prices.