The Kaiser's Holocaust: Germany's Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism
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Curt von François, the ruthless ‘soldier of darkness’ who led the first colonial force to German South-West Africa.
Friedrich von Lindequist, the young Deputy Governor photographed here in the 1890s in a Windhoek beer garden (seated, right with a beer tankard). Popular among the settlers, Lindequist was an early advocate of Lebensraum theory.
Cattle and ox-drawn wagons traversing the long trade route to the Cape, through the vast, arid interior of South-West Africa.
Governor Theodor Leutwein’s first meeting with his successor, General von Trotha, Windhoek June 1904.
In October 1904, Hendrik Witbooi and his mounted Nama fighters joined the war against the Germans.
German volunteers are cheered as they march off to war against the ‘Negro King’ Maharero, amid the feverish atmosphere of Berlin in late January 1904.
A reprisal against the Herero. Hangings were common both during and after the anticolonial wars. Several postcards were printed depicting similar public executions.
Von Trotha’s army preparing to march on the Herero encampment at the Waterberg on the edge of the Kalahari Desert.
A German reconnaissance patrol guided through the Waterberg escarpments by a Witbooi Nama scout. The Nama fought alongside the Germans at the Waterberg, but after witnessing the brutal aftermath, they decided to rise up as well.
General Lothar von Trotha who ordered the extermination of the Herero nation.
The work of the ‘collection patrols’. Starving Herero were captured in the bush and sent to the newly opened concentration camps.
Herero prisoners being transported to the Swakopmund concentration camp in cattle trucks.
The largest of the concentration camps, beside the German fort in the capital Windhoek. At its height, this camp held 7,000 prisoners.
A group of Nama women and children, captured by a German patrol and forced to pose for the camera.
Herero women in the Swakopmund camp used to pull railcars loaded with ammunition and provisions. The majority of prisoners in all the camps were women and children.
A scene from inside Shark Island, probably the first death camp in world history. Its mortality rates were over 70 per cent.
A German officer, Dr Gühne, poses among prisoners in the Shark Island concentration camp, c. June 1905.
German South-West Africa’s first civilian governor, Friedrich von Lindequist, was the man responsible for the final solution to the Nama problem: Shark Island.
A hand-drawn map, produced by the local missionary, shows the location of the concentration camps on Shark Island and around Lüderitz bay. The main camp was divided into Nama and Herero sections while another camp, run by the railway company Lenz, is situated across the harbour.
An extremely rare photograph of the Shark Island concentration camp taken through the barbed wire fence. By October 1906, more than 2,000 prisoners had been driven onto the island.
A postcard shows German soldiers packing skulls into crates, for export to university collections and race scientists in Germany.
The severed head of a Nama man – labelled ‘Hottentotte 2’. Preserved in alcohol by camp physician Dr Bofinger, human heads were sent from the Shark Island camp to race scientists in Berlin.
Dr Eugen Fischer, whose study of the Rehoboth people of South-West Africa made him Germany’s foremost race scientist.
The white residents of Windhoek gather on the site of the Windhoek concentration camp in 1912 for the inauguration of the Rider Statue, in honour of Germans who had died in the wars to exterminate the Herero and Nama.
‘A people without space’: German settlers in Windhoek, c.1912.
Veterans of the German colonial army carry the flags of the lost German empire through Vienna in 1939.
‘For Justice and Honour’: a Nazi propaganda poster demanding the return of the former German colonies in Africa.
Dr Eugen Fischer, Nazi Germany’s leading race scientist. A late but enthusiastic convert to the Nazi cause.
Lindequist Street in Lüderitz in the 1930s. Nazism was enthusiastically embraced by much of the German settler community.
Members of the Hitler Youth and the Pathfinder movement parade in Lüderitz in the 1930s.
Ritter von Epp, as a young infantry lieutenant in colonial uniform.
Von Epp and Hitler greet Mussolini, Bavaria, September 1937.
Von Epp (front row, second from left) reunited with his old friend Hermann Göring (front row, centre), while in American custody at Mondorf-les-Bains in 1946. Epp, awaiting trial, died shortly after this picture was taken.
Aerial photography reveals the enormous graveyard of the concentration camps’ victims, on the outskirts of the Namibian seaside resort of Swakopmund.
The remains of a victim of the Shark Island camp, in an unmarked mass grave in the southern Namib desert, photographed by the authors in 2006.
The bones of the dead emerging from the sand.