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

by Casper Erichsen

  Finally, there was Theodor Mollison, who assisted Eugen Fischer in his work on the Rehoboth Basters and who had undertaken fieldwork in German East Africa. In 1937 Mollison wrote to a colleague, ‘If you think that we scientists do not join in the call “Heil Hitler”, you are very much mistaken. We, the German scientists, are very much aware of what we owe to Adolf Hitler.’10

  The Nazi state transformed the place of race scientists and eugenicists in German society. They were entrusted with nothing less than the genetic health and racial purity of the German people, and with transmitting their ideas and prejudices to their students. As lecturers, research supervisors, mentors and teachers, they trained the eugenicists and anthropologists of the Third Reich. It was this generation, young and enthusiastic for the racial revolution, who left the laboratories, institutes and colonial schools and went out into the field and to the new territories of the East after 1941 and applied the lessons they had learned from men like Fischer, Reche and Mollison.

  The connections between the colonial race scientists and the stars of Nazi race science are startling. Joseph Mengele was a student of Theodor Mollison at the University of Munich. After completing his Ph. D. on the racial anatomical differences in the structure of the human jaw, Mengele was drawn into the orbit of Otmar von Verschuer, professor at Frankfurt University’s Third Reich Institute of Hereditary Biology and Race Hygiene. Von Verschuer was a close associate of Eugen Fischer, and, on Eugen Fischer’s retirement, in 1942 became Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. When Mengele was wounded on the Eastern Front that same year, von Verschuer invited him to come and work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which had by then been renamed the Eugen Fischer Institute. A year later, Mengele left Berlin to take up a post as Senior Doctor at Auschwitz.

  In 1943 von Verschuer helped his protégé attain funds for his work, writing in support of a grant application made to the German Research Council. The money awarded for Mengele’s work paid for a new and well-equipped pathology lab at Auschwitz in which Mengele conducted a series of horrific experiments.

  The extent of Mengele’s involvement with von Verschuer and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute will never be fully known, as much of the institute’s documentation was burned by von Verschuer in 1945 as the Russians closed in on the city. However, what is known is that in the darkest traditions of racial experimentation Mengele sent body parts and skeletons of his victims at Auschwitz back to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. On one occasion a family of eight were killed by Mengele so their eyes, which displayed a rare discolouring, could be sent for examination by scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.11 For the second time in German history, the victims of a racial genocide were used to advance the racial theories that had justified their killing.

  In the name of their racial and eugenic revolutions, the Nazi state turned upon its own citizens: Jews, Gypsies, black people and the disabled. The struggle to secure Lebensraum beyond the borders of the Reich would not be fought against such a weak opposition; it required the mobilisation of the entire nation. Alongside the process of rearmament, the Nazis embarked upon a concerted propaganda campaign that aimed to exploit the deep sense of nostalgia that millions of Germans felt for the lost colonies in Africa.

  By the 1930s, the idea of the lost colonies was perhaps a more potent and mobilising force than colonialism itself had been during the Second Reich. The story of the former colonies had become a powerful narrative of fortitude, loss and injustice. The importance of this colonial longing for the political parties of the right and centre cannot be overstated. Germany had lost her empire under the terms of the hated Treaty of Versailles. It was therefore politically impossible for any party – other than those of the far left – openly to accept their loss. To do so risked being linked with the ‘November Criminals’, the civilian politicians who had supposedly stabbed the army in the back in 1918 and betrayed the nation at the negotiating table a year later.

  The potency of Germany’s claim to her former territories was in part a reaction against the arguments that had originally been used by the British and South Africans at Versailles. The Allies’ case for summarily expelling Germany from the club of colonial powers rested on the atrocities Germans had committed in their empire, most shockingly in German South-West Africa. These crimes, the Allied powers maintained, had shown Germany to be ‘unfit’ to rule over ‘backward races’. This claim was dismissed in inter-war Germany as the ‘Colonial Guilt Lie’, and huge efforts were made to discredit the Blue Book. Major O’Reilly’s report was loudly denounced as a work of fiction. Others accepted its veracity but retorted by claiming that Germany’s colonial record had been no worse than that of any other great power. Despite such protestations, the ‘Colonial Guilt Lie’ festered throughout the inter-war period and was resented as much as the confiscation of the colonies itself.

  Before the Nazis came to power, the campaign for the return of the lost colonies had been coordinated by the German Colonial Society, a movement that outlasted the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, as well as the colonies themselves. Most of the society’s leading members were former colonial administrators or veterans of the Schutztruppe, men for whom the shame of defeat and the loss of empire were mixed with their own personal bitterness. The end of empire had abruptly foreshortened their careers and rendered their expertise utterly irrelevant. Tapping into a groundswell of resentment, the German Colonial Society had harnessed massive popular support.

  For sections of the Nazi elite and for millions of party supporters, the demand for the return of the German colonies was a genuine and heartfelt call, a passionate rejection of the ‘Colonial Guilt Lie’. For others, it was primarily a political stance, necessary to unify the party’s supporters during their election struggles of the 1920s and early 1930s. Nazism was a movement built on its ability to bring together the forces of the right. The party had achieved this remarkable balancing act by appealing to as many prejudices and obsessions as possible: they embraced anti-Semitism, anti-Marxism, Völkisch Romanticism, Nordic mysticism, atheism, anti-capitalism, eugenics and colonial imperialism. The result was a wild and at times unstable mix of traditionalism, conservatism and radicalism. Colonial imperialism was one of the more important of these political strands, and while campaigning at the ballot box, the Nazis skilfully exploited the nostalgic longing for the lost colonies to great effect.

  Even after coming to power in 1933 and dismantling the democratic apparatus of the Weimar state, it is remarkable how acutely sensitive to public opinion the party remained. Despite the totalitarian nature of Nazi rule, the party machine, oiled from a decade of electioneering, was primed to keep its disparate support blocks moving in the same direction, constantly assuring each of them that their particular concerns and preoccupations were at the core of the party’s programme and in the forefront of the Führer’s mind.

  While the recapture of the lost colonial empire was in reality a policy of secondary importance to the Nazis, it was never abandoned. Although in Mein Kampf Hitler had dismissed colonialism in Africa as an outdated policy that risked diverting German energies away from her true destiny in the European East, the party actively campaigned for the return of the Kaiser’s former colonies while pursuing power through the ballot box in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Hitler’s vision was ultimately global, but he was adamant that Germany’s priority was to forge a vast continental empire. When the East had been conquered and colonised, Germany would have the raw materials and access to food supplies needed to make her impervious to naval blockade. As the masters of Europe, with the resources of the whole continent at her disposal, she would expand further and take back the German colonies in Africa.

  The Nazis were so convinced that Germany was destined to return to Africa that when in power, the regime set about planning for the new overseas empire. Under Hitler, the Mittelafrika fantasy of a giant central African block, centred around the Congo and linking the four former colonies together, was reborn. The Colonial Institute
in Hamburg was revived to train a new generation of German colonialists, and by 1935 there were thirty-one institutions in Germany offering courses in all aspects of colonial administration, as well as in ethnography, colonial history, tropical medicine and agriculture. In 1940, as Western Europe came under Nazi occupation and the British were driven from the continent, German confidence reached its apex. In that year, the work of the Colonial Policy Office went beyond simple planning and embarked on preparations for a new age of empire. Guidelines for a colonial code governing the conduct of the Wehrmacht in Africa were produced, new uniforms for men who would administrate the colonies were designed and ambitious bureaucrats clamoured for places in night classes in Swahili and the Yoruba language of southern Nigeria. A Colonial Act for the civilian administration of Germany’s future African territories was drafted. The terms of this law that banned miscegenation and enforced strict racial segregation were based upon the Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour, which itself had adopted the legal terminology developed in the African colonies of the Second Reich. Going further than any laws passed in peacetime Germany or in the Kaiser’s African colonies, the draft Colonial Act stipulated that ‘members of the African and mixed-race communities … who have sexual intercourse with a white woman in the German colonies shall be punished by death’.

  The extent to which German attentions wandered to Africa in 1940 is also shown by the Nazi plan for the resettlement of the Jews in Madagascar, a colony that they imagined could be acquired from the defeated French and transformed into a ‘reservation’, in the colonial sense. This ‘territorial solution’ to the Jewish problem was only abandoned at the end of 1940.

  Much of the planning for the future German empire was directed by private companies. In 1940 IG Farben, the manufacturers of Zyklon B gas used at Auschwitz, established an ‘African Committee’ which helped the company win concessions to supply chemicals to the future Nazi empire in Africa. Both Dresden Bank and Deutsche Bank were also involved in planning the exploitation of Nazi Africa. It was not until January 1943, when the German army trapped in Stalingrad disintegrated, that preparations for German rule in Africa were halted and the seemingly irrepressible fantasy of Mittelafrika was finally laid to rest. Later that same year the German Colonial Society was closed down and its assets transferred to the party coffers, on the orders of Martin Bormann.

  Before 1943 the planning for an expanded African empire had been accompanied by a vocal campaign for the return of the colonies lost at Versailles. To mastermind this, the party had turned to von Epp. In May 1936 von Epp was given control of the German Colonial Society, which was subsumed within the party, as the Reichskolonialbund – the Reich Colonial League. By 1938 it had six thousand branches nationwide. Its Senior Manager was Wilhelm Rümann, a former Schutztruppe who had fought under von Epp in the 4th Field Company during the Herero genocide.12 Together, von Epp and Rümann battled to keep demands for the return of the colonies high on the party’s programme. Von Epp travelled extensively, both inside and outside the Reich, seeking support, maintaining contact with the numerous Schutztruppe veteran associations and cultivating close ties with prominent German settlers who still resided in the former colonies.

  While von Epp coordinated the colonial campaign, the party also set out to link itself and its leadership with the lost empire – and here the memory of German South-West Africa took on a particular significance. Part of this process involved the construction of a historical myth around Hermann Göring’s father, Dr Heinrich Göring, the first Reich Commissioner to South-West Africa. Hermann Göring’s official party biography, published in 1938, enormously inflated his father’s role in the development of German rule in the colony. It also maintained that the elder Göring’s supposed bravery in the face of the Herero had inspired his son and helped shape his character. The summit of this process of historical reinvention came in August 1940 when a museum in honour of Dr Heinrich Göring was opened in Hanover. Although the Völkischer Beobachter described the Dr H. E. Göring Colonial House as the ‘centre of the [party’s] colonial political work’, the curators were faced with the not inconsiderable problem that Dr Göring’s colonial career had in fact been ineffectual, embarrassing and short. They overcame this impediment by skimming over the actual details of Göring’s time in South-West Africa and created what was in effect a mausoleum to the lost empire. The centrepiece was a large bronze bust of Dr Göring surrounded by wreaths. The various exhibition halls that housed the museum’s inventory of curios and exhibits were themed. One explored the idea of Lebensraum, another showed examples of the raw materials the empire had once provided. To create a genuine African ambience a number of stuffed monkeys were distributed in hallways and corridors, and some springbok horns were mounted on the walls. The entrance of the Göring Colonial House was flanked by the Nazi blood banner on one side and the Imperial War Flag of the Second Reich on the other. In the main hallway there hung a huge portrait of the Führer flanked by suitably smaller portraits of the heroes of the empire, including Adolf Lüderitz and Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck.13

  While many prominent colonial figures played roles in the emergence of the party or flocked to the colours once it was in power, not all Second Reich colonialists supported Hitler’s Third Reich. Despite having been a prominent Freikorps commander Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck was a conservative monarchist who never joined the party. Wilhelm Solf, the former governor of German Samoa and the official who drafted Germany’s colonial demands during World War I, is better known as the husband of Hannah Solf, the organiser of the anti-Nazi intellectual group the Solf Circle. Even Paul Rohrbach, the man who fully accepted the cold logic of settler colonialism and wrote that black Africans only had a right to exist if they were of use to the ‘higher’ white race, rejected Nazism. However, these voices were drowned out in the late 1930s, by the general background chatter of the Nazi propaganda machine as it geared up for war.

  One aspect of the increasingly vocal campaign for the return of the colonies was the use of feature film and documentary. In 1939 the documentary director Karl Mohri produced the feature-length documentary Deutsches Land in Afrika (German Land in Africa.) The film was commissioned by the Reich Film Chamber and sanctioned by Joseph Goebbels in his capacity as Propaganda Minister. It inter-cut the history of German colonialism with anthropological scenes of the people of East Africa and South-West Africa. Much of the film takes place in South-West Africa, then under the South African mandate. It set out to show that a successful and prosperous German settler community had forged a place for itself on the colonial frontier, and that these expatriate Germans had embraced Nazism from afar. The film was shown across Germany. An educational pamphlet was produced to accompany it, to help teachers use the film to educate their classes in the story of Germany’s lost colonies. Deutsches Land in Afrika appealed to the young by showing the youth of East Africa (then Tanganyika) and South-West Africa as the vanguard of the Nazi revolution in Africa. The Lüderitz chapter of the Pfadfinder, the German Boy Scouts, were shown marching across the southern deserts with their fluttering banners, and staring out across the South Atlantic, their faces silhouetted against a dramatic sunset.

  In this regard at least, Deutsches Land in Afrika was accurate. By the mid-1930s large sections of the German settler community of South-West Africa were solidly behind the Nazis, and the movement was indeed strongest among the young. The para-militarisation of childhood, a defining feature of Nazi rule in Germany, had been imported into South-West Africa. Just before the outbreak of the war in Europe, Benjamin Bennett, a travelling American journalist, stumbled upon a secret Hitler Youth ritual being performed in the deserts outside Swakopmund.

  Crouching behind a tamarisk bush late at night I watched the ‘Sonne und Wald Tag’, the Nazi ceremony of ‘Ordeal by Fire’. Flames crackled and spiralled across a course formed by long ranks of boys and girls. Voices chanted, softly at first, then shriller, ‘Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer’. The small
boys, ten or twelve years of age, braced themselves, grasped the hands of their elders and vaulted the flames. Sparks and glowing embers showered over them. Their legs and clothes were singed. Gasps of pain gave way to cries of triumph – they had survived the ‘Ordeal by Fire’.14

  Fittingly, the Nazi stronghold in South-West Africa was the town of Lüderitz. Not only did the town have its own party office and branch of the Hitler Youth, it was also home to a chapter of the Stahlhelm, a fanatic grouping of former frontline soldiers and Freikorps, who in Germany were eventually incorporated into the Brown Shirts. Wilfried Lubowski, a former member of the Lüderitz Hitler Youth, recalled in an interview that after the Nazis had come to power in Germany, the Jewish population were jeered at in the street. Rotten eggs and even rocks were thrown at their shops and some emigrated to South Africa.

  By the mid-1930s Hitler’s birthday was openly celebrated in South-West Africa, a tradition that outlived the Third Reich and Hitler. In 1936, when the Windhoek Brewery failed to hoist the Nazi banner in honour of the Führer, a boycott by German settlers was only narrowly averted.

  In the 1930s, the potent image of South-West Africa under the spell of the Nazi revolution proved to be a less powerful propaganda device than the nostalgic image of German South-West Africa before the Great War. A disproportionate number of the more successful pro-colonial novels and memoirs published between the wars were set in German South-West Africa, the colony that attracted the largest number of German settlers and had always been most firmly associated with romantic, frontier fantasies.