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

by Casper Erichsen

  During the Berlin Conference of 1884–5, at which Africa had been notionally carved up by the European powers, not a single African had been present. When the German portions of the continent were redistributed at Versailles, there were at least a handful of black faces. Blaise Diagne, the Senegalese deputy of the French Parliament, the man who had inspired so many francophone Africans to fight for France in the trenches, attended the conference, as did W. E. B. Dubois, the black American Pan-Africanist. There was also a delegation from the African National Congress, seeking to draw attention to South Africa’s mistreatment of its own black populations, just six years after the passing of the infamous Native Land Act. However, there were no representatives of the Herero or Nama – the views of the ‘natives’ of Germany’s colonies were presented to the conference second-hand, by missionaries and colonial ‘experts’. Major Thomas O’Reilly was not there either. After completing the Blue Book, he had set himself up in legal practice, but quickly fell ill. He died in Cape Town in September 1919, exactly two years after he had accepted the commission to write the Blue Book, a victim of the Spanish Flu pandemic that claimed tens of millions of lives between 1918 and 1920.

  The testimony held within the Blue Book was therefore particularly valuable. It allowed Hendrik Witbooi and others to speak from the grave, directly to those in whose hands the futures of their peoples rested. Yet what is most remarkable about the Blue Book and the propaganda barrage that supported it was that, in both the press and at the conference itself, the atrocities committed in South-West Africa were openly compared to those the German army had committed in Europe.

  In 1914, during their advance through Belgium, the German army had reacted to supposed attacks by snipers and resistance fighters with a ferocity that had genuinely shocked Europe. The town of Louvain had been razed to the ground and over six thousand Belgian civilians had been murdered in a series of orchestrated mass executions and random killings, ignoring the distinction between combatants and civilians that Europeans imagined was the hallmark of civilised warfare. At the time the Kölnische Zeitung had falsely claimed that Belgian civilians had tortured wounded German soldiers and mutilated the bodies of their fallen comrades. The Kölnische Zeitung had exhaustively reported the Herero and Nama wars a decade earlier and considered the Belgian atrocities akin to those perpetrated by the ‘Negroes in South-West Africa’.6

  An investigation into the ‘rape of Belgium’ by the Germans in 1914 had been initiated by the Allies during the war and another Blue Book produced. This was distributed at Versailles alongside the South-West African report. Although both British and French propaganda energetically exploited the German atrocities in Belgium (and indeed those committed against the population of the occupied regions of northern France) for their own interests, they had not fabricated the events outlined in the report. The outrage felt across Europe and in America at the massacres at Liège and destruction of Louvain – described by the Daily Mail as the ‘Holocaust of Louvain’ – was genuine.7

  In 1919, the genocides committed against the Herero and Nama were set alongside the massacres of Belgian civilians. At Versailles, if only momentarily, the lives of black Africans were regarded as comparable to those of white Europeans.

  As the history of German brutality in South-West Africa was unveiled, the massacres in the Omaheke and the mass deaths in the German concentration camps came to be seen as having anticipated the devastation of Louvain and the mass executions of Belgian civilians. Both events, taken together, were proof that the ‘civilised world’, united in victory, was duty bound to shackle the monster of German ‘militarism’. An editorial in The Times of September 1918 stated:

  It had been widely supposed that in the oppression of Belgium the German capacity for wickedness had reached its limit. That was a foolish delusion. The inhuman outrages committed in Europe are insignificant compared to the savage abominations which were the foundation of German rule in Africa. Here we see the ‘blonde beast’ untrammelled. Here he gluts his appetite for blood, for plunder and for his bestial lusts.8

  By the time Lloyd George opened the debate on the future of the German colonies at Versailles on 24 January 1919, the extermination of the Herero and Nama had been dragged from the shadows of colonial history and presented to a world audience. The South-West African genocides were as infamous in 1919 as they are forgotten today.

  When the issue of the German colonies was debated by the presiding ‘Council of Ten’, Lloyd George almost immediately raised the policy of extermination the Germans had pursued in South-West Africa.9 While President Wilson remained deeply suspicious of British imperialism, he needed little persuasion as to the nature of German colonial rule and, in the first debate, he agreed that the colonies should not be returned to Germany under any circumstances. Although at one point wrangling over the final status of South-West Africa threatened to derail the conference, the colony was finally declared a ‘Class C Mandate’ and placed under the control of the Union of South Africa. Each of Germany’s other colonies in Africa and Asia were similarly assigned as mandates and distributed among the other victorious powers.

  On Valentine’s Day 1919 President Wilson gave a speech that suggested how much his views on Germany’s colonial empire had been shaped by what the world had learned of events in South-West Africa. Announcing his intention to preside over a final reckoning with Germany, Wilson remarked:

  It has been one of the many distressing revelations of recent years that the great Power which has just been happily defeated put intolerable burdens and injustices upon the helpless people of some of the colonies which it annexed to itself; that its interest was rather their extermination than their development … Now, the world, expressing its conscience in law, says there is an end of that.10

  Notes – 15 ‘To Fight the World for Ever’

  1. Quoted in Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 618.

  2. Ibid., p. 588.

  3. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 59.

  4. Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 195.

  5. The Times, 12 September 1918.

  6. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 135.

  7. Quoted in Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  8. The Times, 12 September 1918, p. 7: The ‘Militarist’ and Colonist.

  9. William Roger Louis, ‘The South West African Origins of the “Sacred Trust”, 1914–1919’, African Affairs 66.262. (Jan. 1967), pp. 20–39.

  10. Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, Britain and Germany in Africa: Imperial Rivalry and Colonial Rule (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 346.

  16

  A Passing Corporal

  Germany’s reckoning began the moment her armies returned. The force that most Germans had earnestly believed would be home for the Christmas of 1914 stumbled across the Rhine for the meagre festivities of 1918. They streamed home in their millions, from the blackened wastelands of the Western Front, and later from the lost empire in the East. The nation’s roads became rivers of grey and steel as endless columns of soldiers fanned out across the nation, heading home. In Berlin, as they passed through the specially decorated arches of the Brandenburg Gate and beneath the thin wintry trees of Unter Den Linden, large crowds gathered to cheer. Even in defeat Germany’s army, once the mightiest in Europe, looked nothing like a vanquished force. But the Germany they marched through in November and December 1918 bore only a vague resemblance to the dynamic, jubilant state that had waved them off to war four years earlier.

  The unprecedented and unnatural effort of total war, particularly during the last
two years, had taken an appalling toll. Germany was exhausted, shabby, run-down and, above all, hungry. In proud defiance of the Allied blockade, the wealthier classes had attempted to maintain some semblance of normality in their everyday lives; but it was paper-thin. The elegantly dressed gentlemen of Berlin still made an ostentatious show of smoking, but by 1918 their cigars were made from cabbage leaves and potato skins. They still drank coffee on café terraces, but it was brewed from acorns, the milk in it a watery imitation of the real thing.1 The word ersatz (substitute) had taken on a new and central position within the wartime lexicon of the home front.

  For the poor – the bulk of the people – war and hunger had become synonymous. There was no famine, as such, in Germany, but by November 1918 millions were suffering from the effects of long-term malnutrition. For a quarter of a million German civilians, the cost of total war had been total.2 While politicians of the far right had delivered speeches demanding annexations and colonial expansion, the poor had rioted in the streets demanding nothing more than bread. These recent traumas were etched on the faces of the crowds who gathered to cheer, as best they could, the returning German army of 1918. Those civilians, who had witnessed the gradual collapse of morale, health and calorific intake, had slowly become accustomed to the appearance and feel of this new Reich. The returning soldiers, some of whom had hardly seen their nation during the war years, were profoundly shocked.

  The troops were, in a way, refugees from another land. The fronts themselves had become almost a different country, a subterranean state of dugouts, ditches and trenches stretching for hundreds of miles across the continent. The soldiers who flooded back into Germany in 1918 found themselves abruptly ejected from the only adult existence many had known. Suddenly they were free of the inscrutable logic of survival, and the discipline and fanatical camaraderie of their units. Most worryingly for Germany, they were also bitterly divided.

  Even before the final defeat, the German army had begun to come apart at the seams. Each stalled offensive and each broken promise had widened the gulf between officers and men, but by 1918 the critical division was between those who still believed in the war and their comrades who considered the whole thing to have been an enormous swindle. During the bleak, tense winter of 1918–19, demobilised soldiers began to take their places on the barricades and in the death squads of both the left and right. Some were genuinely dedicated to Communism or its demise, others were merely addicted to fighting. The army that left the trenches as brothers-in-arms were quick to turn their guns on one another, as Germany toppled into anarchy, revolution and counter-revolution. By the end of the year, talk of grand annexations in the East and the creation of a vast empire in Africa seemed to belong to another world.

  No city was more ravaged by the German revolution of 1918–19 than Munich. It was there that the disintegration of the Second Reich began and from there that the Third Reich later emerged. The birth of the early Nazi movement in Munich is a story that brings together the movements and societies of Germany’s Völkisch right wing – the very men who had campaigned most vociferously for her colonial empire – and the soldiers who had fought in those now occupied colonies. These two groups played critical roles in making Munich in the early 1920s a sanctuary for ultra-nationalist, anti-republican, anti-Marxist and anti-Semitic extremists.

  The city’s slide into chaos began on 7 November, four days before the Armistice. That day, a crowd eighty thousand strong took to the streets and effectively brought down the government of Bavaria, the German state of which Munich is the capital. The crowd raided the city’s barracks, brushed aside the exhausted garrison and distributed hundreds of rifles to the workers and former soldiers turned revolutionaries. Congregating in the Theresienwiese, Munich’s great public square, the jubilant masses found themselves a leader. Kurt Eisner was a Jewish poet and a socialist intellectual from Berlin, who had only just been released from prison. Still dishevelled, he stood before the enormous crowd and demanded the creation of a new Bavaria run by the people. That evening King Ludwig III of the ancient Wittelsbach dynasty, rulers of Bavaria since the fourteenth century, fled his palace never to return. The next day, the people of Munich woke to discover they were citizens of a new state, ‘The Democratic and Social Republic of Bavaria’.

  Just a week after the Kaiser’s abdication, Kurt Eisner and his flimsy administration gathered in Munich’s National Theatre to celebrate their revolution and proclaim the birth of their new and idealistic nation. Eisner spoke of justice and brotherhood and of making Munich an example to the whole world. Yet as the strains of Handel’s Messiah rang out across Munich, in the half-light of the city’s beer halls the forces of the right were planning the destruction of Eisner and the new Bavarian government.

  Munich’s right wing was numerous, fanatical and well funded. The city had long been at the forefront of Völkisch and nationalist politics. During the war years, the Pan-Germanic League and an array of smaller movements had worked hard in Bavaria to whip up support for annexation in the East and the creation of a German Mittelafrika. In the last desperate months of the conflict, their calls for harsher annexations and ever-larger swathes of Africa had grown louder and more fevered.

  The movement had grown so large in Bavaria before the war that the league’s national leaders had decided that the organisation’s annual meetings were to be held in Munich. One of the driving forces behind the success of Pan-Germanism in the city was the wealthy publisher Julius Lehman, a founder member and a powerful financial backer. The Lehman family were owners of a leading publishing house, Lehmans Verlag, and under Julius Lehman’s leadership they had come to specialise in the production of medical textbooks. Lehman also used his press to produce pamphlets for the Pan-Germanic cause and propaganda for various colonialist, racist or expansionist policies. In early 1918, he had been behind a war fund aiming to raise money to ‘strengthen Germandom on our language borders and abroad, to support German settlers, students, libraries and economic enterprises, and [to help establish] colonies throughout the world’.3

  As well as a passionate advocate of German imperialism, Julius Lehman was a fanatical believer in eugenics and a member of Alfred Ploetz’s German Society for Racial Hygiene. Lehmans Verlag published Ploetz’s eugenics journal, Archiv für Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, as well as an array of other race hygiene titles. At one point Lehman had even attempted to persuade Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the ‘high priest of Aryan supremacy’, to publish through Lehmans Verlag.4

  Sometime in 1918, Julius Lehman became deeply involved in another of Munich’s ultra right-wing societies, the Thule-Gesellschaft (Thule Society). Founded by a fraudster named Adam Glauer, who had renamed himself Freiherr von Sebottendorff, it was ostensibly a gentlemen’s club for the study of Germanic culture and antiquity. Its small membership was drawn from Munich’s elite: university professors, the aristocracy, the judiciary and wealthy business interests. Well heeled and influential, they held their meetings within a private suite of rooms in Munich’s Four Seasons Hotel. These chambers had been specially decorated with symbols and runes drawn from the occult world of Aryan mysticism; one of those symbols was the swastika. At some point in 1918 the society’s members adopted the greeting Heil. However, the members of the Thule Society were not primarily motivated by Aryan mysticism. These hard-headed men were much more interested in using their wealth and influence to promote the traditional policies of the Völkisch far right – the spread of German power and settlers beyond the Reich’s borders and the maintenance of racial purity within. In July 1918, in an effort to spread this message beyond their exclusive membership, they purchased a Munich newspaper, the Münchener Beobachter (Munich Observer).

  In November 1918 the members of the Thule Society, like most Munichers, were stunned by the speed and ease with which Kurt Eisner’s socialist government took charge of their city and the Germany of the Kaisers disintegrated. Within forty-eight hours, the Second Reich and most of its institutions had simpl
y ceased to exist. On 10 November, the day before the Armistice, Julius Lehman proposed that the Thule Society found an armed wing of the movement, the Kampfbund Thule (Fighting Thule League). With links to high-level commanders in the army sympathetic to their cause, Lehman and his co-conspirators quickly amassed a stockpile of weapons which they hid in his offices. Among those who followed Lehman into the Kampfbund Thule were several men destined to become powerful figures in the Nazi party. They included Alfred Rosenberg, the ‘Philosopher’ of National Socialism, and Hans Frank, the murderous governor of occupied Poland – both were to be hanged at Nuremberg. The most famous member of Kampfbund Thule, however, was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy.

  Despite all their careful preparations, Lehman’s plot was uncovered, and when the stash of rifles was discovered, Lehman was arrested and imprisoned. Despite this setback, the Thule Society played a part in the destruction of Eisner’s new republic, but in a way no one had imagined.

  In early 1919, with the Kampfbund Thule in ruins, a young cavalry officer applied to join the Thule Society. Like all prospective members, Count Anton von Arco-Valley was asked to prove that he was of pure Germanic racial stock. When it was revealed that, despite his aristocratic title and dashing appearance, von Arco-Valley was half Jewish, he was immediately barred. Infuriated by this rejection, embittered by the loss of his status, rank and insignia at the hands of the socialist state, he set out to prove himself.5 With one direct and surgical blow, he would confront his enemies on the left, and demonstrate to his detractors on the right that his dedication to German nationalism was unwavering – despite his Jewish blood.