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

by Casper Erichsen

  Despite von Luschan’s claims and the preponderance of competing theories, the process of degeneration remained scientifically unproven and unobserved. Among the many scientists who set out to prove the theory was the young German anthropologist Eugen Fischer.

  In 1906 Eugen Fischer was a rising academic star. His first major study, on the skull-width of Papuans, had won the prestigious Broca Award from the Parisian Anthropological Society. Buoyed by this success and the recent rediscovery of Mendelian genetics, Fischer, like many of his contemporaries, began to scour the globe for a mixed-race community whose physical traits and genealogical history would permit him to demo strate how racial degeneration actually worked.24

  He required a community with an extremely specific racial heritage. The perfect case study would be an isolated, mixed-race people, who could trace their ancestry back to a single moment in history, when their forefathers – two peoples of ‘pure’ blood – had come together in sexual union. That moment of union, ideally between black and white, had to have taken place several generations earlier and, in the intervening decades or centuries, the mixed-race offspring needed to have eschewed interbreeding with all other peoples.

  Scrutinising existing work on ‘the bastardisation of the races’, Fischer at first looked to the mixed-race populations of the southern United States, but in 1907 a colleague handed him a booklet titled The Nation of the Bastards. It had been written by Captain Maximilian Bayer, the German officer who had fought at the Waterberg alongside General von Trotha. After taking part in the pursuit of the Herero into the Omaheke in 1904, Bayer became a member of the German force sent to confront the commando units of Hendrik Witbooi. On his journey south, he encountered the town of Rehoboth, 50 miles south of Windhoek. Rehoboth was home to a small community of mixed-descent people known as the Basters, who traced their ancestry back to intermixing between white men and Nama women of the Cape centuries earlier.

  The Basters had moved into the south-west in 1869, having been pushed out of the Cape by the Boers. In 1870, they had settled in Rehoboth, naming their new home after the town on the Euphrates mentioned in the Bible. The term ‘Basters’ dated back to the 1700s and was not considered offensive by the people of Rehoboth, or their descendants, who still live in Rehoboth and remain fiercely proud of their ancestry, their history and the name ‘Basters’.

  Although they had lived in South-West Africa for well over half a century and had been in constant contact with the twelve Nama tribes and the Herero, they had remained a tightly knit community, with few marriages between them and other local peoples. When Rehobothers married outside their community, it was normally a case of a Baster woman marrying a white man. Devoutly Christian, the Basters had also kept meticulous birth and baptism records, and most families could trace their lineage back several generations through church records. They were the ideal people for Eugen Fischer to test his theories on.

  In 1904 the leaders of the Basters had rejected Hendrik Witbooi’s call to arms and upheld the terms of their protection treaty with the Germans, supplying men to fight with the Schutztruppe against the Herero. It is partly through the accounts of Baster soldiers, shocked by the behaviour of their ‘allies’, that the true brutality of the war in the Omaheke later emerged. Having avoided becoming the targets of von Trotha, the Basters had survived the war with few casualties, and in 1908 they were two thousand strong.

  Like any mixed community, their physical features varied from one individual to the next. Some looked distinctly Nama, while others clearly had European features; most were a mixture of both. The Baster women were particularly striking, with fair, afro hair and green or bright blue eyes, set above the high cheekbones common among the Nama. In an academic paper of 1910, Fischer wrote: ‘Among the hideous, yellow-skinned stumpy Hottentot population, and also among the needy, skinny, dark Damaras, the Baster makes a good impression.’25

  While Fischer fixated on their physical appearance, the Baster people, like most religious, conservative nineteenth-century communities, placed much greater emphasis on matters of spirituality, propriety and decency. They were immaculately and modestly dressed. Many of the men wore bushy Victorian moustaches; the women tied their hair in tight buns behind their heads and wore ankle-length, high-necked dresses.

  Unlike the Nama, the Basters spoke only Afrikaans and had adopted most of the cultural traits of the Boers. Their family names were (and remain) a matter of pride, reflecting their determination to celebrate their mixed heritage. Eugen Fischer’s notes contain his descriptions of members of the van Wyk and Cloete families, the Beukes, the Steenkamps and the McNabbs. These last were descendants of a Scottish sailor who had married a Baster woman. The current Kaptein of the Rehoboth Basters, John McNabb, is the grandson of the McNabbs whose photographs and anatomical measurements can still be found in Eugen Fischer’s original files, held by the Namibian Scientific Society in Windhoek.

  Within days of his arrival Eugen Fischer, aided by the local missionaries, began to force his scientific attentions upon the Baster community. Despite reassurances from the missionaries that his intentions were purely benign, the Basters were not easily persuaded to subject themselves to Fischer’s programme of anatomical measurements. One elder reminded Fischer that ‘the Basters were not savages’, and asked him why he did not also carry out examinations of the white residents of Rehoboth, ‘the missionary and the Oberleutnant [District Chief]’.26

  Several of the Basters refused to submit themselves to Fischer’s examinations; others only permitted him to carry out procedures that allowed them to retain their dignity. Fischer was especially disappointed that he was refused permission to measure genitals and pubic bones. He later complained, ‘I tried several times to frisk around this area but it could not be done, especially with the women.’

  In the face of determined resistance, Fischer was forced to reduce the scope of his examinations to measurements of arms, hands, legs and heads, and to resort to a more extensive use of photographs. In total, he examined and/or photographed 310 members of the Rehoboth community.

  Throughout his time in Rehoboth, Fischer’s work was characterised by a series of striking methodological lapses. Due to the refusal of the Baster people to be measured naked, many of Fischer’s measurements were taken over heavy clothing and were extremely inaccurate. Even more worrying, a series of sample measurements from the two racial groups from which the Basters were descended, Nama and White Europeans, were also highly inaccurate. The measurements representing the average dimensions of ‘pure-blood’ Nama were based on examinations of just eight Nama individuals, whose body measurements were taken to represent their entire people.

  After two months’ fieldwork Fischer had completed his research. Before leaving Rehoboth, he briefly toyed with the idea of robbing the graves of his Basters’ ancestors in Rehoboth’s Christian cemetery. Unable to satisfy his ‘ardent desire to encounter the dead of this small community’, Fischer exhumed a number of Nama skeletons from a set of graves in the desert between Swakopmund and Walvis Bay.

  After this ‘encounter with the dead’, Fischer left German South-West Africa and never returned. In many ways, Fischer’s work and the conclusions it drew him towards were typical of racial studies of the era. His study was detailed and enormously complicated, while at the same time deeply flawed at a methodological level. Fischer’s files contain hundreds of anthropological photographs of Rehoboth people. Many of his subjects have been photographed from several angles to illustrate specific cranial and facial features. As well as the photographic material, there are a number of charts mapping the complex genealogy of various Rehobother families. The files are well ordered, neatly catalogued and beautifully presented. The rigour belies the fact that the measurements were at times almost meaningless, and that Fischer’s conclusions were merely the substantiation of preconceived racist assumptions, given legitimacy by the apparent application of scientific methods.

  Nevertheless, in 1913 Eugen Fischer published
the results of his study in a book entitled Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (The Rehoboth Bastards and the Bastardisation problem in Man). Fischer claimed that his examinations of the people of Rehoboth showed that racial features and characteristics found in the Basters and inherited from their Nama ancestors had, with each succeeding generation, become dominant over the traits inherited from their white forebears. The process of racial degeneration was stamped on their bodies and the story of the Rehoboth Basters demonstrated the universal truth that ‘every European people that has adopted the blood of inferior races – and that Negroes, Nama and many others are inferior only mad people would deny – has, without exception, atoned for the adoption of these inferior elements with their mental and cultural downfall’.27

  Even before the publication of his book, Fischer had begun to tour and lecture on his findings. On publication, Die Rehobother Bastards helped Fischer establish himself quickly as Germany’s foremost expert on racial mixing. It was regarded as a breakthrough study, the first successful application of modern Mendelian genetics to human anthropology. The book was still in print in 1961.

  Fischer was emerging as a front-rank German racial scientist at the moment the pseudo-science of eugenics, the invention of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, was achieving an important place in German scientific discourse. The man chiefly responsible for the establishment of German eugenics was Alfred Ploetz, a passionate believer in the supremacy of the Aryan race. In the mid-1880s, Ploetz fused his ideas of Aryan supremacy with eugenics and began a crusade to preserve the purity of the Germanic people. In one of his books, he stated that the love of humanity ‘is nothing more than love for its Aryan part’.28

  As Ploetz had begun his studies before Francis Galton had devised the term ‘eugenics’, he called his science Rassenhygiene – race hygiene. Although Ploetz’s term lacks the elegance of Galton’s Greek etymology, it more accurately conveys the ideas of purity and pollution inherent in the eugenics movement. In 1895 Ploetz published his key book, The Foundations of Racial Hygiene, and in 1904 he helped found the periodical Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Archives of Race Science and Social Biology) and opened the Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1909 Galton agreed to become its honorary chairman. Eugen Fischer, who had been involved in eugenics even before his time in German South-West Africa, was ideally placed to take up a leading position in the German eugenics revolution.

  By 1910 Fischer was arguing that Rassenhygiene was the first step in ‘saving our wonderful German nation’, and that it was the duty of race scientists to convince the public of the intrinsic merit and importance of racial hygiene. Yet what allowed ideas like Rassenhygiene to gain ground in German society was not the proselytising of scientists like Eugen Fischer but the trauma of Germany’s defeat and humiliation in World War I. The disaster of the war and the ensuing chaos helped radicalise Germany’s race scientists and made German society more receptive to racial theories than ever before.29

  Notes – 13 ‘Our New Germany on African Soil’

  1. NAN, Photo collection, ref no. 2857; J. Zeller, ‘Symbolic Politics’, in 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. 231–49; Kolonial-Post, 1937, p. 6 (courtesy of Joachim Zeller); D. J. Walther, Creating Germans Abroad (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002); J. Gewald, We Thought We Would Be Free (Cologne: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 2000).

  2. U. van der Heyden and J. Zeller, Kolonial Metropole Berlin (Berlin: Berlin Edition, 2002), p. 164.

  3. Kolonial-Post, 1937, p. 6.

  4. K. Epstein, ‘Erzberger and the German Colonial Scandals: 1905–1910’, The English Historical Review 74, No. 293 (Oct. 1959) pp. 637–63.

  5. NAN, ZBU 456, D IV. l.3, vol. 6, p. 88.

  6. NAN, ZBU 465, D IV. M.3, vol. 2, p. 147.

  7. Ibid., p. 119.

  8. Ibid., p. 239.

  9. G. I. Schrank, ‘German South-West Africa: Social and Economic Aspects of Its History, 1884–1915’, unpublished Ph. D. thesis (New York: New York University, 1974), p. 212.

  10. Walther, Creating Germans, pp. 58–9.

  11. BAK, Kl. Erw. NL 1037, Nr 8, p. 6.

  12. Walther, Creating Germans, p. 20.

  13. Ibid., p. 30.

  14. Ibid., pp. 90–1.

  15. Ibid., p. 93.

  16. Ibid., p 103.

  17. L. Wildenthal, ‘She Is the Victor’, in G. Eley (ed.), Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930 (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 374.

  18. J. W. Spidle, ‘Colonial Studies in Imperial Germany’, History of Education Quarterly 3.3 (Autumn 1973), pp. 231–47.

  19. M. Baericke, Luederitzbucht: 1908–1914 (Windhoek: Namibia Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, 2001), p. 33.

  20. Klaus Dierks, Chronology of Namibian History (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 2002), p. 138.

  21. Walther, Creating Germans, p. 46.

  22. There are still black Namibians today who carry the name von François, and trace their ancestry back to the von François family.

  23. Decree of the Governor of German South-West Africa on the Half-Caste Population, 23 May 1912. Deutsches Kolonialblatt (1912), p. 752. Quoted in Helmuth Stoecker (ed.), Bernard Zöller (trans.), German Imperialism in Africa: From the Beginnings until the Second World War (London: Hurst, 1986), p. 211.

  24. R. Gordon and S. S. Douglas, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Oxford: Westview Press, 2000); R. Gordon, ‘The Rise of the Bushman Penis: Germans, Genitalia and Genocide’, African Studies 57.1 (1998), pp. 27–54; E. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1913); idem, Begegnung Mit Toten (Freiburg: Hans Ferdinand Schulz Verlag, 1959); M. Bayer, ‘Die Nation der Bastards’, Zeitschrift fuer Kolonialpolitik, Kolonialrecht und Kolonialwirtschaft 8.9 (1906), pp. 625–48.

  25. E. Fischer, ‘Das Rehobother Bastardvolk’, Die Umshau 13 (1910), p. 1049.

  26. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards, p. 57.

  27. Ibid., p. 302.

  28. Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 118.

  29. Henry Friedlander, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 12.

  14

  Things Fall Apart

  The Great War came to German South-West Africa in the early hours of 18 September 1914 when, under the cover of darkness, a flotilla of British and South African warships rounded the tip of Shark Island and quietly slipped into Lüderitz harbour. When the sun crested the rocky hills to the east of the town, revealing the harbour crowded with warships, panic caught hold of the local population. Men, still in their pyjamas, were seen running from their homes. A government official scurried through the streets carrying a box of official documents, and, with somewhat undignified haste, a white sheet was raised on a flagpole over the main jetty.1

  The commanders of the colony’s Schutztruppe, expecting an overland invasion by the army of the Union of South Africa, had dispatched the bulk of their forces in the south to their border on banks of the Orange River. Lüderitz, her people and her diamond fields had been left almost completely undefended. With the guns of the invasion fleet now ranged against the town, the mayor of Lüderitz Emil Kreplin, the resident judge Dr Dommer and the editor of the Lüderitzbuchter newspaper sailed out to the South African flagship. There, Mayor Kreplin formally surrendered Lüderitz to Colonel Beves of the Union army. By noon the next day the British Union flag had replaced the white sheet on the flagpole in Lüderitz harbour, and an invasion force of almost two thousand men had begun to come ashore and unload their equipment.

  Six days later the Armadale Castle, an ocean liner belonging to the British-owned Union Castle Shipping Line and recently refitted as a warship, suddenly appeared off the coast of Swakopm
und. Once in range she began to bombard the town, aiming her fire at the only two facilities of any strategic importance: the long wooden jetty and the mast of Swakopmund’s long-range radio transmitter. Over the course of several raids, both were destroyed, and stray shells also landed on the Customs House and the offices of the Woermann Brock Company, a subsidiary arm of the Woermann Shipping Line. The day after the naval bombardment began, the German colonial authorities started to evacuate the civilian population inland. By 30 September, Swakopmund was effectively a ghost town. Tendrils of sand began to creep onto the wooden walkways and loiter in the doorways of shops and homes.

  On Christmas Day 1914, a large force of South African soldiers landed at Walvis Bay, and two weeks later marched on Swakopmund. The only resistance the South Africans encountered came from a handful of German snipers, who fired a few volleys from the nearby sand dunes and remotely detonated a series of large mines, before making a hasty retreat. With the capture of both Lüderitz and Swakopmund, German South-West Africa was effectively sealed off from the ‘Fatherland’ and in the same months, similar fates befell Germany’s other colonies in Africa.

  In August 1914, as 1 million German troops had swept through Belgium following the grand battle plan of the late Alfred von Schlieffen, Germany’s West African colony of Togo had also been invaded by French forces from Dahomey to the east and by British units from the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to the west. The small German colonial police force had surrendered at the end of the month, giving the Western Allies the sort of quick victory that was good for morale and seemed to support the widespread conviction that the war in Europe would last only a few months. The invasion of German Cameroon was also well under way by the time Swakopmund fell to the South Africans. While the Belgian forces defending their homeland were being routed, their colonial units based in the Congo had marched into German territory from the south. French columns had also invaded German Cameroon from Chad and a British force of four thousand West Africans, led by 350 British officers, had launched a simultaneous invasion from Nigeria to the west. The British struggled against strong resistance from a German force made up predominantly of local African soldiers, but with the help of the Royal Navy the capital Douala fell at the end of September and the German garrison was forced to seek refuge in the neutral territory of Spanish Guinea.