The Kaiser's Holocaust by
David Olusoga & Casper W Erichsen – review

Piers Brendon is horrified by a graphic account of colonial atrocity

Piers Brendon
04.12.2010
Foto - Protection racket - African prisoners chained up by German soldiers, 1904. Photograph: Ullstein Bild

Germany was slow to win a place in the sun but quick to turn it into a hell on earth. Bismarck long opposed the acquisition of tropical colonies, arguing that they were a luxury the Fatherland could not afford, "exactly like the silks and sables of the Polish nobleman who had no shirt to wear under them". But in 1884 he changed his mind on grounds of national prestige and economic advantage, establishing a protectorate over south-west Africa. Within a decade its military commander, Curt von François, who had learned his business in King Leopold's Congo, carried out an unprovoked massacre of native inhabitants that shocked even his own men. It was a prelude to genocide.
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The Herero and Nama peoples, numbering respectively 80,000 and 20,000, put up a fierce but uncoordinated resistance. Hendrik Witbooi, the Nama leader, proved an exceptionally able guerrilla captain, and he inflicted a series of humiliating reverses on German troops. But his fighters had no answer to artillery, particularly as it was used against their women and children. So, like the Herero, the Nama were forced to sign a treaty placing themselves under German "protection". This meant, as Witbooi realised, precisely the opposite of what it said.
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Soon afterwards, in 1896, a disastrous rinderpest epidemic destroyed most of the cattle on which the indigenous population depended, enabling the German settlers to buy some of the best grazing land and to crush further opposition. The master race considered that blacks responded best to severity, and with the new century, beatings, rapes, robberies and murders multiplied. The coming of the railway precipitated an uprising in which about 150 whites were killed. Like Britain after the Indian mutiny, Germany cried aloud for vengeance.
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Kaiser Wilhelm appointed General Lothar von Trotha to "end the war by fair means or foul". He was a colonial veteran, described by one subordinate as "a human shark". Where a racial struggle was concerned, Von Trotha believed in "absolute terrorism and even cruelty", and vowed to "destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood". In 1904 his army encircled tens of thousands of Hereros at Waterberg and drove them into the desert. Here most died of thirst and hunger, some reduced to eating scorpions. The rest were subjected to Von Trotha's notorious extermination order, which declared that every Herero within German borders would be shot on sight.
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The order was soon rescinded because it damaged Germany's reputation at a time when Belgian atrocities were attracting international opprobrium. Anyway, as the Nama disintegrated after Witbooi was fatally wounded in 1905, the authorities found other means of annihilation. Missionaries persuaded desperate Africans to come in from the bush by promising them good treatment. They were then herded into concentration camps and turned into slave labourers. By a deliberate act of policy, well understood in Berlin, large numbers were starved, flogged and worked to death.
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The worst camp, situated on Shark Island, off the coast of present-day Namibia, was a bitterly cold penitentiary that took a hideous toll on its ill-clad, ill-housed inmates. Here, women were forced to boil heads severed from the corpses of their own people (sometimes their own relations) and scrape off the flesh with bits of glass so the skulls could be sent to museums, universities and anthropological collections in Germany. The camp physician, Dr Bofinger, used the prisoners for medical research. No one entering his clinic recovered.
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By 1908, as David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen show in this horrifying and graphically told account, only 16,000 Hereros and 10,000 Namas were left alive. And it is tempting to see the whole ghastly saga in the terms that these authors propose – as another Aryan seizure of Lebensraum resulting in the final solution to the Namibian problem. As their title and subtitle indicate, they emphasise the continuity between the kaiser and Hitler and suggest that nazism stemmed from colonial roots of evil, themselves long forgotten.
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This is highly dubious. In the first place it is nonsense to say that the genocide in south-west Africa is forgotten. Admittedly, it could be better known. Germans did their best to suppress the evidence and to portray their homicidal activities as a triumph of civilisation, and British imperialists, with their own guilt to hide, were sometimes complicit in the obfuscation. But particularly since Horst Drechsler's pioneering study, Let Us Die Fighting (1966), on which the present book draws heavily, academic and popular interest in the subject has been strong.
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Secondly, it is misleading to represent the Führer as the kaiser's heir. National Socialism had no time for monarchy and its trappings. To be sure Wilhelm was antisemitic: he once advocated employing gas in a pogrom. But His Impulsive Majesty was as erratic in this as in everything else. Damned by Hitler as an "incorrigible fool", he had rich Jewish friends, disliked nazism and said that Kristallnacht made him ashamed to be German. The kaiser, who died in 1941, would hardly have endorsed Hitler's Holocaust. And since this was an event unique in scale and method, the term should probably not be applied to the genocide in Africa.
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Finally, Hitler's drive to secure living-space from Slav untermenschen owed little or nothing to Germany's imperial endeavours in Africa. Indeed, as the authors briefly concede, he regarded them as an outdated diversion from the Third Reich's destiny on the steppes. None of the kaiser's colonies would compare with his eastern empire, he boasted, and the only bit of the "dark continent" he wanted back was the Cameroons. Hitler's malign philosophy was fertilised by much dung, but it did not grow out of African soil.

Piers Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is published by Vintage.
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